Page 40 of Dark Prince

A roar rips through the chaos and turbulence, and the jet bounces, spinning the other way. Lucas pins me to the wall as he struggles to rip open the cockpit door.

“Ready to eject,” Carlin shouts. “Strap—”

The front window of the plane shatters as massive claws shove through it. The dragon grabs Carlin, its vicious claws impaling his chest. For one split second, he stares at us with wide eyes, and it feels like time stretches and slows down. Then Carlin slumps, his eyes turning glassy as the life drains from them. The dragon-thing yanks, jerking the old man’s body up and out of his seat as a scream bursts from my throat.

I barely get a glimpse of the dragon shaking Carlin’s corpse free of its talons, because I’m suddenly falling through the hole in the window, dropping like a stone with Lucas curled around me.

Lucas must have grabbed a parachute,I think wildly.The plane is falling faster than we are.Are we falling at all?

The beat of the beast’s wings echo above us, and out of my periphery, I catch another set of dark gray wings beating heavily.

Oh fuck, there are two of them.

The forest below snaps into sharp focus as we near it, the branches of tall trees reaching up as if to snatch us out of the sky. If we can just get below the tree line and slow down a little, maybe we can survive this. Assuming Lucas’s parachute doesn’t get caught, leaving us to dangle like a couple of worms on a hook for the terrifying, otherworldly creatures who seem to be hunting us.

The first dragon is still directly above us. I can feel the rush of air from its wings on my face, and I cling more tightly to Lucas, my gaze locked on the ground below. It’s coming up fast. Too fucking fast. I remember a bunch of statistics about how many people break bones when they have to use parachutes, and my brain scrambles to figure out the best way to land to minimize the damage.

Who said that thing? A stuntman I served at Rinata once, I remember him saying something—soft knees, roll, something else… God, why can’t I remember?

We slow even more as we near the earth, almost floating, and at first, I think it’s an optical illusion, that my mind is just trying to soften the fear of slamming into the ground. Then my feet find the ground softly, gently, with no more force than stepping out of the shower.

I blink, staring stupidly down at the spot where my feet are planted on the grass. Then Lucas shoves me toward a thicket, breaking me out of my stunned stasis.

“Hide,” he tells me in a voice that sounds unlike his usual tone. It’s deeper and gruffer, as if he’s swallowed gravel and is speaking around it.

I spin around to look at him, and my heart nearly seizes in my chest. He doesn’t look like Lucas. If I hadn’t been touching him the whole time we were falling, I wouldn’t believe I was looking at the same man right now.

My jaw drops open, my throat working as I try to speak, but Lucas doesn’t give me the chance.

“Go!”

He shoves me again, then turns away from me. A loud, feral roar shakes the trees, snapping me into motion.

I duck between a boulder and a thick tree, making myself as small as possible as one of the six-legged reptilian things with the glowing eyes and fiery breath plunges out of the trees, hurtling toward Lucas—or the thing thatwasLucas a few minutes ago.

Because this man looks nothing like my handsome, billionaire boss.

He barely looks like a man at all. His skin has turned a dark gray, almost the same color as the dragon, and…

Horns. He has horns.

Not to mention claws, which he’s using to slash through the thick armor-plated hide of the dragon. Thick black ichor spills from the beast’s wounds in place of blood, and plants smolder and curl as the black stuff touches them.

The dragon screams, and Lucas pushes off from the ground, unfurling a pair of giant gray wings.

I stare at him in mute shock, pressing a hand over my mouth as I realize that the second dragon I thought I caught a glimpse of in the sky doesn’t exist. It wasn’t another set of dragon wings I was seeing.

It was him.

Lucas.

He flaps his wings just as powerfully as the dragon does, managing to dart around and collide with its back, locking his arms around its neck like a wrestler. It thrashes, gnashing its teeth, its tail whipping hard enough to knock down the saplings around it as its wings beat frantically. But it can’t dislodge him. It isn’t built to twist or reach that way.

The demon on the dragon’s back—Lucas—slowly begins strangling it with powerful legs, and is… is that a fucking tail? He’s grabbing the thing around its massive jaw with one arm. I can’t see what he’s doing with the other.

A crack halfway between an explosion and a joint popping makes me wince. The glow dies in the dragon’s eyes as ichor spills out of its mouth, pooling on the forest floor, killing everything it touches. It hits the ground with a resounding crash and goes limp, collapsing in a dark heap. Lucas moves his legs just in time, flapping his wings to draw himself several feet up above the creature before it can crush him under several tons of what-the-fuck.

He lands in the middle of a puddle of ichor, but his feet don’t smoke or blacken—they just get wet. His tail twitches, and he turns toward me, his broad wings spreading out behind him and his eyes glowing red in his dark gray face.

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