15. Ava #2
She kneeled in front of Dragon again and allowed him to collapse his head onto her thighs. Stroking the sides of his face, she whispered words of encouragement. He lay very still, and only the rise and fall of his huge chest indicated that he even lived.
And then it happened, so suddenly she didn’t have time to react.
One minute a dragon lay in her lap, heating her with his inner fire.
The next, a man lay with his arms around her waist, his ear pressed against her thigh.
She grabbed the blanket as it began to slip and tugged it over his shoulders, but Jerrid remained motionless. Was he unconscious?
Or worse, dead?
She shifted her hand to feel his throat, relieved to find a thready pulse.
“I’m here,” he whispered hoarsely. “Shades, I don’t know how, but I’m back.”
Something raw and vulnerable threaded through his words. He sounded like a beaten, broken creature, like one of Talos’s poor, mistreated hounds. She lifted her right hand and cautiously sank it into his hair, letting the tangled strands slip through her fingers.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “You’re okay now. You’re safe.”
He shook his head against her legs. “No, it’s still there.”
A chill tingled down her spine, and her chest tightened. So, they had gotten Jerrid out, but was it as Dragon had feared?
Had they trapped Dragon with the shadow inside of their mind?
“And Dragon?” she asked, a tremor in her voice.
Jerrid pushed up slowly, shifting so that he braced his hands on either side of her folded legs. “He’s alive… Angry…but alive.”
She leaned back to put more distance between them as relief cascaded through her soul. For a moment, she’d been afraid that she had sent Dragon back just to die.
“Can he fight it? The shadow thing?”
Jerrid met her gaze at last, his human eyes darker than normal. “I don’t know.”
Something inside her shriveled a little. “He’ll fight it. He’s cantankerous. He’ll fight.”
“You don’t know what it’s like.” He sounded so hopeless.
“You forget,” Ava said gently, “that I’ve had nightmares about this thing too. I know how terrible it is. What I don’t know is what it is or where it came from. If we knew more about it, maybe we could figure out how to get rid of it.”
He laughed mirthlessly.
Heat filled her cheeks. “I’m serious. I’m not just being naive or optimistic. I’ve had some experience with this sort of thing.”
“Oh, have you?” he mocked. “You had experience battling monsters?”
They stared at one another, a mere foot or two separating them, her blushing furiously and him smiling in condescension.
“Yes,” she said slowly, firmly. “You forget that Prince Haryk suffered under a similar ailment. He had a curse put on him, and it caused him terrible nightmares. Persis talked about it as if it were alive, just like this thing—”
She broke off with a hiss, her gaze wrenching free of Jerrid’s and swiveling to the forest beyond. The puzzle pieces began to shift in her mind as she remembered how she had ended up in the Shadewood to begin with. Why they had come. What they had done.
“What is it?” Jerrid’s voice had lost its wry humor.
“I don’t know.” She licked her lower lip, still trying to sort out the pieces.
They were falling into place, slowly…so slowly.
“What if… What if Persis cast out the thing that was making Prince Haryk sick. I thought they had broken the curse—killed it. But what if they didn’t?”
Jerrid inhaled sharply. “What are you suggesting?”
“What if,” Ava said, still staring wide-eyed into the woods, “they just drove it out? Set it free? What if it’s out there in the Shadowed right now, searching for…for…”
She couldn’t say the words.
“Searching for what?”
Ava’s lips began to tremble. This couldn’t be happening…not again.
“Searching for what, Ava?” He caught her chin in his hands and turned her face toward him, his lips slightly parted in a frown as he stared down into her eyes. “What are you thinking? What does it want? What is it searching for?”
She pressed her lips together briefly before releasing a low moan. “Oh, Jerrid. What if it’s looking for a new home?”
He stared at her, hands frozen along both sides of her jaw. His calluses scratched against her skin, and yet his touch was impossibly gentle.
“You mean, the reason it has been visiting everyone in their dreams…is because it’s looking for a new host?”
She winced but nodded. “And I suspect the connection between you and Dragon has made you vulnerable to him. I think he can visit you while you’re awake because one of you is always, well, kind of asleep.
In a state of partial unwakefulness. When you go to the…
other place in your mind. Wherever it is you go. ”
“Darkness,” he said grimly, his thumb grazing along her jawline. “We go into darkness.”
A chilly feeling washed over her, settling in the pit of her stomach like an icy rock as she imagined them being trapped in this other place, this prison in their mind.
A prison they themselves had created.
“I don’t think it’s going to go away,” Jerrid said as he shifted his right hand down her neck to rest on the curve of her shoulder. “It feels…content. In a totally malevolent, mean sort of way.”
She flicked her eyes closed briefly. “Then Prince Haryk’s nightmare creature has found a new host.”
“Yes,” he said grimly, his hand squeezing her shoulder tightly, “I believe it has.”