Page 143 of Bone Year

“Can’t you fly us there faster?” I ask, and he gives me an exasperated look.

“I can’t fly us that far in this kind of wind.” He stands and looks around, like he’s calculating distances. “There is a hunting blind not far from here. I saw it on the map this morning when I was checking the route at the chapel. Trappers used to run a line through this stretch in the warmer months. Most of the blinds are abandoned now.”

“How not far?”

“Twenty minutes. Fifteen if I carry you.”

“Draven—”

“Rose, do not start with me.”

“I am not starting with you. I am asking you not to carry me. I will walk.”

“You will hobble slowly, and the storm will be on us before we get there.” He looks at the sky again, and his jaw tightens. “Faster than I thought. Come here.”

I stand up and limp the two steps over to him, and I expect him to turn so I can climb on his back. Instead, he bends and hooks one arm under my knees and the other behind my shoulders and lifts me against his chest.

“Hold on.”

I slide my arms around him because the alternative is dangling, and I lock my fingers together at the back of his neck, and his hair is loose where it has come out of his bun. It grazes against my fingers.

He starts walking.

He travels faster than he did when I was walking behind him. I hadn’t realized how much he was slowing down for me. The wind has picked up another notch since we stopped, and the snow has started coming down again, sideways, and I press my face into the side of his neck, because the cold is biting at my cheeks, and there is nowhere else to put my face that isn’t his shoulder or his throat.

He doesn’t say anything about it.

Neither do I.

“Doesn’t vampire blood have healing qualities? Couldn’t you just give me a taste and my ankle will be good enough for us to make it back?”

I realize how it sounds the moment it leaves my mouth.

His lips quirk. “You want to taste me, Rose?”

Heat climbs up my neck. I open my mouth, close it, open it again, and produce a sound I would rather die than describe.

He chuckles. “I don’t know how your body would react to my blood. It’s not something vampires go around doing lightly.”

Noctis appears, and I see him disappear in the distance.

We make it maybe five minutes before the storm breaks.

“Noctis found the blind. We’re close,” he says, and I nod into his neck, thankful he didn’t say anything else about me tasting him.

One moment the snow is coming down hard, and the next the wind nearly knocks us over. The trees go from bending to whipping, and the snow turns from falling to flying, and I can’t see the path anymore, because there is no path, only white moving sideways at an impossible speed, and Draven curses under his breath and stops walking.

“Hold tight to me, Rose.”

“What?”

His wings come out.

They unfurl behind him in a single fluid motion, a span wider than he is tall, dark and leathery and impossibly fast, and the wind catches them, and he braces against it and they curve forward.

He isn’t flying us.

He’s using his wings as a shield.