“Oh, thank God.” She pushed her way through the wall of muscle to his side. “Is he stable? Is he going to be okay?”
“I’ve neutralized the poison. That was the hard part. Now I’m healing the carnage it did to his heart.” Hugh was resting his bare hands on Griff’s exposed chest with a look of intense concentration. He glanced up at her, his handsome, finely-drawn face pale and exhausted. “At least you did the right thing, starting CPR right away. It stopped him from getting permanent brain damage.” He scowled back down at his patient. “Not that any of us would have been able to tell the difference. Idiot.”
“The poison did do what he hoped it would,” Dai pointed out. “It paralyzed his body and knocked out his animals. It stopped him from shifting further.”
“Yeah, because it practically killed him,” Chase retorted. His fists clenched. “That psychopathic wyvern shifter is a fucking menace. We should have flung her into prison and thrown away the key when we had the chance. I am going to kick her scaly little-”
Ash cast Chase a quelling look, and the pegasus shifter subsided. “Thank you for calling us,” the Fire Commander said to Hayley. His tone was still perfectly level, his face betraying no sign of the tension in the other men’s expressions. “I apologize for the inconvenience, but we cannot take him away yet.”
“I don’t want you to take him away!” Hayley anxiously studied Griff’s distorted face. His ears were still sharply pointed, his mouth almost a muzzle. “If you’re healing him, why isn’t he going back t
o human form?” she asked Hugh.
“I can only fix what’s damaged.” Hugh adjusted the positions of his fingertips, his jaw clenching briefly as though he was somehow drawing pain out of Griff and into himself. “Not what doesn’t know it’s broken. His body thinks that this is the way it’s supposed to be. He has to make it shift back on his own.”
Dai hissed what sounded awfully like a swear word in Welsh. “You know he can’t, Hugh. There has to be something you can do.”
“I’m a paramedic, not a bloody miracle worker,” Hugh snapped, which seemed a bit strange coming from a man who was currently healing a damaged heart with his bare hands. “If Griff wants to be human, he’s going to have to take care of it himself.”
“Not entirely,” John rumbled. He looked at Hayley. “Call him back to us, my lady. You are his mate. He will always come to your call, across fire, across water, across death itself. Call him back.”
Hayley hesitantly started to put her hand flat against the side of Griff’s face—and then snatched it back, remembering what had happened last time. “I can’t. I tried to help before, when his seizure started, and I only made it worse. I don’t dare touch him.”
Dai and Chase exchanged uneasy glances. “Maybe she’d better not, John,” Dai said. “He’s alive and stable now. It doesn’t matter what he looks like.”
“You think his face is messed up, you should see his pancreas,” Hugh muttered. “I’m with John. The worst she can do is kill him again.”
Hayley put her hands behind her back. “I’m not risking that!”
“You are his mate,” John insisted stubbornly. “You cannot harm him, no more than he could ever harm you. You must try. You are the only one who can.”
All four firefighters glanced at Ash, and Hayley found that she too had turned in his direction. The Fire Commander had such an air of quiet authority, it seemed only natural to look to him for a decision.
Ash met her eyes calmly. “Try.”
Feeling self-conscious under the weight of all their stares, Hayley put her hand against Griff’s cheek. She cringed a little as her palm brushed his skin, half-expecting him to cry out again in agony—but he just made a small sigh, turning fractionally into her touch.
Encouraged, Hayley bent to put her lips to his ear. “Griff?” she whispered. “It’s okay now. I’m here. Your friends are here. We won’t let anything happen to you. It’s okay to come back now.”
The drawn tightness around Griff’s closed eyes eased a little. Slowly, so slowly, his face softened back into more human features.
Chase made a strangled yelp, as though he’d started to whoop with joy and then remembered that Danny was sleeping upstairs. He snatched Hayley up, spinning her round in a brief, dizzying hug. “You did it! You did it! I could kiss you!”
“You do, and Griff will punch your lights out when he wakes up.” Grinning, Dai rescued her from Chase’s arms, depositing her back on the ground. “But thank you. From all of us.” He hesitated. “Ah, I don’t think we even know your name.”
“Hayley Parker,” she said dazedly. “And thank you. All of you. How did you even know where we were?”
Chase bowed extravagantly. “Just one of my many talents. We pegasus shifters have a knack for finding people.”
“I can still barely believe that there’s even such a thing as pegasus shifters. Or dragons.” She glanced up at John Doe. “You’re a dragon too, right? Griff mentioned you. He said he had a friend who was a dragon knight.”
John smiled, inclining his head in assent. “Sea dragon, and Knight-Poet, to be completely precise.”
“And…” Hayley looked at Ash in awe, remembering the fiery bird that had swooped into her kitchen. “You’re a phoenix, aren’t you?”
“The Phoenix,” said Ash, mildly. “Since we are being precise.”
There’s only one? Just like in the old myths?