Page 7 of Pierce

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Jasmine

The last clear,conscious thought I had before I hit my head on the steering wheel was: This is it. The end of my life.

And damned if it didn’t all flash before my eyes, just the way it was supposed to in a person’s final moments. I saw everything. All my choices, good and not so much. Every opportunity I had to do something I really wanted to do, but didn’t. Every time I let my temper get the better of me and every time I felt a stab of guilt when I did. Every time I settled for less than what I really wanted or deserved.

That was the thing about the end-of-life review. Nobody ever knew when it was coming, and it could be pretty damned depressing when the person having it thought they had all the time in the world to do things the right way.

And then, I’d slid into unconsciousness—or, rather, it had slammed into me. I figured that was it. No more. End of the road.

Except it wasn’t. In fact, things only got crazier after that.

The first thing I was aware of after that was the roar of wind in my ears.

That, and the sensation of flying. Was that how it happened after death? Did a person literally fly away to wherever the next destination was? No, we didn’t believe in that sort of thing, not in my family.

But maybe we were wrong, because damned if I wasn’t flying.

My stomach dipped and dropped in relation to my position in the air. Only I wasn’t doing the flying. That much, I was sure of.

I didn’t want to open my eyes, though. Some instinct told me not to. It was better to let things happen the way they would and open my eyes when it was over.

It was the roar that got to me. The roar and the flapping of wings.

I must be imagining this. No way this is really happening. And if I’m imagining it, that means I can open my eyes and not worry about what I see. It’s all part of whatever’s going on in my head. Or I really did die, and that means nothing bad can happen to me anymore. I have nothing to be afraid of. No consequences.

I opened my eyes.

And immediately closed them again.

“What is happening?” I screamed, clinging to what felt like leather to keep from plummeting down.

Slippery, moving, breathing leather.

What was it? And why was I on top of it?

I opened my eyes again and looked around.

I could see the trees below me, and the side of the mountain. And out of the corner of my eye, a wing roughly the size of a mainsail, flapping up and down.

I froze.

No way. It couldn’t be. But it was.

I could hear it flapping, could see the thin membrane of the brown wing which I realized a split second later was attached to the brown, scaly, moving creature I was sprawled out on.

A dragon.

Either I was having an end-of-life hallucination, or I was still back in the car, unconscious, having the craziest dream anyone ever had.

I screamed again, and the sound barely reached my ears before the wind ripped it away.

I was riding on the back of a flipping dragon.

Maybe it heard my scream and felt the need to reply, because it roared and the roar shook its body and made its sides move in and out.

And it made me lose consciousness again out of sheer terror.

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