"Feeling up to guests?" I asked my mate as I sat down beside her. Alex and Evie were supposed to be coming over in a few hours, but if she wasn't feeling well...

Jess rested her head against my shoulder and smiled down at little Bran. "As long as they don't stay all afternoon, yes."

Strange. Alex and Evie weren't exactly demanding company, and I was sure they'd spend most of their time cooing over the baby anyway. Even as I thought that, I realised I could feel the heat coming off her. One of my hands snuck up to rest on her forehead. It was burning hot.

"Jess?" I asked. "I don't remember there being anything about fevers in the books."

And I should know. I'd read pretty much all of them. Well, Jess had read them, and I'd listened. I had been much too young to help with Eira when she had been a baby, so my knowledge had been very much limited to Mort's kid and a few Shadowcat second-cousins before that.

"I'm fine," she grumbled.

"Then you won't mind if the doctor looks you over, just to be sure, will you?" I said dryly. "Where's Hailey?"

"Off treating some raider who got his throat torn open near Ember," Jess sighed. She let her head rest against the pillow. "Can you link her from here?"

I wasn't sure. That was a very long way. Eira could have helped me, but she was on her way to Bangor with Lee by then. Still, I would have to try. I sat down, and I took Jessie's hand to anchor myself while I gathered my strength and began to reach.

At first, I struggled to even find the fragile thread of mind-link between us, because it wasn't like I knew her well. Eira and I could talk at opposite ends of the Silverstones without much issue, but the doctor wasn't a tapper and she wasn't related to me.

Every time I would try following the thread, I would lose concentration somewhere along the way. It took a dozen attempts to even get close and another dozen to actually make contact. When I felt the edges of her mind, I didn't wait around for my concentration to slip — I just sort of threw the message at her and hoped for the best.

"Jess has a fever," I told her. I was practically shouting, but it would likely be a whisper by the time it reached her.

Holding the mind-link still while I waited for a reply ... it was like trying to build a bridge across a chasm. I was pushing a steel beam over the edge, knowing damn well it wasn't long enough for the job, and I was holding it steady without any kind of support at the other end while someone walked across.

She didn't manage to convey any words. All I got was a whisper too quiet to hear and a general vibe of 'bad' and 'uh oh.' I had to drop the link at that point or fall with it, and I slammed back into my body with jarring force.

"Rhodric," Jess said softly. She touched the side of my neck and chewed on her lip. "You're bleeding."

That made sense. Everything was blurry. My head was throbbing in time with my heartbeat, and I could feel something trickling down the side of my face. It appeared the link had skipped the nosebleed stage and gone straight to ears — a sure sign I'd done something I shouldn't have.

"Yeah, that's normal," I assured her.

"Normal? It's anything but normal," she growled. "That's a symptom of brain trauma, jackass, and you can't just ignore it."

I did try to hide my grin, but she must have noticed my lips twitching. "Yes, I can actually. I've been doing it for years. Now stop trying to deflect attention, love. The doctor said I have to take you to the hospital."

She'd said no such thing, of course, but Jess didn't need to know that. Most shifters would die before they went to A&E because most shifters didn't have a tapper to stop the humans noticing their skin knitting together in real time. You might survive the initial injury, yeah, but you would spend the rest of your life as a test subject, if I knew anything about human beings.

Before she could argue, I flicked my link with Mort. "Bring the car around, would you?"

It took him a moment to collect his thoughts. "You know I can't drive, right?"

Of course I knew. I'd given him a lesson once and he'd rear-ended a post box. "Just do it, kid. The keys are in the ignition."

The car was shared with Lee, since it had been a joint effort to steal it from the Pine Forest Alpha, and I doubted he would be thrilled if Mort smashed it up on the way across the field, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

"On your feet, give me the baby, and let's get moving," I told Jess. She wasn't in any hurry to obey. She handed over Bran happily enough, but it took some coaxing to make her leave the warmth of the bed for the drizzle outside.

No sooner had we set foot out of the room than Jess swayed a little. I put an arm under her shoulders despite her best efforts to swat at me, and I steadied her as we stepped out into the courtyard properly. She wasn't walking at a reasonable speed. She was just sorta creeping along, stopping every now and then to curse and close her eyes.

Something was clearly wrong. One brush of the mate bond let me feel the waves of dizziness washing over her in all their sickening glory. There was pain in her stomach, too, and a lot of it. No wonder she'd been blocking me.

"I'm fine, you said," I muttered. "I'm fine? Is that what you call this?"

She rolled her eyes. At least, that was what I assumed she was doing, but it turned out that her eyes were rolling back into her head, and she slumped against my shoulder. She nearly fell. It took an absolute nightmare of logistics to take her weight and hold the baby at the same time, so I was very grateful when Maggie Thompson appeared from seemingly nowhere to take Bran.

"What on earth is going on?" she demanded.

"I don't have time to—" I started before I managed to catch myself. That was not a tone I could use with my mother-in-law if I wanted to live much longer. "Just look after the kid, yeah? Please?"

And with that, I got my other arm under my mate's legs and hoisted her up properly. It was more aesthetically pleasing than throwing her over my shoulder, but it was also a lot more difficult. I set off before Maggie could think of arguing.

Jess came around as we were leaving the castle. She was clearly still pretty out of it — her eyes unfocused and her whole body loose.

"I can walk," she told me in a quiet and rather shaky voice.

"I know, Jess," I said, equally quiet. "But we need to move a bit quicker, so I think this might be for the best."

She let her head rest against my chest. "You're worried, aren't you?"

Yes, I was. Shifters didn't get fevers often, so it was usually a sign that something serious was going on. For her sake, I tried to bury that unease. "I'm always worried about you. Just relax and enjoy the ride, okay?"

"Okay."

***

I didn't like the smell of hospitals. It wasn't the cleaning products that bothered me, cloying as they were, but rather the faint smell beneath they were supposed to hide. That sickly-sweet stench of urine and fear and blood and death. Not for the first time in my life, I wished my shifter senses weren't quite so keen.

We hadn't needed to wait long in A&E. The fact that Jess had been half-conscious had probably helped us jump the queue. Now she was lying in a hospital bed on broad-spectrum antibiotics while we waited for test results. She wouldn't stop messing around with the cannula in her elbow.

"Are you a relative?" the doctor was asking me.

"We're married," I replied, because that was the only way they were going to let me stay. I wasn't sure if they could check, but I could always just fiddle with their minds and make them forget that.

So far, I'd had the joy of deflecting their attention from the mark on her neck, the scars all over her body from training, their tentative assumptions that I was abusing her, the darker tint to her blood and her body temperature, which was lower than a human's even with the raging fever.

And of course, all that careful fishing around in people's minds was wearing me down, so I then had to stop them from noticing that my nose and ears were bleeding. It all went around in a vicious cycle. The more I covered up, the more I had to cover up the cover-up.

I was sat down, if only because I was too dizzy to stand anymore. I wasn't entirely sure how much longer I could keep this up without doing some damage to one of the humans, so I'd asked Eira to swing by when she was finished.

"She's got postpartum endometritis," the doctor told us. It was a young woman, scarcely out of med school, by the look of her, but she seemed to know what the hell she was talking about. It took me a moment to process that she'd even spoken, let alone what she'd said, because my mind was going about a mile an hour. "An infection of the uterine lining. She'll need to stay here for a few nights, but there's no reason she shouldn't make a full recovery."

"There you go, Rhodric," Jess said cheerfully. "You can stop worrying now. Told you I was fine."

The doctor shook her head, sparing me the trouble of deflecting that bullshit. "Oh, you're not fine. Another few hours and we'd have been dealing with sepsis. But if you stay in that bed, get some rest and stop fiddling with your IV, you will be fine."

"Thank you," I told her. She took the cue and left.

I forced some of the tension out of my body. My heart had been skipping along since we'd left the castle, and I'd stopped breathing on several occasions while they'd been rushing her up here. Jess adjusted her pillow. She was watching me now, chewing on the inside of her cheek, so I took hold of her hand and squeezed. "What is it?"

"This whole childbirth thing has been a bit of a hassle," she said quietly. "I want more kids. Three or four at least. But maybe we could leave it a while...? Get the hang of parenting first? That way we'll only screw up the first one."

I couldn't even find the energy to laugh, but I did manage a weary smile. "That's unusually sensible of you, Jess."

She shrugged at me. "Once I've kicked this infection, I'll be back to raiding, and I'm not keen to take another six-month break, to be honest. Sitting around the castle all day ... it's boring."

That was fair. We hadn't really been trying to have Brandon. We'd just ... sort of ... stopped trying not to have a kid. And that was fine — we'd been pining for a baby, but there was no rush to do it all again. We'd have years for that. A whole lifetime.

I looked out of the window. There was a brilliant view of Bangor's rear end and not much else, but I knew the sea was lurking just beyond those houses. We were close to Anglesey. So close, in fact, that I could mind-link my big sister for the first time since the day I'd set fire to the bridge. We'd been talking most of the afternoon. She made very good moral support, even if using the link made my headache even worse.

"Which ward are you in?" Gwen asked me suddenly.

"Why?" I had to ask, of course, but I'd thought of the answer automatically, so she didn't need to explain herself.

"That's one of the nicer ones," she said, and then she cut the link quite abruptly.

I didn't have time to worry about it. One of the nurses came back with the new antibiotics and hooked them up to the drip while Jess played with the line. By the time she had taken the 'obs,' which involved temperature, blood pressure and heart rate and had to be done almost constantly, another of the nurses poked her head through the door.

"You've got some visitors," she said. "A young couple. Are you expecting anyone?"

Jess and I exchanged bewildered looks. Alex and Evie wouldn't have left Silver Lake yet, and Lee and Eira were still at the local police station, so I didn't have the faintest clue who might be invading our hospital room.

"Yeah, send them in," I said, just for the hell of it.

It didn't take her long to disappear and return with the visitors. They were both in their mid-twenties, same as me. I knew both of them, of course — recognised them in a heartbeat. But it was the woman my eyes fixed upon.

She looked exactly the same. Yes, perhaps there were a few more wrinkle lines in the crease of her forehead and her light-brown hair was a handspan longer, but those hazel eyes were as bright and alert as they had ever been,

Slowly, disbelievingly, I stood up.

"You'll need to turn your scent off, Ric," she told me. "I can't go back stinking like a rogue, now, can I?"

I did it without a second's thought because I had been in the habit of obeying her since I was five or six years old, and I wasn't about to stop now. She waited nearly ten seconds before she crossed the room and hugged me fiercely.

It had been an awfully long time since I'd seen her, so I didn't care what she was doing here or who might find out. I just hugged her back. Quin Davengard caught my eye and gave me a little nod, which was returned as soon as Gwen released me.

She was smiling. It wasn't an expression she used often, so it was all the more flattering when she did decide to indulge. "I don't have long. My patrol think... You know what? I'm not sure what they think, but they're outside and they're not happy."

"Are they ever?" I laughed. "How are you, Gwen?"

"Good, yes. And you look well, I suppose." She looked me up and down, her eyes narrowing at the torn, mud-splattered clothing, and eventually she tapped the stubble on my jaw with a scathing finger. "What, have you forgotten how to shave?"

I had to suppress a snort of laughter. "How else am I supposed to blend in with all the scruffy, unwashed criminals?"

"Blend in?" Jess scoffed. "You're very much the worst of them, Llewellyn."

I turned to grin at her, but I'd lost Gwen's attention by the time I turned back again. She crossed over to the bed and held out a hand to my mate. "Ah, you must be Jessie. It's good to finally meet you."

Jess took her hand and shook it. "Likewise. And I'm sorry — I'm not quite at my best right now. You'll have to excuse the hospital gown."

"Not at all. It's my own fault for bursting in here unannounced."

While they talked, I noticed poor Quin standing in the doorway, trying his best not to intrude, so I went to put an arm around him and drag him into the room properly. In the process, I managed to forget that casual rough-housing was very much a rogue thing. Lee would've pushed me right back, but he looked like a rabbit in the headlights.

Jess gave me a pointed look, asking if I was going to introduce them, so I obliged her. "This is my brother-in-law, Quin, and the lovely young lady is his wife. I forget her name."

Gwen turned those shrewd hazel eyes onto me and made sure I saw her roll them.

"Very funny, Rhodric," Jess muttered. "Hi, Quin. I apologise for him — really, I do."

"Oh, I don't mind," Quin said, shrugging, and he was telling the truth. I could have shanked him and he probably wouldn't have minded. "I'm just glad to see you in good health. Both of you."

Grinning, I sat back down in my chair and lounged there. My feet were resting on the edge of Jessie's bed, which was, of course, entirely forbidden. Gwen came over to fold her arms and frown at me. "Who are you and what have you done with my little brother?"

Huh. I realised a lot of the newfound rogueness probably didn't convey well over the phone, and I hadn't been advertising my shadier deeds. Yes, to Gwen, this must be a quite a stark contrast to the well-mannered young man who'd left Anglesey.

"You mean he wasn't always like this?" Jess asked, visibly delighted. It spared me having to answer, at least, but she had a look in her eyes that I didn't like one bit.

"Heavens, no. He was an angel," Gwen told her, and then she wrinkled up her nose. "Albeit a rather grumpy and uptight angel..."

Dammit. This would be worse than Jess and Eira's friendship. I was quite sure of that. I scratched the back of my neck and scowled at them both, hoping to put a stop to this before it went much further.

But suddenly they were staring past at me — at the door, and I twisted around to see what had caught their attention. It was Eira. She had Lee and a handful of his raiders at her heels, and she was staring at Gwen in shell-shocked silence while a grin crept across her lips. It didn't take her long to process the situation. She crossed the room with a few long strides and wrapped her arms around our sister with more force than strictly necessary.

It was closer to a tackle than a hug, really, and I had to steady them before they crashed into Jessie's drip. I got stuck between them and the wall, so I just stopped trying to wriggle my way to freedom and wrapped my arms around them both. My chin could rest quite easily on the tops of their heads.

And it was only now all three of us were together for the first time in a year that I realised just how much I'd missed her.

"Dammit, Eira," Gwen murmured when she finally managed to pry herself loose, because now all her precaution was wasted. She would have to lose the jacket and hope her patrol didn't notice the faint whiff of rogue. "You weren't seen, were you?"

Eira made a face. "By the idiots in the foyer? No. Shit, Gwen — give me some credit here."

They began bickering in earnest. Lee took advantage of the commotion to come over and slip a piece of paper into my hand. I unfolded it carefully, risking a glance down to see an address written in his scratchy handwriting. It took a while for me to make sense of the muddle of letters.

Scott M. Anderson

4 Llys Geraint

Bangor

Gwynedd

"Thank you," I mouthed, and Lee offered me a grin.

"Thank Eira. She did all the work." He tapped his forehead and shrugged. "This mind shit freaks me out, I'll admit. Have I ever mentioned how glad I am that you two are on our side?"

I laughed and opened my mouth to tease him, but the door creaked open and one of the nurses glowered at us. "Three visitors was pushing it. Eight is taking the piss."

That put a stop to my sisters' bickering, at least. For now. They could fight all day and night when they were in the right mood, and they had a year of separation to make up for.

"Not now, Joanne," Jess groaned.

That lazy complaint wouldn't have deterred her, but I saw Gwen close her eyes for a split second and knew that she was going to take over my tapping duties for a few minutes at least. My head would thank her for it. I could actually hear the blood pumping in my ears, loud and echoing, and it was very distracting. Soon enough, the nurse went vacant-eyed and left quietly.

"Right. You three — out," I told Lee's guys. "If you let the wolves in the foyer see you, I'll skin you alive."

They traipsed out of hospital room like so many ducklings, and I felt my sister's eyes on me again. She was just realising that I'd lost my aversion to leadership, too. I wondered what she'd make of it. She still had no idea why I'd left the island in the first place. We ended up locked in a staring competition of sorts, and it lasted so long that I saw her eyes darken.

Shit. I was so not getting into a pissing contest in my mate's hospital room. I appreciated that she was on the mainland and her wolf would be out of whack, but couldn't she .. like ... stop?

"Let's improve the efficiency of the seating arrangement real quick," Eira said. "We've been on our feet all afternoon."

It was a welcome distraction. I took the hint and got up. Jess noticed my eyes glazing a bit as all the blood rushed from my head. She pulled the blanket back and shuffled over, and I climbed into the bed beside her, breaking yet another rule. It wasn't as comfortable as it looked. It was also too narrow for both of us. Even with my arm around her, I felt in danger of falling off.

Instead of taking the chair I'd vacated, Eira pushed Lee into it and sat on him. It was efficient — there was no arguing with that, but it scared poor Lee half to death. He kept looking between Gwen and I, no doubt wondering which of us would jump him first.

And sure enough, I noticed Gwen's eyebrows go wandering upwards. She and Quin weren't really allowed to engage in public displays of affection. I wasn't entirely sure I had even seen them kiss in all the years they'd been together, but that seemed to work for them. Eira, on the other hand, had never been afraid to start making out with boys in full view of the court.

"Are you going to introduce us to your ... friend, Eira?" my sister asked.

Eira just smiled. "Nah, don't think so."

Lee opened his mouth like he might just introduce himself, but I caught his eye and shook my head ever so slightly. Safer for him to stay anonymous where my big sister was concerned. She was more protective than I was. Like, a lot more.

Gwen folded her arms across her chest. "Well, I see you haven't changed, at least. Have you been corrupting Ric here, by any chance...?"

She wrinkled up her nose. "Oh. No, he did that all by himself."

"I see," Gwen said. She was still looking at me, so I moved my eyes onto Jess just to avoid a squabble.

I hated this new friction between us. I really did. It was almost like there were consequences to abandoning your closest family without warning or any half-decent excuse. She kept staring at me for her entire visit. And although we talked like nothing was wrong, I could feel the link between us thrumming with tension.

So, horrible as it sounded, it was almost a relief when she had to leave. Phone calls were one thing. Having to look her in the eye, knowing damn well that I'd deserted her to Anglesey's cutthroat politics ... that was a whole new level of uncomfortable. And, yes, it had been a choice between that or watching her die, but there was no question which of us was happier for that decision.

And it was me.