Chapter 8
eight
Heat engulfed my hand, warm enough to wake me, and I found myself in an unfamiliar bedroom.
Panic swamped me, my heart thumping hard, and I sucked in frantic gulps of oxygen.
“You’re safe, mo chuisle,” a low voice rumbled next to me. “I’ve got you.”
“Rían,” I gusted out, slumping against my pillows, but horror slammed into me in the next breath. “Sloane.”
“She’s okay.” He stroked his thumb over the back of my hand. “She’s with our healer, Burdock, and his last report mentioned she had woken up for a few minutes. Long enough to get some broth down her.”
“Thank God.” I dropped my face into my hands, wincing as my left arm screamed in pain. “Ouch.”
“You need to rest.” He took the wrist I could now see was bandaged from elbow to fingertips and set it on the mattress beside me.
“Try not to move. Burdock has regenerated most of your arm, but it’s going to take a few more sessions before you’re back at one hundred percent.
Even then, you lost so much of the muscle in your forearm, you’ll be weaker on that side without physical therapy.
” His hand lingered in the air, but he didn’t touch me again.
“He was able to set your dislocated shoulder without issue, so other than residual tenderness, you’re good there. ”
“I can’t believe my…” My chin hit my chest. “I don’t know what to call him.”
“I call him an enemy.”
The harshness in his voice drew my eyes to his bright ones, and I saw any leniency he had shown Dad on my account had ended the moment he put his hands—and teeth—on me.
“I knew it wouldn’t go smoothly, but I didn’t expect this.” I thanked him when he passed me a glass of ice water and coughed as the cold hit my parched throat. “I didn’t think he would take it so far.”
“There are reasons why dragons prefer to mate their own kind. Preservation of the species is beyond our grasp. We might give our people another generation or two, but our end is coming. The true threat to our kind is fixation.” He must have read my confusion.
“We live among other shifters, hide ourselves among them too. Usually, it’s not a problem, but there are those whose greed drives them to pursue us for their own ends.
” He exhaled. “We’re only ever safe with each other, and even then there are complications. ”
“Like my…” I caught the slip and tried again. “Like Carmichael?”
Sartori hurt too much to think, let alone say, but Carmichael was a name I had never called…him.
“Yes.” He took my glass and set it aside.
“Your father was vergoldet, a golden. His scales were solid gold, making him invaluable. But your mother was a different breed entirely. She was glücklich, a luck dragon. Just one of her scales could grant almost any wish, but luck dragons don’t regrow them.
They have a set number of scales, so a finite number of wishes.
Since a dead glücklich held the same value as a live one, they were killed rather than captured to make harvesting their scales easier. ”
Bile rose up the back of my throat, and fresh understanding of why so few dragons remained soured my stomach. “That’s horrific.”
“Yes,” he agreed softly. “That was the fate awaiting you if you had shifted at puberty.”
Unable to hold down my water, I vomited over the edge of the bed, but Rían didn’t fuss. He only wiped my mouth with a cloth he must have been using to cool my forehead then set about cleaning my mess.
With supplies in easy reach, it took him only a minute, and I spent that time cataloguing details of the room that must be part of the Brentwood Urgent Care building. “Did Carmichael love Liesel?”
“He didn’t know her. Barely spoke to her a handful of times.
He was obsessed with her power, with what he could do with all those wishes.
He stalked her. Hunted her. She spent the last two years of her life looking over her shoulder and never leaving the safety of the clan home without Dietrich by her side. ”
“I was his consolation prize.”
“You were a golden opportunity no matter which of your parents’ magics you inherited.”
Though, in one case, that gold would have been quite literal.
“You don’t know what I am?” I wet my cracked lips. “Do you think I’ll be like her?”
“Your parents feared it enough to arrange our betrothal, but it’s only a guess until you fledge.”
“You never said.” I recalled his gargantuan beast. “What kind of dragon are you?”
“As you saw last night, I’m a gigant.”
“Gigant as in giant?”
“Both my parents were gigants, so they knew what to expect with me. That was why your parents felt safe entrusting you to me. They knew I would mature into a titan, another name for my breed, who could protect his mate. Gold or wish affinity, it never mattered to me. I only wanted to find you and honor the vow my parents made yours. Even if you don’t care for me in that way, I still want you to know you’ve got a place with us here.
Sloane too, of course. We have seven wolves in the clan, so she wouldn’t be alone. ”
“Thank you.” I couldn’t hold his gaze. “I always wanted to be free of the pack, to live my life on my own terms, but I never expected it would happen. Certainly not like this.” I twisted the thin sheet between my fingers. “When can I see Sloane?”
“Not for a while yet.” His lips twitched. “Burdock gave me an earful for the condition I brought you both home in last night. He won’t let Sloane out of bed for several more days, but I can probably ask him—”
“No,” an accented voice sliced through the room ahead of a short man with a round face and kind eyes. “Your charms are wasted on me.” He wore faded jeans and a plaid button-down shirt with a red stethoscope coiled around his neck. “Your tricks too.”
Cheeks flush, he dipped his chin. “Yes, sir.”
“Are you sure you don’t mean Liam?” I smiled in welcome. “I hear charm and tricks, and that’s where my mind goes.”
“That’s only because you don’t know this one well yet.” Burdock scoffed at Rían’s show of contrition. “Did he tell you about the trouble he had learning to fly?”
“Some of it, yes.”
Small wonder he struggled with a body as massive as his must have been, even at a young age.
He was too hard on himself, but the adult perspective he had gained wouldn’t soothe those childhood wounds to his pride.
The fact he kept his dragon caged due to its sheer size, always afraid of slipping and hurting someone by accident, would only continue to isolate him among his peers, a feeling I knew all too well.
“Well.” Surprise widened his eyes behind their thick lenses. “I bet he didn’t tell you he also accepted a birdbrained dare from his cousin to land on a power line, snapped the cable, and got electrocuted for his trouble.”
A low groan poured out of Rían, who covered his eyes with one hand to avoid looking at me.
“Liam was an instigator even then, huh?” I jabbed the back of Rían’s hand with my index finger. “Though you should have known better. Please tell me you did this when you were much, much, much smaller.”
“About the quarter of the size he is now,” Burdock told me, beginning his examination.
“Fayne almost died from the shock—pun intended—when she heard the news. Me? I almost wet myself laughing.” He squinted at me while I attempted to picture a dragon sitting on a power line like a giant bird and failing.
“I get the sense you’re either protective of Rían or you flat-out don’t like Liam. ”
“Can’t it be both?” Pack justice fresh on my mind, I was almost afraid to ask, “How was Liam punished?”
“I would have made him choose his own switch off a hedge then spanked him striped with it.” He shook his head. “Fayne settled for making him wait on his cousin hand and foot while Rían recovered. He had to take over Rían’s chores too. For six months. Cooking, cleaning, cutting the grass.”
God knows adolescent wolves got up to all kinds of trouble, most of it harmless, but they wouldn’t have gotten off with such a light sentence.
“Liam is a steinhart, a stone skin,” Rían explained to me. “The only reason Burdock didn’t spank him was he knew Liam would harden his skin and not feel so much as a tickle from it.”
“And if I had raised a hand to her grandsons, I would have been the one getting whipped. By Fayne.” Burdock’s face shone with fondness.
“Your vitals look good, and I sense your pain levels are nothing an ibuprofen can’t fix.
For now. You’ll get something heavier when I come back later for your next healing session. ”
“Will there be any lingering effects from the damage?”
“Not if you follow the PT program I’m going to design for you to the letter.”
“And Sloane?” I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “Will she recover fully?”
“Since she can shift, she regenerates much faster than an unfledged dragon,” he said gently, calling me a dragon without a hint of doubt or mockery.
“That said, she also sustained more extensive damage. They really did a number on her, but I’ve seen worse.
I’m confident she’ll pull through, physically, but there’s an emotional component as well.
” He paused for a split second. “Sartori broke her bond to the pack.”
He broke her… I stared at him, certain I had misheard. His somber gaze cured me of that notion.
“I have to get to her.” Panic flooded my mouth like a shot of adrenaline. I fisted the cover, ready to fling it aside. “Lone wolves can’t pull energy from a pack. Her recovery hinges on that tether being intact. Otherwise, you can’t know if she’ll heal.”
“Please, God, don’t tell me you’re another one.” Burdock shackled my ankle then tossed the blanket over me. “I never said your friend was unbound. I said Sartori broke her bond to him and his pack.”
A dull ringing filled my ears. “Then I don’t understand.”
Hand clasping mine where my fingers spasmed with the urge to go, go, go, Rían growled, “Neither do I.”