Page 59 of Dream Reaper

He could only moan, scraping the side of his face against the ground in an attempt to make it stop. Anything to make it stop. As he blundered through a firepit, scattering pots and pokers, something sharp dug into the side of his cheek. He groaned and rolled in the other direction.

Ava gripped his face again, her hands slick against his scales. Why were her hands so slippery? She was talking to him, but he couldn’t hear her over the roar of pain in his head.

In fact, he couldn’t hear Jerrid anymore either.

All that remained was pain.

Pain that ripped and shredded through his mind, through his head, through his…heart? Pain exploded in his chest, expanding and blossoming as surely as if a spear had plunged between the scales on his breastplate and shoved right through to his vital organ.

Ava whispered into his ear, over and over again. What was she saying? He wished he could hear what she was saying. Maybe she knew how to help him.

Please, please make it stop.

And Jerrid. Where was that coward when Dragon needed him the most?

And then something slipped through the cracks in his mind, in the exact spot where the pain hurt the most, sneaking in between the stabbing waves of pain. He didn’t have the energy to fight it or to even wonder what it was. He’d never known such pain in his existence.

The pain was all he knew. All he had ever known. Had there ever been anything else besides the pain and that shadow sneaking through the deepest corners of his mind like a fox on the hunt?

“Come on, Dragon, you need to help me!”

Dragon cracked open one eye, but he couldn’t focus on her, on his meat pasty. “Hurts.”

He wasn’t even sure he said the right word. What was the word for pain again?

“Where does it hurt?” she demanded, her hands still cradling his triangular head.

She shifted him, nestling his chin on something firm but soft. Her lap? He could only manage a moan.

He’d already forgotten the question.

“Is it your head? You keep rubbing your head.” Ava began to slowly move her fingers in gentle circles, stroking with firm pressure around his temples.

For the first time, a hint of relief swept through him. It wasn’t much—just a breath of fresh air in a foul bog, a wink of sleep after nights of sleeplessness, a bite of food after near starvation. But her fingers continued to move, somehow finding the places that hurt the most as if by magic.

“Try to relax,” she whispered, so softly that he strained to catch each word. “You need to relax. Keep your eyes closed and think about every muscle in your body relaxing, like it’s…like it’s turning to mud. Or flowing water.”

He wanted to laugh, but that would require too much energy, too much concentration. Instead, he listened to her voice and the pressure of her fingers and tried to sink into her lap.

Mud. He could be mud. His body clenched too tightly for him to even imagine flowing as easily as water.

At least now he wasn’t alone with the pain. Now he had his meat pasty…

She continued to talk to him in low, soothing tones as if she had done this a thousand times before. Perhaps she had while caring for her puny elvish prince. He growled, thinking of that prince with his head on her lap. This lap should belong to him. She was his meat pasty, and no one else’s.

He wouldn’t have it. He’d…he’d…

“Something’s wrong,” he rasped, eyes flaring wide open.

But he couldn’t see Ava, or the night sky, or the camp around them. He saw nothing at all, just endless darkness. A darkness so vast that it surely encompassed the whole of Rhuin, from the heated shores of the southern Dunewatch to the northernmost reaches of Agmon, north of his home in the mountains. A darkness that covered all, saw all, knew all…

In the furthest corner of his mind, someone screamed a bloodcurdling shriek. It rattled Dragon’s bones and set his teeth on edge. It made his scales ripple, made the spikes on the back of his head bristle.

He shifted, peeling his head off Ava’s lap as the horrible realization hit him.

That shadow. The nightmare that had slipped into his mind uninvited.

The nightmare had found Jerrid.