Chapter 7
ADA
The wind is a wall.
The world inverts and rights itself in the wrong direction, and I'm falling. The canopy is a hundred feet below. The ground is a hundred feet below that. I'm falling through all of it, and it's the right decision.
Four years of right decisions. This is the last one. Something loosens in my chest that I didn't know was there—all of it, every wrong morning and bad call and person I couldn't save, just gone. This is finished. I chose it.
A good death. My death. I chose it.
He's forty feet to my left.
Already airborne. Already level with me and closing.
Crown horns wider than I am tall, skin the deep red of old brick, dark red hair thick and curling around the base of those horns, cascading past his shoulders.
His wings are tucked back in a dive that I understand in the half-second I have to look at him is not random—he was already there, already watching the building. The wind has just carried me to him.
His body goes still. Mid-air. Wings locked. Everything locked.
He hangs in the sky and his eyes change—from amber, the amber of something that has no interest in me, the amber every survivor learns to watch for because amber means you're nobody to them—to something else entirely. Something that has been waiting and has just been told where to go.
I'm falling and he's looking at me like he found what he was looking for. I can't do anything about either of those things.
He dives.
I try to angle away. With nothing to push from and gravity taking everything, I manage a half-twist that does nothing except turn my back to him. His arms close around my chest and waist from behind. His wings snap open and the deceleration hits like a wall.
My vision blackens. Something pops in my shoulder. I bite through my lip. The blood is immediate and copper and real.
His tail—long, enormously muscular, I feel the weight of it—wraps around my thighs in one fast coil and locks my legs together against his.
We're still moving. Slower, spiraling down through the canopy levels, his wings beating in long controlled strokes. His arms across my chest, his tail around my thighs, the drop still a hundred and sixty feet below my feet.
I drive my elbow back into his ribs. His ribs don't move. I try again, harder, and get the same answer. I go for his jaw with the back of my head and catch something solid. My skull rings.
He shifts his grip exactly enough to prevent it happening again. Nothing else. He doesn't make a sound. He doesn't react.
"Let me go," I say. "Let me go right now, let me—"
I get one arm free and claw at his forearm. He takes it back without looking.
I fight him. I fight him the whole way down. I try every angle I know—four years in the wasteland, a thorough education in fighting things bigger than me—none of them land, none of them matter. He keeps descending in long spirals, his wings working above us, my boots kicking at nothing.
His tail finds my neck.
The tip of it. Almost careful, the way something enormous can be almost careful if it decides to try. It presses below my ear and what comes from that point is warmth—fast, spreading, reaching my shoulders before I can name it. Then my arms. Then my hands.
My hands open. The fight goes out of them and stays out.
I tell my hands to close. They don't close. I tell my whole body to keep fighting. My whole body goes quiet.
I'm awake—completely, furiously awake, feeling everything. The wind, his chest against my back, the blood on my lip, the cold rushing air. I can't make a single muscle do anything.
The nectar works on the muscles. I knew that. I know all of this. I was briefed.
His tail uncoils from my thighs and recoils wider, slower, taking its time. It winds from my knees to my hips in three heavy loops—warm, impossibly strong, each coil squeezing just enough to know it could squeeze harder—and settles.
My whole lower half is wrapped in him while his arms hold my chest and his wings hold the sky.
Knowing it is the most useless thing I've ever known.
Five miles east-northeast, my settlement is holding or it isn't. My fighters are on the wall or they're not.
I'm the gate commander. I'm the intelligence network.
I'm the only person with the full picture of what the Ordained are doing and when.
And I am two hundred feet above all of it, held, my body taken by a drug that doesn't know anything about chain of command or what I'm supposed to be doing right now.
There is no move from here that gets me back. I have checked every angle I have. There is nothing.
"You bastard," I say, flat, because I can't get any force behind it. It's still true.
His body is against my back. His loincloth—leather, dark, worn—presses against the small of my back, and below it he's already hard. Hard before we touched.
Hard the moment the wind carried me to him and the switch flipped and he decided. I know it. I don't want to know it. I can't stop.
A hundred and forty feet above his nest now. I can see it below—a hollow in the canopy, wide and deep, lined with furs. That's where this ends. Not on the ground.
His fangs sink into my throat.
The nectar was warmth going quiet. The venom goes inward—goes deep, goes somewhere the nectar never touched. It spreads from the bite and finds every nerve I have and rewires them, all of them, at the same time. I flush hot from scalp to sole. My breath drops into my belly.
Something starts between my hips—thick, building, a pull I have no word for—that I absolutely do not want. Can't stop.
I know what venom does. I've read the briefings. I know exactly what is happening to me.
None of that changes a single thing.
His claws find the collar of my jacket. One pull and it splits down the back and is gone. Both hands at my shirt next—collar to hem, one motion—and that's gone too. Cold air on my chest while we're still spiraling down through canopy levels.
His hands move to my waistband.
"Don't you dare," I say. "I swear to god, I'll—"
The seam splits hip to thigh. The trousers fall away into the air below us. I'm bare in the canopy wind, tan skin browned darker in places, freckled across my shoulders from the years on the wall. Held open and furious and unable to move.
His tail rewraps. One loop around each thigh, pulling them apart, locking my legs wide.
His loincloth shifts aside and his cock is against the inside of my thigh—enormous, already hard—and it moves. The tip drags from my cunt to my clit in one slow stroke, tracing every slick thing the venom has put there. I hear the sound it makes. Obscene and wet in the canopy air.
I am furious. I am soaked. His cock drags back down and my hips push back.
I don't decide that. My hips push back against him in the air. He makes a sound against my ear—low and rough, a grunt from somewhere below language. Then his feet hit the furs.