14. Jerrid
JERRID
Dragon forced his aching bones forward in an attempt to move Ava safely behind him—harpies bite him, he could hear every bone in his body creaking in protest—but the fool lass wouldn’t move.
As if her feet had rooted to the spot.
Her cheeks had gone a chalky shade of gray, her lips partially parted as if frozen mid breath. Frowning, he roughly bumped her side with his elbow. Shades, the meat pasty barely came up to his shoulder when he was in his natural form.
This is not our natural form, Jerrid growled.
Dragon begged to differ, but now wasn’t the time to quibble over such trivialities.
Trivialities! This is my body you have hijacked!
Dragon focused his mind, shoving Jerrid deeper into the dark. Now wasn’t the time. Not with Meat Pasty standing beside him in a state of complete incompetence.
“What’s wrong with them?” Dragon asked. “Meat Pasty? Pasty! Ava!”
The use of her name finally tore her out of the strange state she had succumbed to. She turned her face upward, meeting his gaze with wide eyes. Such dark, beautiful eyes.
A dragon could drown in such eyes…
Stop falling in love with her. Now isn’t the time.
The snideness nearly tore a roar from Dragon’s throat. Jerrid was too cheeky for his own good most days.
“I don’t know,” Ava said. “Is it the—”
“Nightmares.” Brynja appeared on Dragon’s other side.
Shades, he’d forgotten the cranky one was still here. “What do you mean, nightmares? All of them at the same time? What strange creatures you humans are.”
“We need to wake them up…”Ava began, but Brynja was already in motion, bursting into the first tent.
To Dragon’s horror, Ava also left his side and made for another tent a dozen yards farther up the path. She disappeared inside while he trundled after her and waited helplessly outside the tent flap, chuffing inquisitively for news.
Another scream pierced through the thin fabric of the tent. Dragon grew impatient and stuck his snout through the flap, his pupils widening as he grew accustomed to the dark interior.
A young woman sat on a bed at the far end of the tent, holding a tiny half-elf child in her arms. The child, a girl, writhed in panic and lashed out with both arms and legs while Ava tried to pat her cheeks to wake her.
“She isn’t waking up!” the mother wailed. “Why won’t she wake up?”
Ava continued to call out to the child, patting her cheek harder. “I don’t know. Come on, child, open your eyes. Open your eyes for me. Please!”
But her shrieks continued, shrill and heartrending. Even Dragon, with his thick skin and heart of stone, found he could not endure the sound. It pierced his head like a spike, a genuine spike driven into his brain. He flared his nostrils and roared as loudly as he could.
The woman screamed and nearly toppled off the bed. Ava spun to face him, hand to her chest, eyes huge.
But they quickly narrowed, and she shook her fist at him. “Get out! Get out, you stupid…stupid—”
The little girl began to cry and wailed, “Momma?”
The young woman held her close and rocked her from side to side. “Oh, my poor baby.”
The girl clung to her, arms wrapping around her mother’s neck.
She stared over her shoulder at Dragon. “Momma, why is there a dragon in our house?”
Ava backed away, shooing Dragon with subtle movements of her fingers behind her back. He ducked out and waited for her to join him.
“That wasn’t kind,” she snapped, eyes glinting in the firelight.
He bared his teeth at her. “But it worked.”
Ava had no time for him however, already flitting away to wake up some other howling human.
You have no heart…
He trudged after her, annoyed with Ava, annoyed with Jerrid, and mostly annoyed with all the screaming. Would it ever stop? Or would it go on endlessly, driving the stake deeper into his brain. His head hurt. Oh, how it hurt.
He blinked, and his meat pasty had disappeared again. Which tent had she gone into this time? He growled and sniffed at the nearest tent anxiously, trying to pick up her scent. It was spicier than the human musk that filled the camp. Deeper and harder to detect.
Poking his nose into another tent, he inhaled deeply but only got a shout and something hard upon his nose for his efforts. Backing out, he flicked the boot that had been hurled at his head back into the tent with a wounded sniff.
Brynja called out from behind him, “I can’t wake them up!”
Dragon looked over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of the human girl leaning out of a tent, her expression grim and anxious.
You might as well bellow again and wake them all up, Jerrid muttered. If you’re going to keep my body, you may as well make yourself useful.
They would have words later about Jerrid’s ill-humored opinions of him.
Dragon spun to face the bulk of the tents on his side of the campfire. Bracing his feet, he swallowed back the pain in his head, in his bones, and summoned his deepest reservoir of strength.
His roar shook the ground beneath the camp, so loud it shut out all other sounds in his ears. All he could hear was his own roar.
He blundered by the tents, roaring and poking his nose into tent flaps.
The humans hurled more personal items in his direction, and a small dog with floppy ears and a curled lip actually tried to take a bite out of his clawed foot.
Dragon shook the mutt off with a warning growl, but it only ran barking around his legs, growling and snapping and making a nuisance of himself.
Dragon tried to back away without squashing the thing, but it was everywhere at once. Jumping, darting, loping in circles. Everywhere he turned, there was dog.
Dog, dog, dog…
And that splitting pain in his skull. Why the shades did it hurt so badly?
I think something’s wrong, Jerrid whispered from the darkness, his voice so low that Dragon could barely hear him over the incessant yapping. You need to let me out.
“We’re being attacked by a squirrel. Of course something is wrong!” Dragon bellowed as he tripped over a cast-iron cauldron and very nearly stepped into the ashy remains of someone’s cook fire.
Not the squirrel—I mean, the dog. Something else. I need to get out. Let me out!
What else was there? Besides the dog, and the screaming, and the pain…
Yes, the pain…the pain…
Dragon stumbled and went down on one knee. The dog jumped against his leg, straining to reach Dragon’s face, barking and snarling and snapping. Yes, snapping. Snapping was a good idea. One good snap and there would be no more barking…
Don’t you dare eat that dog! He isn’t food. He’s a pet— Oh, that hurts!
Dragon had never known such pain, this splintering, rending pain. Pain so great it brought a dragon to his knees. He threw back his head and roared in agony.
Hands grabbed his face and tugged him toward the ground. He snarled, lashing out and wincing away at the same time. But then the hands were there again, cupped on both sides of his face.
Ava’s face swam into view mere inches from the end of his nose. “Dragon!”
When he responded by yanking out of her hands, she came at him again, a hand on his shoulder.
“Dragon! What’s wrong?”
He could only moan, scraping the side of his face against the ground in an attempt to make it stop. Anything to make it stop. As he blundered through a firepit, scattering pots and pokers, something sharp dug into the side of his cheek. He groaned and rolled in the other direction.
Ava gripped his face again, her hands slick against his scales. Why were her hands so slippery? She was talking to him, but he couldn’t hear her over the roar of pain in his head.
In fact, he couldn’t hear Jerrid anymore either.
All that remained was pain.
Pain that ripped and shredded through his mind, through his head, through his…heart? Pain exploded in his chest, expanding and blossoming as surely as if a spear had plunged between the scales on his breastplate and shoved right through to his vital organ.
Ava whispered into his ear, over and over again. What was she saying? He wished he could hear what she was saying. Maybe she knew how to help him.
Please, please make it stop.
And Jerrid. Where was that coward when Dragon needed him the most?
And then something slipped through the cracks in his mind, in the exact spot where the pain hurt the most, sneaking in between the stabbing waves of pain. He didn’t have the energy to fight it or to even wonder what it was. He’d never known such pain in his existence.
The pain was all he knew. All he had ever known. Had there ever been anything else besides the pain and that shadow sneaking through the deepest corners of his mind like a fox on the hunt?
“Come on, Dragon, you need to help me!”
Dragon cracked open one eye, but he couldn’t focus on her, on his meat pasty. “Hurts.”
He wasn’t even sure he said the right word. What was the word for pain again?
“Where does it hurt?” she demanded, her hands still cradling his triangular head.
She shifted him, nestling his chin on something firm but soft. Her lap? He could only manage a moan.
He’d already forgotten the question.
“Is it your head? You keep rubbing your head.” Ava began to slowly move her fingers in gentle circles, stroking with firm pressure around his temples.
For the first time, a hint of relief swept through him. It wasn’t much—just a breath of fresh air in a foul bog, a wink of sleep after nights of sleeplessness, a bite of food after near starvation. But her fingers continued to move, somehow finding the places that hurt the most as if by magic.
“Try to relax,” she whispered, so softly that he strained to catch each word. “You need to relax. Keep your eyes closed and think about every muscle in your body relaxing, like it’s…like it’s turning to mud. Or flowing water.”
He wanted to laugh, but that would require too much energy, too much concentration. Instead, he listened to her voice and the pressure of her fingers and tried to sink into her lap.
Mud. He could be mud. His body clenched too tightly for him to even imagine flowing as easily as water.
At least now he wasn’t alone with the pain. Now he had his meat pasty…
She continued to talk to him in low, soothing tones as if she had done this a thousand times before. Perhaps she had while caring for her puny elvish prince. He growled, thinking of that prince with his head on her lap. This lap should belong to him. She was his meat pasty, and no one else’s.
He wouldn’t have it. He’d…he’d…
“Something’s wrong,” he rasped, eyes flaring wide open.
But he couldn’t see Ava, or the night sky, or the camp around them.
He saw nothing at all, just endless darkness.
A darkness so vast that it surely encompassed the whole of Rhuin, from the heated shores of the southern Dunewatch to the northernmost reaches of Agmon, north of his home in the mountains.
A darkness that covered all, saw all, knew all…
In the furthest corner of his mind, someone screamed a bloodcurdling shriek. It rattled Dragon’s bones and set his teeth on edge. It made his scales ripple, made the spikes on the back of his head bristle.
He shifted, peeling his head off Ava’s lap as the horrible realization hit him.
That shadow. The nightmare that had slipped into his mind uninvited.
The nightmare had found Jerrid.