"David!"
They met halfway, the sun glowing exactly warm enough and the air sweet, details like him setting down a heavy cage and her leaping from stone to stone across the brook tossed off by bodies running on autopilot while the brains focused on more important things. She drank in the smell of him and the lean hardness of his body enfolding hers, the fire of his lips. Had she been downplaying sex? Damnfool thought.
But this place was a little too public for her taste. Wouldn't want to shock the dragon. She pulled back and stared into his eyes.
"I'm sorry." There, she'd said it, blanket statement covering a multitude of sins. Next step was acting on it.
Then she saw his pain. He winced and slackened his hold, favoring his left arm. The Healer inside her saw the ripped sleeve, the dark blood clotting there, the aura of infection, and grabbed hold of her.
Slashed wounds and punctures, livid skin spreading from them and blackness starting to fringe the cut lips. Her fingers traced the edges, listening to his body. Infection, yes, and a nasty one. She remembered the buzz and reek of it, killing that small strange man in the tower. The same germs, the same kind of wounds, bite or claw slash or cut. But this had barely started. She almost smiled.
Her hands ran up his arm, inside the torn sleeve and ripped it like tissue paper all the way to his armpit and then circled his shoulder, tracing the skin, feeling the heat of the germs warring with the antibodies in his blood, finding the end of them. Fingertip to fingertip, thumb to thumb, her hands ringed his arm and squeezed gently. Toothpaste in a tube, she thought, run the fingers down the tube and bring all the paste to the end and squeeze it out.
His arm trembled under her touch, and she felt his muscles bunching from the pain, but he didn't pull back. He trusted her.
He needed her. Her, not just her body.
Her hands reached his fingers, followed each out to the tip and nail, and then retraced the path to the slashed wounds on his forearm. Foul yellow-green slime dripped from the raw meat there, and she tore the wrecked sleeve into pads to mop it up. Her touch left shiny scar tissue behind, purple with new-grown skin but clean and cool and pure.
The healing dragged strength out of her and left a strange calm ecstasy behind, Zen satori or Sufi trance or some other kind of mystical exhaustion. God flowed through her hands.
She laid her palms on either side of his forearm, feeling her way deep into the muscles and tendons, asking them about lurking death or hidden damage. All seemed well.
White ringed his eyes and his lips, but he smiled. He shook his hand, gently at first, and then flexed his fingers into a fist to remind him of what his forearm should feel like. He captured her hands and kissed them, and Jo felt the thrill up her arms and down into her belly.
And then her knees gave up on her and she thumped down on her butt in the soft grass. The forest pulsed around her, in and out as if she saw the clearing through a zoom lens hunting for the proper framing of a picture. David knelt beside her, tender hands cradling her cheeks, fear replacing the wonder that had replaced the pain on his face.
She waved the fear away. "Long day. 'M okay. Just tired. Done a lot."
"Jo . . . your father . . ."
"Had to happen. Should have happened years ago. Rabid dog."
She closed her eyes and sank against his chest, letting the warmth and strength of him enfold her. Support her. That's what this pairing thing was all about. Not just sex. David made her stronger. If they worked right, pairs grew rather than shrank. Not like Daddy's vampire act, sucking life from Mom to fill his own emptiness.
{I smell you.}
That voice in her head . . . Jo cringed and broke loose from David's warmth and the soft kitten-purr of her own comfort, staring up at razor-edged obsidian scales and a huge yellow slit-pupil eye staring back. They plunged her back into the terror of the other dragon. This had to be the mate, freed from its master's power and seeking blood . . . .
David's arms tightened around her, calming and protecting. "That's a formal greeting, not a threat. Jo, this is the poet Khe'sha. He's decided to add our song to the dragon-sagas, rather than feed us to his brood."
{I hear your name, Cynthia Josephine Pierce. No dragon would eat a Healer. Most certainly, no dragon would eat a Singer or his mate.}
"Pleased to meet you." Jo tried hard not to stare at the long serrated teeth within arm's-reach. She tried hard not to gag, as well. This dragon had halitosis thick enough to wilt the grass for ten yards around. But she was sure that puking would be seen as bad manners, even in draconic society.
Poet? Dinosaurs were poets?
{Our songs are our lives. The Singer gave me your songs and showed why blood came between us. Where there is no choice, there is no guilt.}
The huge head swung away from her, to stare at Brian and Maureen and the woman crouched between them. {Guilt comes from choosing evil. I would eat that one, instead. But it still holds my young in danger.}
Maureen cocked her head. "Does it now?" she drawled, with a hard edge to her voice. "And I thought we had a bargain." She stared down at the woman at her feet, drew back her foot, and kicked. Her toes stopped a scant inch from the woman's belly.
Jo shuddered. Maureen had always
