Vivian’s eyes opened, as though she had been roused by the sound of their voices. Her hands reached out, grasping at something invisible to Weston, and she murmured words that sounded like, “I’m coming,” but he couldn’t be sure. “Hurts,” she added. Her lips were dry and cracked. He tried to give her a sip of water, but she turned her head away and it only dribbled across her face.
Weston pulled the blanket and his makeshift bandage away to check the wound and gasped with dismay. The flesh of her chest wall, from collarbone to breast, had risen in a tight, irregular swelling. The edges gaped, although there was no more bleeding. To a gentle touch, the whole area felt rock hard, as though the flesh beneath the skin had turned to stone.
“Dear God, what is that?”
Startled, Weston looked up to see Zee, made awkward by the bound hands, kneeling on the other side of Vivian’s unconscious form.
Weston reached behind him for the shotgun. At such close range there was little need to aim.
“The knife,” Zee said. “You called it dragonstone. Would it do this?”
Weston’s hands tightened on the gun, his trigger finger itching. “Don’t try to play stupid. If you were carrying it, you know what it’s for.”
“I found it. What will it do to her?” Agate eyes stared into his with all the intensity of a hunting cat. “Tell me!”
Weston found himself answering, compelled by the need behind the demand. “I don’t rightly know. It is said the stuff will kill a dragon, no matter how slight the wound. No way to stop the bleeding. Whether it will kill her in human form, I don’t know. Whatever this is, she’s not bleeding.”
The raven fluttered down and landed on his shoulder, poking an intrusive beak into his beard. Weston shoved it away. “Shoo, would you?” The bird edged sideways a little but stayed firmly rooted to his shoulder.
Vivian shifted restlessly. One of her hands clawed at her chest and he held it back with one of his, the other never leaving the gun.
He looked up at Zee, whose eyes didn’t budge from their focus on Vivian. “Get back where I put you.”
“Can’t. Look—you have to do something.”
As Weston watched, horrified, the swollen flesh shifted on its own, the lumps moving as though alive. The wound stretched and gaped as something blood-colored and shining tried to push its way out. Weston touched it with a shaking hand and found it smooth and hard as polished stone.
“Whatever that thing is, you have to get it out.” Zee’s voice betrayed him in that moment, stretched to breaking with guilt and grief.
Weston applied pressure, ever so gently, to the skin on either side of the stone, watching the flesh tear and stretch to make room. A gush of blood stained her white skin. Vivian cried out, both of her hands grasping at his wrists, but he steeled himself to go on. Little by little he eased the stone free. She sighed and went limp.
“Vivian,” Zee said, his voice sharp with alarm.
“She’s just resting more easy.” It was true. Her hair was damp with sweat and her lip was bleeding where she’d bitten it, but her breathing was more regular and her face looked almost peaceful.
Weston held the thing up to the light—as big as Vivian’s fist, red as heart’s blood and strangely beautiful.
“What the hell is it?”
“Feels like stone. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He turned back to Vivian. She was still breathing, slow and even, no longer muttering. He put his hand to the area around the wound and pressed gently at a smaller lump, manipulating it into the opening and out. Another stone, smaller. One by one he expressed more of the stones, easing them out until the flesh felt soft and there were no more swellings.
“Will she live?” Zee’s voice sounded like broken glass.
“Time will tell. But she’s better.”
Already her face had gained a touch of color. When he put his ear down to her heart, it had slowed and steadied to a more even rhythm. Weston gathered up the handful of strange stones. They chimed as they shifted against each other, with a clear crystalline tone for all the world like dreamspheres. In all of his memories there was nothing to prepare him for this, nothing that even hinted at what they might be.
“When I found her in the cave, she was a dragon,” Zee said. “The other dragon was dead, I still don’t know how. Maybe they fought, and she killed it. The dreamspheres—the noise was mind-bending. I saw that they were dying. And she was—she was—eating them. Swallowing them. And then I saw—I thought I saw . . .” He broke off there and wouldn’t say more.
Weston was wrung with a reluctant pity. Set adrift in such a maelstrom he could see how the mind would go astray, how a person might mistakenly turn on a loved one. And he had reason to believe that the man had seen more in the cave than he was going to be willing to mention.
Weston shook himself, jolted back out of the memory and into a now he wanted to escape. Zee was looking at him, apparently expecting an answer for some question asked and not heard. He jumped back to the last thing he remembered and assumed the topic hadn’t wildly strayed.
“I remember a childhood tale about the Guardian . . . she is the dragon who guards the Cave of Dreams. There was danger once to the dreamspheres; some sort of blight had come upon them and they were beginning to die. The Guardian consumed as many as she could hold, preserving them . . .”
“If the dreamspheres were to die, what then?”
“Perhaps nothing. Perhaps dreamers would die with them.”
Zee caught the hint of something left unspoken. “And sometimes?”
“I don’t wish to speak of it, not here. So close.”
The other man’s eyes appraised him, warrior’s eyes, reading both the warning and the fear. “What—who—do you think killed the Guardian, then?”
Weston shrugged. “I suspect it was whoever took Vivian’s pendant and set up the trap for the two of you.”
“The sorceress?”
“Looks like it.” Oh, Gracie. What have you done?
“We’re not safe here, if that’s true. She’s not safe.”
This was true, and not just because of the sorceress. And a shotgun wasn’t going to be of much use against anything that would come against them. But Weston also didn’t think Vivian should be moved.
“That’s not your concern,” he said to Zee. “Get back over there and sit, would you? She’ll be mad if I shoot you, but I can live with that.” Maybe. Unless she turned into a dragon again. Hell and damnation, he was in way over his head. He thought back to the flaming house with longing. A moment of pain, and then nothing. No responsibility, no guilt, no worry.
The man named Zee hesitated. “I know you don’t have to tell me anything,” he said. “But it would ease me to know who you are—what sort of hands she is in.”
Weston wasn’t entirely sure why he answered; something in the eyes, the tone of voice. “Name’s Weston. I’m a Dreamshifter, but not a good one.”
“George told her she was the last—”
“Yes, well. Never say I didn’t try to make it so.”
“So you know what to do then—how to get to the Black Gates. As soon as she’s well enough to travel, anyway.”
“Haven’t a clue. There was a book with a map, but it’s missing.”
“I have the map.”
Weston was on his feet, shotgun ready to fire, before the words were fairly out of the other man’s mouth. “So you’re in cahoots with her then, the one who stole the pendant and the book. Where is she? And give me the map.”
“Whoa, easy. Vivian’s mother drew it for me. In Surmise. It’s in my head.”
A few steadying breaths, and Weston lowered the gun. Just because he hadn’t pulled the trigger when he should have so many years ago, didn’t give him the right to get trigger-happy now.