He was beautiful. They both were beautiful, like airbrushed models, the one holding me mixed-race with the sort of smooth perfect medium-brown skin that people try to imitate with fake tans, and the other sharp-featured and so pale he had to be albino, with wavy white hair and lavender eyes.

The third one came down, saying something angry. The pale man snapped something back, and the latecomer got down on one knee to look into my face.

Something was wrong with him, the kind of wrong that made my skin creep. He was as beautiful as the others, with a striking, angular face that reminded me of a fox or a coyote, but his pale green eyes looked wrong. His ears didn't match his face, either, and his mouth moved in the wrong way as he spoke. Photoshopped—he looked like he'd been photoshopped by someone who didn't know what they were doing, painted over like that one fresco of Jesus that woman had tried to restore and everyone memed.

Around me the words the men were saying resolved, as my nostrils flared and eyes widened.

"She's going to die if we leave her out here," the one holding me said, his voice upset and animated. "It's easy to bring her back with us, and you can make the healers care for her."

"I've killed plenty of people already," the wrong one growled. "I don't want to deal with the backlash of bringing a random human back home. Let her die."

"You don't have to keep her," came the angry answer.

I didn't care what they were saying, it didn't matter, he was wrong, the world was tilting and sliding sideways and I couldn't bear to look at him and not know. As he started to stand, I snatched at him with speed I didn't realize I still had left in me, and grabbed him by the shirt.

His eyes snapped to me again, cold and angry.

I started shaking. "Dain," I panted out, through the fever and the numbness and the pain. "Dain, what's wrong with your eyes?" I stared at him, desperate to know, needing an answer, holding onto his shirt with the grip of a drowning man.

He went very, very still. All three of them did.

They weren't wearing backpacks, some sane part of my brain noted. No backpacks, no gear. They were dressed like woodsmen in movies, as if they'd wandered in from a Renaissance Faire.

"Gods and monsters," the pale one whispered. He scrambled backwards, stumbling to his feet. He didn't move normally, too fast, too smooth, like someone had poured a feral cat into a man's body.

I only saw it in my peripheral vision, my eyes locked on Dain's face.

Dain?