by W. J. May
“What hurts?”
This time, the question got through. She considered it, thoughtfully stretching out each limb while her cheek rested lightly against his bare chest. There should have been breaks. There should have been sprains. There should have been massive internal bleeding. But, strangely enough, minus an unprecedented level of disorientation, she seemed to be all right.
“Um...nothing.” She could hardly believe it herself. “Is that bad?”
She wasn’t paralyzed, was she? She’d actually moved all those limbs she’d stretched, right?
“It’s a miracle,” Dylan murmured in amazement. He helped her into a delicate sitting position, then ran his hands gently over both arms, both legs. Down her sides, up her back. Rotating her head back and forth as he checked her pupils. Nothing. She was just fine. “A freakin’ miracle.”
His own salvation had not been quite so astounding. The entire left side of his face had been torn open, like he’d been thrown into a jagged wall. There were hundreds of cuts and scrapes and abrasions covering every inch of visible skin and, judging by the tender way he was handling his shoulder, the thing had been ripped clean out of its socket.
But he was alive. They both were. At least for the time being.
But what about the others?
The second she thought the words, they heard a muffled groan. A hand popped out of the ice, followed immediately by a head of cinnamon hair.
“Tanya!”
Dylan propped Katerina gently on the snow and raced over to help. The tiny girl wrapped her arms around his neck, and then screamed in pain as her legs were tugged free of the ice.
“My knee,” she panted, doubled over at the waist. “I think I broke it.”
“We’ll fix it,” Dylan assured her quickly, wrapping his belt around it as a temporary brace before packing that brace with snow. The cold would numb her until other arrangements were made. In a flash, he made a cursory check for any other damages, then took her face firmly in his hands. “It’s just a knee—we’ll fix it. But Tanya, right now, I need you to think. Where’s Cassiel?”
Katerina’s head whipped around, frantically scanning the surrounding landscape. There wasn’t much to go on. The entire world had been wiped clean, blanketed in a fresh layer of dazzling white snow. There wasn’t a fae in sight.
“CASS!” she shouted at the top of her lungs.
Nothing.
Dylan clearly wanted to be shouting, too. In fact, a part of him was in a full-on panic. His best friend was missing, with limited air, and he hadn’t the faintest idea where to start looking for him. The only thing he had to go off was a single witness. One who was half-blinded by pain.
“Tanya, please,” he begged, “focus for me. You were with him last. Both of you were braced against the back of the cave. What happened next? Did you see what happened?”
Her head slowly lifted as she looked back at the boulder—buried in over twenty feet of ice. An almost dreamy look flitted across her face as she pulled the memories deep from within her dizzy subconscious, dragging them forth into the light.
“He never left...”
Dylan shook her shoulders. A little harder than he meant.
“What does that mean?”
She blinked quickly back to the present, trying desperately to summon her wits. “He shielded me from the worst of it, then got thrown into the ceiling when the ground shook. I was thrown clear, but the whole thing got buried after that. He couldn’t have left.”
That was all Dylan needed to hear. A second later, he was tearing towards the boulder, the very top of which was only barely visible over the sea of white. The air around him shimmered, and a second later a giant wolf was standing in his place, digging frantically through the snow.
Katerina covered her mouth as icy tears slipped down her face, while Tanya dragged herself closer, her dilated eyes locked fiercely upon the ever-growing hole. When it got big enough, Dylan shifted back into a man and slipped inside, falling noiselessly into the abyss. No idea whether his friend was even alive to save. No idea of how he was going to get back out.
“Dylan!” Katerina shouted, even though she knew it was useless. He was down there already, there was nothing more to be done. Still, that didn’t stop her and Tanya from shouting at the top of their lungs.
“Dylan!”
“Cass!”
They waited for what felt like an eternity, each second more excruciating than the next, then Katerina sucked in a breath as a sudden movement caught her eye.
“THERE!”
An explosion of ice burst into the air, and the next second two heads of hair popped out of the snow. One was conscious and moving. The other was not.
The princess scrambled to her feet, shocked that her legs were still working. Fast as she could, she made her way across the ice and fell to Dylan’s side, helping him drag the sleeping fae out of the darkness and into the light.
It was then that she paused, staring down in horror.
Cassiel had been perfectly cordial to her in the beginning, but since finding out that she was a Damaris that spirit had significantly cooled. He was still polite to a fault, but there was a distance between them that couldn’t be breached. A civility that never seemed to extend to friendship. It was his choice, not hers, but under the circumstances she didn’t see what could be done.
Because the two didn’t talk much, she’d watched him instead.
Over the course of the last week, she’d seen him laughing and relaxed. She’d seen him tired, but patient. Wary, but charming. She’d seen Dylan, the strongest man she’d ever met, lean on him many times. He was a beautiful as he was strong. As intimidating as he could be kind. She’d seen a hundred different emotions, and a hundred different faces.
But never would she have imagined he could look like this.
Those beautiful eyes of his were closed. That invincible body was helpless and broken, as vulnerable as a little child. A dark cloud of bruises had laced its way over his fair skin, and although she couldn’t see where it was coming from his silver shirt was stained with blood. He was breathing, faintly, but every breath seemed to come with the greatest effort, and when Dylan lowered an ear to his chest for a better listen, his face paled with fear.
“Cass.” He shook him very gently, careful not to disturb his spine. “Cass. Wake up.”
The girls huddled closer together as Cassiel lay perfectly still upon the snow. The tranquil look on his face stood in sharp contrast to the brutal devastation of the rest of his body, and even in the few seconds he’d been lying there that stain of blood had spread to the surrounding snow.
“What’s wrong with him?” Tanya whispered, staring down with grief-stricken eyes. The two might delight in tormenting the other, but they’d grown closer than either was prepared to admit. In spite of her shattered knee she knelt down in the snow, gently taking his hand.
“Internal bleeding.” Dylan looked like he could hardly say the words. “Most of his ribs are fractured; it sounds like one of them pierced his lungs. I don’t...” He trailed off helplessly, trembling slightly with the cold. “I don’t know what to do.”
For a moment, everyone was silent. Then Katerina whipped off her cloak and lay it across the fae. Her hand reached out to Dylan, while she kept her eyes fixed on Cassiel’s face.
“Give me your knife.”
Dylan froze for a moment in surprise, then his face paled in horror. “Kat, you’re not going to kill him! We can think of another way! There has to be something we can—”
“I’m not going to kill him,” she said calmly, never taking her eyes off his face. “I’m going to save him. And to do that, I need your knife.”
About five years ago, the palace had emptied as the royal family embarked upon their annual hunt. Normally, when hunting, the royal family extended only to the men. The king and the prince would set off with a contingent of favorite courtiers and guards, while Katerina and the rest of the women were left at home. But five years ago, aft
er weeks of begging, the princess had finally been allowed to come along.
She remembered how excited she’d been as the grooms saddled up her horse and she rode out with the rest of the men into the forest. She remembered how exhilarating it had been to gallop full speed through the woods. The wind in her hair. The sun in her eyes. Leading the charge.
She remembered how abruptly terrified she’d been when one of the men suddenly fell off his horse and tumbled headfirst into the ravine.
The entire party had come to a screeching halt. People were shouting. The man was bleeding uncontrollably. The doctor had been left behind at the palace. For what felt like a small eternity, the man lay dying on the ground while everyone else anxiously hovered, wringing their hands helplessly as they desperately debated what to do. Then one man stepped forward. A young lieutenant, new to the palace, that Katerina had seen only a few times before.
Unlike the panicked people around him, this man kept his head. With nothing more than skilled efficiency, he knelt to the ground and tore open the man’s shirt. A second later, he slipped his knife strategically between his ribs. The king had shouted. Katerina clapped her hand over her eyes.
But then the strangest thing happened. The man on the ground woke up.
“Your knife, Dylan,” Katerina said again, sweeping her hair into an efficient knot behind her head. “He’s running out of time.”
After a moment of profound hesitation, Dylan reached into his belt and pulled out his trusted blade. He turned it over nervously in his hands before placing it cautiously in hers. She took it without looking and rolled up the hem of Cassiel’s shirt.
His injuries were even worse up close.
By the looks of things, he’d been literally crushed against the wall of the cave. The jagged rocks had lacerated wide gashes of skin, but it was the internal damage that was the most pressing. It was there that Katerina focused her attention.
With the utmost care, she moved her fingers up the edge of his ribcage. Counting silently as she went. Mimicking the same motions she’d seen the lieutenant do all those years ago. When she reached the proper place, she pulled in a deep breath and pressed the tip of the blade to his skin.
...which is right when all hell broke loose.
“Are you crazy?!” Tanya shouted. At the same time, Dylan’s hand shot out involuntarily and grabbed her by the wrist, stopping the blade in its tracks.
As she looked up at them slowly, shaken to the core, she was suddenly reminded that the four of them hadn’t known each other very long. They had bonded as well as possible under the circumstances, but in the grand scheme of things they were still relative strangers.
And strangers didn’t let strangers go poking their friends with knives.
“I can’t...” Dylan’s voice shook as he stared down at Cassiel’s face. His pale skin was now tinted with the faintest traces of blue. “I can’t let you...”
It was a turning point. The second she was needed the scared little princess disappeared, and a fearless young woman rose up in her place. Like flipping a switch all the tension left Katerina’s body, and she gazed steadily into his eyes. Her panic was replaced with sympathy. The wild nerves gave way to calm assurance. A royal authority that was impossible to ignore.
“Dylan.” Her hands were sure, and her voice was steady. “Trust me.”
Their eyes locked again, and he pulled in another deep breath. He had no reason to do so. In fact, he had every reason not to. But, for whatever reason...he did.
A second later, he released her wrist. A second after that, the blade slid into Cassiel’s chest.
There was a rush of blood, followed by painful moan. Another rush of blood, and there was a sudden gasp as the pressure released and Cassiel was able to pull in a breath of air. His eyes shot open a moment later, flying around wildly before coming to rest on the girl kneeling in front of him.
“You...” he gasped weakly, hands coming up to his chest. “What are you...”
“It’s all right.” Dylan knelt quickly beside him, slipping a hand behind his head as he placed pressure against the wound. “You couldn’t breathe, but Kat...she helped you.”
There was a newfound deference in the way he said the words, and his eyes rested upon her like it was a favor he would not soon forget.
As for Cassiel, it was hard to tell how much he was absorbing and how much was lost in shock. His eyes travelled to Katerina when Dylan said her name, then returned almost immediately to the gaping hole in his chest. They widened slightly, tight with pain, but only a moment after that they came to rest upon something else. A trivial detail, but one that had a lasting effect.
“You gave me your cloak.”
The others glanced down in surprise. Katerina had completely forgotten about the gesture. It had been pure instinct. To protect the fallen. To safeguard the weak. She hadn’t thought anything of it until she saw the look of wonder in Cassiel’s dark eyes.
“Of course I did,” she answered self-consciously. “You’d do the same for me.”
Maybe that was true. Maybe not. But one thing was for sure. The fae was looking at the princess as if he’d never really seen her before that day.
Of course, their resident shape shifter couldn’t help but shatter the touching moment.
“So, what now?”
Since it was clear that their fourth member would survive the day, she had turned her focus to more immediate problems. They were still stranded in the middle of nowhere, in below-freezing temperatures, with a crush victim and a girl with a broken leg. Where did that leave them?
Dylan wiped his dagger on the fallen snow before pushing to his feet. His ice-blue eyes pierced through the stormy clouds with fresh determination as he glared up at the sky.
“Now we get off this bloody mountain.”
Chapter 6
One of the strange things about travelling around with a ranger is that you don’t need a map. Dylan was the map. Every step the others took for granted, every passing landmark, they were ingrained in his very bones. So, when Dylan was faced with the impossible question of how to get them off the stormy mountain, he answered the only way he knew how.
“We can’t go forward, and we can’t go back. But we can go around.” He turned suddenly towards the east, a direction they’d been moving parallel to thus far. “Redfern Peak. If we can make it that far, we can bypass the worst of the storm and come down on the other side of the mountain.”
“Redfern Peak?” Katerina repeated, stressing the last word. The snow around them was already stained with blood. Did he really think they’d be scaling mountains anytime soon?
Dylan read her concerns and answered them with quick assurance. “We’re already at the top of the peak. We’re not going to be hiking uphill anymore.” He hesitated suddenly, glancing down at his friend. “But it is a tricky climb down...”
Cassiel paled slightly at the thought but put a bracing hand against his chest and pushed shakily to his feet. Fae didn’t heal the same way mortals did. They had a higher tolerance for pain and a greater natural endurance. As long as his strength held, he could make it to the peak. What happened when he got there, however, would be anyone’s guess.
Dylan’s lips twitched up in the faintest of smiles as he looked his friend up and down. “You up for something like that?”
Even bloodied and broken, Cassiel still managed to look so haughty it was all Katerina could do not to laugh. “You insult me,” he scoffed. “I’ll manage it better than you.”
“I was just asking—”
“Put on some bloody pants, my friend.”
For the second time, Dylan tightened the cloak that was wrapped around his naked body and hurried back to the boulder to recover the clothes he’d lost as a wolf. His ability to shift might have saved the day, but it left the rules of propriety far behind them.
Katerina cast a quick glance at the others before hurrying after him.
What she was going to say, she didn’t know. What there was
to say, she had no idea. But with the world spinning past them at speeds too fast to control, she needed something steady. “So...Redfern Peak, huh?”
He glanced over his shoulder, his shirt halfway above his head. “Princess, if you’d like to see me naked, all you have to do is ask. I am a loyal subject, after all.”
Right. She could just picture this guy sitting down to pay his taxes.
She tried valiantly to smile but found herself quite at the mercy of her emotions. Instead of flashing a conspiratorial grin, as she’d intended, her eyes filled with sudden tears. Each one of them freezing before they could make it even halfway down her face.
“Kat?”
Dylan glanced back again, waiting for some sort of response, then stopped what he was doing the second he saw her face. The shirt was forgotten. The girl became his immediate priority.
“Hey.” He gathered her up in his arms, ignoring the cold, ignoring the pain. Ignoring everything except her tears. “Honey, please don’t cry. It’s all right.”
Honey, again. The man uses pet names when he’s nervous.
“I’m sorry.” She wiped her face, embarrassed, trying to get herself under control, but it wasn’t the easiest thing to do. “I just can’t believe what just...I mean, one second we were just standing there, and then...” A belated shiver shook her entire body as she pulled in a trembling breath. “When I woke up in the snow...I thought maybe I was dead.”
Saying the words aloud didn’t help like she thought it would. In fact, it made everything much, much worse. How was this her life? How were these her problems? Where was her palace, her horse, her bed, and her friends? Why the hell was she standing on this frozen mountain?
Dylan froze for a moment, then his arms tightened. “I know,” he soothed quietly, stroking her fiery hair with one hand, while the other held her tight against his chest. “I did, too.”
His heartbeat was faster than normal. She could feel it even through her clothes. Probably from the cold, the pain, and the adrenaline. He was still bleeding freely down his neck.
