Dreamfever
Page 97

Unless it had fallen out, I had a baby-food jar of Unseelie flesh in my coat. I tripped over my own feet in my haste to get to it and unbuttoned pocket after pocket, searching.
“Ow!” I’d found it wriggling wetly in shards of broken bottle, buttoned in an inner pocket. I extracted the flesh carefully from the jar, which must have shattered in my tumble across the sand. Of the seven strips I’d crammed into the tiny container, there were four left. Three of them had wriggled off somewhere. I held the noxious pieces of gray Rhino-boy flesh, picked out slivers of glass, and considered the rapidly healing cuts on my fingers.
Was I healing so well because of the Unseelie I’d eaten in the past? Did it cause permanent changes, as Rowena claimed? Would it do something terrible to Christian? I had no idea what else to do for him. I had only two protein bars, and I didn’t know if the water around us was drinkable or contaminated by some deadly-to-humans parasite. I’d never been a Girl Scout, couldn’t start a fire with sticks, had no container to boil water in even if I could, and was disgusted to realize I was still, in many ways, remarkably useless.
I hurried back to his side, lay one of the strips on a flat stone, and cut it up into pieces as small as early peas. I pried open his teeth, stuffed the pieces in, and held his mouth and nose closed, hoping the flesh would, in dim-witted Rhino-boy fashion, wriggle toward his stomach, seeking escape.
It did. I wasn’t so useless after all!
He gagged, I released my hold on his nose, and his throat muscles convulsed. He gagged again and swallowed involuntarily. He coughed and made a retching sound. Even when you’re unconscious, Unseelie meat is revolting.
With a groan, he rolled over onto his side.
I diced another strip, stuffed it into his mouth, and held it closed again. This time he resisted, but his body was still too weak to put up much of a fight.
By the time I got the third strip sliced up and in his mouth, he’d rolled over onto his back again, opened his eyes, and was looking at me. I think he was trying to ask what I was doing, but I clamped his teeth together with one hand on the top of his head and the other beneath his chin. He gagged instead and swallowed again.
The effects of Unseelie flesh on an injured human body are instantaneous and miraculous. As I watched, his blisters disappeared and his color returned to normal, leaving him lightly tanned. The gauntness in his face vanished, and the epidermis on his body plumped everywhere, erasing the damage of dehydration, rebuilding him from the inside out.
Unseelie flesh is potent, and addictive. Even though I was cured of my little obsession with it (did he really need that last strip?) I envied what I knew was happening to him: the heady rush of power surging hot through his veins, heightening his hearing, smell, and vision, increasing his strength to Barrons’ levels, filling him with a euphoric sense of invincibility and an exquisitely elevated awareness of his own body in relation to its surroundings.
Yes, he was certainly getting better.
Tiger eyes were not only open but moving with unabashed appreciation over the skin bared by my bra and underwear. He pushed my hand off his mouth.
Quickly—and possibly in large part because I was tempted to eat it myself—I knelt over him and shoved the last strip between his lips.
He sat up so fast our heads banged, hard.
I yelped and he spat.
Unseelie flesh went flying from his mouth and flopped on the ground between us.
He looked at the animated piece of meat, then he looked at me, and I’m not sure what he found more disgusting: the smelly gray flesh with oozing pustules, or me, for putting it in his mouth in the first place. It pissed me off, because, even on my worst day, I was preferable to Unseelie flesh. The absence of heat in those amber eyes was downright chilling.
“You might try thanking me,” I said stiffly.
He gagged again, cleared his throat, turned, and spat over his shoulder. “What,” he said, turning back to me and pointing, “the bloody hell is that?”
“Unseelie flesh,” I said coolly.
“That’s Unseelie? You fed me the flesh of a dark Fae?”
“How do you feel, Christian?” I demanded. “Pretty good?” He certainly looked good, sitting there in faded jeans, wet T-shirt straining over his wide shoulders, muscles rippling in his arms as he slicked wet hair back from his face. “No burns, no blisters, no hunger or thirst? Has it occurred to you that I saved your ass?”
“At what cost? What does eating it do to you? Nothing Fae is without price!”
“It heals you. Would you rather I hadn’t?”
“Big, huge lie in there. There are drawbacks. What are they?” he pushed furiously.
“There are drawbacks to everything,” I snapped.
We glared at each other.
“Would you rather I’d let you die?”
“Did you even try anything else first? Or are you all about magic, instant gratification?”
I leapt to my feet and began pacing. “What would you have had me try? Dragging your big body into the shade all by myself so you wouldn’t get burned worse? How about figuring out how to start a fire with twigs? No, I have it!” I whirled around and shot him a look. “I should have gone looking for a convenience store for sunblock and aloe gel and then when I found that, set off for a vet so I could find you subcutaneous fluids like my neighbors gives their sick cat!”
His mouth twitched. “Nice outfit, Mac.”
I bristled. I’d been stomping around in my bra and panties and he found me amusing in my underwear? “My clothes are soaked,” I growled.