“Tell me,” he said at her ear, swallowing the urge to bury his face in her hair. “How do you feel about flying?”
She whipped her head around. “What are you planning?”
“Hmm.” Careful of his horns, he ran his nose along hers. “That might be an answer you don’t want.”
“Not funny,” she breathed.
Her nails sank into the flesh of his arm, apprehension in every biting crescent, when he shifted to the edge and dropped into a crouch.
“Brand…”
“If death awaits, I would have a moment of joy before the Veil takes me.” A moment of weightless freedom withher. “Trust me,” he whispered.
With that, he launched into the air.
To her credit, she didn’t scream. The shield stretched and bent with them, following their trajectory through the gloom as they plummeted. Brand braced for the impact and they landed with a booming thud, his knees bending to absorb their momentum.
Luna’s hair was a wild, wind-blown nest. Half of it had flung forward, covering her face and body. The rest clung to him in snaking waves, and he used a finger to detach one, thick lock that had tangled in his horns.
“That was…” She sat forward to push the mass away, a wide-eyed look of wonder brightening her face.
“We like flying then?”
A thread of something wrapped around his heart, his lungs. Nervousness. Not his own, buthers.
It was a heady sensation, blood hammering through his veins. Brand barely stopped himself from rubbing at his chest. From giving up the small clue. She would run, if she knew. Hide. He could feel that as surely as her trepidation.
Her voice was tentative when she said, “I like flyingwith you.”
The thread snapped and melted away with her words, edginess gone, leaving him alone with only his own feelings for company.
Damn it.
He was a fool for dwelling on it anyway when his mind should be focused on rescuing his friend. Scouring his senses, he searched for any indication of new threats, beyond the darkness already?—
Not a scream, but a garbled cry that time. All the more horrifying for its desperation. It’s distance.
“I’m scared, Brand.”
Her whispered confession cracked right through him. “I know, little moon.”
If only he could reassure her that there was nothing to worry about.
Luna gathered her hair, deftly twining the mass on top of her head and summoning a stick to hold it there. “Then I would have some joy before the Veil, too.”
Who was he to deny her?
She forced the shield out again and they were soaring. His spirit nearly left his body when she leaned forward and spread her arms wide, eyes closed and chin lifted to the wind as it whipped by them.
She was breathtaking. Wild.
The risk, the danger… Worth it, perhaps, to glimpse that side of her. Of who she might really be, free, without her secrets and pain. Burning Solyrian, maybe it was all worth it.
Another thunderous landing, the shield stretching towards a new step—they went on like that, over and over as they ventured ever deeper, the onyx fog lightening to a dense, smoky grey the further they fell into the bowels of the Dread Chasm.
Until, at last, rocky ground was revealed below.
Brand called a large platform from the chasm wall just in case, and leapt for the last time.
