Page 62 of Dream Reaper

“What is it?” she whispered, more to herself than to him.

“It’s nasty.” Dragon spat onto the ground. “It’s drilling into my head. I think…I think it’s trying to take over. I can feel it.”

She inhaled sharply. “And you think it’s taken over Jerrid?”

“I don’t know. I told you I couldn’t find him.” He practically barked the words at her.

She took a wary step backward, raising her hands defensively, but he made no movement toward her, his tense body still draped across the ground.

“We need to get it out of your head,” she said, mulling over the words as she spoke them. “But you’re already awake. So how do we get it out?”

He gave the barest shake of his head.

She frowned and looked around the camp as if an idea might pop out of thin air. Brynja was still darting in and out of bedrooms, trying to wake up her people. The women and several of the half-elvish children had begun to gather in frightened clusters outside their tents.

How did she wake up someone who was already awake?

Understanding hit her like a fist to the jaw. “You’re not awake.”

Dragon glared at her, lifting his head and flaring his nostrils. “Do I look asleep to you, Meat Pasty?”

“That’s not what I mean,” she snapped back at him. “You are awake, but Jerrid is not. We need to wake up Jerrid.”

“I already told you, I can’t find him, you stupid she-elf.”

“You need to let go and allow him to come back.”

He lumbered to his feet and shook his head from side to side, growls of pain blasting out of him. “I can’t let him out when he isn’t anywhere to be let out of!”

Ava stepped forward and caught his face in her hands, her scarred palm pressed against his uncomfortably warm scales. “You need to let him come back. If you go back to the…to the place, then Jerrid can come out. Maybe that will chase away the shadow. Drive it out.”

Dragon exhaled slowly as he tilted his chin upward to get a better look at her.

“Or,” he said in a tone devoid of emotion, “you’ll just trap me with the shadow instead of Jerrid.”

Ava winced but forced herself to maintain eye contact. “I don’t think that will happen, but if it does…you’re stronger. I believe in you, Dragon. I know you can do this. I know you can hold out until we figure out what is happening and how to stop it. I don’t think Jerrid can. He’s already disappearing.”

He said nothing and made no indication he intended to do as she asked.

Taking a breath, Ava leaned forward and placed a cautious kiss on the smooth plate between his eyes, the large scale fiery beneath her lips. “I know you can do this.”

When she pulled back, something flickered in his slitted eyes. A shadow? She caught her breath, wondering if it was the very thing probing around inside him. Could it hear her? Did it know what she was doing?

Dragon sighed and pressed his snout into her waist. “Get me a blanket, would you? I don’t care if people see Jerrid, but he seems to find it very unpleasant.”

She patted his head and darted into the nearest tent. No one was inside, so she grabbed a blanket off the nearest cot and ran out to awkwardly toss it over Dragon’s back end. It barely covered his back and offered no modesty at all, but once he transformed—if he transformed—the blanket should do the trick.

She kneeled in front of Dragon again and allowed him to collapse his head onto her thighs. Stroking the sides of his face, she whispered words of encouragement. He lay very still, and only the rise and fall of his huge chest indicated that he even lived.

And then it happened, so suddenly she didn’t have time to react. One minute a dragon lay in her lap, heating her with his inner fire. The next, a man lay with his arms around her waist, his ear pressed against her thigh. She grabbed the blanket as it began to slip and tugged it over his shoulders, but Jerrid remained motionless. Was he unconscious?

Or worse, dead?

She shifted her hand to feel his throat, relieved to find a thready pulse.

“I’m here,” he whispered hoarsely. “Shades, I don’t know how, but I’m back.”

Something raw and vulnerable threaded through his words. He sounded like a beaten, broken creature, like one of Talos’s poor, mistreated hounds. She lifted her right hand and cautiously sank it into his hair, letting the tangled strands slip through her fingers.