What Fire Dragons Treasure - Cristina Rayne Page 0,13
after all, so wouldn’t that involve some kind of—magic?
“Amber, this is Lady Serie of the House of Cinders,” Emma introduced. “She’s here to take care of your wound.”
Oh. This was the healer Emma had called. Amber had just thought that “healer” was what the dragons called a doctor, but… Did dragon healers actually use magic to heal their patients rather than medicines and stitches? Was that why she’d had such a visceral reaction to the beautiful dragon-woman’s presence alone? Was she sensing magic in her?
“Thank you so much—for coming here to see me so quickly,” Amber said, suddenly feeling as bashful as Matty, who was currently staring at their visitor with wide eyes.
Lady Serie’s face melted into a soft smile, suddenly making her a thousand percent more approachable. “I am pleased to come,” she replied, her words slightly more accented than Raphek’s.
The healer gracefully knelt beside the couch down by Amber’s legs and set down a large, cloth bag onto the rug Amber hadn’t realized Lady Serie had been carrying. She opened it and began to pull out folded squares of white cloth that resembled linen and a couple of glass bottles with wax seals filled with a lime green and dark purple liquid of who-knew-what. Tinctures? Potions?
Amber had to bite her lip hard to keep from laughing aloud at the ridiculousness of her earlier thoughts about magic. I must still be in shock to have let my imagination run so wild.
“The flow of your blood throughout your body sounds weaker than I would like,” Lady Serie said with a frown. She nodded towards the mug clutched in Amber’s hands. “Drink all of that while I work. The tinik juice will help you replenish the blood you lost faster than time and rest.”
“Would you like to watch some cartoons, Matty?” Emma said as she sat down on the couch next to Matty and showed him her tablet.
“Go ahead,” Amber said enthusiastically when he looked back at Emma with a hesitant look.
“Forrest Buddies?” he asked hopefully.
“Whatever you like,” Emma promised, urging him to lean closer to her.
Amber was grateful to her hostess for the distraction. She really didn’t want Matty to watch Lady Serie treat her gunshot wound, especially if it involved something like stitches or… Amber shuddered. Or fire for cauterization given they were fire dragons. Just how advanced was dragon medicine anyway?
Once Lady Serie had carefully removed Amber’s denim bandage and turned her leg to a position that better exposed the bullet hole, the healer tutted. “Nasty things, guns. I have only seen them in videos, but it was enough to make me wish to never see them again. Give me a talon-to-fang battle in my scales rather than death that comes at you from a distance you cannot easily or quickly reach.”
It was easy to forget that the woman tending her wound with such gentleness was also a fearsome, fire-breathing dragon with a wingspan the length of a football field and wicked looking claws that could probably cut her in half as easily as warm butter—until said woman said shocking things like that. Remembering the firmness of Raphek’s scales, Amber wondered if a gun could even hurt a dragon.
Lady Serie carefully slipped one of the square cloths beneath her calf that was once again oozing blood. She then grabbed the bottle with the dark purple liquid and broke the seal.
“This will burn hot for only a couple of seconds,” Lady Serie suddenly warned, “but then the pain will numb as though it had never been, not even an echo, I promise.”
Before Amber could even process the healer’s warning enough to feel alarmed, the dragon-woman poured the dark liquid over the bleeding bullet hole, and what felt like a hot poker abruptly jabbed into a wound that already burned with pain. Only years of keeping her screams of pain behind her teeth for fear of scaring and traumatizing Matty kept the scream of agony that rose in her throat from bursting forth as more than an aborted grunt.
One heartbeat, two, and then the pain inexplicably vanished, and Amber could breathe again without the threat of screaming.
“What—was that?” Amber asked, sounding winded.
“A medicine to stop the bleeding that also has anesthetic properties,” Lady Serie answered as she poured some of the lime green liquid onto a clean cloth. “I will use this one to—sterilize, I believe is the term your people use. Only then can I safely remove the bullet.”
Amber silently watched the healer work with the cutesy voices of