“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 somedragon 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 backfrom 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.
