Chapter 43
He Has Wings
We walked the rest of the night, traveling quietly and carefully through the jungle.
The occasional strand of moonlight that filtered through the canopy was too unpredictable for Soren to use his quick-travel thing.
Shadow-running, he called it. As he tried to explain to me multiple times, he could use the moon’s reflective light to jump through the barrier between the third and fourth dimensions.
However, there were caveats—other than the part that made me hurl nearly every time.
Something about the risk of landing in the middle of a horde of Mods by accident made moving the old-fashioned way more plausible for now.
The only breaks we took were because of me, but Soren was patient. Sometimes too patient, offering to rest even when I hadn’t asked for it yet. Like he could sense the moment I’d start to falter, the instant my brain recognized the exhaustion in my limbs.
Just as I was about to ask for another break—maybe one involving actual sleep—a high-pitched whirring noise sliced through the stillness.
I felt Soren crash into me, and then we were yanked through space and time, the risk of wherever we might land not as high as the certainty of being blasted to pieces by an Extermin if we didn’t get our asses out of there.
When we hit the ground, there was no time to think. Everything was only spinning trees, lurching breath, and the burn of impact.
Clouds had rolled in, stealing our moonlight. Behind us, we heard shouting.
Mods.
“Get down!” Soren hissed, pushing me flat into the earth. He pulled something from his pocket and flung it over us. A shimmering, featherlight fabric floated down, veiling us in darkness, cocooning us together in safety.
His mouth found my ear, his voice barely a breath. “Don’t move. Don’t make a sound. They won’t see you.”
We fell still. So still and silent that the crunch of the Mods’ boots over leaves rang out like a warning shot. One passed right by me.
Another followed, but his steps slowed. He moved from my toes to my knees, then stopped.
Then one step forward and three hundred pounds of armored Mod came down on my fingers.
My mouth wrenched open, and my eyes bulged. My tongue flexed in the middle of my open mouth, trying to release the pain in a silent scream. Soren’s fingers fidgeted around the wrist of my hand not in the process of being crushed, the tip of one finger tapping right in the center.
His eyes darkened, and then he mouthed something, but I couldn’t focus enough to try to figure it out. His hand slid into mine, so I squeezed, trying to pass some of the pain from one hand to the other, to give him some of the excruciating misery.
He could handle it. I couldn’t.
Tears clouded my vision, and my back ached from how much strain the rest of my muscles were using to fight the urge to physically and vocally react to the pain.
Just when I thought I’d pass out from the torment, the pressure lifted.
I couldn’t pull my hand in yet. I couldn’t react or move even an inch.
I had to remain completely still in the throbbing ache of what was surely my broken hand as I stared at Soren’s dark eyes and waited.
Without words, those eyes assured me that it wouldn’t be much longer.
Hold off for just a bit, and he’d make everything alright.
No idea why I trusted him, but I did.
Eventually, Soren peeked from under the fabric, then ducked back and whispered an inch from my face, his breath warm but doing nothing to ease the urgent pulse in my hand.
“When I say run,” he whispered, “You run to your right.” He grabbed my good hand. “Eliana. Listen. Focus.”
I nodded once, concentrating on the storm in his eyes and not the one brewing in my pulverized bones.
“Keep running,” Soren continued. “There’s a cave hidden behind the vines. Stay right.” He hesitated and pressed his mouth in a line. “Just keep going. I’ll be right behind you.”
I nodded again. Twice.
He peeked out once more, then whipped off the cover.
“RUN!”
I yelped as I instinctively tried to push myself up with both hands. Mistake. The pain rocketed up from my hand through my arm and down my back, sharp and blinding.
I scrambled from knees to feet and tore into the underbrush. Branches clawed at my arms and face, thorns dragging blood out as evidence.
I heard the Mods shout as I thrust both hands through the vines. Another mistake. Gritting my teeth, I tore at the greenery with my good hand until an opening gave way.
A loud clang of metal and some more shouts charged the space behind me. I turned back to see Soren silhouetted by the moon.
He wasn’t holding a weapon. He was the weapon.
His arms had morphed into blades of shadow—curved, elegant, and deadly. He swung them through a Mod’s neck in one smooth arc, removing a man’s head like a chunk of warm butter.
Even more shocking than his arms were the enormous, ink-black wings stretching behind him and promising everything dark in this world.
He has wings.
He has black wings because he is the son of a Fallen—a dark angel, condemned.
Even like this, especially like this, he was strikingly beautiful.
The wings weren’t those of any angel I'd ever imagined, smooth feathers carefully curated in place like an eagle’s.
Soren’s wings were a nightmarish appendage that threatened to swallow any light within reach, stretching out in pure menace.
Another creature stalked from the woods—tall, gangly, with dark and gnarled skin. This one was as far from beautiful as one could get. I’d never seen anything like it, but Soren didn’t look surprised. He lifted one shadowy sword-arm, grinning like a wolf, black veins protruding from his neck.
“Run, Eliana!”
I looked away more to escape the image of what Soren had transformed himself into and the thing he was fighting, rather than to watch where I was going.
Just one more stride before I hit the red clay of the cave and sprinted right, just like Soren had told me. A muffled voice shouted from the left. I didn’t stop.
The passage that greeted me was so narrow that I had to turn sideways for parts of it, and with no light, I was running blindly until I was falling instead.
The floor dropped beneath me and slipped into a steep slope.
Gravel and roots grabbed at me as I slid with loose dirt, creating the worst non-water slide experience ever.
I grabbed for anything—roots, walls, even air—both hands flailing.
My right hand caught something for half a second, but the burst of pain was immediate, like a firecracker exploding in my arm. I let go and gave up.
The cool that washed over me as the ground fully disappeared moments later was a welcome release from the abuse my body had been taking. That is, until I realized I was still descending, sinking.
Why does he never warn me about this?!
I flung my arms and legs around like I’d been taught in the swim lessons Farren had tried to give me during our NTG training, but even the pressure of water against my broken hand was too much.
Then strong arms wrapped around me.
I was pulled against Soren’s chest as he swam us both upward, cutting through the murky dark, not even giving me enough time to fear death this time.
I gasped for air the second we surfaced, spitting water into his face on purpose.
Soren hoisted me up to sit on a solid bank of tile, cold against every cut I’d earned on the slide to my watery grave.
“Why didn’t you swim?” Soren asked, hovering way too high above me. “You’ve been training for this.”
I wiped snot and water from my face and hoped I looked less like a drowned rat and more like a water demon as I glared up at him. “I panicked because someone didn’t warn me.”
“You were faster than I expected,” he said, casually.
He no longer sported wings and had relatively normal arms, though a bit too muscular for one man to be allowed. “I was hoping to take you down the ramp with me.”
I made the familiar mistake of trying to use both of my hands to help me stand and cried out at the pain. Soren dropped the bag he had in his hand and knelt next to me.
He reached out for my wrist and gently turned my hand to examine it. My three middle fingers were swollen to twice their size and colored in an exquisite bluish-black, but my attention was on the touch of his skin on mine.
“They’re most likely broken,” he said softly, continuing his inspection by lightly pressing against one of my fingers.
I hissed at the pain and recoiled.
Soren looked up at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read, but it felt…almost warm. Not too dissimilar to how he’d stared at me with those silver eyes when he asked me if I wanted him as well.
“It’s not as good as Zuri, but I have something in the pack,” he said as he moved toward the bag. “You have to be still, though, and let me help you.”
I nodded with a small whimper. “If you have some nerveblock, that would be great, too.”
He actually chuckled—a low, easy sound that did strange things to my insides. “I might.”
From the satchel, he pulled a nerveblock injector, what looked like black tape, and a thin shard of stone. When he pressed the pen to the center of my palm, I sighed out loud as the numbing effect instantly took over.
His touch was delicate as he straightened my pulverized fingers and taped them together around the piece of stone.
“It’ll take a few hours to start healing,” he said. “Be careful not to put any pressure on them. Can you shoot with your left hand?”
“Yeah, probably.” I looked down at the crossbow on the floor beside me. “Guess it’s a good thing it’s not the longbow after all.”
Now that my hand wasn’t in excruciating pain, the cold of my soaked clothes and the burning sensation of the scrapes I’d acquired on the descent to liquid hell started to settle into my bones.
Soren frowned at my exaggerated shiver.
“You only have one spare set of clothes in here,” he said, pulling out black shorts and a T-shirt from the waterproof pack he’d brought along with him from the warehouse.
“So maybe don’t go swimming with all your gear on next time.
” One corner of his mouth lifted, and he eyed me for too long.
“You’ll just have to go skinny dipping from now on. ”
I turned a shade of tomato and made a face, but muttered, “Thanks,” as I took the clothes.
Soren turned away without a word and peeled off his soaked shirt, his back carved from shadow and light, muscles flexing beneath a tattoo of two black wings.
Now that I knew those wings were real, the marks on his back felt like they belonged to someone new. He felt like someone new, different.
“Enjoying the view?” Soren asked, amused.
I choked on my own saliva, turned away quickly, and faked a cough to hide my embarrassment. My ears burned hotter than the scrapes on my back.
“You can look if you want, Eliana,” his voice dropped again. That low, teasing tone. Dangerous, dark, and far too perceptive. “I think you’re about to miss the best part.”
I laughed a sound way too high-pitched to be casual. “You’re seriously too full of yourself.”
“You’re the one staring,” he said. Then, after the sound of more clothes being taken off and put on—and my trying not to imagine the scene playing out behind me—footsteps crunched against dusty tile as he came closer. “I’m finished now. Your turn.”