Chapter 8 In Sickness and in Health and in Everything Else #2
“Sometimes this happens,” he said, leveling sorrow into his voice. “Drayks grow lethargic and slowly waste away. Better to put her out of her misery than let her suffer such a horrible fate. Thankfully, you brought her to me in time.” Ragnar reached for the drayk.
“No!” Brioni grabbed the creature first, and the animal gave up the limp act when squashed to a pair of heaving breasts. “She’s fine! I mean…we should at least give her a chance to get better, right?”
Ragnar tipped his head. “She does appear to suddenly be improving.”
“She does?” Brioni’s eyes crossed as she looked downward at the drayk wriggling in her too-tight grip. “Oh, yes, she does! Wow, you did it.”
“And yet, I didn’t do anything. Curious.”
The drayk finally scrambled out of Brioni’s hold and up onto her shoulder. The woman winced at the talons on her bare skin there, but she plastered on one of her sweet smiles. A smile that almost made Ragnar forget the whole thing. “Well, it’s a miracle then.”
“Thank Vitae.” He knelt to replace the stone in the cabinet, resting his forearm on the door and peering over it at her. “Or perhaps we should be thanking the trickster Frank since it seems like she was never ill to begin with.”
The human’s breath caught, struck motionless and wordless as that duplicitous mind of hers tried to work its way out and failed.
Ragnar couldn’t hide his smirk, too surprised by the gratification at finding her out. The minor panic in her eyes was nice too, her quick breaths and twitching fingers doing something to him he didn’t entirely expect. “Did no one ever tell you how naughty lying is?”
“I, um…you’re right!” She snapped her head to the drayk as her face flared with redness—not a human sickness apparently but a betrayal of their temperament. How convenient. “I can’t believe you lied to us.”
The drayk huffed and took off with one feathery flap of her wings.
Brioni mumbled something like “traitor” under her breath, then coyly peeked back at Ragnar as he stood. She was truly fidgeting then under his towering form, and it was enticing in a way it almost certainly shouldn’t have been.
“Okay, maybe I lied a little”—she waved as if to shoo the idea away—“but I just wanted to check on your hand, and I knew you wouldn’t let me see if I showed up without some other big dramatic reason.”
Something in Ragnar’s chest thumped. It was his heart, of course, but his mind was too perplexed to suss that out. “My…hand?” He flexed the fingers in question, feeling the inconsequential ache of the day before. “Rand said it would heal. There’s no need to be concerned.”
“But I am concerned!” She threw her arms out, eyes glassy again but not like they had been with a drayk feigning floppiness in hand.
The thumping in Ragnar’s chest shifted into a deep pounding, and it choked back any semblance of words.
What could he even say to that? No one was concerned about him on the worst of days, let alone when he endured what was barely a scratch.
There was…there was no need for anyone to start being concerned now…
least of all a small human who kept trying to put herself right in front of him when all he really wanted was…
“You clearly don’t want me around, though, so I had to come up with something,” she said, crossing her arms under her breasts with a defiance he really should have been expecting. “So it’s actually your fault that I lied, if you really think about it.”
Ragnar did his best to ignore the quirking corner of her lips that proved she was far too pleased with her own nonsense bit of logic. Instead, he focused on that other thing she said, the thing that struck him painfully. “I never said I don’t want you around.”
“You didn’t have to—you dragged me through the forest and threw me out,” she said, turning her nose up to the barn’s high ceiling and putting on an expert pout.
It was Ragnar’s turn to cross his arms, as amused by her antics as he was incensed. “I did not drag you.” In fact, he had been quite gentle considering what he’d fantasized about doing to her later that night. “You will know if I ever decide to drag you anywhere.”
Brioni jolted as if someone had poked her hard in the side. She searched the ceiling as if for a new out then let her eyes ping back to him. “Well, regardless, I just wanted to know. So?”
Ragnar hesitantly unfolded his arms and revealed his unbandaged hand.
She swept across the short space separating them and snatched it up, her thumbs tracing lightly over his palm as she tugged it toward her face.
Her haughty pout devolved into something much more sincere, and a sad sound escaped her lips.
“There are still some bruises, and a line right here.” She traced the deepest of the cuts. “Does it hurt, Ragnar?”
The demon would have retorted quickly if he thought the single word would come out with any kind of strength, but her soft touch had stolen away his ability to be anything but weak himself. He shook his head instead.
“I’m sorry this happened.” She turned her green eyes up to him, but not in that playfully sulky way—a way he only recognized now because what she was showing him was completely earnest. “But I am glad you were there. If you weren’t…”
Ragnar shook his head again.
She smoothed her palm over his healed cuts, and for a moment he wished Rand hadn’t done such a good job because he wanted to feel her touch deeper.
To absorb everything she had to offer into his veins and wrap it around his bones.
To let her do whatever she wanted with him, to him, for him, and repay those deeds a thousand times over for as long as he lived.
“Actually, there’s another reason I wanted to come here.”
He lifted a brow, the shiver of her touch too much to speak through.
“I also wanted to thank you for yesterday.” She tugged her bottom lip between her teeth then released it. “Properly.”
Ragnar’s stomach twisted. Being thanked properly could mean a number of things, but her inflection made his cock twitch, and he certainly didn’t deserve that. “You owe me nothing.”
“Oh, good because I couldn’t come up with a darn thing, so I just made you, like, seventeen of these.
” Brioni released his hand—disappointing—then dug into her skirt’s deepest pocket to reveal a wad of folded up parchment—confusing.
“This one’s a drayk, and this one’s a butterfly, and this one’s a sparrow, though it could be any kind of bird, really, so you should imagine it’s whatever you call the ones that have those weird eyebrow feathers and sing at moondown.
” She handed each off as she named them, and it was instinct to accept the folded oddities almost entirely because of the speed with which she tossed them at him.
“And this is supposed to be a veilhound except it’s actually a dog, just bigger.
I couldn’t get the bones right—need more practice with that.
This is another veilhound, and another…Oh, boy, how many dogs did I make?
This one’s a rabbit! You don’t have those around here, but they’re these cute, furry guys with long ears and round tails that look like puffy wish-flowers, and they hop around on giant back feet—”
“And have antlers?”
“Huh?”
“Elongated ears and paws, antlers, a small tail on a rounded hind end—that is a kewniq.” Something like excitement rose in Ragnar at the idea she had them in her world too.
“Bunnies don’t have antlers.”
“I thought you said it was a…a rabid?”
“No, never mind.” She rubbed her hands over her face, now empty because Ragnar was holding all of her parchment crafts.
“The point is, I know you didn’t like the one I made for you of Moar, so I tried to come up with a better thank you gift, but I also make these things when I’m trying to think, and I never ended up having a better thought, so I just kept folding and folding until I had a whole pile of the only thing I knew for sure you wouldn’t want.
” She sighed and reached for the paper animals.
But Ragnar jerked them away quicker, holding them just out of her arms’ length. “No.”
Brioni froze, fingers spread. “No?”
“I want them,” he said, the admittance more aggressive than he meant but only because it was true, which was embarrassing enough to make him duck down to the cabinet beneath his worktable.
“They are more than I deserve, but I will keep them.” He loaded the little figures inside and latched them safely away.
When he stood again, Brioni was studying the ground as if trying to figure out what had just happened.
“I didn’t dislike the other one,” he also admitted because it was unfair for her to think that. “I simply disliked that you were wandering in the Veilwood alone. Bad things can happen to you out there.”
She blinked, and it was like she’d been woken up out of some far-off thought, swaying slightly so her skirt swished around her knees.
“Bad things can happen to me here too. Well, not here here,” she said, running a finger over a narrow crack in the worktable.
“It’s different here. It’s nice and quiet and cozy. ”
“Cozy?” Ragnar snorted, glancing about at the dust motes in the lantern light as a creature brayed quietly from its stall. “No one’s ever—oh. Clever. You’ve managed to completely move on from that fib you told.”
“Did I? Hey, look, you have one of those funny Heck-goats with the floppy ears!” Brioni skipped across the barn, and then she just…stayed.
Demons almost never stayed at the barn longer than they had to, which was, of course, exactly how Ragnar liked it.
Occasionally Kizros would stop by for tea after an invitation had been extended, but his talkativeness was at least enjoyable since it never included a complaint about the smell of animals or the dusty surfaces.