Kinked (Elder Races, #6)

He tilted his head sideways and looked into the harpy’s wild face. Her eyes were half-open. Did that mean she was still conscious?

“I’m going to give this to you straight up, sunshine,” he whispered into her ear. “You look like hell. Our wounds aren’t closing over. We need to get out of this cell block and away from the dampening spell in here. Then maybe we can see about getting some magical healing. But to do that, you either need to be ambulatory or you need to be portable, and right now you’re neither.”

He looked down at her again. Was that a flicker in her half-closed eyes?

“You have to shapeshift,” he told her. “That might slow down your bleeding some, since—since so many of your wounds are on your wings. And if you can’t walk, at least I’ll be able to carry you.”

“My wings are bad,” she whispered.

The burning in his chest grew more intense. He steeled himself against it. “Yeah,” he said. “Your wings are bad. You’ll probably need surgery. Maybe even a couple of surgeries. The sooner we finish here and get home, the sooner we can get to that and you can take to the air again. But you’ve got to move first.”

There was no self-pity on that feral, beautiful face. There was no emotion at all. “The thing is, Quentin,” she said in a perfectly rational-sounding voice, “I don’t know that I can do that.”

If she was too injured to shapeshift, if she had lost too much blood, she might really be dying.

“No,” he said. He shook his head. “No. I do not accept that.”

“Gods forbid something might happen that you don’t accept,” she said dryly. Her eyes closed.

“Stop it!” He shook her, not caring if it hurt or not. Hell, if it hurt, it might be just the jolt she needed. Her eyes flared open again, and she glared at him. Anger was good. It was awesome. He smiled at her. “I’m going to pinch you until you shapeshift.”

One corner of her mouth twitched. “You really are a bastard, aren’t you?”

“You say that like it’s news. Or even a bad thing.” He found a place under her arm where she wasn’t injured, and he pinched her hard.

A spark lit her dull gaze. “Ouch.”

“Come on, sunshine,” he growled. “I’m not leaving without you, and I haven’t got all day. And if I have to drag you by the foot, you’re going to be a hell of a lot more uncomfortable than you are right now. Shift!”

Her breathing quickened, and her face twisted. He could feel the struggle in her body as she strained. His heart started to pound as he waited. A low, shaking moan came from her lips.

He shouted in her face, “COME ON!”

She bared her teeth and screamed back at him, an infuriated harpy’s shriek. And her wings slowly disappeared from sight. The alien quality of her features smoothed into the more human-looking Aryal. Her features were too pale and damp with sweat, and the area around her eyes was hollow with dark shadows.

Relief made him almost giddy. Who the hell could have ever guessed that he would come to care about what happened to this prickly pain in the ass he held in his arms? “There you are,” he said. He hugged her. “Good job.”

She glared at him and pinched him back, hard. “You suck.”

He barked out a short laugh, hugged her tighter and pressed a kiss to her temple for good measure. One of her arms crept around his waist, and she held him back.

A cautious-sounding Linwe said, “Is everything okay over there?”

“Everything’s okay,” Quentin said firmly. He looked into Aryal’s bitter gaze, and though he answered Linwe, he spoke directly to Aryal. “Or it will be.”

It had to be okay. He wouldn’t let it be anything else.





FIFTEEN


If Aryal thought about the damage that had been done to her wings, panic set in, so she tried not to think about it.

That wasn’t going so well.

She’d had a lot of time for what-ifs in her life, and if she couldn’t fly, she didn’t know that she could live. Flight was sewn into her nature. It marked the shape of her body. It went deeper than her sense of her own identity, into her state of being.

After she shapeshifted back into her human form, for all intents and purposes her wings appeared to be gone. But that wasn’t true. They were still there, still a part of her, and she could still feel the pain from the broken bones and the bite wounds.

She could still remember the agonizing grip of the shadow wolf as it crushed the critical carpal joint, and she knew at that point that the wolf might have already killed her, and everything else that happened after that point would be just her waiting to die.

The shapeshifting had been so hard, afterward she shook like a drug addict going through withdrawal. Quentin gripped her tightly. He sat back on his heels as he held her, and at first she couldn’t even lift her head off of his shoulder.