Page 58 of Where Broken Wings Fly

The dragon roared, the cave shuddering with every release of his powerful voice. Urram whined behind us, moving closer and placing his head against Gliocas’ where he lay beside his friend.

Moments later, Niamh sprinted into the cave with enough poppy flowers to fill an entire basin. She and Killian dropped them at our feet, carpeting the ground with vibrant hues of red far too similar to the blood that laid beneath them.

“Now what?” Raegan muttered as he continued to let fire flow from his fingers, Gliocas still crying out in agony.

“We need the oil from them but… I don’t know how.”

“Just feed them to him,” Urram grumbled. Taking his word for it, I left Raegan as he continued to cauterize and started to shovel handful after handful of the flowers into Gliocas’ mouth. He fought against me, wriggling his head side to side as his carmine eyes snapped open, steam blowing from his nose. Even when the sharpest of his fangs caught my forearm and ripped open my skin, I continued to push more and more into his mouth.

Finally, he slumped over, his mind lost to a deep sleep that allowed me to loosen a deep sigh.

“Okay, that’s enough,” I muttered to Raegan, who cut off the flow of amber at once. Shuffling my way closer to the wound, I tried my best to examine what was left of it. Large clumps of flaky flesh stuck out from the wound, coupled with small rocks and pieces of dirt.

“I need to clean out his wound.”

“Okay.” Raegan nodded, his whole being completely at my mercy as he stared.

“But—” I glanced down at my hands, the skin that had touched a thousand different things in the last few hours. “I need to sanitize my hands and I don’t know how, out here.”

There was also the problem of the copious amount of blood that was dripping from my own wound, but I hid it away from the others.

“Do what you must, Little,” Urram said, his muzzle pressed against the slow-moving nostrils of Gliocas.

He was right – what choice did we have?

With a tight-locked jaw, I got to work on picking various pieces from Gliocas’ wound, tossing them aside only to dive back in again. After several minutes of that, I stepped back and away from him, my head tilted as I looked at it.

“What’s wrong?” Raegan pleaded.

“I think the wound is opening up already.”

Raegan looked back at it, trying to decipher if my words were true or not.

“Shit… I think… I think I need to stitch it.” My stomach churned as I said it, at the horrible realization that not only did I have nothing to stitch it with, but I wasn’t sure there would be any needle strong enough to pierce the hide.

“Then stitch it.”

“I don’t have —” I cut myself off to look at the faint glint that appeared in Raegan’s waist band. The dagger, that he had hidden away in his chest-plate, had been placed in his pants for the entirety of the Beltane Ball.

“Dammit.”

“What is it?’

Groaning, I took a step away from them and pulled at the length of my gown, peeling it off of my body in one swift moment. Not a single one of them said a thing, only stared at me as if I was the strange one.

“Give me your dagger.”

Raegan didn’t question me, he simply pulled it from its hiding place and handed it over leather-handled side first. I took it from him and moved towards Gliocas, where I took a pinch of his hide and tugged at it.

It was tough. Far too strong for mere thread, I wasn’t sure if even rope would be capable of holding stitches.

“They’re not going to be pretty, but I’m going to do a dozen stitches all along here,” I paused to run my finger along the length of the wound. I wasn’t even sure why I was explaining it to them, perhaps because I wanted to hear the reasoning myself as I played through my plan.

Dropping to my knees once more, placing the gown on the floor in front of me, I began to trace a long line of the material with the blade. Except it didn’t cut.

“What is this made of?” I groaned as I pushed the knife harder, still making no advancements through the silk.

“Spider-silk,” Niamh mumbled through the hand over her mouth. “The toughest material we have.”