He grimaces but plows on. “Even the fronds are metallic…ish. Like some sort of impossible combination of organic material and…” His forehead puckers. “Titanium? Maybe? It looks like it’s the same substance your claws are made of.”
To examine my feathers, he was kneeling on the sand but now he rises to his feet, steps back, and releases his own wings before dropping to the ground again.
He curves his left wing toward me. “Do you see my upper feathers?”
“Yeah.” I barely glance at them. “They’re normal?—”
“No,” he says with a gentle smile. “They aren’t.”
I furrow my brow at him.
He leans forward a little. “Look closer.”
I straighten as much as I can without having to lift my wings too much and reach for the outer edge of his feathers.
I’m surprised when my fingertips brush what feels like…
I close my eyes to sense it better…
“Stone?”
I can’t keep the surprise from my voice. Opening my eyes, I find him nodding.
“My mother was a stone gargoyle. I must have inherited a little of her natural power. It makes the edges of my feathers hard and because the fronds are so fine, when I move quickly they can act like blades.”
My lips purse with realization. “So that’s how you fought Halle.”
She had conjured deadly-sharp vines to spear the air, attempting to impale and capture us, but Lucian swept his wings through them, his feathers sparking as he made contact. He cut right through the vines with the tips of his wings.
“It’s my belief that our father’s dark angelic nature is so powerful that it forced combinations of physical traits on us that would never have otherwise happened,” he says. “I think it was inevitable that you would be born with wings despite it never being the case for wolves.” He flushes a little. “Just my theory.”
I grin. “Or our biological mothers were so powerful that we took after them in a lot of ways instead of being purely angelic.”
He mirrors my smile. “That, too.” Rising to his feet, he heads to my side again. “I’ll check your back now.”
I hunch over my knees, relieved to let my wings flop to the sand once more.
Lucian presses each muscle, his touch clinical but gentle, as he explains to me why I would find it difficult to fly.
“These muscles here are too short, too contracted. They’ll be stopping you from moving your wings. These muscles here arethe opposite—too stretched out to have the elasticity you need. And then there are muscles that should have developed here and here but haven’t. The good news is that there are exercises you can do to change all that.”
I’m curious. “How do you know all this?”
“Jonah taught me.”
“A jotunn without wings taught you about wings?”
“He taught me how to fly.” Lucian shrugs it off. “Apparently, when he was a youngling, he spent a lot of time around the Valkyrie.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “Seriously?”
“Seriously. That was before they were extinct, obviously.” Lucian comes around to face me again, all business. “They had metallic wings, too. So hopefully everything Jonah told me will help you. We’ll start with stretches and take it from there. It’s a good thing we have a month.”
For the next three hours, my body becomes what Lucian calls a “pretzel”.
Apparently, they’re yummy to eat. Not so great to fold myself into the shape of one.
After we break for food—or what I decide to call, “lunch at midnight”—Anarchy claims my time, taking me into the training hall where the floor is soft. Or maybe soft-ish, as Lucian might say.
