Page 42 of Deven and the Dragon
Something that glittered like gemstones. Something large.
Deven ran.
He rounded the curve of the path along the bottom of the garden, the same path he’d taken the night he cut Fiora’s rose. He passed the wild climbing roses, now losing their freshness after enduring the heat of summer, but still sweet enough to fill the air with their scent.
And there, lying in the path just beside the barren rose bush where Deven had found the blue rose, was Fiora.
Chapter Nineteen
Fiora was indragon form, with his neck stretched out and his muzzle resting on the ground. His wings flopped at his sides, not folded neatly as they usually were, but limp and bedraggled. Fiora’s long tail was under the rose bush, perhaps wrapped around it.
A livid spot stood out on his flank, small but obvious due to the usual shiny perfection of Fiora’s armor: a gap, with his dragon skin showing through. It looked like it ought to have been the same light blue as Fiora’s human skin, only it was reddened and swollen.
Deven stopped, his feet skidding in the gravel. Fiora didn’t move. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t even blink.
Deven was at his side in an instant, crouched down by Fiora’s massive head. He laid his hand on Fiora’s neck. Was he breathing? Deven couldn’t tell, and his heart felt like it might burst out of his chest.
“Fi? Sweetheart, open your eyes.” No response. “Fi!” Deven shook him a little — or tried to, but it was like trying to shake a stone wall. His fingers slid off of Fiora’s scales as if they were made of ice. “Fuck. Fiora, look at me, please, I’m begging you…”
He didn’t know how long he knelt there, frantically petting Fiora’s neck and face, pleading with him…but at last there was the faintest sigh, one of Fiora’s eyelids fluttered — and Fiora melted from dragon into human, his bulk flowing into the ether and reforming into Fiora’s human body in the blink of an eye.
Fiora was naked, and his pale-blue limbs lay sprawled across the path, the gravel digging into his delicate skin. His eyes were still closed, and his face was pressed against the ground.
Deven stripped off his coat and laid it out flat, carefully lifting Fiora and gently placing him on top. A red mark marred Fiora’s hip, smaller than the matching wound on his dragon form but the same shape and placement. Deven shuddered and wrapped Fiora up in the coat, which covered him down to his knees — luckily, for Fiora was chilled to the touch. He was breathing, Deven could tell now, but his breaths were shallow, and far too few and far between. What the fuck was wrong with him?
“Fiora,” he whispered, and buried his face in Fiora’s long hair. It stuck to the moisture on Deven’s cheeks. He hadn’t even realized the tears had been streaming down. “Wake up.”
Nothing. Deven hoisted Fiora up into his arms and set off for the castle as quickly as he was able. Where the bloody fuck was Andrei? And where was the doctor who ought to be in constant attendance at Fiora’s side — a whole college of doctors, if one couldn’t do enough?
As he approached the terrace, Fiora stirred in his arms and moaned faintly. “No,” he whispered, so weakly Deven could hardly hear him. “No, I want to stay in the garden. Fred, put me down.”
He began to struggle, not with a lot of strength, but enough that Deven had to stop and kneel down to reposition him.
“It isn’t Fred,” Deven said, barely able to force the words out through his tightening throat. He wrapped his arms more firmly around the frighteningly thin bundle in his arms. “It’s me. It’s Deven.”
“Deven,” Fiora murmured, his lips twisting into a pitiful little smile. His eyes fluttered open. Their gold was dimmed, almost silvery-gray in the moonlight. They widened in shock. “Deven? Oh no, don’t look at me,” he moaned, and turned his face away.
“Fiora, what’s wrong with you? You’re —” Deven swallowed hard. His head was buzzing with something that felt like panic. “You look like you’re dying,” he whispered.
“I am.” Fiora said it like a simple statement of fact, like he hadn’t just exploded Deven’s world into tiny jagged fragments. “Why are you here? Please just leave me here.”
Leave him?Leavehim? Deven’s arms tightened until they ached. He was never leaving Fiora again. He would stay by his side, day and night, somehow splitting himself into twins so that he could do that while also taking every doctor in the kingdom by the collar and personally dragging them to Fiora’s bedside. He’d tear the world apart if that’s what it took, drain his own heart’s blood if he had to, but Fiora wouldlive.
“What’s wrong with you?” he demanded. “Tell me what’s wrong, and we’ll fix it. You were — Goddamnit, Fi, you were fine less than two weeks ago! You were fine until the morning after we…after we…” Realization hit like a ten-ton boulder. Fiora was a dragon, practically made of magic, unlike a human in so many ways. All his resistance to Deven’s advances. All his talk of his destiny, the darkness that lay before him. Deven had dismissed it as nonsense, the melancholy of a lonely man with an overinflated sense of the dramatic. “I did this to you. Somehow, I did this to you. Fiora, answer me! Tell me how to undo it.”
Fiora let out a little sob, shaking his head against Deven’s arm. “There’s nothing. There’s nothing you can do. You can’t — you can’t —” He coughed again, a dreadful rattling hack that shook his whole body and made Deven’s tense in horrible sympathy. “You can’t change the way you feel just because you don’t want me to die.”
“Change the way I feel? No, I can’t change how I feel.” Deven laughed, a little wildly, nearly sobbing with it. How he felt. How he bloody well felt…he hadn’t put words to it, because nothing he’d experienced in his life thus far had prepared him to know how. But looking down into Fiora’s wan face, feeling the fragile lines of him in his arms, Deven knew at last. “Fi. You may wish I didn’t, but I love you. I love you more than anything. I’ll do anything to make this right, even if you never see me again. I love you,” he repeated helplessly, and felt it in every beat of his heart.
Fiora stared up at him, his face crumpling in misery. “Don’t lie to me. Don’t — if you loved me, I wouldn’t —” He cut off abruptly, choking and wheezing, his eyes wide and unfocused.
Fiora’s whole body shook, like an epileptic seizure, every limb flailing — and then he went still like someone had cut his strings, falling limp in Deven’s arms. His eyes slid shut.
“Fi!” Deven frantically felt under the coat, laying his hand flat on Fiora’s chest. He was still cold, and his heart wasn’t beating — no, there. His heart was beating. It simply wasn’t in quite the right place. Deven kept his hand there, panting with the shock of terror, feeling it thump under his fingers. Slow, but steady, and Fiora’s chest rose and fell with even breaths.
Deven resettled the coat around him, gathered him up, and stood, setting off for the castle again. He wanted so badly to steal a kiss, to feel Fiora’s soft lips one more time — but he didn’t have the right. He’d done this. He didn’t have the right to anything.
Still, no one was going to take him from Fiora’s side until Deven was sure he’d be all right.
