The thought was bitter. True, but bitter.
She finished her work and sat back, examining the results. Dark fluid had begun to drain from his chest into a container she’d attached to the tube, and he could already feel his breathing becoming slightly easier.
“Better?”
He looked at her. She was exhausted. He could see it in the shadows under her eyes, the slight tremor in her hands, the way she kept blinking as if fighting to stay awake. How long had she been working on him? How much of her own resources had she expended to keep him alive?
She has nothing to gain from this. Why is she helping me?
He couldn’t understand it. In his experience, creatures didn’t help each other without reason. There was always a motive, always an exchange, always something to be gained.
Unless she simply couldn’t bear to watch another being die.
Foolish. Dangerous. Admirable.
He was too tired to sort out which of those adjectives felt most appropriate.
The storm howled outside, shaking the walls of her shelter, and he felt the floor shift slightly beneath him. The structure was damaged, and every gust of wind seemed to stress it further.
“You need to rest.”
Her voice cut through his observations. She had moved away from him, settling into a chair near the wall where she could watch both him and the storm. Her posture was still tense, even though her eyelids kept drooping.
She doesn’t trust me enough to sleep. Smart.
He should stay awake too. He should keep watching her and assessing the situation, planning his next move. But his body had other ideas. The pain was fading to a dull throb, probably some effect of whatever she’d given him, and exhaustion was pulling him under.
When I am healed and the storm ends. Then I will decide what to do with her.
The thought felt hollow, even to him. He didn’t want to do anything with her. He wanted to understand her, this strange female who had saved a stranger’s life, who had tended wounds she wasn’t sure how to treat, and who sat watching him with tired eyes and steady hands.
He wanted to know why.
But that question would have to wait. His eyes were closing despite his best efforts, and the darkness was rising up to claim him again. The last thing he heard before sleep took him was her voice, soft and low, speaking words he couldn’t quite understand but soothed him anyway.
CHAPTER FIVE
Jaz’s neck screamed in protest as she jerked awake, her hand already reaching for the knife she kept strapped to her thigh.
Threat. Stranger.
The memories caught up with her in pieces. The storm. The explosion. The impossible creature she’d dragged through a kilometer of ice and wind because apparently her survival instincts had gone on permanent vacation. Her gaze flew to the bunk.
He’s still here.
She blinked hard, scrubbing a hand across her face, half-expecting the image to dissolve into something rational. A trick of exhaustion. A stress-induced hallucination. Anything other than what her eyes were actually showing her.
But no. The male on her bunk remained stubbornly, impossibly real.
He was unconscious again, his massive chest rising and falling with breaths that rattled slightly but no longer gurgled the waythey had hours ago. The drain she’d inserted was still doing its job, the collection container now half-full of dark fluid that made her stomach turn every time she looked at it.
She stood slowly, her joints popping in protest after too many hours crammed into a chair designed for functionality rather than comfort. The habitat unit groaned around her, a sound she’d grown disturbingly accustomed to over the past twelve hours. The storm was still raging outside, but her shelter was holding.
She moved towards the bunk without really deciding to, her feet carrying her forward while her brain tried to catch up.
Wings.
That was the thing she kept coming back to. He had wings. Massive ones, folded now against his back, their membranes an almost translucent white that darkened to pale blue at the edges. And one of them was damaged. She’d done what she could to immobilize it, splinting the broken bone with supplies meant for human limbs, but she had no idea if her treatment would actually help. For all she knew, she’d made it worse.
