I hoped the seams of his garments would hold as I grabbed both of them, then launched myself out of the newly created hole in the cave ceiling.
Fresh air, the sky, the sun, none of those things had ever been as precious as they were right now. My wings worked as I climbed higher, but I could not take off as I wished. Landing didn’t feel like a safe thing, but relying on the armour to hold and Dain’s grip not to loosen on Fern was too much for me torisk. With a heavy thud, my hind legs hit the ground some way away from the cave complex, the others joining me seconds later.
“You…” Dain was in great pain. I could feel it radiating off him. “I…”
“Saved the day again.” Kael grimly pulled something from Slate’s saddlebags and then marched over to the injured human. Powder was produced and Dain held back a scream as it was applied to his wound. “I know. I know, brother.”
“Neutralises the acid,” Lorien told Fern and Lance in grim tones.
“Let’s hope it was just a glancing thing and didn’t burn you down to the bone.” Kael’s eyes flashed as he raised his waterskin and then emptied it onto the wound. Red flesh was revealed, pink blood splattering on the ground. I leaned in closer to inspect the damage, but Argent was there already. Dain’s pants of pain faded away as he stared into his dragon’s eyes.
What is Argent doing?Fern looked up at me.Is he hypnotising Dain?
Taking away the pain, I replied, a low croon starting in my throat.He will bear it so his rider doesn’t have to.
Perhaps that was why Dain’s eyes rolled up into his head and then he fell away in a dead faint. Kael intercepted his fall, which was when Fern rushed over.
“Is he going to be alright?” Her voice trembled as much as her hand did as she reached to touch the unconscious man’s face. “He shouldn’t have gone back for me.”
“Can’t stop himself.” The growl in Kael’s voice had my head rearing up. “Can’t stop drawing you, dreaming of you, and now the bastard can’t stop trying to kill himself to keep you safe.”
“I’m sorry.” She shrank back a little, then dropped to her knees beside Dain. His limp hand was clasped by one of hers as she held out her palm. “Another egg was revealed in all of the chaos. We went down there for answers…”
And now perhaps we would find more.
“We need to get out of here.” Lorien’s eyes were trained on the gates of the human settlement beyond. “The city watch iscoming and they’re gonna want to know what happened. I vote we don’t stick around to tell them.”
“Everyone get in the saddle,” Kael ordered. “Argent will carry Dain as we make for somewhere beyond the watch’s reach.” He glanced down at Fern’s hands. “Then we can discover whether or not that egg was worth the cost.”
Chapter 49
Dain
“Ow!”
Gods, how I hated coming back here.
The rock wasn’t what had a much smaller, much younger version of me crying out in pain. The welt the projectile left on my arm stung fiercely, but welts would fade away, so would bruises. No, it was the look on my brothers’, my cousins’ faces. A vicious hunger I didn’t understand at all.
That was what hurt the most.
“Little beast,” John, my eldest brother, said, picking up another rock and throwing it at me.
They very rarely called me by my name. Beast, cretin, scum, thing?—
“Pale as a ghost,” Aidan, my other brother, said, right before he joined in the games. “Wish you’d disappear like one.”
Run, I wanted to tell the much younger version of myself. Get the hell away from them, but back then, freeze was the best strategy I could come up with. Some animal part was sure if I made myself small enough, still enough, I’d fade into the whitewall behind me and the people who were supposed to love and care for me would leave me alone.
“Rumour is your lady mother dallied with a revenant in the cemetery,” one of my cousins said with a grin, lobbing his own rock my way. Making any sort of noise just seemed to egg them on so I stifled my yelp. His brother came closer, picking up not one, not two, but three rocks before hefting one in his hand. “That’s how she spat out a pale, malformed creature like Dain.”
At the time, I struggled to understand any of this. What they were saying about Mother. Why they would take such pleasure in hurting me. My cousins all jeered as they went to throw their rocks my way.
“Don’t talk about Mother like that.”
When John stepped in between my cousins and me, for just a moment, I dared to think he would intervene on my behalf. The adult I was now marvelled at my own stupidity. Run! I told the little boy, because my brothers had never shown me a moment’s kindness and they wouldn’t today.
“It wasn’t an undead creature that created something like him,” Aidan said, coming to stand beside John before shooting me a dismissive look. “Dain’s just like those lambs that were born wrong too early in the spring.”
