The Dragon Marshal's Treasure (U.S. Marshal Shifters 1)

“Theo, we have to get out of here.”

He blinked at her—his eyelids, she noticed, were golden—and then, slowly and shudderingly, transformed back into her Theo.

Shifting hadn’t healed him. He was still covered in blood and soot. When he’d wrapped her in his wings, he’d taken the brunt of the damage for them both. It had left him looking glassy-eyed and dazed.

She would have to do the thinking for the two of them right now. She looked around. All she could see was wreckage. The room was unrecognizable: there was nothing left but dust and smoldering ashes. There wasn’t any fire near them, but its glow was there, flickering against the walls, so she knew it had to be close.

She inhaled deeply, trying to clear her her head, and noticed that the smoke was thicker now. He was right, they couldn’t afford to waste time. He was a little out of it, but she had no excuse for lingering, no excuse for being lulled into some kind of blame game, no matter who she was finding guilty. She had to pull herself together.

So she did. She gently put his arm over her shoulders.

“Lean on me. I’ll get us out of here.”

“I’m in your hands.”

It was strange to be dragging him when he was so much stronger, but it wasn’t impossible. She could tell he was doing all he could to help her. He bore as much of his own weight as he was able to, even though it was costing him to do it: she could hear that in every sharp breath he sucked in. She could feel it in the way his hand clenched into a tight fist. She wished she could have made it easier on him, but she didn’t tell him to stop. They would need to work together. Even now, she needed him as much as he needed her.

The stairs were gone.

All Jillian could see of them was a heap of splinters and scorched carpet runner. The second floor landing jutted out unstably, sagging at its edge, and she didn’t dare to step out too far on it. There was no way down except falling.

Theo could see that as easily as she could. He said, “I can probably drift us down. No matter what’s wrong with my wings, I should still have enough of them to act as a torn parachute. It will work for a short fall.”

No way. She wasn’t going to give up and let him get hurt even more. There had to be another way down.

The trellis!

There was an ivy trellis near her dad’s bedroom window. She’d always figured he put it there so he could sneak down to see his mistresses.

Theo’s hands seemed fairly intact. Even if he was too out of it to be much of a climber, the ground was still soft, so if he got even part of the way down, the fall wouldn’t be bad.

She dragged him down the hall and into what was left of the bedroom. She had to wrap a pillow cover around her hand to undo the burning-hot latches on the window, but then she shoved it open hard. The air would feed the flames, so they would have to hurry.

To her relief, she could hear sirens.

She eased him up onto the sill.

“Go. I’ll follow you.”

To her great relief, he didn’t make her make him go first, he just nodded and went. He dug his fingers into the ivy and the trellis so tightly that she wouldn’t be surprised to find his hands covered with splinters and sticky with green from the crushed leaves. He did fall, but only when he was less than a foot from the ground. She see him nod up at her and gesture for her to come down.

She made it to the ground in what felt like record time.

They

stumbled away into the dark. Some basic part of her felt that the further away from the fire, the better. She coughed a few times, but her chest felt basically clear. Her only concern was Theo.

“Thank God for the sirens,” she said. “Somebody must have seen the fire. They’ll send an ambulance, too, and then we can get you—”

“No ambulance,” he said, planting her feet as she tried to turn them around. “I can’t. Shifters, for anything serious... we can’t go to the hospital. We heal too quickly, you’ve seen it.”

She had. If even she’d been thrown by it with something as minor as scratches, of course a doctor would notice it in something this serous. And there was no way she would let anyone drag him off to some X-Files lab and cut him open to see how he ticked. For a second, she was completely on the side of his family and the whole community of dragons: humans were terrible.

She would treat him herself if she had no other option, but there had to be another option. Surely shifters got appendicitis like everyone else. Surely they had children and migraines and broken legs.

“What do you do when you get hurt, then?”

“When it’s something that just resting won’t cure, we have trustworthy healers, shifters who know medicine or medics who are familiar with shifters. There’s a veterinarian here in town who stitched me up once. But she’s not going to know what to do about damaged dragon wings, there just aren’t enough of us.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was raw and vulnerable. “I think I need to go home.”