My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 304

Jace

"Inn."

He went to the waist, the chest. He didn't stop. He lowered himself until the rolling water closed over his shoulders and then his throat, and he sat down in it, submerged to the neck in a basin throwing steam off its own surface, and he held still.

His skin began to change. I made myself watch it, because looking away seemed more dangerous than looking. The red came up first across his shoulders and the back of his neck, the flat angry red just like when meat is dropped in a pan, spreading down into the water and up his throat to the line of his jaw. A finer thread of steam lifted off his wet hair, separate from the steam off the water.

He was being cooked. I'll tell it plain, because there's no soft way to set it down. A living man sat in water hot enough to take the skin off my arm in a second. The heat did to him what heat does to flesh. His painted eye stayed open, fixed on nothing. He never moved. He never made one sound.

The shaman walked the rim of the basin around him, chanting, low and fast, the same lines turning over without a break.

"Vér gefum hann eldinum. Vér takum aftr þat sem eldrinn heldr eigi."

The pack's circling tightened to them. The drum of the fists came faster. Mina's lips moved against the words, giving them to me a breath behind the old man, her voice flat and quiet at my shoulder.

"We give him to the fire," she said. "We take back what the fire does not keep. The skin is not the man. The skin is not the man. Burn it off him and leave the man."

The old man's voice climbed. The pack took the last line up off him, over the drumming, hundreds of white-eyed throats throwing it around a boiling man, and I didn't need Mina for it anymore, I had the shape of it now.

I found her across the ring.

Sera stood apart from the circling, in furs, still, not chanting, not turning. The first time for her too, the same as me, the two of us the only newcomers in a courtyard full of people who'd grown up on this. Everything I'd built about her since I rode in told me I'd find her sick with it, that we'd hold the same horror across the steam, the two southerners who didn't belong.

Oh was I wrong. She didn’t look sick with it. She watched the flat water where her husband had gone under with her hands folded in front of her, her face composed and steady, nothing on it at all. No flinch. No swallow. She watched the old man hold the man she'd married under boiling water with the plain patience of someone watching a thing she'd seen before and accepted, a thing that was hers now. Whatever the omega had been that I'd known in the South, she was gone. I had badly mistaken who I climbed this mountain to bargain with.

The Luna of the North

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