The console goes completely dark.
My stomach drops through the floor.
“Oh, fuck.” The words slip out before I can stop them.
For two endless seconds, every instrument is dead. The helicopter seems to hang suspended, held up by nothing but hope and denial. Then the lights flicker back, but wrong; gauges spinning, displays tilted at angles that make zero sense.
“That’s not interference,” I say, because apparently my brain has decided thatnowis the perfect time for me to state the obvious.
“No.” Luke’s hands move automatically, checking circuit breakers, flipping switches. “Something’s jamming us.”
Jamming. Like someone’s actively trying to kill us.
Of course. Because why would anything in my life be simple?
The helicopter lurches sideways. Hard enough that my harness cuts into my chest. I gasp, the sound crackling loud through the headset. Beside me, Ember inhales sharply.
I grab for the seat, reaching for my phone and shoving it into the side pocket of my cargo pants.
Luke’s fighting the controls now. I can see it in the set of his shoulders, the tension in his arms.
“Hydraulics are failing.” His voice is matter-of-fact, like he’s narrating routine maintenance instead of our imminent death. “I’m going to try to find somewhere to set down.”
“Try?” My voice climbs an octave I didn’t know I could reach.
The rotor pitch changes. Goes from a steady whine to something guttural and wrong, like machinery tearing itself apart. Smoke starts curling from the console; thin wisps at first, then thicker. The smell hits me: chemical, burning, the scent of expensive equipment dying.
“Luke, what’s happening?” Ember’s trying to stay calm. I hear it in the careful control of her voice.
“Electrical failure. Some sort of interference.”
The rotor stutters.
My hands go numb.
The helicopter shakes. Not turbulence. Not wind. The kind of shaking that means fundamental things are breaking.
Through the windshield: trees. Rising fast.
Too fast.
Shit! Shit, shit, shit!
“Everyone, listen to me.” Luke’s voice cuts through my rising panic—calm, authoritative, the kind of tone that’s used to beingobeyed. “Tighten your straps. Cover your heads with your arms. Do it now.”
My hands move on autopilot, yanking the harness tighter. Beside me, Ember’s doing the same, her face pale but focused.
I curl forward, arms over my head, and that’s when my brain decides to go over every single stupid decision that led here.
Agreeing to come on this trip.
Thinking I could handle the supernatural world.
Not telling Elena I loved her the last time we talked.
Wearing purple lipstick on a goddamn helicopter ride.
The cabin shakes so violently that my teeth clatter. The horizon through the window is tilted at an impossible angle. Trees rushing up to meet us like the earth is reaching to grab us out of the sky.
