Alpha rumbled a low growl, sides expanding beneath her legs.
She pressed his ribs with her bootheels as she fought a wave of dizziness. “Go,” she whispered, then, forcing authority into her voice, “go. Attack.Now.”
He trumpeted his displeasure, the girls echoed it, but he swung back around and battered the window open with his horns.
The glass shattered. Sconce light from inside flickered on the shards as they rained down over the stone windowsill and fell toward the pond below. Bright sparks like fireflies, like the vertigo bursts already flaring at the edges of her vision. Between rapid-fire blinks, Amelia glimpsed men inside, unarmored, sluggish in their movements, pale faces slack with shock. One of them screamed when Alpha thrust his head inside and clamped his jaws around his waist.
Blood spurted, and bile rose in Amelia’s throat.
“Gods,” she gasped, turning her face away. The ground spun circles beneath her, and the metronomic beating of Alpha’s wings made it worse. Up, and down, and up, and down, and up, and…
Down. She was sliding again.
Her throbbing hand wouldn’t close on the saddle, and her legs went numb, and she dropped off his back like a useless doll. Or a corpse, which she thought she might be soon, the way she was feeling. The tugging pressure on her hand was so strong she barely felt the snag and jolt of her safety strap catching. Her belt snatched her around her hips, and she hung suspended under Alpha’s belly, buffeted by his wings.
She coughed, and heaved, and spat, and, dangling as she was, the blood rushed to her head. If she hung here a moment longer, she’d lose consciousness.
Alpha bellowed, and she juddered through the air as he twisted, flapped, tried to gain altitude and stretch his neck down toward her. In his attempt to get to her, to help her, his panicked thoughts crowding her own, he slammed her up against the chateau wall.
Her vision exploded, a whiteout burst that left her reeling.
Sounds assaulted her ears: the clang of steel, the shouts of men, what sounded like the crackle of fire, which made no sense, because the drakes knew not to burn the chateau; their whole plan depended upon letting the invaders up the mountain think Sels still controlled the chateau.
But the plan was failing as fast as her body was. And she had to make it stop.
With her good hand, Amelia drew her belt knife, and sliced through the safety strap.
Alpha roared.
There was a lovely, cool moment of free fall, when the world stopped spinning. And then she hit the water, and the pond’s surface may as well have been a bed of rocks, the way it forced all the air out of her lungs.
I’m going to drown, she thought, with a kind of certainty that was almost peaceful. The water closed over her, cold and thick, and crushing against her chest, and she couldn’t fight it. She cracked her eyes open, and there was a light source, smeared and yellow underwater.
Her hand. The light was coming out of her hand, a too-bright line of it where Romanus had cut her palm.
Oh, she thought.Better to drown than go with him.
She was aware of Alpha’s distress, his panic over her, but she couldn’t lock onto their bond and feel it properly; it was more like a memory than something currently happening.
This time, when the tug came on her hand, she didn’t try to resist it. She would drown soon, and then…
Then she was yanked up to the surface, and through it, and she sucked in a desperate breath and slicked water off her face with her good hand. The tug this time had not come from the astral plane, but from a real human hand. And the pale face bobbing across from hers in the pond belonged to Cassius.
Amelia gaped at him. “What are you doing?”
His silver hair was plastered to his neck and shoulders from diving in after her, his breath quick and unsteady like he’d been running. “My lady. We must—”
His eyes widened, as the water bubbled and frothed around them.
Alpha screamed overhead, the wind from his wings beating at them.
“What,” Cassius started, and then the pain spiked to an unbearable hot flash in her hand, where Cassius still grippedher, and Amelia thought she smelled ozone before the water sucked them both down into oblivion.
10
There was blood in Leif’s mouth. Hot-salt-copper on his tongue, down the back of his throat. Bits of cloth were snagged on his teeth, and when he shifted back to his human form, he spat a wad of damp wool onto the ground, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It came away smeared black in the moonlight.
Bodies lay like the marks on a sundial in a ring all around him. All Sels. Some with their throats torn out, others gutted. One was still twitching, whimpering and moaning as he tried to crawl away, his legs savaged beyond repair and unable to support his weight.
