Chapter 53
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
MASON
Nothing on Earth could’ve ever prepared me for the sight of a truck slamming into Dakota head-on, going sixty miles an hour.
Her body was thrown in the air, limp the second the vehicle hit her.
She crashed back down onto the road, skidding to a stop on the rough asphalt, her body broken and small and unmoving.
The truck crashed into a thick pine tree, metal crunching and glass shattering. I could smell her blood from here.
Micah got to her before I did, cradling her bleeding skull in his palms.
She wasn’t screaming, wasn’t whimpering in pain, wasn’t making any noise at all. That lifeless silence rattled something so deeply inside of me I felt like I was going to throw up.
There was so much blood on her face that I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Her nose, her ears, lacerations around her hairline. Her lip was split open, and gravel had embedded itself in the soft skin of her cheek, road rash ripping dark and raw along her jaw.
She wasn’t dying.
She was already gone.
The anchor of her in the back of my mind had blinked completely out of existence.
Her fragility had never struck me quite so severely as it did now.
The angles of her limbs were all wrong and the side of her head was crushed, Micah’s fingers pressing against broken skull fragments. I shoved my fingers to her throat, feeling for a pulse and not finding one.
My brain wasn’t working correctly.
Her hair was spread on the pavement like a halo around her head, a pool of blood spreading below her faster than it should. None of the things I was looking at were being processed in my thoughts. As if I was looking at some artificial rendering of Dakota, and not the real girl.
But it was real.
Dakota Masters was laying dead on the pavement right in front of my fucking face.
I broke my promise.
It was the only thought in my scattered brain. I’d told Dakota her death belonged to me, and now it didn’t. It belonged to metal and pavement.
It was so devastatingly human.
Micah didn’t hesitate to lean forward and press his mouth to hers. It only took me a second to register what he was doing, but by that point it was too late.
“Micah!” I shouted, grabbing his arm, trying to pull him off her, adrenaline making me shake. It should be me.
He exhaled into her mouth, her eyelids instantly beginning to twitch.
I knelt on the opposite side of her body, holding her head as life began to come back to her. But in the same breath, life was leaving Micah. He slumped down next to her on his side on the pavement, her blood staining his sleeve, his hair.
Dakota was waking up quickly, already screaming in agony, the back of her shirt splitting to reveal the skin on her back tearing open.
Bones and bloody white feathers shoved out of her muscles, growing and expanding out of her.
She was sobbing, shrieking, her face as pale as a sheet, her body shaking and sweating, goosebumps racing over her skin.
Micah was motionless on the ground, and my heart was at my feet.
Dakota started grabbing at her throat, clawing with her nails, sounding like she was choking. She couldn’t get a full breath in, her eyes going wide and terrified. She was suffocating.
“Why can’t I breathe?” she gasped, a choked breath breaking on her lips.
“You haven’t chosen to fall. You have to go to Heaven first.”
She was shaking her head frantically.
“We have to go, baby,” I said, my eyes flicking fearfully towards Micah. He wasn’t breathing.
Her response was lost to the noise of agony shredding up her throat.
I grabbed her under the armpits, hoisting her up onto her shaky legs, then I took off, pushing upwards with my own wings while she hung in my grasp.
“Wait!” Dakota said, forcing her voice louder.
“We can’t wait.”
She wasn’t fallen. She couldn’t breathe in such low levels of neon, not until she made the choice herself to fall to Earth. She had to go to Heaven now or else she’d die.
“Wait!” she wailed, as I pushed us higher. “Micah!” Her voice shattered, her throat choked with sobs. “Where is he? Is he coming?”
She was screaming, gasping for breath, trying to make me look at her now.
I didn’t answer her.
I fucking couldn’t.
“Micah!” She couldn’t get a full breath in.
I was trying not to panic so I could keep Dakota from suffocating, trying to continue our desperate ascent, trying to keep myself from spiraling into the gaping chasm threatening to swallow me whole. The most absolute darkness in the universe. The nature which I no longer had any defense against.
My heart thrashed wildly in my ribcage.
Dakota’s wings were sticky and wet with blood, her feathers clumped together, more still growing from her white wings. I flew higher and higher, watching her choke as she tried to breathe, sucking in huge gulps of thin air.
“Mason!” she screamed hoarsely. “Is he okay?”
I clenched my jaw, holding her tighter, pushing with my wings through the clouds.
“You have to go to Heaven right now. Okay?” I said, fingers digging into her skin. “And I can’t take you there. Do you understand me?”
She shook her head again and again.
“No. No!”
“No isn’t an option,” I told her as firmly as I could.
“I don’t want to leave you!” Fresh tears started rolling down her cheeks.
“Dakota, baby, you’re going to have to fly. I can’t take you all the way up. You have to get to Heaven, baby. You can’t breathe here. Please try to move your wings. Please.”
She looked like she was about to pass out. When she tried to move her wings, her face contorted with pain and she screamed again. All her muscles were still tender from being shredded open, and they had yet to grow around her new wings.
“You have to. You fucking have to. I know it hurts, but you’re going to die if you don’t go.” I was starting to panic.
“I want you to hold me.”
I wrapped my arms securely around her waist, holding us steady in the air. “Stretch your wings out behind you. Just extend them.”
She was going to suffocate to death in my arms if I didn’t push her now. As much as I fucking hated it. I didn’t want to see her so terrified and in pain like this.
“Do you see the entrance?” I asked. I wouldn’t be able to see the entrance, but she’d be able to. “It should be like a tear in the sky.”
“I don’t know,” she said through the agony in her voice.
“Look up. Please, baby. Please.”
She tilted her head at the same time as she stretched her wings. She could hardly inhale now.
“I’ll throw you, but you have to try. Okay? I love you so much.”
I didn’t give her a chance to answer me before I used as much strength as I had to literally toss her up into the air as high as possible. Her limbs flailed, a weak scream carrying on the wind, before her wings finally caught on the air and she soared a few feet before disappearing.
Just like that.
I didn’t have time to waste, though.
I plummeted back to Earth in a blur, arrowing straight toward the ground, feeling like my soul was ripping apart into a million pieces. He couldn’t be dead. Micah wouldn’t just die. That wasn’t how this worked.
I was supposed to be the one to die.
Not him. Never him.
So many thoughts rushed in my brain I could hardly make sense of any of them.
Dakota was gone. She was an angel. A Sigeian angel.
And she was in Heaven now, where she would be loved and cared for in a way I’d never be capable of. She might not come back. Why would she?
I can’t breathe.
She’s going to fall to Earth for me and she’s going to end up regretting it just like he did.
She’s going to give up safety and happiness and a full life in Heaven for someone who’s going to kill her.
My eyes stung as I flew through the clouds.
I saw the red flame of neon burning on the ground and every muscle in my body instantly jammed, my synapses misfiring, my nerves sparking with the worst fear I’d ever felt in my life.
My wings were tucked tight to my body as I dropped headfirst, wind ripping around me, a nauseating tightness in my chest.
Kill.
Kill. Kill. Kill.
My vision was blurring and my hands shaking violently by the time I got close enough to drop onto my feet.
Heart lurching, I stumbled toward him, but it was like I’d forgotten how to move.
Every step was stiff and unnatural, my brain disconnected from my physical reality because none of this made any sense in my brain.
The flame was so bright, surrounding his form in a silky sheet of crimson. A flame I’d seen too many times over the course of my life. The flame of an angel dying.
Somehow, I forced myself to step closer.
His face was already almost gone.
A choked noise burst out of my throat, and I couldn’t breathe, my chest tightening and tightening and tightening. Pure horror encroached on every thought in my brain. His gorgeous face. The only face I’d ever seen in my dreams.
No.
I watched the last of his blond hair burn into nothing.
No.
His powerful body, surrounded by red flame, disappeared in front of my face. And there was nothing I could do. I gasped my inhales, my heart pounding so hard it was making me sick.
I just stared at him.
Paralyzed.
Less than a minute later, it was over.
The flame extinguished. The pavement was empty, like nothing had ever been there.
And Micah Killshaw was dead.