fit perfectly. She had no memory of being dressed, but the thought left her with an uneasiness she had no choice but to ignore.
“How do you feel?”
She stood, looking from Sorrow, who was lying on her side, panting, to the crowds of people, then finally to the front of the room.
The man who’d spoken sat upon an elaborate throne. He was dressed in a blue suit that was so out of place she thought she might still be asleep and lost in her dreams.
He should have been wearing robes and a crown, not a suit and shiny black shoes.
“That’s fucked up,” she mumbled.
He rose and descended the short steps of the dais which held aloft his throne, his smile wide and white in the darkness of his face.
Sorrow gave a tortured, almost human cry, and Rune glanced away from the approaching man to see what ailed the dog.
“Sorrow is ill,” the shimmer lord said, as he reached her side. “She has never entered this or any castle, but she has come here to…” He hesitated before continuing. “To die. Because you are here. She has come to be with you in her last moments of life.”
His people gasped and began to murmur in hushed tones, as though they’d been waiting for him to say the words before they could actually grasp what they were witnessing.
Rune knelt beside the laboring dog and despite the warning Nadaline had given her, placed her hand on Sorrow’s face.
“Careful,” the shimmer lord exclaimed. “She’ll relieve you of your fingers…”
But when Sorrow simply lay there and let Rune caress her, he knelt beside Rune, his face full of wonder. “As long as I have known her, she has never allowed a touch.”
“She’s not sick,” Rune told him. “She’s in labor.”
His smile was quizzical. “Pardon me?”
“She’s having puppies.”
He dropped his sharp stare to the dog. “Impossible.” His voice was a whisper but despite his denial, the belief was in his eyes.
Again, the crowd gasped, the sound moving through them like wind through a cornfield.
“The second miracle,” one of them murmured.
“What was the first miracle?” Rune asked.
“Why, your arrival, of course,” the shimmer lord said.
She looked at him. “You’re the Flesh Shimmer lord?”
“I am. My name is Brasque Dray.”
“I need the cure to the rotting disease.”
“You are cured. My doctor healed you.”
She raised an eyebrow at his referring to the old sorceress as a doctor. “I realize that. But I need to take it back to my people.”
He studied her, his gaze dark. “You don’t mean to leave, surely. If you leave, you will not return.”
“It doesn’t matter if I come back or not.” She ground her teeth. “I still need the antidote for my world. I was told your hand could help me.”
Sorrow whined and the sound of her pain twisted Rune’s heart. “We’ll talk about this later,” she told Brasque. “Right now, you need to call your doctors to help Sorrow.”
He drew back. “Indeed not.”
“Why not? She’s in pain.” It didn’t matter to her that he was a shimmer lord. It only mattered that Sorrow was in pain and he wasn’t doing a damn thing to help her.
“No one will touch her,” he said, his voice almost sympathetic. “She won’t allow it.”
Rune turned up her lip. “Useless.”
He merely watched her.
“Get your hand here,” she ordered. “I’ll want to talk to him when this is over.”
Sorrow screamed.
“Shit,” Rune said, forgetting about the lord, the hand, and the antidote.
Sorrow wasn’t having an easy birth, and Rune wasn’t exactly equipped to perform doggy cesarean sections, should Sorrow need one.
“It’s not natural,” Brasque Dray said, standing and moving away. “Sorrow should not be…pregnant.”
As though pregnancy itself were abhorrent.
Rune bent close to Sorrow’s face, close enough to feel the dog’s hot breath on her skin. “I don’t know how to help you, love.”
But Sorrow didn’t need her help, only her company.
Seconds later, she expelled a squirming, fat puppy so large Rune had no doubt that eventually he’d be as big as his mother. Or bigger.
And as Rune sat back on her heels, her hand to her chest, Sorrow jumped up. She licked Rune once on the cheek, then began licking and tending the newborn quickly and, it seemed to Rune, impatiently.
And when she was finished, she turned, her nails clicking on the floor, and sprinted away. Before Rune could understand what the dog was planning, Sorrow was gone.
“He’s yours now,” Brasque said.
“That’s wrong in so many ways, and I don’t have time to explain any of them. Bring me your hand,