The chills continued unabated despite the distance she put between her and the dead dragon lizard. Her clothing dried and then became soaked with sweat, each step becoming harder to take. Twice she stopped and bent over with dry heaves.

Her heart fluttered erratically in her chest, her mind attributing it to loss of blood, to shock, refusing to consider anything else, shying away from thoughts of the lizard’s body fluids pouring over her open wounds, from contemplating the possibility that more than its bite was deadly.

The mound of rocks and downed trees hiding Levi’s lair came into view. She climbed out of the streambed, relief making her sink to her knees in a pool of sunlight, the heat of the sun a hand pushing her forward to lie against warm soil.

Something was wrong. It was a fleeting thought lost in darkness as consciousness slid away.

TIR ran. Harder and faster than he had before. The nameless urgency he’d experienced as he turned away from Oakland and toward Araña had only intensified when he discovered the dead dragon lizard.

How she’d survived the attack at all was beyond imagining. But she had.

She still lived. He refused to believe it was too late. He wanted to believe she hadn’t been bitten at all.

The evidence suggested otherwise.

His fists tightened around the knives. Her knives. He’d found them near the dragon lizard’s corpse, as if she’d forgotten she was holding them. She would never have left them behind if she was well.

He owed her for his freedom. That’s what drove him forward, he told himself. But he had no explanation for the bolt of agony spearing through his chest when he rounded the corner and saw her lying on the ground only a few steps from the water.

She whimpered when he pressed his fingers to her throat, a faint sound that could have been protest or a longing for the comfort of touch. Her pulse was weak, her breathing thready, and her skin fevered though she trembled as if freezing.

Tir rolled her to her back. Bile rose in his throat as the smell of infection and death reached him. It radiated from the scratches on her chest and sides, oozed from her flesh.

In all his memory he’d never willingly tended to another. But his hands worked without his conscious decision, stripped her of clothing so he wouldn’t miss any of her wounds. And then he slashed her knife across his palms.

Never in all the times his blood had been used to heal had he endured the agony of it without promising himself one day vengeance would be his. But this time, as he pressed his hands to her fevered flesh, he willed his blood to make her whole, to restore her to health.

The agony of it was excruciating, worse than it had ever been, perhaps because on other occasions the healing had been involuntary. Pain sliced through his skull and the muscles of his arms and neck stood out in violent relief. His breath came in tortured pants. His jaw clenched against the need to scream as he battled to heal rather than kill.

Time slowed. Every minute contained an eternity of suffering as, wound by wound, he kept his palms pressed to her flesh, only leaving one spot for another when her skin was unblemished, unmarred. Perfect.

As abruptly as the torment started, it was gone, leaving him disoriented, his eyes unfocused for long moments, until the smooth texture of her skin and her nakedness burned away the haze left by the painful echoes of his sacrifice.

She was beautiful. Beyond what he’d imagined the night before when her appearance in his dreams had made him wake and take his cock in hand.

He caressed every inch of her with his eyes. The earth-rich color of her skin stirred primitive emotions, a fierce possessiveness twined with the searing flames of lust.

They were the same feelings that had made him turn away from her earlier and take a different path. But looking at her, he knew he wouldn’t be able to leave her again without taking her first.

His attention lingered on dusky breasts tipped with dark areo las, then moved to her smooth, bare mound. Carnal hunger clawed through his belly, ravenous and dark.

It was a bestial urge to dominate. To mate. To cover Araña as she offered herself to him on hands and knees, her thighs parted and her folds slick and open.

The strength and suddenness of the erotic fantasy, the power she had over his body—even when she was unconscious and helpless—brought the return of uneasiness.

It damped down the lust, cooled it, until his gaze went to the place between her thighs, drawn there again against his will.

A moan escaped as he fought the need to tumble forward, to prostrate himself like a supplicant and press his mouth to her tempting flesh.

Seconds earlier the lust pulsing through him had been primitive in nature. Now he wanted to worship her with heated kisses and an adoring tongue. He wanted to inhale her scent, taste the honey of her arousal, and hear her whimper as he pleasured her.

Once again the force and suddenness of the desire, the intensity of the fantasy, shook him. Only this time his uneasiness was met with a wall of lust, a lava-hot need that had built up over centuries and wouldn’t be denied.

Tir couldn’t stop himself from rising to his feet and shedding his clothes before lifting her into his arms. He stepped back into the creek, going to a sun-warmed pool his subconscious had noted.

As he sat, cradling her on his lap, his hands smoothing away all evidence of her near death, he told himself he meant only to clean her of blood. It was a lie, one he admitted as soon as her eyelids fluttered open and she tried to escape.

Tir’s arms tightened automatically, ruthlessly, as if some part of him feared he’d lose her if he freed her. “I won’t hurt you,” he managed, her struggles inflaming him, the rub of slick flesh against slick flesh making his buttocks clench and his cock throb.

“Stop,” he said, holding her against his chest, nearly moaning at the feel of her breasts with their dark, dark nipples brushing his skin, sending icy hot streaks of sensation down his spine and through his penis. “I don’t intend to hurt you.”

The words barely penetrated Araña’s consciousness. Panic. Fear. Confusion. The emotions held her in their grip as she tried to make sense of where she was and what had happened.

It came to her in hazy, fever-shrouded glimpses. The fight with the dragon lizard. The trip up the creek. Collapsing on the bank. Tir.

Clarity brought shock. She was alive when she should have been dead.

Araña stopped fighting. With a thought she found the demon mark above one nipple, trapped against Tir’s bare chest.

A more familiar fear made her heart trip into a frantic beat. Panic from a different source gathered and she started to struggle again as she said, “Let me go. It’s not safe to touch me. The mark—”

Tir’s arms tightened, preventing the words from escaping. His laugh was a heated stroke along her spine, a hot cupping of her breasts and mound.

“You can’t kill me,” he said, burning away her fear and panic with the absolute certainty in his voice.

Araña stilled, for the first time becoming aware of the smoothness of her flesh now, where earlier it had been ragged and bleeding, torn in the fight with the dragon lizard and the encounter with the guardsman. Becoming aware, too, of the heat of his skin, the hot throb of his cock trapped between them.

She felt bombarded by sensation, by something she’d only imagined. Heat pooled in her labia, her breasts. Her breath came faster, taking in his scent, imprinting it on her consciousness along with the feel of his body against hers.

She wanted to turn in his arms, to wrap her legs around him and press more tightly to him. To guide him into her and touch her lips to his as her fingers explored him. She wanted to capture this moment of physical contact and turn it into a memory she could cherish and savor for a lifetime.