The Fae King's Dream (Between Dawn and Dusk #2) - Jamie Schlosser Page 0,123

sticking out of my chest at a weird angle.

It’s not the same as Whitley’s first premonition. She did change the future after all, but it didn’t stop this from happening.

I can tell my heart is compromised. Every beat is like a cannon ball wrecking me from the inside out.

Whitley doesn’t even realize I’ve been injured. She’s fussing with the sheet, trying to drape it over my head. She almost gets nicked by the iron when she moves in too close.

Pushing her away, I stumble back. My knees buckle and I fall on my ass. Groaning from the impact, I clutch my middle and roll onto my side.

Whitley finally sees the arrow. I watch her face go from shocked to horrified.

“Damon.” Losing the sheet, she kneels next to me. “No. No, no, no.”

Mayhem breaks out among the soldiers in the clearing once they realize I’ve been hit. Orders to capture the witch who shot me are shouted, and several men fly toward the trees.

Snapping the rod in two, I pull the first half out the front. Before I can reach around the back, Whitley bends to get it. It’s lodged in muscle and bone, and her whispered apologies get lost in the wet slurping sounds as she removes it from my body.

Clenching my fists, I grit my teeth and swallow a pained shout. My vision dims from the sheer agony, but I blink until the spots clear.

After tossing the broken weapon away, Whitley encourages me to lie on my back. Her soft words are breathless with panic, and when she rips my shirt, she makes a noise of dismay. The telltale black ooze is seeping from my wound.

“Your heart?”

I nod. “I’m sorry, baby.”

“This wasn’t supposed to happen.” Her fingers flit about my wound, like she can’t believe what she’s seeing.

My hand finds hers. “Maybe it was always going to be this way. Destiny.”

Whitley’s face gets hard, and I’ve never seen her look so angry. So untamed.

“Destiny can fuck all the way off.” Jumping to her feet, she goes from soldier to soldier, grabbing them by their shirts. Throttling them like someone on a rampage. “Do you have any distilled day water? I need Glow. Do you have some? Do you? I need it to save the king. If you know of a distillery nearby—”

The telltale roar Zander makes when he’s in griffin form echoes from the sky, interrupting Whitley’s tirade. He swoops down to the field. As soon as his paws touch the ground, a satchel drops from his beak and he begins shifting.

He’s barely gotten back to human form before Whitley strides over to him.

“This is all your fault.” She punches him in the shoulder before sticking a finger in his face. “If you’d have listened to me at the distillery, I would’ve gotten what I needed. But no, you just had to blow it up, didn’t you?”

To drive her point home, she pokes him in the chest a few times.

I’m in too much pain to tell her not to touch him when he’s completely nude. That’s how I know I’m dying.

He gently bats her hand away as if she’s a toddler throwing a tantrum. “No, I didn’t.”

She stops her assault. “You didn’t what?”

“Blow it up.”

“You didn’t destroy everything?”

Shaking his head, he bends to get the satchel. He removes something shiny from it. “I believe this is yours.”

“My flask.” Whitley takes if from him carefully, as if it’s a precious artifact. And when she hears the liquid sloshing inside, she releases a gasp of disbelief. “Is this filled with Glow?”

“Yes. When I went inside to investigate your claim, I discovered the flask you dropped, along with the captives and the experiments. When I found the alchemist’s journals, I put two and two together and I realized why you needed it so badly. That’s why I shifted and stayed that way.”

“The witches can’t get to your mind when you’re a griffin?” Whitley concludes, and when Zander confirms it, she jumps up and down. “If you weren’t naked, I’d hug you.”

He brings his hands up. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Experiments?” I say on a raspy cough. “What are you talking about?”

“I can fix your heart, Damon.” Whitley comes over and gets on the ground next to me. Then her face goes white. “No, I can’t. The witches took my syringe.”

Turning her head toward the forest, she looks like she’s ready to go after the coven.

Zander tosses something to the ground next to her. “You mean this? There was an excess in my medical