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.
