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I deposited us at my castle, which happens to be on the edge of a lake.
The lake is frozen over at present, but that’s never stopped me before.
I ascend high into the sky then turn upside down and rocket with my claws extended toward the ice.
There’s only a moment of brusque airtime before I smash into the icy surface. The pain is momentary, and then I’m plunged into breathtakingly cold water.
The angel-spark inside my chest strikes up and warms me as I extend my wings fully outwards in the water. Flapping them quickly back and forth, I wash out the filth that has accumulated from my months in the bears’ haunt.
I quickly scrub myself up and down, including my lion’s mane, and then I head back toward the hole I created in the ice with its circle of sunlight beyond.
When I break from the surface with a bellow, my eyes immediately seek out my consort on shore.
And there she is.
Fleeing across the endless snow away from the lake.
Oh, sweet consort.
I roar, and my monster’s laugh echoes out across the lake and back from the mountains on all sides of us. I explode out of the freezing water to chase down my prey.
Chapter Five
HANNAH
I flee.
I don’t care if it doesn’t make sense. I now understand fight or flight, and I am all flight.
There’s an elation and terror in my legs’ newfound strength. They shouldn’t work as well as they do, considering they are the same legs I woke with yesterday—at least to see them from the outside.
But somehow there’s fresh muscle inside—
Or maybe it’s just absolute terror and the instinct for self-preservation at seeing a monster up close like that. Like the adrenaline that allows moms to lift thousand-pound cars off their kids. Yeah. Like that.
Cause when the sunlight broke over the horizon, and I saw its face—
His bulk has already told me that he is an unnatural thing, but to see it with my eyes and fully realize that while all this time I’ve been praying to the heavens…
I’ve accidently unearthed something straight from hell.
And when you look a demon in the face…
Well, you run.
You run as fast as the legs you’ve got can carry you, regardless of how those legs function.
When he explodes through the ice like a torpedo, I’m already running.
He’s going to kill me. He’s already taken me to a secondary location. I don’t know why I suddenly forgot all the stranger-danger instruction I’ve been taught my whole life.
Especially as a disabled woman, I’ve taken as many self-defense classes as possible. When the first class and first lesson had the instructor say that a person’s best chance is to run, I thought, well I’m screwed.
But here I am, running.
The problem is, I’m not being chased by any ordinary predator.
And I am being chased. I see that when I look over my shoulder and scream. Because the bird-man-lion monster is up in the air again, flinging water from the lake off his great wings with a mighty flap.
His head moves around as if he is searching.
Maybe he has bad eyesight with those strange cat’s eyes of his. Maybe he’s like those dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and can only see things when they’re moving. Not that it stops me from sprinting like my life depends on it. Especially considering that I’m pretty sure it does.
A fresh burst of energy burns through my blood, and I sprint for a rocky outcrop ahead. If he is like the dinosaurs, maybe I can hide in the rocks and he won’t—
I scream as clawed hands grasp me underneath my armpits, and then I’m being lifted off the ground. I bicycle my feet uselessly in the air as the crunchy white snow disappears in front of me, and I’m swung up into the sky.
“Let go of me!” I scream. “Let go!”
I look around wildly as I’m whipped through the air. Unlike when we took off from Alaska, there’s nothing below us—no separated tracts of land. It’s all just…unending white. No lights of human dwellings anywhere. It’s only October. Where are we that it’s this snowy, this time of year? Somewhere in the Arctic Circle, or what? How is there a castle—
“Are you sure of that?” he growls.
My entire body is wracked with shivers from the freezing air… and his voice. This is all wrong, wrong, wrong. Unnatural.
“Let me go!” I scream again.
And then—dear Jesus—he does.
He drops me, and where moments before, there was controlled flight, now I’m freefalling.
I can’t even catch my breath to scream as the white, packed snow comes at me faster than—
I flail uselessly as if my tiny, bony arms will do anything to soften my impact, moments from hitting.
And then I’m caught again. Awkwardly by my middle, clawed fingernails slicing into my shirt as I’m captured from above.
Harshly my descent is stopped, and then we’re ascending again.
