Page 15 of An Oath at Midnight

I wouldn’t let him touch me, but the need to touch him, to heal him, was overwhelming. Brushing his hair back, I took his chin and tilted his head to the side. There was a bruise on his jaw, a cut by his eye.

“It’s nothing serious.” His voice was full of grit and lifted goose bumps all over my body.

“Lie on the bed so I can tend your wounds.”

“Maggie—”

“Please,” I said, my heart squeezing at the use of his nickname for me, one he used rarely and only when we were alone. I had trouble meeting his eyes all of a sudden, something else that was new. More distance, more pain.

He did as I asked. We’d done this several times now, but he’d never been this badly hurt before.

I grabbed my basket of healing supplies from the bathroom. I’d taken to leaving one here since he’d needed them more often. “Can you at least tell me what kind of creature did this so I know the best treatment to use?”

He didn’t answer, just shook his head.

I muttered a curse and pulled out a generic poultice and the herbs and balm I’d need, then started cleaning the cuts…or scratches. I wasn’t completely sure what they were.

“I’m okay,” he said into the quiet room.

“Bullshit.”

He didn’t contradict me, lying still as I slowly and methodically cleaned out his wounds and smeared them with Else’s healing balm to get the regeneration of tissue started. Then, laying the poultice over the top, I closed my eyes, held my hand over it, and muttered the spell that would go one step further. “Blood and bone. Flesh torn, skin bruised. Return what was broken…again to what was.” Warmth radiated from my palm as I said the rest of the spell, a spell that was unique to me. Like all healing witches, the spells needed to be of our own making, since no two witches had the exact same healing power. Mine had come to me in a dream, at least part of it, and I’d developed the rest from there.

I checked under the poultice and the bruise beneath hadn’t healed completely, but it’d lost some of the angry purple and the slice in his skin had thinned, the deeper tissue beginning to heal already. I moved to the next. A slice across the rigid muscle of his abs, and repeated my spell, doing it over and over again, until I was shaking and exhausted from all the magic I’d drained working on him.

I moved to the next—

Bram grabbed my hand, stopping me. I looked up.

“No more. Bed, Magnolia. Now.”

I’d gotten the worst of them, but I couldn’t bear to think he was in pain. “I’m fine, let me finish—”

“I don’t need it. Bed,” he said in that incredibly deep, velvety voice of his. It’d surprised me the first time I’d heard it. I loved his voice. I could listen to him talk all day, if he was the kind of male to talk nonstop, which he was not. His voice had only grown deeper, grittier as he’d gotten older. But that wasn’t the only thing that’d changed. The way he spoke, the things he said.

The last couple of years another side of Bram had come out, a more demanding, blunt, forceful side. Gone was the shy boy I’d met that first day. He still didn’t like to talk much, not to anyone besides me and his brothers, but a dominance radiated from him now that he hadn’t had when he was sixteen, but it’d sure as hell grown over the years. He’d always been protective, but he could also be seriously possessive.

I’d tell him to stop being so goddamn bossy now, if I wasn’t so exhausted. I stood on shaky legs. I’d expended a lot more of my power than I’d realized—

My legs gave out, and Bram cursed, jackknifing up. He hooked me around the waist and planted me in the bed beside him.

“I should be the one cursing right now,” I muttered, giving his shoulder a pathetically weak shove.

He pulled me close, ignoring my pitiful struggles, and pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “Rest.”

I should resist, ask him about The Bank and what he’d been doing there. I could say a lot of things, but I didn’t want to fight. He wasn’t going to tell me no matter how angry I got anyway.

And honestly, I didn’t have a fight in me. So I let him manhandle me to where he wanted me, wrapped in his arms, his face to my throat, because I was just glad he was home.

Then I closed my heavy eyes and let the heat of his body soak through me.

* * *

When I woke again, Bram was dressed and in the middle of lacing up his boots.

“What’s going on?” I sat up.

His jaw clenched.