"THERE! THE HEALER!"
Not Theron. One of his men.
Three humans peel off and come straight at me.
Swords drawn. Closing fast.
"MELORI, RUN!"
Dara's voice. But can't run—wounded all around me, can't leave them, they're mine, when did they become mine?—knife, where's the knife?—supply pile, there.
My hand closes around it.
The bandage knife.
They have armor. They have training.
I weigh a hundred pounds after a big meal and my knees don't even work properly right now and the knife is for cutting bandages, not for—
What am I going to do, stab one of them and then get very murdered by the other two? Throw it? I've never thrown a knife. How hard can it be?
It's a pointy thing.
I aim the pointy end.
Three humans. Closing fast. Ten feet. Eight.
This is it.
Something to my left—big, fast, black fur tearing through the chaos, shoving past a knot of fighting bodies—the size, the one eye cutting through everything else—Keer. Running.
He hits the space between me and the three humans at full sprint.
Skids, turns, plants himself. Teeth bared. Snarling. A wall of black fur and muscle and teeth, crouched between me and three swords.
The humans stumble. The front one trips back a step because there is a very large, very angry wolf right in front of his face and his training didn't cover this distance, this close, those teeth.
"Oh fuck—"
"KILL IT!"
The older one raises his sword. Two-handed grip. Coming down—
Keer doesn't attack.
He shifts.
Close enough to feel the heat of it—the wrongness, the cracking, the sound that my healer brain still protests every time because bodies don't do that, joints don't bend that way—but this time is different. This time the sound fills the whole clearing and the three humans are right there, watching, their faces—
Fur pulling back into skin. Body stretching upward. The crouch becoming a stand, four legs becoming two, the massive black wolf rising and rising into a man. Spine straightening. Hands where paws were. Snout flattening into a jaw, a face, one eye.
Keer. Human. Naked. Standing between me and three swords.
The older human's swing stops mid-air. Just stops. Blade hanging above his head, arms locked, because the thing he was about to kill just became a person.
Keer doesn't move.
Doesn't flinch.
