“You’re hurt,” I exclaimed, my heart squeezing painfully.
“Ribs,” he admitted. “Got hit by a wall.”
“You’re bleeding, too.” True panic coursed through me as I reached out to him, but he took a step away.
“That would be from my wing.”
“Let me see,” I insisted. I peered upward—the graceful lines of one wing were horribly distorted.
I took a step closer, but he pulled away again. “I will shift form,” he said. “That will mend the bones.”
I stared. “Shifting heals bone?”
“Yes.” He pulled his lips back from his impressive teeth. “The process hurts, though. The membrane tear is problematic. Soft tissue tends to get worse, not better.”
I swallowed. We had no way to heal that. How did one heal a wounded dragon?
Could he bleed to death?
“I will be back.” He started to turn away.
“No!” I almost shouted it. “Stay here.” I didn’t want him to leave. Wounded animals crawled off to die—how badly was he hurt? Would he tell me if it was bad?
“This will be unpleasant,” he winced, his breath hissing through gritted teeth.
The rain dripped over his scales and plastered my hair to my scalp. “Do you think I care about that? If I can help, I will.”
“There is nothing you can do.”
“Stay,” I pleaded.
He hesitated. A moment later, the bones began to shift beneath his skin.
I don’t know what I had expected—but when his head snapped back, and his jaw shook with the effort of holding in his screams, I thought my heart was going to tear into small pieces. His entire body trembled with pain, his talons sank into the concrete floor, before falling away, as his human fingers emerged from the dragon.
He did scream when the bones of his wings realigned. A hoarse, strangled sound that brought tears to my eyes. He collapsed to his knees, and then, forward onto his hands as the wing bones settled into a familiar pattern.
I found myself kneeling beside him in the rain, my hands wrapped around his arm. He was trembling. I would have done anything to spare him that pain.
Anything to keep him alive.
The realization hit me like a freight train, shredding the perception of my future, and what I really wanted for it. It came apart so easily—it clearly had been, at best, a patchwork project.
It was as though the hand of Fate had reached out, and touched me. Or rather, given me a hard slap up the back of the head.
Perhaps it had.
I swallowed, and found my voice, albeit a hoarse rendition of it. “Turn a bit this way.” I tugged on his arm.
He shot me a look, but he moved, shuffling sideways on his knees. In the firelight’s fitful and too distant glow, I saw how the wing membrane had been torn. Blood pulsed from it, mixing with water on the broken concrete. I so desperately wanted to heal him. If only I had a regenerator…
I didn’t have that. But we did have the laser cutters.
“Stay here,” I said.
“No problem,” he grated.
Casting my eyes amid the debris. My backpack had been near the fire—I started moving branches around, and eventually found it about thirty feet from where I’d left it.
