Page 78 of Dark Mate

Low. Wet. The drag of a great weight against heartwood.

He’s moving.

I freeze halfway down, my heart slamming my ribs, and listen to the most terrible and most beautiful thing in the world: ten feet of wrecked predator hauling himself up out of the dark one slow pull at a time, breathing like every breath costs him, and alive. Alive. Coming back up to me.

The broken horn comes up out of the black first. Then the rest of him, dragging into the gray light through the cracked wood wall, hauling up into the entrance with the bolt still in his shoulder.

I see it before anything else, the shaft sticking out of the meat of him, the dark blood running down his arm and dripping off his claws, steaming in the cool air, pooling where he sets his hand to hold himself up. The male I thought couldn’t be hurt. The thing in the dark I never once imagined bleeding. He stands in the doorway of the nursery he carved and bleeds on the furs he laid for our child.

And underneath the relief, the cold thing lands—the understanding I had no room for until I knew he’d live. It was timed. While he fought six Unmade in his own passages, a second handler hit the nearest nest in the web—Lira’s aerie, the newest link, the one I brought in only weeks ago. The clicking from two directions was never a pincer on us. It was a diversion. Lira’s already gone, three territories east, recaptured, the eastern link cut, taken clean while I was here putting down the one that came for mine. Six dead-twice things spent to do it, and they decided she was worth the trade.

I’ll carry that. Later. Right now there’s a bolt in him.

I go to him.

My legs shake the whole way across. My bare feet step in his blood and it’s warm—hotter than bathwater, the heat of something running out of him that’s meant to stay in. The smell of it fills my nose. Iron, and under it something that’s only him, woodsmoke burned down to coals.

“Sit down.” My voice comes steadier than my hands. “Sit down, Riven.”

He sits. Not the smooth unfolding I know, a heavy lowering, ten feet of him going down to the furs because he’s spent everything he had. I kneel beside him.

“I have to pull it.”

He nods. No sound, his jaw set so hard the muscle jumps.

I grip the shaft. It’s slick, my hands too small, my fingers slipping and finding it again, his blood under my nails. I brace my other hand on his chest—the muscle locked, his heart going fast and hard under my palm—and I pull.

It comes free with a sound like tearing cloth, a rush of dark blood following. His jaw flexes. No grunt, no hiss, the tendons standing in his neck like cables, his claws shredding the pelts on either side of him.

I heat water the way he taught me—the fire-pit stones dropped in, warm in seconds—and the motion steadies me. My hands know how to do this. They know how to heat water and wring moss and clean a wound. The Cage taught me to tend a body. This isn’t what they meant. My hands don’t care.

I wash it. The burnt edges flake away under the wet moss. He hisses through his teeth—the first sound he’s made—and it goes through my chest like a blade.

“I know,” I whisper. “I know. Hold still.”

I pack the wound and bind it with the bark-fiber cord I braided, the first thing the canopy taught me, my own two hands’ work, holding his shoulder together now. The strips darken as his blood soaks through.

“You’re bleeding.” Not about himself. His good hand finds my hip, where the ceramic opened me—a shallow line, long, already clotting, my own blood dried dark down my thigh. His thumb stops just short of it. Something crosses his face that’s worse than anything the bolt put there. He fought six of themand took a bolt through the shoulder without a sound. He’s silent now, too, but it’s a worse silence, all of it aimed at the small cut a thing got close enough to leave on me.

“It’s nothing,” I say. “I’m fine. It barely caught me.”

“It got that close.” Flat. Wrecked.Close enough to mark you.

“And I put it down.” I take his face in both hands. “Me. With Neve’s knife. The one she gave me for exactly that.” I hold his eyes. “I’m not the thing they grew in a jar anymore, Riven. It came through the wall, and I used it.”

His forehead comes down to mine. We stay there a moment, breathing the same air, his blood and mine drying together on my hands.

He sits back against the wall, the hurt wing flat behind him, and I see something on him I’ve never seen. Not the easy weariness of a body that chose hard work. The gray, drawn exhaustion of a thing that fought for its life and isn’t sure it’s done.

I sit between his knees, my back to his stomach, the way we spent three weeks in the dark. His good arm comes around me. The hurt shoulder holds anyway, and I feel what it costs in the fine tremor running through his arm, but he holds.

“Can they kill you?”

He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. The bolt went deep. Two inches closer to the spine and the wing-joint shatters. A stronger dose and the wound spreads. I’d be alone in the canopy with a child and nothing between me and the clicking things that get back up.

He’s flesh. He bleeds. He can die. The not-being-able-to-die was a story I told myself in the dark, and the dark just took it back. And there are more of them than there are of him.

His hand stays on my belly. The hum starts—rough, damaged, catching on whatever the wound knocked loose in hischest. It sounds broken. It sounds like a voice that’s been crying. It’s the most honest thing he’s ever said.