Her brows knit together, and she tilts her head to the side. She wraps the furs up around my chin, as though she’s tucking me in for a nap.
“No.” I pull my arm free and bat her hands away, shoving the pelt down so I can pick at the massive scale fused with my skin. “I need to see how bad it is.”
How close they got to killinghim.Killing us both, had I not been fast enough to preserve myself.
Another sharp hiss has me looking up to see her lips peeled, revealing bright white teeth and canines much sharper than mine.
“You win.” I whip my hand away. “Just ... put your teeth away. I’m in no state to tussle.”
She makes a clicking sound with her tongue, pats the tapered edges back into place, and brushes her fingers over the seam between scale and skin, making a chill crawl from my tailbone to the base of my skull. She tucks the furs over my chest, hiding the burst of gooseflesh that broke out across my body, and scurries toward a workbench that takes up the length of one wall, pitted with a basin.
Bare legs; long, slender, golden-brown ...dirty.
Bare feet that remind me of Orlaith.
My heart dives.
She grabs a bowl hewn from the same sparkly stuff that makes up the walls, stuffs some kelp in the hollow with a few other things I don’t recognize, and sits cross-legged on the ground. Setting the bowl before her, she hunches over and begins grinding down the contents with the blunt end of a thick stick.
Odd.
“Did you ... bring me here?”
She continues to pulverize the mixture, putting her entire body into it.
I sigh and try to look around—hard to do while I’m horizontal. “I’m sitting up,” I warn, and she flicks her hair off her face, watching me through shrewd eyes.
Grind.
Grind.
“Right. Here we go.”I use my elbows as leverage to crank my upper body off the nest of furs, but the motion casts an agonizing bolt through my chest.
I groan, face twisting as I reach for the wound.
There’s a flurry of movement, then her warm hands are on me—poking and prodding. She pushes close to my sternum, striking me like there’s a knife on the end of her finger, piercing through flesh and muscle and—
A scream saws out of me, wild and unleashed.
Head cocked to the side, she watches ...listens? Then she pinches the edge of the scale.
“What are you—”
Shepulls.
I roar.
She absolutely used some sort of adhesive to stick that thing down, because there goes a layer of skin.
Panting through the red haze of throat-cinching pain, I look down, eyes bulging as I take in the gruesome wound in my chest ...
My pulse pitches.
It’s a big, fleshy crater unlikeanythingwe’ve ever sustained.
Even so, Zykanth should’ve healed us by now.
Unless …
