13. Ava
AVA
Nameless horrors whispered Ava’s name and stalked the edges of her consciousness.
Everywhere she turned, monsters rose out of the shadows. Spiders with long legs. Wolves with sharp teeth. Wyrms with mighty tails and bulging eyes.
She woke often, rolling over only to fall almost immediately back to sleep, back into the nightmares.
She wandered the Shadewood in her dreams, looking for Echo and Jerrid. She even called out for Dragon in her delirium, but no one responded.
She was alone, cut off, with only the black trunks of the trees to keep her company. Even the wind had abandoned her, the air thick and heavy and lifeless. The forest felt unnaturally still, completely void of birdsong and insect activity. The only sound she could hear was her own heavy breathing.
Even the leaves were silent beneath her feet.
Her breathing quickened as she tried to break into a run, but the invisible ground seemed to tug at her ankles, as if she were trying to wade through thick sludge. She yanked her feet forward, one after another, but her progress grew slower, more difficult.
Was the forest trying to swallow her alive?
Panic rose in the pit of her stomach, blossoming and expanding to invade her chest and then the back of her throat. She feared she might choke on it, on this nameless fear.
Was this what the nightmares had been like for her prince?
She recalled his screams in the middle of the night, when even the sand healer from the Dunewatch struggled to wake him and keep him calm. That was how she felt—like screaming. It rose in the back of her throat. She tried to hold it in, but it choked her.
At last, it tore out of her throat as she stumbled forward onto all fours in black shadow. She crawled forward, but now the invisible sludge pulled at her hands, reaching up her arms, to her shoulders, to her throat—
I’ve found you, little elf, a ragged, coarse voice whispered through the mist and shadow.
It echoed around her as if they were alone together in a cavern and not in the woods. In that moment, she realized that the trees had indeed disappeared, leaving her in empty, impenetrable darkness.
Yes, I can see you.
Laughter rolled over her, not amused, but dark and cruel. Laughter meant to pierce. To hurt. To wound.
The monster wanted her to be afraid.
Tears streamed down her face, and her chest tightened, lungs aching for air. She needed to breathe. She needed air—now!
Clawing at her throat, she searched for an invisible hand trying to strangle her, but there was nothing there. Her fingernails clawed at her own skin, tearing into her own flesh, and yet her windpipe continued to constrict. Tightening, tightening. Oh flames, she needed to breathe!
Beg for air.
She would have, if she had enough breath left in her lungs to form words. The invisible hands tightened around her, now pulling her wrists away from her throat. She arched backward, blind instinct taking over, but she found no relief. She was going to die.
She realized it then.
Just as she realized this was real. It wasn’t a dream. There was no waking up from this nightmare. The invisible darkness choking the life from her was somehow real.
Killing her.
Killing…
If only she had a blade to stab out at the darkness. She pulled her hand back, imagining the weapon in her grip, and she plunged down the make-believe blade in one final, desperate attempt to free herself. Heat unlike anything she had ever known—blazing, blue heat—exploded around her.
A scream echoed through her brain.
The darkness recoiled, laughing, and vanished. Like a puff of smoke in the wind, it disappeared, carried away on waves of mirthless laughter. Ava opened her eyes, and firelight painted the trees above her. She choked in a breath, a desperate and wild one.
It felt like bliss in her lungs as they expanded to welcome the life-giving air.
Something beside her writhed.
Panic surged anew as she rolled away and scrambled to her knees, ready to flee…
Jerrid kneeled beside her, clutching at his side. His eyes stared into hers, narrow and reptilian. A wing snapped out of his left shoulder.
“Jerrid, no—”
The second wing snapped out, catching her across the face and flinging her backward.
As pain exploded in her head, she tumbled and missed the edge of the fire by inches.
Rolling away and suppressing a cry of agony, she managed to push back up onto her hands and knees just as Jerrid fell to all fours.
His body rippled while scales broke out across his body in waves that caught the glinting light of the fire.
Dragon’s roar ricocheted through the camp.
Ava stared up at him as he towered over her, his front claws planted mere inches from the palms she pressed into the dirt.
One swipe of the claws, and he’d gut her or fling her into the fire.
She didn’t dare move, but staying where she was meant certain death.
But Dragon didn’t attack her. He moaned, powerful limbs trembling as the heat of his breath fell upon her head.
Why was he in pain?
She let her gaze wander from his long, sinewy throat, down over powerful shoulders armored in scales, down to a bloody wound surrounded by shattered scales. Blood dripped from the shards and plopped onto the ground.
She heard every drop as if it were a death knell.
“Dragon!” she rasped. “What happened?”
He heaved a guttural moan in response.
Footsteps pounded against the ground behind her seconds before Brynja’s sharp voice cracked through the night: “What the shades happened?”
Tears pricked at Ava’s eyes as she wadded up the hem of her own skirt and tried to press it against the wound. Dragon recoiled with a snarl, but then he froze, neck arched so that he could stare down at her through eyes that blazed with betrayal.
“Jerrid, let me help you,” she said as she reached for the dragon’s injury yet again.
Beside them, Echo loosed a pitiful, keening wail.
Dragon’s blazing eyes blinked once…then twice. At last, he heaved a rumbling groan and eased onto his side, exposing his tender underbelly to Ava and Brynja, who dropped to her knees beside Ava.
“I was watching from a tree nearby,” Brynja ground out to Ava. “I saw Jerrid attack you. Or…maybe you were trying to run away, and he restrained you. I couldn’t tell from my vantage point.”
Accusation and suspicion dripped through every word, but there wasn’t time to dwell on that now. But the question lingered in her mind as Ava pressed fistfuls of her skirt into Dragon’s wound, trying to staunch the flow of his abnormally hot blood.
Did Jerrid actually attack me?
His blood ran over her hands, so heated she feared it might leave burns across her tender skin.
But she didn’t let go.
Dragon’s massive chest spasmed above her. “I didn’t attack.”
His words rumbled over her, vibrating her teeth and setting them on edge.
“I wasn’t trying to run away either,” she said with a sideways glance at Brynja. “There must be another explanation for what happened. Jerrid wouldn’t attack me—and I wasn’t trying to run away. I was…I was having a nightmare.”
Brynja’s gaze snapped to hers and held, something like recognition in her expression. “A nightmare? About…the forest?”
Ava’s blood chilled even as Dragon’s hot blood continued to trickle over her skin. “How did you know?”
“You aren’t the only one having nightmares,” Brynja said grimly. “I didn’t realize it was…catching. We’ve suspected that we’ve just been shut up in the forest for too long and are going a little stir crazy. But you’ve only been in the Shadewood a couple of days.”
A few days, to be more precise, but not nearly long enough to cause the sort of phenomenon that Brynja was suggesting.
Within a minute, the blood had soaked through her skirt and begun to trickle down the dragon’s side and around her pressing fingers. Dragon’s breathing grew erratic, unsteady.
“I need to stabilize him,” she whispered to Brynja. “I don’t know why this is bleeding so much.”
She needed to find a way to stop the bleeding, some way to…
cauterize the wound? She stared at her own hands and thought about how Princess Persis had used her magic to heal Prince Haryk.
She’d poured her magic into him to protect him from his nightmares.
Maybe she could use her magic in a similar way. It wouldn’t exactly be healing…
But it’s the same concept, she whispered to herself. If Persis could do it…
Maybe she could find a way to put her flimsy magic to good use. She dropped the corner of her skirt and pressed her bare hands against Dragon’s injury.
“What are you doing?” Brynja asked.
Ava ignored her, closing her eyes as she willed heat into her hands. Heal him. Stop the bleeding. Heal him. Stop the—
Brynja’s gasp tugged her out of her focused state.
Opening her eyes to slitted cracks, she could see the warm heat of her blue flame flickering around her fingers.
Dragon roared angrily and tried to shift away from her, but Ava pressed harder into his side.
She imagined pouring herself into him, giving him her strength and her fire.
Stop the bleeding, stop the bleeding, stop the—
Brynja yanked her backward. Ava fell onto her bottom with a thump, flames crackling around her fingers as they slid away from Dragon’s scales. Beneath the place where her hands had been now sat a blackened hole curling with thin wisps of smoke.
The stench of charred flesh wafted in the air.
Ava held her breath. Was it still bleeding? She began to count automatically. One, two, three…
A trickle of blood oozed through the freshly cauterized skin.
“You stopped me too soon!” she barked at Brynja.
The human girl ripped off her own overshirt to reveal a stained and tattered sleeveless blue tunic beneath it. She handed the wadded-up overshirt to Ava, who immediately pressed the new material to Dragon’s wound. He hissed, molten breath teasing the top of her head.
“Please don’t roast us,” she said to him.
He huffed in response. “You’re the one doing the roasting!”