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I’m about to scream tanks again when Ksenia unhooks herself from the bench chair, drops to the floor, hikes her legs up, and screams so loud it’s clear she’s ready to push out her baby before Kharon can even get there to catch it.
But none of us expect the baby to emerge from between her legs, along with a rush of bright white-blue light runes that burst straight through to the front window, shattering it. The runes continue on fifty feet outside of the helicopter, creating a pearlescent pool like earlier when Ksenia’s water broke.
“What the fuck?” Layden shrieks as I finally yell again, “Tanks!”
Layden looks down, finally seeing that the tanks have launched their missiles during the explosive birth. He has just enough time to move the stick of the controls full speed ahead right toward the hovering pearlescent mirror still hanging in the air in front of us.
And just like that—
We head straight into darkness. It’s like going from day to night, and it’s so pitch dark that the lights of the helicopter barely penetrate, the sky somehow thick and inky.
Then we all hear it, and our heads swing around. That sound. It’s already loud in the helicopter with the wind rushing in through the front broken window, the rear ramp still open, and the blades overhead, but this is something far louder. It’s a horrible, deep, squawkish scream from some sort of beast. First one and then another.
Raven begins to cry, and Hannah holds her tightly. All of our heads twist back and forth, trying to locate the sources of the sounds. Or to try to discern how close the ungodly creatures might be because they sound like they’re in the sky with us.
And they don’t sound happy that we’re here.
But exactly where the hell are we? Is this some sort of—
“Get buckled in,” Kharon demands as he grabs his wife and new baby, still wet with afterbirth, off the floor to buckle them on the bench wall. Before he can even get the buckle cinched, something bumps against the helicopter, sending me flying into the opposite wall.
“Thing!” Layden shrieks from the cockpit. “Get us the hell out of here.”
“I don’t know where here is.”
“Your kid brought us here, and you’re the only other realm-jumper I know. So get us all out of here before whatever the fuck is out there decides to eat us for dinner. You spend a thousand years boiling in its intestines.”
“Fuck,” Kharon says, clutching his freshly born daughter tight with his center pair of arms. With the rest, he grabs hold of the helicopter wherever he can, spewing runes that start to cover the helicopter both inside and out.
I watch on in awe, finally managing to buckle myself in right as we jerk roughly again. I look toward the back ramp, where a gigantic, reptile-like claw has gotten hold of us.
“Faster!” I cry, clinging to the belt straps.
“I’m going as fast as I can,” Kharon shouts.
The baby in his arms starts crying, and runes begin to pour from her waving fists in a bright stream out the back until another bright pearlescent mirror looms again in the night. The light is enough to illuminate huge beasts with giant flapping wings and clawed feet. Holy shit! I can barely breathe. Are those—? Are those dragons?
“Turn it around; we have our way out!” Ksenia yells, one hand clinging to Kharon.
Layden doesn’t wait. He swings the ’copter around, backend heavy from our extra passenger still clinging to the entrance, and we wobble as another claw lodges into the side right above my head.
Oh god, we’re not going to make it! Those things are going to drag us down out of the air before we can get to the portal—
We tilt wildly back as the snout of the beast holding onto the ramp comes into view. His head is huge, but it’s clear he’s still much smaller than some of the other shadows we saw silhouetted in the distance.
The entire copter tips backward. Hannah, Ksenia, and I would have fallen out the open back if not for the straps holding us in while Kharon held onto the walls and his newborn daughter with his many hands to keep himself still.
“Get the fuck off my bird!” Layden shouts, and a fire of runes shoots from his fingertips down the center of the aisle past where Kharon is barely holding on.
The runes strike the dragon in the face, and the helicopter drunkenly rights itself just as we tip forward into the shimmering white portal.
Hannah and I scream as the helicopter continues bobbing and then spins wildly once we’re back in the sunlight. Hopefully, we at least left behind our passenger when we came back through.
Layden continues spitting out curses as he tries to get the helicopter back under control.
My stomach roils as I try to glance at the ground to see if the tanks are still there, my stuttering mind remembering the threat we were running from when we teetered into that outlandish place, but I only catch a glimpse of smoke rising before we tilt wildly in another direction.
I throw a hand over my mouth. Puking is about to be the least of my worries because we’re going down.
