Page 147 of Gates of Rapture
Endelle allowed herself to feel the being she had become.She flexed her new wings, grateful that she still had her arms and legs and wasn’t in too different a shape from her usual flight arrangement.
She experimented for a moment, flapping the butterfly-like panels.Just as she suspected, she could move quickly and make much sharper turns.She also found that because the change was genetic, her body knew what it needed to do.
What bemused her, however, was just how much she perspired from every cell of her skin as well as her wings.
Greaves began to advance on her, a satisfied smile on his face.He moved through his advanced levitation and gained speed.
Shit, if he plowed into her, he could knock her into the water, and she had the worst feeling she would never get out.Wings and water did not mesh at all.
Her genetics began to speak to her about the fluids she shed.They had a purpose, but she couldn’t quite make it out.
Greaves had completed half the distance.
On he came, his protective plates writhing as he floated.His eyes were almost black as he stared at her.He lowered his chin.
She knew what would happen.He was a bull charging her, and only speed would get her away.
Greaves drew within fifteen feet, formed a missile with his body, then charged.
But she had the ability to flit in this form.She twisted a couple of times with her wings and was suddenly thirty feet away and to the southeast.She flapped her new wings, hovering.She smiled.Damn, she liked this form.
She waited for Greaves to charge her, but for some reason he didn’t move as he watched her from a distance.He looked as though he was injured as he held a hand over one of the plates.But exactly how had she hurt him?
His hand fell away as he straightened and looked up at her.
Endelle wondered if when she’d twisted and whisked away, she’d struck him with her foot, but she didn’t remember making contact.
All around her, Thorne’s force battled death vampires.She could hear dozens of war cries sounding again and again.She heard the flapping of wings, sword rasping against sword, and occasionally a scream of pain.
She also heard water splashing and the rumble of speedboats below her.
When Greaves once more sped up his levitation and came barreling toward her through the air, her perspiration increased.It came from every part of her body, wings included.
As he drew near, she moved but not quite fast enough.He caught her right hip and sent her spiraling.She moved her wings but couldn’t quite catch air.She tumbled in the direction of the water.She calmed her mind and allowed her new body to right itself so that her wings went through a new wicked twist.
She now floated just a few feet above the water.Her heart was a jackhammer.
She searched for Greaves, but couldn’t find him.
On instinct she began to fly straight up.As she did, hands clamped around her feet and began pulling her down once more toward the water.
She looked down.Greaves’s morphed body looked strange, as though he’d been pelted with baseball-sized balls of hail.
Down he dragged her.As hard as she flapped her wings, she had no strength to withstand his physical and muscular superiority as the being he had become.
If he got her under the water, she would drown.
But there was something more, something that worked at her subconscious mind.
She sweat profusely now, but the flapping of her wings sent all that perspiration into a spiral above her.
Then she understood.
She drew her wings in, which of course plummeted her more quickly to a sure death.At the same time, she focused on the fluids leaking from her, increasing the volume and letting them flood Greaves.
He screamed and released her.She flitted back into the air, barely escaping the lake’s surface.She glanced down.Greaves was writhing in the water.It wasn’t sweat that she perspired, but droplets of acid.How grateful she was to have trusted the image in the future streams.
Greaves thrashed in the lake for some time, but it was clear the water wasn’t helping and that his protective biological plates were being eaten away.She couldn’t imagine the pain that he experienced right now.
