Page 14 of Gemini Queen
All I need to do is get over there.
I’m halfway to the chopper and the updraft’s whipping my hair like Medusa snakes around my shoulders when I angle my path away from Ronin to avoid the hovering bird dead ahead and make for the 8.3 foot gap right beyond. I punch through the fear that’s screaming at me to stop and give it as much gas as I’ve got.
In training, I can clear a nine-foot gap. Most of the time. But typically I’m not wearing a leather dress and platform boots and no freaking panties when I do it.
You’re wearing your lucky cuff, showgirl. You can clear it. Besides, it’s this or the Icarus Academy.
And you know that’s not happening.
Without warning, an authoritarian whiplash of a voice snaps through the air. It curls around my charging body and just about yanks my feet out from under me.
“ZARINA SELENE GEMINI.”
That mouthful happens to be my full legal name, and whoever’s barking it is using Compulsion—a type of common magic—to full effect. That magic tugs at me like a seatbelt in a sharp brake. Thank Christ whoever’s doing the Compelling isn’t magically bonded with me, which means I can shrug it off and keep running.
Albeit with real indignation. That better not be Ronin trying to Compel my ass on the basis of one five-minute fuck.
I’ve just about cleared the chopper when a blur of movement snares my eye. I whip my head sideways in time to see Ronin with his fluid grace scramble aboard the bird, but the guy in the coat’s long gone.
What I’ve got bearing down on me instead is… a goddamn timber wolf.
Never mind how completely crazy that sounds.
I swear to God it’s the biggest effing wolf I’ve ever seen in my life, all gray and shaggy and slavering like it’s rabid. And I don’t know what the hell it’s doing on Wang’s roof. But I do know it’s way the hell faster than me.
In the split second I’ve got to think, I decide I’ve got a better chance with the jump than the wolf.
I dig down deep and find that extra burst of speed. But I’m still a good ten feet from the jump when the wolf slams into the side of my legs like a freaking freight train and takes me right out.
There’s this endless instant of sheer screaming chaos—actually, I’m the one screaming—when I’m flying through the air and fighting to get hold of what feels like five hundred pounds of snarling, slavering, writhing wolf that’s also trying to get hold of me. Then I’m hitting the ground hard, tumbling across the tarmac, all tangled up with the wolf, scraping patches of skin off my naked knees and ass and elbows and still fighting somehow to bring my knife into play and get the beast off me.
Until my head hits the tarmac with a nuclear burst of light.
Then my whole world goes dark.
Chapter Eight
Lucius
Zarina Selene Gemini is exceedingly fortunate to be alive.
As are we all. If Ronin and I had failed to bring the last purebred female scion of the Twelve Houses back to the Academy alive, we’d have sealed the fate of the four races.
It’s for precisely this reason that I take particular care in disinfecting and bandaging the various contusions and abrasions caused by the Gemini heir’s unfortunate encounter with the tarmac on the roof of the Tai-Sun Tower.
Of course, it’s entirely self-inflicted damage, since I clearly commanded her to stop. Just as clearly, she disobeyed.
In this world—my world, our world, the witching world—defiance and disobedience lead to punishment.
At least Zarina assists her cause now by remaining obligingly unconscious. With her wild head of blue-green curls, she’s like an enchanted mermaid curled up on the oxblood leather sofa in the mahogany opulence of the in-flight library, one slim hand tucked under her cheek as she slumbers. I’ll confess to imposing a magically induced sleep, one of my litany of common magics, on this fiery fugitive the moment I ascertained she hadn’t suffered a head injury during that criminally reckless escape attempt.
I do wonder how she’ll cope with her new reality when she wakes.
Now, with the three of us securely ensconced abroad the well-provisioned slate-and-silver luxury of the Academy’s private jet, engines humming softly in the night and the near disaster of Singapore hours in our rearview mirror, the Gemini girl’s somnolent state allows me the latitude to attend her myriad injuries at my leisure. Once aloft, I ordered Ronin to undress her, then left him to it to give the girl some privacy, since apparently there isn’t much of Zarina Gemini he hasn’t already seen and handled.
Rather thoroughly.
Besides, intimate contact with my new student’s naked body won’t earn me any points for academic decorum with the Dean.
