He didn’t have a plan. Not unless he counted needling the beast like a bard who knew only one off-key tune. He loved this Griff who looked at him like he was something special, and he didn’t ever want that to end. He had a dragon’s heart, with his love of shiny things like the twin emeralds of Griff’s eyes, and he guarded his own treasures with his life. This beast was in for a fight.
As his blade slipped from his bloody grip and hit the grass, he swore and aimed an irate kick at the wyvern’s side, the dragon in him roaring up madder than ever. Desperate to do anything he could to save Griff.
He lashed out at the wyvern with his bloody fists as panic threatened to draw him deep into its blackened, unending maw.
He wanted to be someone Griff could count on too.
“Mal!” Alys screamed as she took in the scene from somewhere behind him—he wasn’t sure when she had gotten here, though she must have started running the second she heard his call. “Your sword! Why the hell did you drop your sword?”
He didn’t answer. He was breathless from continuing to beat and kick the creature’s scaly body, doing little more than making it as livid and panicked as he was.
The wyvern hissed and slashed at him with her claws, managing to land a few deep scratches before Alys finally charged forward with her blade raised.
She plunged Rhun’s sword in deep while Mal had the beast distracted. There came some telltale wet sounds as she pushed the blade down through scale and into the resistance of thick cords of muscle.
Her roar was louder than the wyvern’s as the creature rounded on her and bared its dripping teeth, glistening with Griff’s blood.
Mal, meanwhile, wasted little time in diving away from the next slash of Alys’s blade, his face flushed with exertion and his palm bleeding freely.
Alys jabbed her sword into the wyvern’s soft underbelly, earning a wrathful screech and a loosening of its jaws. Released from the creature’s grasp, Griff lay on the ground, limp as one of his nieces’ beloved rag dolls.
Seeming to realize she was outnumbered, the wyvern slunk away from Alys’s blade that bit deeper than venomous teeth—though it still showed off its own as it retreated, an effect made no less chilling by the crimson rivulets running down the creature’s flank and belly.
Mal grabbed his blade again, holding it up with both hands as the wyvern’s violet eyes narrowed. The arrogant creature still seemed to be assessing whether there might be some better angle from which to snatch up her quarry.
Rushing at the beast with a growl and a flash of steel, Mal finally convinced the creature to try her luck elsewhere. Sheslithered into the dappled late afternoon shadows with another hiss, painting a scarlet trail as she went.
Mal tossed his blade aside again and quickly knelt beside Griff, fingers and eyes searching for signs of life as Alys dropped down next to him and started to do the same.
“Griff? Griffin Sayer. Look at me,” she demanded of the bloodied, unconscious man as tears slid down her cheeks. “Open your eyes and look at me. I am not watching you die twice in the same year when I don’t know any necromancy, do you understand?”
Mal had managed to escape the wyvern’s claws with only a few slashes through his much-abused cloak, which was now stained a dark red. The cuts were burning and oozing, but he knew they were nothing compared to the punctures Griff had suffered in his shoulder, dangerously close to his neck.
Ignoring Alys’s quiet sobs, he leaned in close to Griff, listening for breath and finding, to his immense relief, a thready pulse.
He whisked off his tattered cloak, pressing it against Griff’s shoulder with the force of both hands as he said to Alys, “Where are our packs? We’ve got to stop this bleeding. Griff has—he has bandages, and whatever else healers use.” He was usually so calm in bloody situations. What the hell was wrong with him? Griff needed him to think.
Griff needed him.
He had let him down that night in the Wyrmwood, not being there to stop the attack or to help, but he wouldn’t fail him now. Griff could still count on him.
“He’s got some kind of special elf medicine, something in a vial, he gives it to the dog—I think his pack is with Prancer,” he managed finally.
The cloak was already turning scarlet beneath his hands, the color spreading.
“I love you. Please don’t die,” Alys whispered to Griff before grabbing her sword and disappearing back the way she had come.
Mal didn’t know how long she was gone.
Holding a dying Griff in his arms was his worst nightmare. Worse than failing to get the treasure in time and being torn apart by a host of revenants or having to work for Kage forever. Every second of it was torturously slow, but also not nearly long enough when it might be the last they ever got to spend together.
“Mal—” Alys panted upon returning. “Mal, I—”
“I’mfine!” he snapped, though he was aware he wore the wild-eyed look of someone who was anything but. He scooted his knees under Griff’s shoulders, remembering something about elevating the wounded area from a lesson of Wynnie’s long ago.
Gazing down to where Griff’s head lolled peacefully against his thigh, Mal whispered darkly, “If you die on me now after all that talk about how you wouldn’t, I’m never fucking forgiving you. I’d take you as a sad elf over a happy phantom any day.”
He closed his eyes for a minute, pushing that cloak harder against the hot dampness of fresh blood seeping through its many folds, and when he opened them, he found Alys white faced and offering out a bunch of shirts to him.
