With the last of my strength, I hoisted myself onto the slyvik’s back—just for a moment, just long enough to throw myself off it.
Just long enough to aim my blade at its wing, thin and membranous and spread wide for me in this critical second.
I lunged. My blade tore open the delicate skin as I fell.
I hit the ground hard. Everything went distant and fuzzy. The sound of the slyvik’s scream of pain sounded as if it was underwater.
“Shoot!” Atrius commanded.
Three arrows lodged into scaly skin. The slyvik’s agony rang clear and vivid in the threads—oddly mournful. It fought death the whole way, thrashing with increasing weakness. But finally, the creature slumped to the rocks.
I pushed myself up just as it fell, its final breaths labored, before slowly fading.
The air was, once again, unnaturally quiet.
I approached the dead slyvik. It had fallen awkwardly into a narrow part of the cliffs, so its body was suspended above us. One broken, shredded wing dangled to the ground, its twisted neck wedged against the stone.
When it was moving, it was difficult even for me to get a full sense of the scale of the creature. Now, I felt a little dizzy that I’d just thrown myself at that thing. It was perhaps the length of four grown men, nose to tail.
I touched the wing, and a darker realization settled over me as I sensed the remnants of its aura.
“This is a juvenile,” I said.
Erekkus muttered an Obitraen curse.
“What were you thinking?” Atrius’s voice snatched my attention away. He approached me, palpably furious. But my attention immediately fell to his shoulder, which was soaked in blood, and his right arm, which hung uselessly at his side.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
Erekkus eyed the corpse. “A juvenile,” he repeated.
His tone of voice said it all.
“I don’t think they get much larger than this,” I said, “but they do get stronger. And cleverer. They usually don’t venture this far south.”
“Or wander away from the pack,” Atrius said.
No surprise that he’d done his research.
Erekkus’s eyes went wide. “Pack?” he yelped, grabbing his bow again.
“There aren’t others here,” I said quickly. I pressed my hand to the stone again, making sure I hadn’t just made myself a liar—but I felt no other living creatures but us, save for the distant reverberations of what must have been other slyviks far ahead.
“This is a young male,” I went on. “They’re often driven away from the pack when they reach maturity.”
“And this one wandered far from home.”
Atrius touched the corpse’s tail, and I wondered if I imagined the brief pang of sadness in his voice, at something that maybe seemed a bit too familiar.
My attention fell again to his shoulder. And his arm. He still hadn’t moved it at all.
I cursed myself for not being a more useful healer.
Atrius must have read the look on my face. “It’s fine,” he muttered.
“You’re right-handed.”
A brief pause, like it struck him I had noticed. Then, he said breezily, “I’m just as good with both hands.”
Arrogant man.
“We’ll patch it up,” I said. “And then we need to get moving. We’ve wasted too much time already.”
Erekkus was already rummaging through his pack, withdrawing a roll of bandages and a bottle of medicine. He started to approach Atrius, then, when Atrius scowled at him, he handed them to me instead.
“Tell the others to be ready to move,” Atrius told him, wincing as I poured the medicine over the wound. Up close, I could feel the heat of the broken flesh—the teeth had cut deep and torn, and the saliva posed risk for infection. Nasty stuff. I prayed that his vampire hardiness would fight it off better than a human could.
“That wouldn’t have happened if I was awake,” I muttered, as I lifted his arm to wrap the bandage over his shoulder.
His other hand caught my chin, tipping it toward him. “You did an incredibly foolish thing,” he snapped.
Weaver, I was sick of being told how stupid I was.
“You—”
But then he said, “Thank you.” And his kiss was so soft and quick that I barely felt it before it was just his breath cooling on my lips.
I paused, startled more than I’d like, before resuming my bandaging.
“You’d do it for me,” I said quietly. It was the only thing I could think to say, and I wasn’t even sure why—until I realized that it was undeniably true.