Listening warily for any sounds outside the cell block, he moved quickly over to Aryal’s cell, picked the lock and eased the door open. He rushed to her prone figure and kneeled at her head.
She lay on her stomach and showed no reaction to his sudden presence. He stroked her black hair to one side and felt for a pulse. Relief blew through him as he found one. It was thready and too rapid, but it was there.
“Hey, sunshine,” he said softly. “You in there? Feel free to get snarky and cuss me out anytime now.”
She didn’t say anything. Maybe she was unconscious.
Gods, she was a wreck. He was appalled at the state she was in. Those magnificent wings of hers were sprawled awkwardly on either side of her body, torn and broken. That last shadow wolf had known exactly what to do when it attacked her. It had very clearly intended to ground her, and that was what it had achieved.
If she hadn’t hesitated to take off, she might have gotten clean away. She had waited for him, and when he couldn’t get to her, she had said she would come for him.
A burning knot sank into his chest, like the same emotion that gripped him in the tragic nursery, only this time it was even hotter, more painful. Avian Wyr typically did not survive well if they lost the ability to fly.
This couldn’t cripple her. That was all there was to it.
First, though, he had to make sure it didn’t kill her.
Carefully he moved her. He didn’t try to turn her onto her stomach, because that would shift her wings too much. Instead he lifted her up until he could hold her, putting her head on his shoulder. She lay against his torso in a dead weight.
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.
Belatedly she realized she was resting against his bare, warm skin. She focused on the steady, strong heartbeat against her cheek. Concentrating on something outside of herself helped to stave off the panic.
He rested his cheek against her temple, and the light dusting of whiskers along his jaw felt good. She didn’t often like men’s beards, as sometimes the bristles felt prickly, but Quentin’s beard was as silken as the rest of his hair. In contrast, his wide, tanned chest had very little hair on it, just a light dusting of gold.
A sluggish curiosity stirred. Her voice sounded rusty as she said, “Your shirt’s gone.”
“I used it to bandage my leg and arm.” His arms eased. “Speaking of which, we need to bind your wounds. You’ve already lost too much blood.”
She pulled away and helped him to tear strips of her tank top off at the waist, which he used to wrap her visible wounds tightly. It wouldn’t stop the bleeding, but it would slow it down. As she watched him tie the ends of the cotton on her thigh, she asked, “How did you pick the lock?”
He smirked at her. “I have talented claws.”
Despite his lighthearted rejoinder, his gaze was sharp and assessing as he looked down her bloody figure. She looked down at herself too. They had left enough of her tank top so that it covered her breasts, and her jeans were torn and grimy with blood and dirt.