Lupi 04 - Night Season

didn’t know what to do, so she just stood there.
    After a few seconds of hugging, Cynna Weaver said, “I don’t know. I kind of want to, but the—the wise people I know would say that killing him was wrong, and doing wrong things won’t make us feel better.”
    â€œI don’t understand.”
    The Ahk leader barked out an order. They had to go now.
    Cynna Weaver sighed and stood. “Sometimes I don’t, either.”

TWENTY-NINE
    T HE gut-wounded guard had woken, and was moaning. Kai tried not to listen. At least her own patient was quiet, though the way she stared at Kai with those big, dark eyes…Kai raised her hand to brush the hair from her face, noticed the blood on her fingers, and didn’t.
    â€œHis name is Harry,” the woman she was sewing up said. “He’s Harry. He doesn’t have much of a chance, does he? He’s just human. Humans don’t heal well, and they got him in the gut.”
    â€œI don’t know,” Kai said. “I don’t know what’s possible here.”
    â€œYou’re a Theilo?”
    â€œSort of.” Theilo meant a slider, one of the many who’d accidentally slid into Edge from elsewhere over the centuries.
    â€œYou speak Common Tongue well.”
    â€œThank you.” Kai knew the language for the same reason she knew what Theilo meant: Nathan. He’d given her the tongue one night soon after they arrived.
    She finished her sewing, tied off the thread, and reached for the peroxide. The woman flinched when the liquid bubbled over her wound, but held as still as she had throughout. Kai appreciated a patient like this. The wound in her shoulder was shallow, no stitches needed, but the one in her thigh had gone to the bone. Yet she’d sat motionless the whole time Kai stitched her.
    She was a pretty thing, rather feline looking, with a jaw that hinted at a muzzle and pointed ears. Then there was the fur—soft, short, and subtly striped like an orange tabby cat. Kai had had to shave it around the wounds, but it should grow back.
    Kai carefully put the needle and thread back in her sewing kit. Nathan planned well, but the carnage that had greeted them when they reached the inn at Shuva needed so much more than their little medical kit. Not that the villagers hadn’t been trying to help the wounded, but their only medical person was an herbalist who doubled as a dentist since he owned a pair of pliers. A real scary pair of pliers.
    They needed more than a physical therapist—or former physical therapist. What was Kai’s profession now? Wanderer? “Does your species heal well? Are you susceptible to infection?”
    The woman shrugged one shoulder. “I’ll heal. That’s a beautiful cat you have. Well-trained.”
    All eight feet of Dell were stretched out as near the hearth as she could get without interfering with the two patients also laid out there. Her dappled coat was winter-thick, so she didn’t really need the fire’s heat, but like most cats she enjoyed it. “She is lovely, isn’t she? She’s not exactly my cat, though. She’s my familiar.”
    The woman’s eyes widened. “You’re a mage?”
    â€œNo. Do people here have to be mages before they can take a familiar?”
    â€œHuh…yes. I always thought so, anyway. Where are you from? You’re human, but he isn’t.” She nodded at Nathan, who was with the moaning guard. “He looks human, but his scent…I’ve never smelled anything like him.”
    Kai just smiled and stood. Her back twinged and she twisted, stretching it out.
    â€œNot going to tell me, huh?”
    â€œNo.” She looked at the others in the room. Most of the villagers had cleared out when they arrived, taking the dead with them to the ice house to await burial, but the one they called the sheriff remained. He was the tall, bearded man sitting at one of the two intact tables, nursing a mug of ale and keeping an eye on them. He’d answered their questions honestly, if tersely. The man sitting with him was the innkeeper, who hadn’t answered honestly—until he realized Kai knew it when he lied. Since then, he’d been more afraid of her than of Nathan.
    Foolish man. She looked across the room at Nathan.
    He sat on the floor between Dell and the gut-wounded guard, whom they’d laid close to the fire’s warmth. He’d done what he could for the