Page 53 of Dream Reaper

Jerrid kneeled beside her, clutching at his side. His eyes stared into hers, narrow and reptilian. A wing snapped out of his left shoulder.

“Jerrid, no⁠—”

The second wing snapped out, catching her across the face and flinging her backward. As pain exploded in her head, she tumbled and missed the edge of the fire by inches. Rolling away and suppressing a cry of agony, she managed to push back up onto her hands and knees just as Jerrid fell to all fours.

His body rippled while scales broke out across his body in waves that caught the glinting light of the fire.

Dragon’s roar ricocheted through the camp. Ava stared up at him as he towered over her, his front claws planted mere inches from the palms she pressed into the dirt. One swipe of the claws, and he’d gut her or fling her into the fire. She didn’t dare move, but staying where she was meant certain death.

But Dragon didn’t attack her. He moaned, powerful limbs trembling as the heat of his breath fell upon her head.

Why was he in pain?

She let her gaze wander from his long, sinewy throat, down over powerful shoulders armored in scales, down to a bloody wound surrounded by shattered scales. Blood dripped from the shards and plopped onto the ground.

She heard every drop as if it were a death knell.

“Dragon!” she rasped. “What happened?”

He heaved a guttural moan in response.

Footsteps pounded against the ground behind her seconds before Brynja’s sharp voice cracked through the night: “What the shades happened?”

Tears pricked at Ava’s eyes as she wadded up the hem of her own skirt and tried to press it against the wound. Dragon recoiled with a snarl, but then he froze, neck arched so that he could stare down at her through eyes that blazed with betrayal.

“Jerrid, let me help you,” she said as she reached for the dragon’s injury yet again.

Beside them, Echo loosed a pitiful, keening wail.

Dragon’s blazing eyes blinked once…then twice. At last, he heaved a rumbling groan and eased onto his side, exposing his tender underbelly to Ava and Brynja, who dropped to her knees beside Ava.

“I was watching from a tree nearby,” Brynja ground out to Ava. “I saw Jerrid attack you. Or…maybe you were trying to run away, and he restrained you. I couldn’t tell from my vantage point.”

Accusation and suspicion dripped through every word, but there wasn’t time to dwell on that now. But the question lingered in her mind as Ava pressed fistfuls of her skirt into Dragon’s wound, trying to staunch the flow of his abnormally hot blood.

Did Jerrid actually attack me?

His blood ran over her hands, so heated she feared it might leave burns across her tender skin.

But she didn’t let go.

Dragon’s massive chest spasmed above her. “I didn’t attack.”

His words rumbled over her, vibrating her teeth and setting them on edge.

“I wasn’t trying to run away either,” she said with a sideways glance at Brynja. “There must be another explanation for what happened. Jerrid wouldn’t attack me—and I wasn’t trying to run away. I was…I was having a nightmare.”

Brynja’s gaze snapped to hers and held, something like recognition in her expression. “A nightmare? About…the forest?”

Ava’s blood chilled even as Dragon’s hot blood continued to trickle over her skin. “How did you know?”

“You aren’t the only one having nightmares,” Brynja said grimly. “I didn’t realize it was…catching. We’ve suspected that we’ve just been shut up in the forest for too long and are going a little stir crazy. But you’ve only been in the Shadewood a couple of days.”

A few days, to be more precise, but not nearly long enough to cause the sort of phenomenon that Brynja was suggesting.

Within a minute, the blood had soaked through her skirt and begun to trickle down the dragon’s side and around her pressing fingers. Dragon’s breathing grew erratic, unsteady.

“I need to stabilize him,” she whispered to Brynja. “I don’t know why this is bleeding so much.”