Page 115 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
“We’ll have to walk out to the arena. I need a bit more space than this for takeoff,” she said, looking thoughtfully at the trees.
“But . . . I’m . . . I can’t-this is insane!” Jack craned her neck, looking over the crowd.
The Queen gave her a sympathetic look. “He isn’t coming, Jacqueline,” she said, and everything inside Jack came to a stop.
She stared at the Queen in silence. After a moment, Jenna said, “Believe me when I say this is much harder for him than it is for you. It’s better this way. A goodbye will only drive the knife deeper.”
Jack didn’t know what to do, or say, or think. She desperately wanted to go home, but she was full to bursting with so many unanswered questions—for Jenna, for Morgan, but especially for Hawk. Everything was happening too fast. It was all too confusing, too strange, and to top it off, she couldn’t remember the last few weeks of her life . . . or much of the beginning of it.
Lost, she looked around at the gathered faces, the beautiful strangers she’d been told she once hated but for whom she now felt nothing but curiosity and awe and, okay, a little fear.
Jenna said, “It will all work out exactly how it’s meant to, I truly believe that. And sometimes . . . sometimes distance can give you more clarity than when you’re seeing things up close.”
Jenna seemed conflicted—it was as if there was so much more she wanted to say—but she left it at that. Then the young man returned, pushing his way to the front of the group with a small nylon backpack in his hands. Jenna murmured her thanks and held it out toward Jack.
She took it and stared down at it, filled with apprehension and a cold, painful lump in her chest she recognized as grief.
“Wait!”
The voice came from the tree. Everyone looked up, and there was Morgan, leaning over the porch railing of Hawk’s home. Branches filtered down light from above, haloing her head in a gossamer cloud. “Don’t forget this!”
She held out her arm and dropped a small bundle over the side.
It was caught, passed forward through the crowd, then held out. Jack took it. Lightweight, folded in a rectangle of blue fabric tied with a white ribbon, it fit easily inside the backpack, nestled between a bottle of water and the shiny metal barrel of a revolver. Seeing the gun gave Jack a small sense of relief; she remembered she knew how to shoot, at least.
Jack craned her neck, gazing upward, then held out a hand in farewell to Morgan. She returned the gesture, her face grave, and her words echoed in Jack’s mind, words spoken only yesterday, though they seemed a lifetime ago.
I’m sure under different circumstances we could have been good friends.
They looked at each other a moment longer, then Morgan stood up and disappeared.
“All right,” Jack said quietly, turning back to Jenna and Leander. “Let’s do it.”
The Queen nodded and walked forward. Seething with such a storm of emotions she could barely discern left from right, Jack fell into step beside her.
Neither one spoke again.
Riding a dragon turned out to be exactly nothing like riding a horse.
For starters, there was the issue of mounting.
There was no saddle or bridle or stirrups, nothing to clasp onto but miles of diamond-hard, slippery scales. The creature crouched low on its belly on the arena floor. After several awkward attempts, Jack resorted to grabbing a fistful of silky white mane, bracing a foot against the leathery joint of a wing where it met the body, and hauling herself up. The wing curved around her like a cloak, supporting her, until she was seated, straddled atop the beast, her calves gripping its ribs, both feet resting above its wings.
It radiated heat. The skin on her inner thighs smarted from it.
The dragon curved its neck and looked back at her with brilliant emerald eyes, a long, assessing look. Feeling reckless, Jack said, “Sure. Why the hell not?” and before she could say another word, the dragon jerked its head forward. She just had time to wrap her other hand in its mane before it launched into the sky.
That was the main difference between a horse and a dragon. Horses didn’t fly.
The dragon took to the heavens—circling once so Jack saw the gathered figures below growing smaller, faces upturned to the sky—and exhilaration, hot and vivid as sunlight, flooded her.
The air was warm and humid, redolent with the sweet perfume of flowers, heavy with clouds. The dragon sliced through them as neatly as a scythe. She climbed higher, breaking free of the clouds, then tipped to the left, following an updraft of heated wind. The earth below peeked through in patches of glistening emerald through the fluffy cloudscape. The horizon was aflame with the rising sun, bleeding scarlet into infinity.
Jack wanted to cry at the beauty of it. Instead she laughed, and screamed with exhilaration. The dragon turned back to look at her—grinning, its muzzle and lash
es beaded with moisture—then surged forward with a powerful thrust of its wings and climbed higher still, until the air was so thin it was hard to breathe.
Her hair snapping out behind her, the morning sun blinding her eyes, the wind a deafening roar in her ears, Jack thought, If I die at this moment, I’ll die happy.
