It recoils, claws swiping at the fire, at me, missing by inches as I duck and roll and come up with the torch still gripped in both hands.
The creature looks at me. Dark slits in a darker face, fixed on mine, and I swear I see something behind them. Something that might be recognition, or the ghost of whoever this thing used to be before it became this.
Then it runs.
Into the darkness, between the buildings, gone.
I drop the torch. Turn.
Kovren is slumped against the well, chest heaving, blood soaking through what's left of his shirt. His eyes are still gold, still burning, but they're flickering. The amber trying to surface through the rage.
I walk toward him.
“Maren.” His voice is wrong. Deeper. Scraped raw. “Stay back. I can't... I don't know if I can...”
I keep walking.
“The rage is still...” He's shaking now, his whole body trembling with the effort of holding something back. “If you get too close, I might...”
I kneel beside him.
His hand snaps up, closes around my wrist. The grip is too tight, almost painful, and his skin is burning — but it's different from the fever. Hotter, drier, like something inside him caught fire during the fight and hasn't gone out yet.
“I could hurt you.” His voice cracks. “Right now. The thing inside me wants to.”
“I know.”
“And you're still here.”
“I'm still here.”
I put my free hand on his chest, over his heart. His ribcage is massive under my palm, the space between two ribs wide enough to fit my whole hand. The heart underneath pounds against me, fast and hard, and his fever-heat presses through the ruined shirt until my fingers ache with it. My hand stays.
“Breathe,” I tell him. “Come back.”
He breathes. Ragged, shaking breaths that move through his whole body.
The gold fades. Not the way it faded in the ditch, a slow settling. This is harder. Fought for. The amber comes back in patches, spreading through the gold like cracks in heated metal, and I can see him fighting for every inch of it.
His grip on my wrist goes from too tight to careful. His thumb finds my pulse.
“You should have stayed inside.” His voice is his own again. Wrecked, but his.
“You were losing.”
He doesn't argue. Can't, maybe. I saw the moment he froze. The moment the creature said brother and the fight went out of him.
“Maren.”
“What?”
“Thank you.” Two words. Raw. “For coming out. For not running.”
“You don't need to thank me for that.” I squeeze his hand once before letting go, turning back to my pack. “You just need to hold still while I stitch you up again. Think you can manage that?”
The sound he makes is almost a laugh.
I work through the night, putting him back together for the second time in four days. The new wounds are deep but clean — claws, not teeth, and the edges are sharp enough that the stitches pull together without fighting me. His skin is still hot under my hands, but as the hours pass and the rage settles, the heat changes. Cools. When I pull the final thread taut and cut it, his forehead under my palm is warm instead of burning.
