Free Web NovelChapter 42: Chapter 42 Snake Bite
_Author’s POV_
It happened in the late afternoon, when the light had gone a bit dim and the sun was long, the forest had settled into the particular quiet of the hour before dusk.
Rowena had gone further from the main camp than she intended.
There was a section of the stream she remembered from childhood, a bend where the water ran over flat stones and there was a small natural pool that caught the late light in a specific way her father had shown her once. She had been moving toward it without fully deciding to.
Pierre had followed without being asked, which she had registered and not objected to.
They were moving along the upper stream bank, the ground slightly uneven, the undergrowth denser here than in the cleared sections closer to camp.
Rowena was two steps ahead, navigating a section where exposed roots crossed the path, when she heard Pierre stop behind her.
She turned.
He was standing very still.
His eyes were down.
She followed his gaze and saw it, a thick-bodied viper, disturbed from the sun-warmed rock it had been resting on, coiled and charging toward her foot, which was approximately fifteen centimeters from it.
She went completely still.
Pierre moved.
Not exactly fast, fast movement would have triggered the strike. He placed himself between Rowena and the snake, one hand guiding her back by the arm, and the viper struck at what was now the nearest target.
The bite landed on his right calf.
The snake released and moved into the undergrowth immediately.
Pierre watched it go, then looked down at his leg.
“Pierre.” Rowena was already beside him.
“I’m alright,” he said.
“Sit down.”
“Rowena....”
“Sit down, Pierre.”
He sat on the root-crossed bank, which she suspected he would not have done for most people who gave him instructions in that tone, and she was already pulling up his trouser leg to find the bite.
It was there, two small puncture marks, the skin already beginning to mottle around them, which told her this was a proper envenomation rather than a dry bite.
She didn’t hesitate.
She had been trained for this. Her father had made sure of it, the same father who had brought her to this forest and taught her that preparation was love expressed practically. She knew exactly what to do and she did it, she lowered her head and worked quickly, drawing the venom, spitting it clean, working methodically.
Pierre sat very still through this and said nothing.
When she lifted her head he was looking at her with an expression she wasn’t looking at closely enough to read, she was focused on the wound, on his color, on the signs she was monitoring for.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said.
“Dizziness?”
“No.”
“Nausea?”
“No.” A pause. “My leg hurts.”
“It’s going to hurt more,” she said. She was already tying a clean strip of fabric below the bite, not a tourniquet, just a compression wrap, the way she had been shown. “Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
“Lean on me. Let your wolf work towards healing.”
He stood. He did, in fact, lean on her, more than was strictly necessary, she suspected, because his color was good and his breathing was steady and he had the constitution of a man whose wolf would handle this with considerably more efficiency than it appeared. But she put her arm around him and took his weight and they moved back toward camp together.
“He’s enjoying this,” Kyra said. freeweɓnovel.cøm
“He got bitten by a snake,” Rowena said.
“He got bitten by a snake and he’s milking it a little,” Kyra said. “I can feel his wolf from here.”
Rowena looked at Pierre’s profile.
He was looking ahead at the path with a neutral expression.
She decided not to say anything about it.
They came out of the tree line into the clearing and the camp went immediately silent.
Greg saw them first. Then Kasper. Then Miriam and Vicky, both of whom rose from their chairs. The children were corralled by instinct before anyone said a word.
“Snake,” Rowena said, before anyone could speak.
“Viper. I’ve cleaned the wound. He needs to rest and we should head back within the hour.”
“I’m fine,” Pierre said.
“You were bitten by a venomous snake,” Greg said.
“It’s been handled,” Pierre said.
“By Rowena,” Kasper said, looking between them with an expression that contained several layers of information he was choosing not to voice.
“She was very thorough,” Pierre said.
Kasper looked at Greg. Greg looked at Kasper. A significant quantity of communication passed between them without words.
Pierre lowered himself carefully onto a camp chair, which Rowena pulled closer to him before he had finished the motion. She crouched beside it to check the compression wrap, her hand light on his calf.
He watched her do this with the expression he had been wearing since she said sit down in the tone that didn’t leave room for argument.
Nobody said anything.
Miriam sat back down very slowly, her eyes on Pierre’s face, cataloguing what she saw there.
She filed it away for later.
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At the Varkos estate, the same afternoon.
Greaves found Kaelen in the estate office at half past four.
He came in.
“What is it,” he said, without looking up.
Greaves set a phone on the desk.
On the screen was a photograph. Someone’s contact in the northern region, apparently, the image was taken from a distance, slightly blurred by the speed of it, but clear enough.
Rowena. Her arm around Pierre. His weight against her.
Kaelen looked at it for a long time.
“Where was this taken?” he asked.
“Northern valley,” Greaves said. “Ashthorne family land. They were on an outing.” A pause. “Pierre was apparently bitten by a viper. She treated it.”
Kaelen set the phone face-down on the desk.
The office was very quiet.
“There it is,” Shade said.
“There what is,” Kaelen said.
“The thing you didn’t think would happen this fast. A pause. She’s moving on. Not performing moving on. Actually moving on. With a man who, unlike you, was paying attention when it mattered.”
Kaelen’s jaw was tight.
“Pierre,” Shade continued. “Respected Alpha, Financially sound. Has apparently been fond of her for years, which you would know if you had paid the slightest attention to how he looked at her at the wedding banquet.” Another pause, pointed and deliberate. “You sat in that hall and watched him sit beside her and you dismissed it.”
“I didn’t dismiss it,” Kaelen said.
“You dismissed it,” Shade said. “The same way you dismissed most things about her. Until they were gone.”
Kaelen picked the phone back up.
Looked at the photograph again. At the way she was holding him, carefully, the way she did things when she meant them.
He put the phone in his desk drawer.
He sat in the empty office of a half-empty house and felt something that was not quite jealousy and not quite grief and was considerably worse than either one because it had no clean name and no clean outlet and nothing he could do with it except sit with it.
