Page 43 of Fae Exile

“Yeah, but I’m not the shifter with the miraculous freaking healing here, now am I?”

“I don’t know what you are, Wyn.”

Snapping my head around to face him, I glared, but his comment hadn’t been mocking. If anything, he’d sounded ... amazed.

The tension that had so quickly ratcheted through my body relaxed, and I sighed, running my hand across my face before realizing all I was doing was smearing gunk across it. Sticking out my tongue in disgust, I pulled it back in when I tasted umbrac.

“Will your wings be okay? Have they healed already?”

“I don’t know yet.” Xeno pulled his legs in and leaned his elbows on his knees, staring at the sodden ground.

“Oh my sunshine.” I slid closer to him so that our thighs touched. I lifted an arm to embrace him, couldn’t figure out where to place it that wouldn’t irritate either of our wounds, and eventually let it fall to the log behind me. “Did they heal at all before you shifted back?”

“Yeah, quite a bit. What Finn did helped. But...” His eyes refused to meet mine.

“But?”

“But they were cut up pretty badly.” He shrugged as if he didn’t much care, but every dragon shifter guarded their wings like they were the most precious thing about them. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen.” Again, he shrugged.

I leaned my head on his shoulder, discovered the side of my skull ached as if someone had slammed a large rock against it, and straightened. At least we were all alive.

I’d so often longed to fly like everyone else at Nightguard but me and Zako that I couldn’t fathom what it would feel like to possess that marvelous gift and then fear losing it, to worry I’dnever feel the wind on my face again as I whipped through the skies.

“I’m sure they’ll be fine,” I offered, though immediately after I worried the platitude sounded as hollow to him as it had to me. “You’ve healed from worse.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“The arrow to the heart you took for me was worse.”

“It wasn’t to the heart.”

I gaped until I eked out, “What? I thought...”

“No. It missed my heart by a whisper, but it missed it.”

“Thank sunshine. I worried so much about you. I thought you were dead for a while there. Saffron too.”

“Why would you think that?”

My lips pressed into a line of ragged hatred. “The queen told me you were dead, and when she didn’t flat-out say it, she implied it plenty. Confirmed you’d gotten shot in the heart.”

He rubbed my thigh, and my thoughts immediately jumped back to Rush. Once more, I ordered him out. If he’d ever earned his place in my daydreams in the first place, he surely had since lost that privilege.

“From what I saw of the queen,” Xeno said, “you can’t trust a single thing she says.”

I chortled. “Learned that lesson the hard way. Pretty sure the only thing I can trust about her is that she’s out to get me.”

Xeno swallowed so that his throat bobbed. “I thought you were dead, Wyn. I thought you were gone.”

He gulped, and I waited for more.

“I came to when we were already outside in the stables. The queen wasn’t there, or I would’ve killed her right then and there. I wouldn’t’ve cared what anyone said.”

“Who was there?”

He gestured with his chin, his usually silken dark hair barely moving, clumped with tar-like black. “Just all of us here.” He exhaled heavily. “And Rush. I almost did kill him.”

My heart began racing even though I knew Rush to be alive. “What happened? What stopped you?” I’d seen enough dragon shifter brawls to understand how brutally violent they could be when sufficiently provoked. Rush was an amazing warrior—I’d witnessed his skill in the ring—but Xeno could be ferocious when he wanted.

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