Page 144 of Bone Year

The right wing folds around me at his shoulder, the membrane curving along my back, and the left wing comes up at his other side, and the wind that was in my face a second ago is suddenly cut off, redirected around the wings, and the snow goes from sideways to spilling off the edges of the membrane in soft drifts that don’t touch us.

It is dramatically warmer inside the wings.

I hadn’t understood until now that they were body heat. Whatever blood is in them is his warm blood, and the air inside the curve of them is the first warm air I have felt since we left the chapel. I always thought vampires ran cold, but Draven is always warm.

I tilt my head back to look up at him. His face is six inches from mine, and his hair is loose around his jaw, and his eyes are bright in the dim filtered through the wings.

“We are almost there.”

“How do you know?”

“I can see what Noctis sees,” he says, and I almost fall out of his arms when I look back at him.

“You can see through your eidolon’s eyes? Is that normal? Will I see through Poppy’s someday?”

“You really want to talk about this now while I carry you through a fucking storm?” he yells over the wind, and I narrow my eyes.

“Yes, I do.”

“Gifts are always different. You’re human and shouldn’t even have an eidolon. I can’t begin to imagine what may develop as your bond grows.”

I can’t wait to bring this up in class.

The trees thin ahead of us into a small clearing, and I see a wood structure built up against the trunk of a massive pine, partially elevated with a slanted roof that has held against the snow on top of it. It looks more like a shed than a shelter. The walls are old and dark with weather. There is a single door, latched, with no window beside it.

“That’s the blind?”

“That’s the blind.”

“It looks like it might collapse if I sneeze.”

“Then don’t sneeze.”

He carries me the last twenty feet, and his wings stay forward around us until we are almost at the door, and only then do they retract, folding back into him in the same fluid motion they came out in. The wind hits me again, the second they are gone, and I tuck my face harder against his neck.

He sets me down gently in front of the door, and I lean against the wood with my weight on my good leg while he tries the latch. It sticks for a second and then gives, and the door swings inward into a dark space that smells like old wood and dry pine needles and nothing alive.

He goes in first.

I hear him moving around inside, scraping his boot on a plank floor, and a moment later he comes back to the door and holds out his hand.

“It’s solid. Come in before the storm hits worse.”

I duck inside, and it’s a relief to be out of the wind, but it’s still freezing in here.

It’s a very small room, short enough that we’re forced to crouch, the ceiling low and slanted toward a single rectangular window we can’t see out of because it’s buried in snow. It’s dark in here, not pitch-black but enough that I can make out the shape of Draven and not much else.

I’m missing that hearth in the chapel right about now.

Actually, I never thought I’d say this, but I’m missing Ashwell. How are all the other teams doing? How’s Jace doing? Probably bonding with Killian over how much they despise me. Jace has his reasons. Killian simply despises me for being me.

There’s a single wool blanket folded on the floor in the corner. Draven nudges it toward me with the toe of his boot.

“Romantic,” I say and wrap it around myself.

It doesn’t help. The cold has seeped past the layers and into my bones, and my teeth start chattering before I can clamp my jaw shut. My hair is a tangle of waves, and I quickly push it out of my face and braid it to the side.

“How long until the storm passes, do you think?”