Page 98 of Feralheart

Kicking hard, I climbed back up through the water, my head popping above the surface. I sputtered, and it was all I could not to vomit everything I’d eaten today. I paddled back to the shore and scrambled out, much slower this time.

When I was seated and clutching the spike again, I gritted my teeth and nodded. “Ready.”

We tried again. And again. My body became a mess of new pains. Scraped thighs, bruised ribs, and fingers that wouldn’t uncurl from their death grip on her spike. The pool stopped being cold and started being just numb.

By what might have been the tenth attempt, something shifted.

She lurched upward, catching the wind with her wings. One slight tilt to the right, and I was sliding again, my leathers wet-slick on her hide. But my boot caught on a ridge of scales. I hauled myself forward, flattening myself against her as best I could without being impaled by her spikes. My heart tried to punch through my ribs.

She banked, and I overcorrected, leaning too far into the turn. My body slid…

She shot up toward the sky.

My thigh scraped over scales. Pain lanced through me, and I clutched the spike with both hands, holding position, trying not to think about how high we were or what falling from this elevation would mean.

She leveled out, her wings beating in a rhythm I could feel through my entire body.

Sorry, came through the bond. She didn’t know how to carry a rider, and I didn’t know how to be carried.

“It’s okay,” I gasped. “Just take it slowly.”

She tried. I felt her intention to bank gently, felt the muscles bunch under me as she prepared to turn. But I didn’t move with her. I stayed rigid, braced against movement that hadn’t happened yet. So when she turned I was already off-balance.

I pitched left. My grip on the spike loosened.

Selira rolled into my fall, catching me with her body. I slammed back into position hard enough my teeth clacked together.

She climbed higher, and I clung to the spike, refusing to be the one thing the wind finally managed to peel away. My thighs ached and my hands cramped, but I did not let go.

The wind screamed past me. Below us, the forest spread like a green sea.

I closed my eyes.

Feel, came through the bond. Not a word. A suggestion.

I didn’t know what that meant. I was feeling everything. Terror and pain and the spasms in my muscles.

No. Feel me.

My breath shuddered out. The rigid fear in my spine started to unknot, vertebra by vertebra.

Selira’s heartbeat throbbed against my inner thighs. Steady. Stronger than mine. And before she banked, I felt the shift in her breathing. The bunch of muscle under my left knee.

We banked together, our bodies locking into a shared rhythm that felt as inevitable as gravity.

Selira’s surprise bloomed through the bond, matched by her fierce joy.

“Holy fuck,” I whispered.

Pride. Hers and mine, tangled together.

She banked again, a lazy spiral, and I leaned into it. My body remembered what my brain didn’t know.

Except it wasn’t memory. It was her. Selira’s knowing poured across the bond and settled into my tendons like heat into cold hands, a lifetime of wind and wingbeats, lent to me for exactly as long as I stayed open to her. When I braced, the knowing thinned to nothing. When I trusted, it flooded back.

I wasn’t learning to fly in an afternoon. Nobody could. I was being carried by a body that had always known how, and taught, wingbeat by wingbeat, to stop arguing with it.

We weren’t controlling each other. We were listening.