Page 27 of Dream Reaper

The laughter rolled out of the Shadewood forest with the force of a tidal wave, hurtling Ava into the void.

CHAPTER 8

JERRID

Echo wasn’t moving when Jerrid and Brynja finally made it back to the clearing.

Jerrid’s stomach clenched, his heart rate escalating as he trotted toward her, dropping the meager bag of supplies. He skidded across the grass on his knees and pressed his palms against the dragon’s side.

Please don’t be dead. Please, please don’t be dead.

Echo’s scales were still warm to the touch, and after a few moments of breathless waiting, her side rose in a feeble breath.

“Ah, that’s my girl,” he whispered and pressed his forehead to her side.

Brynja kneeled beside him, and to his surprise, ripped open the bag.

At his questioning look, she grimaced. “There’s a reason I elected myself to come with you. I know what to do. Until I was selected to come to Gelaira, I was apprenticed to work with the wise woman in my village. She knew a thing or two about…this kind of stuff.”

She set a wooden bowl on the grass and pulled out a flask of water and a smaller bag of supplies. Jerrid watched uselessly as she laid out a spool of thread, a small leather pouch of needles of all shapes and sizes, a pair of metal shears…

She met his gaze at last. “Guess you weren’t lying about the dragon.”

He almost smiled at the reluctantly apologetic tone she had adopted. “No, I wasn’t lying.”

She threaded one of the largest needles and set it aside on a clean cloth. Then she stood and began to walk around Echo’s still form, examining her various injuries and clucking sympathetically.

Jerrid wished she would just get down to business and start helping Echo, but he supposed she needed to decide which injuries she should address first.

There were many to choose from.

At last, she began to wash away the blood and gore from a nasty gash on Echo’s left hindquarters. Echo didn’t awaken or stir, but Jerrid rubbed her side soothingly all the same. Brynja’s stitches were fast but hardly pretty to look at.

Stitching dragon skin wasn’t easy, even for master healers. The scales got in the way. Brynja had to carefully position her stitches in the gaps between the scales. In one instance where a scale had cracked in two, she elected to remove both halves completely and stitch up the oozing wound behind them.

After the thigh, she moved on to Echo’s forelegs and then to her wings. Thankfully, the dragon hadn’t sustained too many injuries to her wings, but the ones she had received were no laughing matter. Brynja stitched the tears together in grim silence, biting off the thread with her teeth, dragon blood speckling her right cheek.

She had guts. He had to give her that.

A lot of people, men included, would have quailed at the sight of all the blood.

He examined Echo’s wings as the human girl began to scrub her hands with the little water that remained. He had no doubt Ava’s stitches would have been tighter and narrower, and he wished he’d found a way to bring her along. But they hadn’t been given any choice. And in the end, he doubted Echo would care about a few scars.

Not when she had her life to show for it.

“I’ve done all I can.” Brynja stuffed her supplies back into the bag.

Jerrid frowned and rose from his crouch, one hand against Echo’s shoulder. “What about Echo? Will she be all right? When will she wake up?”

Brynja shrugged, an indifferent expression on her face. “I don’t know. She lost a lot of blood. She might not wake up.”

Jerrid’s gut twisted. “Well, then, we need to do something to help her. Maybe some herbs or something?”

The girl stood as well, slinging the bag over her shoulder. “If you want to try to spoon feed grass to a dragon, be my guest. I don’t know enough about dragon anatomy to know what is safe or helpful to give her. I could poison her.”

“Then I need Ava.”

Brynja’s head shot up, her shoulders stiffening. “No. She stays at the camp.”