When Dragons Burn

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Rayna

He’d been steady for five whole minutes. I was counting them because it helped. Then his breath hitched, like he swallowed air wrong, and everything changed at once.

“Miron?” I leaned in. “Hey—stay with me.”

His back arched off the cot. The bandage across his ribs went tight. I reached for his shoulders to press him down and his muscles jumped under my hands, hard and fast, like live wire. The cot groaned and slid an inch. His pupils went thin again. Heat rolled off him so strong it pushed sweat out of my skin.

“Breathe,” I said. “In. Out.” I might as well have been talking to the stove.

His shirt—what was left of it—pulled against his chest like it was too small. The seams along the shoulder popped. His collarbone shifted under the skin, not the way a break moves, more like his whole frame tried to make room for something. I had a stupid thought—this is going to ruin the cot—and then the fabric tore down the back in two clean rips. For half a second I saw something dark push through: not bone, not muscle. Wing. The membrane caught the lamp light and threw it back dull and red-brown before folding and hitting the wall with a heavy slap.

I stumbled back a step because there was no room for both of us that close. The wing dragged the lamp shade sideways. The cord snapped free, and the lamp clattered to the floor. The bulb didn’t break, just swung on its wire and threw light all over the stove, the table, his body. It was enough to make everything feel too bright.

The second wing came through slower, like he was fighting it. The shirt gave up. Threads floated in the air and stuck to my arms. Heat built fast. The stove’s draft changed from the movement and the fire inside licked at the open seams; for a second the room looked like it had three flames instead of one.

He made a sound I can’t name. Not human. Not animal either. It was pain, and something else under it. The kind of noise people make when the body is doing a thing it chooses without permission.

I should have been afraid. I was, in the way you are when you stand too close to a machine that can chew your hand off. But it wasn’t clean fear. It was jammed up with a lot of other things: training, habit, the part of me that counts breaths and doesn’t stop because something looks wrong.

He rolled off the cot to his knees. The cot tipped, then thudded back down crooked. The wings spread because there was nowhere for them to go. One hit the wall and rattled a shelf; the metal first-aid box clanged and swung. Scales showed along his shoulders where skin had been. Not big plates—smaller, set tight, like a thousand coins overlaid. They shifted when he breathed. Light ran over them in a way that made it hard to look and not look at the same time.

“Miron,” I said, to make this about a person and not just a shape. “I’m here.”

He didn’t answer. His hands—claws now, not all the way, but close—scraped the floor. The gouges he’d made earlier got longer. He lifted his head and the lines of his face weren’t the same. The brow ridge had more weight. The skin along the jaw looked thicker. The cut across his ribs pulled and flexed, then tightened. It should have bled. It didn’t. The edges had that scorched look again, darker now, like the heat inside him had decided to finish the job no matter what I thought.

He turned toward the door like he could hear something I couldn’t. The muscles along his shoulders bunched to launch. If he hit that door at speed there would be no door.

“Don’t,” I said, and stepped into his line of sight. I wasn’t sure what I planned to do if he came through me. There isn’t a protocol for this. The ones I know are for seizures, for shock, for people who want to pull tubes out and climb off stretchers. None of them say anything about wings.

He froze. Not because I yelled—I didn’t. It was the sound of my voice, I think, or the word, or maybe he was just choosing between too many bad ideas.

I realized I was shaking. Not the fine tremor you get when you’re cold. The deeper one that starts in the chest and works its way out. I took a breath like I tell patients to do when they’re going to faint. “Look at me,” I said. “Over here. Just me.”

He tried. His eyes were wrong in a way that would have been easier to see if the room wasn’t so hot. The pupils were still slits. The color around them went bright, copper and red mixed, like metal just before it turns orange. His chest hitched again, and when he exhaled, a narrow ribbon of flame slid out between his teeth and disappeared a foot from his face. It didn’t touch anything. It just… happened, the way a cough does when your throat decides it needs to.

That should have sent me to the back wall. It didn’t. It could have been shock. It felt like something else. Like I was past the part where you make choices about where to stand, and now I was in the part where you do the next right thing and hope the rest follows.

“Breathe with me,” I said. “In through your nose if you can. Out slow.” I showed him. In. Out. It didn’t fix anything but it gave us both a thing to do that wasn’t panic.

He shifted. The wing nearest me dragged the floor. The edge of it brushed my shin. Warm—no, hot—but not burning through my pants. The skin there prickled. His mouth opened again like a reflex, and heat rolled toward me. I lifted my hand without thinking, palm out, the way you’d calm a dog that startles. My fingers landed on his chest, just left of center, over the bandage.

It should have blistered me. It didn’t. Flame curled around my palm like a wind that decided not to blow. It had texture, which is a stupid word for heat, but that’s what it felt like. Not slick, not dry. Moving. The hair on my arm stood up. My skin went hot, then hotter, then stopped just on the line where pain turns to damage. I kept my hand there. If I let go, he’d go with it.

“Rayna,” he said, all rasp, my name a warning and a request.

“Right here.” I pressed harder. I could feel his heart. It beat fast, then a little less fast, then fast again. The gold lines under his skin brightened and dimmed with it. My palm tingled in time.

The bandage edges browned where the heat ran under them. I didn’t look away. His breath came out in a low sound that wasn’t a growl. It was more like what people do when the worst of a cramp passes—relief sharpened by the knowledge it can come back.

The room got smaller and bigger by turns. The wings moved and the air pressure changed. The stove popped. The lamp on the floor threw one shadow, then two. The radio stayed dead. I smelled smoke and wet wood and that hot coin smell that had no business being real.

He refused to look away from me. That helped. I could see the moment control came back online in his eyes. They softened, if that’s a word you can use for someone who looks like that. The slits widened by a hair. The muscles along his forearms stopped twitching. His claws retracted a fraction, enough to show nail beds again.

“You’re okay,” I said. I sounded calmer than I felt. That happens sometimes. Your voice knows the job even when your stomach is late to the idea.

He lowered his head and then lifted it again, like he couldn’t find a place to put it. The wing nearest the wall curled in and slapped the plaster with a dull smack. He winced and flinched the other away from the stove. It hit the first-aid box again. The little door popped open and a roll of gauze fell out and hit the floor and unraveled against his foot. I wanted to laugh because it was so ordinary and so not. I didn’t.

“Slow,” I said. “You’re taking up the whole room. You move fast, you’re going to break something we need.”

He wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. The teeth behind them weren’t the same teeth I’d given him water past earlier. They looked built for ripping, not chewing. He shut his mouth and nodded once.

The heat under my palm eased a few degrees. The flame stopped curling there. I left my hand anyway. The skin of his chest felt like stone warmed in full sun. The bandage under my palm was drying at the edges where I’d just changed it. I’d have to redo it again. I didn’t move.

“Can you pull it back?” I asked. My voice cracked on the last word. I swallowed and tried again. “The wings. Can you… fold?”

He took a breath. The muscles along his back rolled. The membrane drew in on itself, not all at once, more like he had to convince one section at a time. It made a soft skin-on-skin sound, like wet fabric sliding. He winced when the right side moved; that was where the worst cut ran. He paused and did it in smaller pieces until the tips disappeared back into the mess of torn shirt. The room got a foot wider when they were gone.

He stayed half-changed otherwise. Scales still patterned his shoulders and throat. His hands were hands again, but the knuckles were wrong and the nails were still too thick. His eyes were the last to shift. The slits thickened and the color flattened toward brown. The bright edge stayed.

“Better,” I said, partly for him, partly for me. My hand was still on his chest. I didn’t rush taking it away. “You with me?”

He nodded again, slower. “With you.”

I pulled my hand back. My skin looked normal. A little red. No blisters. No raised edges. I flexed my fingers. They worked. I didn’t know what to do with that except be grateful.

He looked down at the scratches in the floor and then at me. “I will fix this,” he said, voice rough but human enough to make sense.

“Add it to the tab.” I heard tires on wet gravel outside and the distant flash of white light came through the window a second later. “They’re here.”

He tensed. Not like before. More like a soldier hearing boots. His eyes cut to the door.

“Hey.” I stepped in front of him again because I didn’t know what else would work and I’d run out of smart. “No more shifting. No fire. No big moves. I’m going to open the door. They’re going to see you hurt and human. That’s it.”

His jaw set. “Rayna—”

“I know.” I put my hand on his shoulder, not his chest, and felt the heat through the skin and the scales. “Trust me for five minutes.”

He held my eyes for a long three seconds that stretched like they had a job. Then he exhaled. The lines of his face settled another notch toward what he’d been when I dragged him in here. The scales faded a shade. He looked… not okay, but more like a man and less like a thing that would make the news.

I fixed the bandage in two quick pulls, ignoring the way the tape edges browned. I shoved the lamp back onto the table. It wobbled but stayed. I kicked the gauze roll under the cot so no one would trip. I did a quick sweep of my own face with my sleeve because sweat had tracked down my neck and I didn’t want to look like a person who’d watched a man grow wings in a ranger cabin.

The radio crackled. “Rayna? We’re on the porch.”

“I’m coming,” I said into the handset. I looked at Miron one more time. “Stay.”

He almost smiled at that. “I heard you the first time.”

I opened the door. Cold air shoved in and cut the heat like a knife. Two figures in rain gear stood with headlamps and a stretcher between them. The beam swung past me and caught the stove, the table, the cot, the man on his knees beside it with a clean wrap around his ribs and a face that said pain and don’t ask.

“Ma’am?” the taller ranger said. “You the caller?”

“That’s me,” I said, stepping aside. “He’s stable enough to move, but careful of the left side. He needs a hospital. And—” I heard my own voice and how normal it sounded, and I kept it that way. “—the floor’s a little chewed up. Watch your step.”