Page 3 of Feralheart

My fingertips brushed the secondary spring, the one that would snap the trap tighter if I touched it the wrong way. Sweat slicked my fingers despite the cool air. If I triggered it while the dragon was this close, I’d be dead before I could blink.

“Please,” I breathed. “Please let me help.”

The dragon’s jaws snapped shut with a bone-deep crack, missing my shoulder by a hair’s breadth. I froze, my fingers still stretched toward the release. The dragon’s breath burst hot and rapid against my cheek, smelling of copper and cinnamon. One more inch and those fangs would punch through my lungs.

I counted to twenty while my vision went spotty.

When its breathing steadied back to something that wasn’t quite a growl, I hooked my fingers around the release bar and wrenched.

The jaws sprang apart with a wet, ugly snap.

The dragon yanked its leg free and lunged backward, dragging itself away from me in a frantic scramble of wings and claws and spiked tail. I fell backward into the mud, my breathing ragged and my fingers numb. It was going to kill me. This was how I’d die.

It crouched a short distance away, its sides heaving. Blood ran down its leg in steady rivulets.

Wingbeats stirred the canopy. The hunters would arrive in moments.

Tolross’s healing herbs, stolen because the apothecary wouldn’t extend credit and my father and I barely made enough to feed and house us, still waited in my bag. They’d give my brother another week, maybe two.

I pulled them out.

The dragon’s eyes followed my movement as I approached it slowly, my hands outstretched. Its nostrils flared, scenting the graymallow and silverleaf.

“Hold still and I’ll heal you as best I can,” I said.

I crept past its head. Its foreleg. Slowly approaching the wound on its right hind leg. Stooping, I slid my fingers along the intact scales above the wound. Its hide was hot, not the coolness I was used to with elite dragons, but alive in a way that startled me. I could feel its heartbeat through the scales.

Quick and steady, my mother would say if she was here. The wound doesn’t care if you’re scared.

The wound didn’t care that my hands were shaking either. I crushed the herbs between my palms, the way she’d taught me, releasing the oils, and pressed the clump into the torn flesh. The dragon made a low, pain-filled sound but didn’t pull away.

I worked fast. Graymallow would slow the bleeding. Silverleaf would fight infection. I had no water to make a proper poultice, so I used spit and the pressure of my palms.

This much graymallow would keep a week of Tolross’s fever-sweats at bay. The silverleaf meant ten days of him breathing without a horrible rattle in his chest. Together, they were the difference between my brother lasting until next month or not making it to the week’s end.

I pressed them into the dragon’s wound anyway.

Heat gathered under my hands, the warmth that meant my mother’s gift was waking, the thing I never named as magic because magic in a commons woman meant attention I couldn’t afford.

The bleeding slowed and stopped.

But the heat in my palms didn’t fade. It bit. The skin along the heels of my hands glowed an angry pink, as if I’d held them too close to a cookfire. I tried to make a fist. The skin cracked at the knuckles, and pain shot up my wrists. I bit the inside of my cheek to hold back my whimper.

My mother had paid this price too every time she’d used the gift. I’d watched her hands turn from pink to red to the mottled white of old scars, layer upon layer until she could barely hold onto a cup.

I’d sworn I wouldn’t use it. That I’d let the gift die with her rather than burn myself hollow.

So much for promises.

Sitting back on my heels, I sucked in a few breaths. The herbs were gone. Tolross’s supply, the thing I’d risked my life for, pressed into the wounds of a wild dragon.

The beast shifted, testing weight on its injured leg.

It curled its massive head around and chuffed in my face, a sweet-smoky smell that made me want to cough. I held it back, not daring to breathe.

Its gaze held mine, and I didn’t know how to handle that. No one looked at commons. We were hands that worked and bodies that performed tasks lords and ladies found beneath them. Problems that needed managing.

But this wild, bleeding dragon I’d just saved truly looked at me.