But she had fought while wounded before. That much was familiar. She knew how to ignore the pain, set aside the weakness, and push onward—and never before had she had quite so much reason.
Judith roared again and bent to face her enemies.
One was easy enough to dispose of. A quick dart of her head and its neck was between her jaws. The taste was foul, and its blood actually seemed to burn her tongue, but she had no time to care. Quickly, savagely, Judith bit down and snarled again, this time triumphantly, at the resulting crunch.
That left three alive.
At her neck, the demon ripped and tore, and Judith felt her skin and flesh giving way before its onslaught. She clawed it away with one leg, closing her talons around its body. The larger demons’ flesh was as liquidly insubstantial as their smaller counterparts’ had been. The demon squeezed through her grip, falling bruised but alive to the ground.
Blood was flowing down her neck now. That happened. She’d live.
At least she hoped so.
This was no quick battle like the one in Aberdeen had been. The demons were too large and too hard to kill—the one she’d thrown against the carriage was already rushing toward her again—and she had no ally with a gun. She didn’t have any ally at all.
When her claws sheared off one of their arms and it started growing another, she knew she was in trouble. Another slash opened up its stomach—a fatal wound for a mortal—but nothing came out. The demon fell back a few steps but kept moving, and one of its friends took its chance to wrap around Judith’s flank and fasten itself—claws and teeth, the bastard—on her side, right under her ribs. It didn’t make its predecessor’s mistake either, but raked through her scales and then leaped away as she struck.
She had to destroy the heads then. Because this would have been too damn easy otherwise.
But now she knew.
Judith threw herself into the fight once more, striking out with claws and teeth, tail and head and even wings, knocking the demons back with the force of her buffeting. It was messy and far harder than she was used to. Judith’s muscles were burning, aching with long use and becoming more and more feeble as she bled from her neck and her side. The struggle was desperate. It was uncertain.
It was exhilarating.
Wounded, worried, tired, Judith was still a dragon, and in dragon shape. All of her old joy in the hunt and battle, her love for testing her strength and quickness against long odds, ran through her veins: rain on earth she’d kept parched for too long. When she threw one of the demons to the ground and crushed its head with her hind foot, she lashed her head back and roared once more, and this time there was laughter in it. The human part of her would have regretted that, but it wasn’t in control.
She was a MacAlasdair, the daughter of Andrew and a thousand other ancestors more savage and less human, and this was still her land—her people—her lover. Any that tried to take them, mortal or otherwise, would answer to her.
The last demon fell before her, and she was, for an instinctual and completely inhuman moment, sad to see it go. Was that all? Would nothing else stand forth against her? She showed her teeth to the brightening sky: a challenge to the world.
She didn’t even see the demon before it hit her. It must have been hiding, perhaps behind the body of one of its fellows, but Judith never knew. She saw the movement in time to jerk her head left, saving her eye by an inch or less. Pain and weight hit her face at the same moment. The demon ripped its way downward, shredding skin and flesh as it went, and Judith clawed at her own face in half-blind agony.
Her first swipe at the thing missed. So did her second, and she knew it was nearing the base of her neck, where the veins and arteries clustered thick and a deep enough wound might kill even her. The demon was on too firmly, too close. She snarled, futile, and lashed her neck from side to side, but it hung on and dug deeper.
All at once it fell away.
She felt its weight drop first, then saw the creature squirming on the ground. Judith pounced—but it was already going still. Its head was missing.
Judith swung her head to the side, peering at the spot where she knew William had fallen.
He lay on his stomach now. One hand grasped his pistol—he had a second—and he’d braced his arm on his other elbow. William’s face was almost bloodless, his eyes huge and bright blue.
“Always one you don’t see,” he said hoarsely.
Almost before she had time to think about it, Judith was human again and stumbling toward him on legs that barely worked. She knew so little about human physicking. She had to turn him over. She didn’t want to move him. She had to.
She was as gentle as she could be, but her hands felt as unwieldy as if she’d still been trying to use claws.
The knife hilt stuck out of his torso, just below his ribs. A malign list immediately marched through Judith’s head: liver, guts, stomach, spleen. Kidneys were toward the back. Blood vessels were everywhere. The blood oozing up around the knife hilt proved that. William’s jacket was dark, so she couldn’t see how much he’d bled already, but his face was white, with an almost bluish undertone. She’d seen that look before.
Ripping up her petticoats, Judith swore under her breath, long and low, in three different languages.
“An educated woman,” said William.
She pressed the wadded cloth against the wound. Never pull the knife out. She’d learned that somewhere. It might have been a hundred years in the past or the day before. “Stop talking. Don’t move.”
William smiled. “Anything for you, love.”
It was not a joke. Judith gasped as if for air, thinking at once that she’d gladly take another demon’s claws to her face if it meant hearing those words again, or seeing that smile—and that no bargain she made would guarantee either. “Stay,” she said, and she heard her voice crack. “Just stay.”
But his eyes had closed.
In the stillness of the morning, her lone sob almost echoed.
With a shaking breath, she got herself back under control. There was still a chance.
William still breathed: shallowly, not healthily, but steadily. That was a start. It wasn’t enough for Judith to thank Anyone or to feel any significant sense of relief, however. Breathing at the moment was no guarantee. Judith knew that too well to even try fooling herself.
The hilt of the knife was very small. Against William, a man with a powerful frame and a good bit of muscle on it, one might not have even seen the glint of metal.
She could cheerfully have rent Ross into his component parts once again, or done the same to the other sorcerer. She would have done so in an instant if it would have helped.
It never did.
Judith looked between the rocky valley where they had landed and William’s body, still save for the faint movement of his chest. How long would it take her to get out? To get help?
Too long.
She knew that without any calculation at all.
At least, when she didn’t have a plan, she didn’t need much time to change it.
The transformation strained every atom of her body, every fiber of her will. Shape-changing had never been so hard before. When it was over, she was shaking with the effort, and she fought back her urgency to make herself sit for a moment, telling herself that haste wasn’t the only thing that mattered.
As gently as she was able, wincing with every rough movement, Judith picked up William in her fore claws. It was not ideal. She kept his body as straight as she could, but she had claws, and even humans weren’t supposed to move the wounded—not without stretchers. She didn’t have a stretcher. She didn’t have many things she would have wanted, and she was conscious of every single lack, just as she saw every rise and fall of William’s chest.
Concentration was as good as prayer. A gunner’s mate had told Judith that, with the sea wide around them and
gunpowder gritty beneath her fingernails, and she hoped he’d been right. She didn’t have time for both.
Judith closed her eyes, breathed in, and became aware of her body. She knew the ground where she stood and adjusted her balance; she tested her muscles, feeling the stiffness coming on and the weakness that she couldn’t quite push aside as blood flowed from her own wounds; she felt William’s not-inconsiderable weight and how it swung her center forward.
Her wings opened with a crack like a gunshot.
She waited. Tested the wind. Crouched. Then, with the smoothest and most conscious leap she’d ever taken, she sprang into the air and away from the ruin below.
* * *
Nobody was on the street when she landed, and the sky was still dark, with only a glimmer of sun showing at the horizon. Farmers would likely be up with cattle or sheep. One of them might have seen her. Judith didn’t care.
Lights did go on in McKendry’s windows. Setting William down on the lawn, Judith saw them at the edges of both her vision and her awareness. They were probably worried about earthquakes inside—or would be until one of them went to a window. Then they’d have other worries altogether.
She stepped away from William, closed her eyes, and shifted.
“Lady MacAlasdair?” The voice was male and young. Sure enough, when Judith opened her eyes, she saw the door open and Hamilton staring at her with his mouth open.
He had seen something. Whether he’d looked out the window before coming down or had opened the door mid-transformation, he looked at Judith now with the knowledge that she wasn’t quite human.
Of course, the blood running down from her face probably didn’t help—not to mention the long gashes on her outer thigh, the general state of her clothes, or the fact that her arms were bloody to the elbows. Damn. She’d forgotten how she would look as a human.
“You—what—he—my God, what happened?” Hamilton finally managed a sentence.
“More than I wanted,” she answered tersely. “Help me bring William inside. Then get the doctor. It’s what will happen that matters now.”
Thirty-seven
For the first time in her life, Judith wished that Loch Arach was a city, or was much closer to one. A city would have hospitals—not the wretched places of her youth, where the poor and desperate went to die—but the modern sort, where a man with a gut wound would end up under the sharp eyes and quick hands of practiced surgeons in a clean, bright operating theater. McKendry was a very good doctor, but middle age was behind him, and Judith couldn’t think where and when he would have seen an injury like William’s before. His surgery was small, too, lit as best as he could manage by gas lamps, and Hamilton and his maid served as the only nurses.
Exiled from the surgery, pacing the parlor and deliberately not looking at the clock nor measuring the amount of sun coming in the window, Judith wished she at least didn’t know how little they had to work with. Aware that she’d be no help, she hadn’t protested when Hamilton had shut the door in her face, but complete ignorance might be better than the limbo where she now found herself, knowing too little to act usefully and too much for peace. She followed the paths of her thoughts, pulled together what plans she could, and then reached the end of useful forethought, where her mind circled like a hungry shark.
Eventually she ducked into the kitchen, stole a bowl of water, and returned to the parlor, where she used the cleaner remains of her petticoat to wash and bind her own wounds. They weren’t so bad. She had to bite her lip when she washed out the deeper spots on her collarbone, and she shivered all over afterward like a frightened horse, but she’d had worse. Her hands worked from memory as much as conscious thought: too many battlefields in the past, too many hours of waiting to hear news of victory or defeat, life or death. Had she really thought she could escape that for good?
Best to be glad of the reprieve she’d won for herself, however long it had lasted. The world didn’t have to give anyone one year of peace, much less thirty. William hadn’t gotten that.
She heard the thought in her own head, heard the epitaph air of it, and almost slapped herself. She couldn’t go outside, not and miss an announcement of any kind, but there wasn’t nearly enough air in the parlor. The windows didn’t open when she tried, and her hands were shaking too badly to try more than once.
She tried sitting down, but stood up again almost at once. She couldn’t be still. And she didn’t want to bleed on the furniture if the cuts on her thigh resisted the bandage. Walking was most likely bad for them too. If Judith had any sense, she’d stand still. The thought made her feel like the earth was going to shake and buck her off, throwing her to her knees—which actually did appeal as a posture, except that she was in McKendry’s parlor and she was the Lady MacAlasdair and she would not curl up on the floor and scream, no matter how much she wanted to.
She would not.
She would hold out as long as she could.
The door opened. Judith spun immediately to face the new arrival—arrivals, as it turned out. McKendry and Hamilton were both at the door. By that, she knew the news would be bad. Their faces confirmed it.
And she couldn’t even feel surprised. She’d seen too much to ever have really hoped. “Is he dead?” Judith asked before they could say anything. She discovered that she couldn’t raise her voice above a whisper.
“Not yet,” said McKendry. His face was haggard, as Judith had seen it before when he’d known he would lose a patient, but there was a sympathy in it that had never appeared when he’d talked to her: his talking-to-the-loved-ones expression. If he hadn’t known earlier that her feelings for William went beyond a working partnership, she thought, her face now probably made it clear. God knew they were clear enough to her now.
Too late. Too late. Ah, God, everything was too late, and not even she was quick enough for this world at times. She longed for some dark place where she could go to ground.
But McKendry was still talking. “He’s lost too much blood to live. Even if he hadn’t, the injuries themselves might be fatal. Particularly here.” He looked down at his hands with tight lips. “I’m sorry, Lady MacAlasdair.”
“Is he conscious?” she asked, feeling every movement of her lips and tongue.
“No. Nor is he likely to be.”
She’d expected no better. But William wasn’t dead, not yet, and so Judith checked her desire to retreat, pulled herself back from the darkness, and faced the decision she’d thought about since she’d first seen Hamilton on the doorstep.
It wasn’t a decision that anyone should make for another. Even less, perhaps, was it a decision that someone who’d never been entirely human should make for someone who’d never been anything else. The women who’d married into the bloodline had known the consequences and been conscious. They’d made their own choices.
William couldn’t.
Nobody else would. Nobody else even knew.
“Mr. Hamilton,” said Judith, “get your equipment and come back to the surgery. You’ll give Mr. Arundell my blood.”
“That—Lady MacAlasdair, there’s only a chance that it’ll help,” Hamilton said. “And I can’t say how great that chance is.”
“I know,” said Judith.
She did. Human wives among the MacAlasdairs died—not very often, but often enough—when their bodies couldn’t handle the dragon blood they got from their unborn children. They were generally strong and healthy, and nobody had stuck a knife in them. Even if Judith’s blood made things better for William, the healing might not take effect until too late—or it might not be enough.
“I’ll be in the surgery,” Judith said. “Waiting for you.” She looked down at her body. “Might be a good idea to send in soap and water too.”
* * *
And then she was lying on her back on a none-too-comfortable table, looking up at the ceiling of McKendry’s surgery and listening to Will
iam’s slow, shallow breathing. He wasn’t even an arm’s length away, but it was best not to touch him. She knew that and kept her arms firmly at her sides, resisting any stray impulses.
Waiting.
It didn’t come easily.
Lying still, she itched. There’d not been much time for cleaning. The maid had cut off the remains of one of Judith’s sleeves, and she’d scrubbed that arm until the skin was red and stinging. The rest of her remained a patchwork of grime, sweat, and at least two people’s blood, not to mention whatever hard-to-see remnants the demons had left drying on her. She hadn’t really thought about that until she’d lain down. Then she’d started feeling every molecule of filth.
She knew why. She didn’t try too hard to ignore the sensation.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw McKendry and Hamilton moving around the surgery. They’d reversed their usual roles. McKendry was the assistant now, taking down equipment and passing it to Hamilton, periodically stepping away to check William’s pulse. Judith heard their footsteps, steady but irregular thumps on the floor, and the thunk and click of instruments on wood.
She swallowed.
“Just about ready, my lady,” said Dr. McKendry, rounding the table. If she’d been one of the village lasses, he’d have patted her on the shoulder. Conscious of her rank, he halted his hand an inch or so short of contact and coughed. “We’d not think a bit worse of you if you’d changed your mind, ye ken. ’Tis a new procedure, and you’ve lost blood already.”
“I’ll be all right,” Judith said and hoped it was true. She felt all right, in that she’d felt worse, at least physically. The cuts on her chest were shallow, those on her thigh a little deeper, but they’d stopped bleeding. “I’ll tell you if I’m not. Word of honor.”
McKendry made a small sound in his throat, one that didn’t quite dare to be frank disbelief but nonetheless indicated that he’d be keeping an eye on her, whatever she said. He started to move off, then stopped and looked at Judith. “Funny thing,” he said. “I’ve no recollection that I’ve ever had you in here before.”
Night of the Highland Dragon Page 25