My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 214

Sera

The fur was black. Coal-black. Not dark grey that read black in low light, not deep brown that did the same. Black. Not one strand of any other color in the whole coat. You usually see something on a wolf — a streak, a salt at the muzzle, a cinnamon along a flank. There was nothing.

The eyes were yellow. Not the amber-yellow of a Northern wolf in his own body. Pale yellow, with whites that were heavily bloodshot — a hot, used-up pink that did not belong on an animal in working condition. The pupils were too wide for the lamplight and did not contract when the light reached them.

The lips did not sit right against the gum. They were lifted off the teeth a fraction of an inch even with the mouth closed, so a length of canine showed at all times. There was a thread of saliva at the corner of the lower jaw that I watched stretch and break and reform.

The breathing was slow. Slower than seemed alive. The chest rose and fell on a count I could nearly time.

Otherwise it was a wolf. A wolf that had been put through whatever this was, and come out at the other end this size, this color, breathing on this count. The wrongness was not in the parts. It was in the dose.

My knees softened. I had not planned for them to. Fenris caught me at the ribs from behind. He held me up. He did not say anything about it.

"How is this here," I said, when I could.

"They are ours."

"How."

He did not answer that yet. Yvara had reached behind her into a low wooden bin set into the wall I had not noticed and pulled out something heavy and skinned and pink. Sheep, lamb, calf. I did not look long enough to know.

"Watch the throw," she said.

She heaved it underhand through the bars.

It did not hit the floor. Something came up out of the dark to the left of the wolf at the gate, and a second from the right, and a third from straight back, and the carcass disappeared before it was halfway across whatever the room beyond was. I heard it tear. I heard the ribcage crack. Pieces of bone hit stone. Then nothing.

"Wolfsbane. The hide does not care about steel. It cares about poison. A wolfsbane-coated weapon will get through the hide the way regular steel gets through a man. That is how Northern wolves get killed in fights when they get killed. That is also why we are very particular about what crosses our borders."

I held that.

"And rogues."

"Rogues bite. All rogues — north, south, east, anywhere — once they take wolf blood, the body changes. The body begins to make a poison of its own. The poison goes into anyone they bite. A wolf shifter from one of the southern packs, bitten by a southern rogue, will sicken. Most die. Some can be saved if the bite is treated quickly. With attention, the wolf usually lives."

He nodded at the gate.

"Northern rogues are different. Same toxin. Stronger by a wide margin. There is no treating it. A bite kills. A scratch kills, if the rogue chooses. They have control over the dose. They can put a tooth into you and not put the poison in if they have been told to keep you breathing." He paused. "That is why Torin is upstairs and not in pieces."

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