The panther moved like death given fur.
One second Birdie was staring at the glowing gold eye. The next, a massive black paw smashed into her chest and pinned her to the bone pile. Claws punched through the thin fabric of her shift and scored burning lines across her collarbone. Hot breath reeking of poison and blood washed over her face. Jaws opened wide enough to crush her skull in one bite.
“Kill me and you die in the next hour!” Birdie snarled straight into those murderous eyes. “Let me work and you might live to regret it!”
The jaws froze a finger’s width from her throat. A low, broken growl vibrated through her entire body. The gold eye was glassy with agony and rage, but something behind it—intelligence—flickered.
“You’re poisoned,” she rasped, voice raw but clinical. “Rare toxin. Spreading toward your heart. I can smell the rot. You have maybe sixty minutes before your lungs fill and your core shuts down. I know how to slow it, maybe reverse it. But if you tear my throat out, we both end as bones in this hole. Choose, fast.”
The clawed paw pressing into her chest flexed. Fresh blood welled. The panther’s body convulsed hard—pain ripping through him—and a wet, choking sound escaped those lethal jaws. He was dying and furious about it.
Slowly, the pressure eased.
Birdie didn’t wait for a second invitation. She shoved the heavy paw aside and rolled to her knees, ignoring the fresh claw wounds and her screaming thigh. Up close the damage was worse than she’d thought. A deep gash ran from the panther’s ribs to hip, edges black and weeping that sickly green poison. The fur around it had melted away. Veins of corruption crawled toward his chest like living cracks.
“Name’s Birdie,” she muttered, already scavenging. “You’re going to hate this.”
She grabbed handfuls of the blackened charcoal left from her fallen fire, crushed it between stones, and packed it directly into the wound to draw toxin.
The panther jerked and let out a sound that was pure snarl, claws gouging deep grooves in the bone floor. She didn’t stop. She found pale, bulbous fungi growing in the damp cracks of the sinkhole wall—the same ones she’d noticed earlier that smelled sharply of ammonia and something metallic.
In her old life she would have tested them for weeks. Here she had minutes.
She tore them free, mashed them with a clean bone shard, mixed in a little of her own spit and the last clean water from a cracked skull, and forced the foul paste into the worst of the wound.
“Pressure points,” she told him through gritted teeth, more to keep herself focused than for his sake. “Beast cores sit behind the sternum. Toxin’s climbing the blood highways. We slow the highways.”
She slammed her fingers into specific spots along his neck and inner foreleg—places Dani Raziel’s first-aid and animal anatomy knowledge screamed might regulate circulation. The panther’s entire body seized. One huge paw shot up and locked around her throat, claws pricking the skin hard enough to draw beads of blood.
Birdie didn’t flinch. She kept working, voice tight. “That’s it. Hate me. Stay awake. If you pass out now you’re dead.”
Long minutes blurred into sweat, blood, and the wet sounds of a dying apex predator fighting his own body. She packed more charcoal. Reapplied the fungal mash. Used strips of her remaining shift to bind the wound tight. Every time the convulsions hit, those claws around her neck tightened—once hard enough that black spots danced at the edges of her vision—but they never quite closed.
Finally the worst of the thrashing eased. The green glow in the wound dimmed a fraction. The panther’s breathing, while still labored, no longer rattled like loose stones.
Birdie sat back on her heels, shaking, covered in his blood and hers. “There. You’re not fixed. But you’re not dying in the next ten minutes either. You’re welcome, you oversized nightmare.”
The gold eye cracked open fully.
It was clear now, lucid, lethal.
In one explosive movement the black panther surged up. Bones scattered. One massive hand—halfway shifted, claws still out—slammed her back down onto the skeleton pile. The other hand closed around her throat again, complete this time, and squeezed just short of crushing windpipe.
Yael’s voice came out ruined, low, and raw with threat, more growl than speech.
“Why...”
Birdie stared up into those murderous gold eyes and managed a bloody, defiant smile even as her air ran out.
“Because I don’t die at the bottom of a hole,” she choked. “And neither do you… if you let go.”
The claws flexed, then stopped.
Above them, through the open sinkhole, heavy footsteps crunched across ash and stone. Multiple sets, wolf-pack weight. Low voices carried on the night wind—Frostfang scouts, close enough to smell.
Yael’s head snapped toward the sound, lips peeling back from fangs still stained with his own blood. His claws remained locked around Birdie’s throat like a living collar, one twitch from ending her, as the first torchlight flickered at the edge of the hole.