Chapter 4
Four
The tall girl with long white-streaked blue hair in an elaborate plait—Anayla—strode over toward me, looking irritated. “Is it just my imagination, or are you covered in wyrm spit?”
“I suppose I am.” I dared another glance down at the gaping wound in my shoulder. I’d been too distracted by my fear of sudden death if the wyrms broke through the warriors surrounding me. I hadn’t been focused on the possibility of death by slowly bleeding out.
But now, the bleeding had all my attention.
“Don’t make her look at it,” a tall man chided her, moving to her side.
“I didn’t make her look at it,” she snapped back.
“I don’t think anyone can make her do anything.” Fieran appeared at my side. To me, he said, “Let’s get you off your feet and healed.”
He took his knife from me and slid it back into the gold engraved sheath at his waist, then lifted me easily against his broad chest again.
The blonde rolled her eyes. “I’m pretty sure even mortals can walk, Fieran.”
“Maybe I like carrying this one anyway.” The grin he gave me was unrepentantly roguish and far too handsome.
I’d always judged my mother for getting entangled with some dragon shifter whose name she wouldn’t admit to me, if she even knew it. Maybe I could have stood to be a little less harshly judgmental all these years.
Suddenly, a wyrm on the ground near us lashed out, coming back to life. Fieran’s arms tensed around me, his wings launching us up since he couldn’t reach a weapon while carrying me. But it didn’t matter.
Another woman had appeared between us and the wyrm with incredible speed, and the wyrm, leaping forward at us, impaled itself on her sword.
“Sloppy, Fear,” she admonished him.
“I knew I had you to watch my back, Maura.” His grin was lighthearted as we settled back to the ground, but my heart was still pounding like a trapped rabbit’s.
Maura rolled her eyes as she turned around, her sword dripping with wyrm guts before it flashed gold and it all burned away.
She was impossibly beautiful, with long ropes of tight black braids, threaded with purple, that fell to her waist. No wonder mortals fantasized about being Fae.
I’d forgotten how gorgeous the Fae and their shifter descendants were.
“You could put the mortal down and make yourself useful.”
“This mortal is a hero.” His eyes met mine, far too close to mine. They looked like molten gold, more beautiful than any human eyes I’ve ever seen. “She deserves to be taken care of like we take care of our own.”
“I’m not a hero,” I said.
“Is that so?” He had carried me beyond the field of destroyed wyrms, and he settled me onto the grass under the spreading limbs of a tree at the edge of the clearing.
“I had clear sight, flying as fast as I could toward that wyrm. An unarmed mortal girl standing between a schoolhouse full of children and a murderous wyrm twice her size. What do you call that if not a hero? And if you don’t think that’s heroic…
what is that for you? A normal Tuesday?”
“I think this is Wednesday, actually.”
He clicked his tongue. “And look at that. Smarter than me as well.”
It was impossible not to smile. He rewarded me with a grin, as if he found my smiling at his jokes deeply satisfying.
It almost took my mind off the pain that lanced through my shoulder as he carefully peeled the fabric of my dress back from my wounded skin. I hissed with pain and then flushed, not wanting to look weak in front of him.
“Wyrm spit is venomous, so I need to clean it out. It might sting.”
“Please, do what you need to do,” I said through gritted teeth. “It already stings.”
He pulled a canteen from his hip and poured it over the wound.
I hissed in pain again. “That’s not water, is it?”
“It is not,” he admitted. “It’s far better for cleansing. And it does have other uses as well.”
“Don’t tell me dragon shifters are going around heroically saving the world while slightly drunk,” I said.
He grinned and held the canteen out to me, offering me the rest of its contents to drink. I took a sip from the canteen before I realized how bizarrely intimate it was, sharing a canteen with a dragon shifter.
He searched through the bag on his belt for something, then cursed softly to himself. “I’m out of salve. Anayla—”
He raised his hand over his shoulder. She’d already pulled something out of her pocket as he fumbled around in his belt, and now she tossed it to him before he could finish asking. He caught it out of the air.
They moved together in perfect sync just as well out of battle as they did in it.
“You’re always out of salve,” she complained.
“Well, I always seem to have friends in need of healing,” he said.
I’d spent all my life terrified of dragon shifters, yet a glow of warmth spread through my chest when he vaguely suggested I was his friend. As ridiculous as it was.
The same thought must have occurred to him, because he asked, “What’s your name, friend?”
“Cara.”
“Fieran. I should have told you before I tormented you.” He nodded toward the ragged wound in my shoulder, now sanitized.
He opened the salve and leaned over me; his gaze was fixed on the wound, but that brought our faces so close together. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his face, no matter how much I wanted to.
My embarrassing obsession was the same way people reacted to the Fae. The Fae and shifters were so beautiful mortals had a hard time not staring at them. His cheekbones and jaw were both sharp and chiseled, his forehead a long straight sweep, and most of all, his eyes were molten gold.
“You weren’t at your best today, Maur,” he said as he opened the jar of salve. “Starfire’s guarding her left flank, and it’s showing weakness. Wound’s healed, right?”
“Fuck you, Fieran,” she called back.
He grinned, apparently unoffended. In a confiding tone, he told me, “She’s just mad at me for insulting her dragon.”
“I’m taking care of it.” She sounded exasperated. “And I’m just reminding you, she got hurt saving your ass on the east wall anyway.”
“I remember.” He smeared salve onto my wound with two of his fingers.
The contact made me bite my lip in pain for a second, and then the feeling changed, as warmth spread across my skin where he was touching me.
It was the salve, I tried to remind myself it was the salve.
But his hand felt so good on my shoulder.
“A little gratitude would be appropriate, Fear,” Anayla scolded him as she came over. She cast another troubled look at my wound—which made me wonder just how bad it was—before she added, “Maur did just save your life while you were busy cuddling the mortal.”
“Anayla is like our mother,” Fieran confided in me. “Always scolding. Always watching out for us.”
“You always need it!”
“Better than a mother, really,” Fieran muttered, half to himself. “We got to choose her.”
Before I had a chance to question the dragon shifter with the mother trauma, he was calling over his shoulder, “Darien!”
“Right here.” The man loomed over us both. “But before you say anything to me, I want to remind you that—despite my reputation—I have never picked up a girl while defending a village.”
Dairen smiled at me, and it was the most bright, magnetic smile I’d ever seen. “Though, I can see why you were so tempted.”
Fieran scoffed. “I couldn’t leave her behind. There was no time.”
“Sure, right.”
“But also, next time, shift sooner. You left yourself open to that wyrm attack if Anayla hadn’t been there.”
“But I knew Anayla was going to be there. She always is,” Darien said.
“Next time, you need to shift sooner,” Fieran repeated.
“And also, we all prefer Smoketail to you,” Maura told him.
She came up alongside him, too, giving me a brief once-over and then dismissing me.
She held a knife by the tip of its blade; she tossed it in the air and caught its hilt before sliding it back into a sheath on Darien’s chest. “You lost this.”
“In a wyrm’s ear. Before it breathed its last breath.”
“You still almost left it behind.”
“I just pretend to be this absent-minded so you feel superior,” he said loftily.
I could feel my skin tingling with warmth, and then I realized that the salve was healing me at that moment. I straightened, feeling a sudden sense of panic. “That’s not just medicine for the wyrm poison. That’s blood salve.”
“And?” Fieran asked.
“And it’s incredibly rare! I’ve heard of that stuff; it’s just for dragon shifters.” I thought, but didn’t point out, that it was incredibly expensive, most of all.
What if they charged me?
I would contemplate bleeding out before I had one more debt I couldn’t afford.
“Well, you’re an honorary member of our clan now. This is what we do for each other.”
I tried not to stare at his inhumanly beautiful face, feeling embarrassment and self-consciousness, fear and desire flood my senses. Gods, what if he was aware of it? His face hadn’t changed. But we were so close, and dragon shifters were rumored to have all kinds of super-powered senses.
Did he know what I was?
Was that why he had brought me along with him?
I could feel my mark burning. Was it just my imagination? Or was it because I was near the dragon shifters?
“I’ve got to go,” I said, trying to pull away.
“The only thing you have to do right now is sit there and let me heal you.” He set one of his big hands on my thigh, as if to hold me there with my butt on the ground.
My gaze met his. His hand burned through my pants against my skin, as if I were keenly aware of his big palm—of each finger resting lightly on my thigh.
His lips looked so soft and lush and so close to mine, but his eyes were what drew me in most—wide and soft gold, with brighter, shimmering specks and a black band around the iris.
His pupil was a narrow vertical slit, and then he blinked, and his pupils were round like a human’s. I still couldn’t tear my eyes away.