Talons #3
Every clean line Dominic wanted came with my body in the path of it. Dominic, who could have ended an empty-handed man in three seconds, could not close. Closing meant going through me. Cael knew it and used it.
He gave Dominic his armored shoulder, his beating wings, every part of himself that could survive punishment, and kept me tucked against the soft places no one would strike.
For a few seconds that lasted a year, the three of us hung over the meadow in a stalemate built out of my ribs. Finally, Rhain broke it.
He did not fight the way Dominic fought.
He did not know how. He had been a dragon for the better part of a century, but he had spent that century in council chambers and drawing rooms, not in the air over a kill.
He had none of the enforcer’s craft for this.
What he had was the one thing that mattered.
He knew how to make himself a problem from an angle no one had budgeted for.
He came in low, with everything to lose, and made Cael choose. Keep me as a shield, or keep his throat. Cael chose the shield, and he swung me wide to fend Rhain off.
I had been counting his grip since the south wall.
Four talons, re-setting on every third wingbeat, a half-count of slack at the top of each stroke.
At the top of the next stroke I went dead weight and hooked my boot against his foreclaw, and the drop carried me a foot below the line between his throat and Dominic’s teeth.
For less than a second, his throat opened to Dominic.
Dominic did not need the second. He needed the part of one Cael had just given him.
The vast machine of the dragon around me went from drive to spasm to slack in a single shudder I felt in my teeth. The fist opened. And then there was nothing under me but a hundred feet of morning.
I fell.
People say your mind goes blank when you fall. Mine did not.
I thought the entire way down. I thought about the meadow rushing up beneath me, green and patient and final.
I thought, with a clarity that felt almost rude, that I had survived ten years in a profession designed to kill me quietly and was about to die loudly in a field in Washington State. I apologized to Mama.
Then the air stopped being air. Something hit me from the side hard enough to tear the breath from my lungs. Pale gold. Shaking. Warm.
The fall became a violent swing. We dropped, then caught, bottoming out twenty feet above the grass.
I was crushed against wet scales that smelled like rain and lightning. A dragon. Rhain.
He had caught me. Clumsily. The catch nearly killed us both.
His wings snapped open unevenly, fighting for purchase in air that seemed determined to drag us down. We lurched sideways. One wing clipped the tops of a stand of firs, sending branches exploding around us. The impact spun us hard enough to make my stomach revolt.
Rhain made a sound that vibrated through his entire body, somewhere between a roar and a groan.
We dropped again and the ground rushed toward us. At the last possible moment he managed to level out, but there was no graceful landing. We hit the meadow hard enough to bounce.
The world became grass and dirt and pain.
I lost track of where my body ended and his began as we skidded across the field. Something slammed into my shoulder. My head bounced once, twice. Mud sprayed across my face.
Then everything stopped. Neither of us moved. I lay sprawled half across Rhain’s side, staring up at a sky that seemed offensively blue. Breathing hurt. Existing hurt.
But I was breathing. Which felt important.
Around us, shouting erupted. Boots pounded through the grass.
“Move back!”
“Give them room!”
“Is she alive?”
I tried to answer and produced a noise that sounded like a dying squirrel.
Several men reached us at once. Rhain moved beneath me, still in dragon form, his sides heaving with exhaustion. The movement was enough to spike fresh pain across my ribs.
Strong hands carefully lifted me away from him. The moment my feet touched the ground, my knees folded. Someone caught me before I could collapse.
“Easy,” a voice said.
I was lowered onto the grass instead.
Dominic appeared above me, anxious and pale. He knelt beside me. “Can you hear me?”
“Unfortunately,” I croaked.
Someone nearby laughed in obvious relief.
Dominic began checking me with practiced efficiency, running his hands along my arms, my shoulders, asking questions I only half processed. “Anything broken?”
“Probably my dignity.”
“Besides that.”
I considered it. “My everything hurts.”
“That is not helpful.”
Someone pressed water into my hand. Someone else announced that I appeared mostly intact.
Mostly. The word felt encouraging.
A few yards away, the men gave Rhain a wider berth as he finally shifted back, exhausted and shaking. Several of them moved toward him immediately, checking him with the same urgency they had shown me.
For a moment I simply lay there in the grass, staring at the clouds drifting overhead.
I had fallen from the sky. Rhain had caught me. And somehow, against all reasonable expectations, neither of us was dead.
There was, I decided, a reason most women fantasized about werewolves. Nobody ever got dropped out of the sky by a werewolf.