Chapter 9 #6
A sound jerked his attention upward, the crack and snap of wings. In the dark, the three black drakes appeared like falling storm clouds, dropping over the chateau, blotting out the stars. They came fast. Cassius wondered if they’d detected the Sels yet, but knew they soon would.
They flew in a three-point pattern, the largest, the big male that Amelia herself rode, nearest the gates; the two females flanked the mansion’s far side. Their wings spread wide, and their dramatic descent slowed as they drew even with the top of the walls.
Off to Cassius’s left, he heard the drumming and clanking of many armored feet, and a glance filled his vision with gold. Another portal, another wave of soldiers.
He drummed his fingers on the handle of the sword, and took stock of his labored breathing, of his burning muscles, of his lightweight tunic and breeches, and knew that it had been the element of surprise, and no small amount of luck that had kept him alive in the tent.
If he turned to meet his countrymen now, out in the open, he’d be run through in a matter of moments.
One of the drakes let out a high, keening cry, and Cassius’s mind filled with a vision of Amelia’s face as he’d seen it earlier, before her departure: the way she’d been pale, and unsteady, just as Lady Leda had said.
Mind made up, he slipped sideways between two pine trunks, and broke into an unsteady run, headed away from the fighting, and toward the side gates that would let him into the chateau’s gardens.
~*~
One moment the ground was rushing up to meet them, the tiny patchwork of the chateau grounds spreading, growing, details popping as Alpha plunged down through the chill night air.
The little matchsticks became trees, and the quilt stitches became stone paths, and the child’s dollhouse reared up as a sprawling, slate-roofed mansion built tall and sturdy to withstand the foothill winds.
Amelia leaned low between Alpha’s folded wings, eyes tearing in the wind, palm, hand, wrist, arm throbbing and blistering with pain. And then—
Then she was floating in a sea of gray.
No walls, no floor, no sky, no ground, no rapidly-growing chateau. But this wasn’t the Between as she’d come to know it. Even without a frame of reference, she knew that she floated; invisible currents buoyed her limbs; her hair waved overhead, as though she was sinking slowly into water.
Here, her hand no longer hurt—instead, it felt warm in a pleasant way. It felt like someone was holding it.
“Come.” The voice was masculine, rich and deep, accented, and it echoed all around her, filling her head, wrapping around her throat and tugging hard at her belt. “Come now.” The warm pressure on her hand squeezed tighter, and then her arm lifted forward, and something, someone, towed her forward.
At first, this gray, nonthreatening expanse had felt like a reprieve from the impending battle, but now panic overwhelmed her. “No!” She kicked the empty air, bucking and twisting, trying to wrench her hand free. “No, let go of me!”
“Come,” the voice repeated, and she knew whose voice it was, now. Romanus Tyrsbane.
Her hand squeezed so tight she felt the bones grind together.
“NO!” Amelia bellowed, and threw every bit of her mind back toward Alpha, and the Merryweather hillside.
The gray flickered. Once, twice, three times.
The world spun. And then Amelia’s face was buffeted by the strong wind off Alpha’s wings as he spread them and flapped backward, turning his nosedive into a sudden, harsh midair stop that lifted her out of the saddle.
If not for the strap that clipped her belt to the harness, she would have gone tumbling off his back and landed in the fish pond below.
Her stomach lurched, and for an awful moment she thought she’d be sick.
She listed dangerously in the saddle, and when she reached to grip his breastplate, a hot, sharp pain shot from the wound in her palm straight up to the ball of her shoulder.
It cracked across her collarbones and lodged in the hollows around her heart, and she screamed before she could catch herself, so intense was the pain.
Alpha hovered outside a top floor window, wings beating, grass and ornamental trees rustling and snapping beneath the force of the wind he kicked up.
He craned his neck around, and blew hot air across her face.
He trilled an inquiry, and echoed it silently through their bond. Are you well? What’s wrong?
She thought she’d vomit if she opened her mouth, so she flapped her good hand at him. I’m well. Do as we discussed.
The girls called from the far side of the mansion, but Alpha regarded her a moment longer, head cocked so she stared deep into his red-gold eye, pupil expansive in the dark, drinking her in, doubting her assurances.
The pain in her hand was exquisite, and then, to her horror, the sensation of another hand gripping it returned. The tugging. Her vision wavered, white at the edges. He was trying to take her.
Alpha rumbled a low growl, sides expanding beneath her legs.
She pressed his ribs with her bootheels as she fought a wave of dizziness. “Go,” she whispered, then, forcing authority into her voice, “go. Attack. Now.”
He trumpeted his displeasure, the girls echoed it, but he swung back around and battered the window open with his horns.
The glass shattered. Sconce light from inside flickered on the shards as they rained down over the stone windowsill and fell toward the pond below.
Bright sparks like fireflies, like the vertigo bursts already flaring at the edges of her vision.
Between rapid-fire blinks, Amelia glimpsed men inside, unarmored, sluggish in their movements, pale faces slack with shock.
One of them screamed when Alpha thrust his head inside and clamped his jaws around his waist.
Blood spurted, and bile rose in Amelia’s throat.
“Gods,” she gasped, turning her face away. The ground spun circles beneath her, and the metronomic beating of Alpha’s wings made it worse. Up, and down, and up, and down, and up, and…
Down. She was sliding again.
Her throbbing hand wouldn’t close on the saddle, and her legs went numb, and she dropped off his back like a useless doll.
Or a corpse, which she thought she might be soon, the way she was feeling.
The tugging pressure on her hand was so strong she barely felt the snag and jolt of her safety strap catching.
Her belt snatched her around her hips, and she hung suspended under Alpha’s belly, buffeted by his wings.
She coughed, and heaved, and spat, and, dangling as she was, the blood rushed to her head. If she hung here a moment longer, she’d lose consciousness.
Alpha bellowed, and she juddered through the air as he twisted, flapped, tried to gain altitude and stretch his neck down toward her. In his attempt to get to her, to help her, his panicked thoughts crowding her own, he slammed her up against the chateau wall.
Her vision exploded, a whiteout burst that left her reeling.
Sounds assaulted her ears: the clang of steel, the shouts of men, what sounded like the crackle of fire, which made no sense, because the drakes knew not to burn the chateau; their whole plan depended upon letting the invaders up the mountain think Sels still controlled the chateau.
But the plan was failing as fast as her body was. And she had to make it stop.
With her good hand, Amelia drew her belt knife, and sliced through the safety strap.
Alpha roared.
There was a lovely, cool moment of free fall, when the world stopped spinning. And then she hit the water, and the pond’s surface may as well have been a bed of rocks, the way it forced all the air out of her lungs.
I’m going to drown, she thought, with a kind of certainty that was almost peaceful. The water closed over her, cold and thick, and crushing against her chest, and she couldn’t fight it. She cracked her eyes open, and there was a light source, smeared and yellow underwater.
Her hand. The light was coming out of her hand, a too-bright line of it where Romanus had cut her palm.
Oh, she thought. Better to drown than go with him.
She was aware of Alpha’s distress, his panic over her, but she couldn’t lock onto their bond and feel it properly; it was more like a memory than something currently happening.
This time, when the tug came on her hand, she didn’t try to resist it. She would drown soon, and then…
Then she was yanked up to the surface, and through it, and she sucked in a desperate breath and slicked water off her face with her good hand.
The tug this time had not come from the astral plane, but from a real human hand.
And the pale face bobbing across from hers in the pond belonged to Cassius.
Amelia gaped at him. “What are you doing?”
His silver hair was plastered to his neck and shoulders from diving in after her, his breath quick and unsteady like he’d been running. “My lady. We must—”
His eyes widened, as the water bubbled and frothed around them.
Alpha screamed overhead, the wind from his wings beating at them.
“What,” Cassius started, and then the pain spiked to an unbearable hot flash in her hand, where Cassius still gripped her, and Amelia thought she smelled ozone before the water sucked them both down into oblivion.