"Would you mind telling me which one of us is bleeding?" Felicity asked. The man holding her looked down at his sleeve, felt along the inside of his arm and found a sliver of car glass tucked into a seam. He tipped it onto the rock. His shirt had stuck to the cut underneath. Blood had run down to his elbow, right where her head had rested.
"Mostly an expensive laundry problem," he said. "You scared me considerably worse." He pressed a folded pad over the cut. When she tried to get her feet under her, the whole river tipped again, and she let the good-looking stranger catch her a second time. Given a choice, she would have preferred to meet him on a day when she could keep her breakfast down.
She came properly awake on a bedroll above the stream, with a small fire burning behind a log. Rose was sharpening a kitchen knife across from her. Finch had hung the bloody cloths well away from camp. Beside her sat the man from the bank, with a clean bandage around his arm and a silver wing stretched between the bedroll and the wind. Black tipped the long feathers and the ends of his hair. His eyes were a deep, vivid red. She had always considered that color a warning, although in her defense it usually came on a traffic light.
"Victor, right? I remember Finch calling you. I also seem to remember getting blood all over your shirt, and I'm afraid the laundromat's had a fairly rough Tuesday."
"He's got another shirt," Rose called. "If he takes that one off, try to stay conscious. We have to sleep sometime."
Felicity covered her face. Victor's low laugh made the blanket shift against her cheek. When she peeked, he had looked away to give her a chance to recover, although the tip of his wing still shook. She liked him rather a lot for that.
He passed her a bottle, and this time she could hold it herself. He told her how he'd found Finch, how long she'd been out, and why the trees above the stream offered better cover than the road. He talked like a man used to giving bad news in pieces someone could swallow. When she'd eaten a little, she asked what he'd done before all this.
"I was a soldier, then a paramedic. Finch and I did contract work together after that. Yesterday, if I'd told you I was a gun for hire, you'd probably have crossed the street to get away from me."
"Yesterday I went jogging for exercise. Let's agree I made some questionable decisions yesterday." She ran her fingers over a patch of dried blood his bandage had missed. He held so still she looked up. "Were the wings always there under your shirt, or have you had a really strange day too?"
"I opened them for the first time over six lanes of traffic. My landing needs work." He was looking at her mouth now, and he knew she'd noticed. "Catching you was the part I liked."
She would have settled for finding shelter that morning. Here she was under an eagle's wing, trying to invent a medical reason to put her hand back on his chest. She'd had a boyfriend for a year and had never needed to invent a reason to keep her hands to herself. It was nice, if deeply inconvenient, to learn there was a difference.
Night closed in as the fire burned down. When Finch took the watch, Victor started to move his wing. The cold got in immediately. So did the sound of something worrying at the cloths downstream, wet little snaps that made her glad Finch had hung them out of reach.
"Would you stay here tonight?" she asked, catching the edge of his shirt. "The horrible part is that I could probably tell you exactly which teeth that thing is using."
Victor put the wing back, drew her against him, and kissed her forehead. "Wake me if it starts chewing closer." His heart beat a good deal faster under her ear than a man discussing night watch had any excuse for. She fell asleep listening to that instead.
By morning, the bloody rags had disappeared. Finch picked up a trail of paw prints before they had walked half a mile along the stream. Felicity could hear claws clicking up ahead, even though the prints led away behind them. She pinched Victor's sleeve and pointed at the rocks where the path narrowed. A dog lifted its head there. Half its face was gone, and it had waited until they were almost beside it to make a sound.
"There's another one behind me," she whispered. His wing touched her once in answer. Then the biggest dog leaped from the rocks, and his wing knocked her clear as fire ran up his forearm. He caught the animal in the air and froze it hard enough to break against the bank. Behind them, Finch hit another with a branch so thick she'd taken it for a young tree.
Rose pulled her around the bend. Felicity stopped after two strides. The clicking had stopped, but a second set of claws was digging through the soft ground below them. She grabbed the back of Rose's jacket and hauled her up onto a picnic table as a third dog came through the ferns at knee height. It hit the table hard enough to tip it. Finch caught one end and drove the other down across the animal's neck. Victor landed beside them with blood running from four fresh cuts under his wing.
This time he went straight to Felicity, searching her arms and throat for bites. "You've got to quit that," she told him gently, catching his searching hand. "You keep counting everybody else's holes before you count your own. Sit where I can see."
He sat on the table because she'd asked him to. With his wing folded, she could barely see the cuts. When he opened it for her, the deepest one pulled wide, and something white showed at the bottom. The warmth gathered in her hands again, strong enough to frighten her after what it had cost at the pharmacy. He saw the light and started to draw away. Felicity held his hand a little tighter. "Let me try it my way this time."