Page 38 of Ashen Wings

Even amidst the roaring laminar air, my thoughts quiet, my muscles relax, and for the first time I truly feel peace. The world melts, leaving only the beat of my heart and the taste of freedom on my tongue.

“Hold on,” Jace commands. Tenebris banks left, his wings rippling with little eddies of air. My stomach jostles, threatening to exit my body, and the moment of peace flits away. We descend in free fall back through the clouds. The world ignites again in a painting of lichen covered greens and crystalline blues.

Another scream claws up my throat, but it’s taken by the wind as we dive faster and faster until the ground approaches rapidly. Tenebris wouldn’t intentionally flatten us…right?

I force my head to turn toward Jace. He’s grinning wider than a mad man as the breeze rushes over his brow. The laugh that pours from his lips is deep and gritty, and entirely infectious.

This is insanity of the highest degree, but we giggle like children sharing a secret as Tenebris rolls and cuts through the air with every maneuver imaginable. Jace’s hands find their way over mine on the pommel and no longer is his touch colder than ice. It’s sun-warmed and gentle like a summer day. I let his fingers interlock with mine, accepting the rush of sparks blazing from the connection.

I’m not focusing on the trees and rivers and the world that whirls by, just the overwhelming feel of his skin against mine.

When Tenebris finally slows and the horizon levels out, a feeling creeps in like mist on the shore—I like his hands on me. I want his hands on me. Fuck, I’m in deep shit.

Jace breaks the tether of our gazes to glance at the tree canopy below us. “We’re approaching the lurker den. See it just there?” I follow the point of his index finger down Tenebris’s left wing.

My throat dries. Just in the distance, there’s a break in the brush, like the earth has been poisoned with incurable blight. Even the air, a column of frozen, silent smog, feels like death.

It’s the pit at the clearing’s center that pricks me with terror, though. Its endless darkness holds me captive, and I can’t look away, no matter how much I will my eyes to retreat.

“Where are they?” I ask, still transfixed on the pit.

“I’m not sure…” Jace’s eyes narrow as he scans the scarred earth below. Everything quiets as we approach the den from the skies. Even Tenebris’s wing beats sound muffled and muted.

Then, I spot it, like a smudge of greyish flesh and decayed death.

“Jace…” I don’t dare look away as a creature of nightmares crawls from the pit. It creeps on four gangly limbs from the darkness, with arched back and inhuman contortions.

“I see it,” he says, his voice a low melody.

The lurker moves with the fluidity of water as it straightens to standing, and my blood runs cold. The curve of its body on all fours was its spine bending in the wrong direction. It rolls its abdomen, snapping and creaking into place from a crawling position with its back facing the ground.

The lurker’s featureless face locks on us and tracks our ascent.

“Jace…it’s looking at us.” Terror courses through me, paling my skin until I’m whiter than a wraith.

“No, that’s not possible from up here,” he replies, but his tone is nowhere near resolute. The lurker’s neck shudders as it follows our path forward.

“Shit,” Jace whispers, gripping the saddle around me. “It definitely sees us.”

I almost ask how that’s possible when the lurker is totally void of eyes—only a filmy layer of cracked leathery skin wraps each socket—but the words are ripped from me by an animalistic growl echoing around us.

My muscles tense. The sound pouring from the creature’s nonexistent mouth is one of pure horror.

Like a wounded, dying hound.

Before my next heartbeat, the pit wriggles with movement. Ten, maybe twenty more lurkers crawl from the darkness, screeching and groaning in response to the first.

And they just keep coming.

Where one creature ends, another begins. Snapping joints and gangly limbs flood from the pit until the entire clearing is stained with leathery grey skin and shapeless mouths.

“Holy fuck,” Jace mutters. “Tenebris…”

The dragon huffs and we climb higher, faster, further until the air thins and my eyes water. He banks left, then right in a series of maneuvers that has my neck aching from the whiplash. My nails cling to the saddle with a grip barely strong enough to keep my seat.

In unison, the lurkers howl a heart-stopping cacophony. Tenebris’s scaly spine jerks and shudders beneath us.

Then, the dragon goes rigid.