Page 41 of Surge of Fire

“My shoulder,” he says, probably realizing I’m searching him for injuries. He winces as he nods toward it.

I hug him again, cautious of his shoulder this time. My heart in my throat. “I thought you were dead.”

“That makes two of us.” He laughs, but it’s cut off by an almost-sob. “I thought you, me, and Sam were all dead.”

Sam. Fuck.

“Where’s Sam?” I ask, my heartbeat filling my ears.

Granger loves her. I can’t imagine a world in which he would be here and Sam wouldn’t be with him, shoulder or no shoulder. The only reason he’d leave her behind… no, no that can’t be it.

“She’s… not here,” he says, eyes filled with tears.

“What the hell does that?”It can’t mean… it doesn’t mean…

He shakes his head and runs his good hand through his dust-covered dark hair. “A dragon took her.”

“Wh-what?” I must have heard him wrong. It’s the head injury. It’s making me crazy.

“A dragon took her. I know this is going to sound insane, but I hit my head. There’s a fucking lump like a baseball, and I woke up alone and confused, and I heard Sam scream. A second later, a green dragon was flying out of here, with Sam in its claws.”

“So, you hit your head too?” I say, stomach sinking. He has no idea where Sam is. He’s hallucinating too. Sam is counting on the two of us to save her life, and we’re both half-crazed.

“No.” He grabs my shoulder, his fingers biting into me. “I saw a dragon take her.”

A large shadow passes overhead, and I look up again to see the green dragon. My heart starts hammering.Is that… real? It’s just not possible. Is it?

“Come on,” he says, pulling me into the shadow of the cavern. “We don’t want it to see us.”

Then I notice how hard he’s breathing and the pallor of his skin. “Are you okay?”

He hesitates, then nods. “I just need to find something to fix my shoulder and my other wounds. And you need the same. Your entire head is soaked in blood, your neck, even your jacket. You’re going to need stitches. And the rest of you is no better.”

I don’t care. I don’t care about any of that. Doesn’t he see?“No, we need to find Sam. We don’t have time for this shit.”

His dark eyes hold mine. “If we don’t take care of our wounds, we won’t be able to help Sam. You know that. It’s Survival 101.”

It is. I know. But it doesn’t matter. Every second I’m without her is another second a piece of me dies. I won’t be alright until she’s safe in my arms.“I–I just need to find her.”

“We will. Okay. We will. But let’s just take it one step at a time.” He steers me to a large rock next to the plastic bin that’s tied to a tree. Wordlessly, he pushes me down on the rock and my knees buckle, even though he’d been gentle.

My head spins. He takes his pack off his back with a hiss. “We need medical supplies.”

I take several deep breaths, realizing he needs my help with his shoulder injured. The world tilts as I lean forward and fish out his medical kit, and then I pop it open and let it tumble from my fingers onto the backpack, even though I’d been trying to hold on to it. I think.

My eyes close. He tends to my head, huffing and puffing as he pours water over my wound. “Fuck, Aydan,” he mumbles. “When I’m done irrigating it, I’m going to apply pressure to stop the bleeding, and then we’re going to need to super glue this sucker. I’d rather pack it with gauze and bandage it…”

“But we need to find Sam, so we need to do this quickly.” We’re taking a risk. If there’s still debris in the wound, I could end up with an infection. We’re going to have created a problem. But I don’t care right now.

He struggles to do his best while only using his injured side when absolutely necessary. He’s sweating and pale when he collapses to his knees, raises my shirt, and cleans and bandages more wounds I hadn’t even noticed, before doing the same with some jagged ones on my legs.Maybe all the scars will impress Sam.I almost smile, but I can’t, because she’s out there somewhere.

He finally crawls to the rock and collapses next to me. “You’re good.”

I’m pretty sure we both have a concussion, but I don’t say it, because it wouldn’t help anything. Instead, I inspect his shoulder, take a t-shirt from my bag, and shred it. “Your shoulder is popped out of the socket.”

He gives me an absolutely exhausted look. I don’t blame him. I’d popped my shoulder out of the socket once when we were on a climb, and he’d had to put it back into place. It’d hurt like hell, but I hadn’t been afraid, because I didn’t know how bad it’d be to fix and to heal. He knew, so he didn’t have the beauty of being ignorant.

“You ready?”

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