We barely had time to dress and jump back into the cab of my truck before the beasts’ howls had grown dangerously close.
I turned the engine over and swore when the damned thing sputtered and choked. I tried again. It coughed to weak life, rattling as though it were on its last legs.
And that’s when I noticed the needle on the fuel gauge.
“Shit.” I reached into the dash and tapped the temperamental old gauges, hoping the needle had merely gotten stuck as it so often did on relics like the one I was driving. After a few knocks, it did move a couple of degrees--deeper into the negative. “We’re practically out of fuel.”
In my haste to put distance between my client’s men in Port Phoenix and ourselves, I’d neglected to do even the most basic systems check. And, in my state of fatigue after so many hours behind the wheel, I’d managed to drive us smack into the middle of nowhere. With hellhounds on our tail.
Another bone-grating howl went up somewhere in the darkness outside.
“I think we can make it another ten miles or so. We can head deeper into the wilderness, try to outrun them.” I grabbed the gearshift and started to put the rig into drive. Drakor’s hand stopped me.
“Nisha, there isn’t time. The truck will only be a hindrance in the end.” He took my hand in his and pulled me across the seat to slide out the passenger side door with him. “Let’s go.”
“We’ll never make it,” I said as we raced away from the sound of the gaining hellhounds. “Are you strong enough to fly?”
“I am,” he replied. “But I wouldn’t be able to carry you very far yet. We have to run.”
I tried to pull myself free of his hold, but he wouldn’t let go. “Drakor, listen to me. You have to get away. You have to leave me here and save yourself.”
He swore something dark and nasty and pulled me into a faster pace. The forest was pitch black, a maze of tall pines and thorny bramble. We tore through it, uncertain where we should go except as far away from the chasing hellhounds as possible.
Each second I felt hopeful that we might elude them, it seemed the Strange beasts sounded closer. Their howls and snarls echoed in the woods, coming at us from several directions.
“Drakor, please,” I whispered fiercely. “We can’t both get away from them. They’re going to catch up to us.”
“Then I will stand and fight them,” he muttered tightly, not slowing his gait.
No sooner had he said it did one of the two-headed hounds erupt from out of the darkness and launch itself at Drakor. I lost his hand in the sudden crash of colliding bodies. I heard the gut-wrenching sounds of the struggle, the snapping of animal jaws. The tearing of vulnerable flesh and sinew.
“Drakor!” I cried, anguished to think of his suffering.
All at once, flames shot up into the night. In the abrupt illumination, I glimpsed Drakor in his dragon form, the thick forest in front of him, nothing but endless night at his back. He hissed a plume of fire at the attacking hellhound, incinerating the beast. Another one came at him with both sets of jaws gnashing and was similarly torched.
Two of the awful creatures were down, but three more were right behind them.
And Drakor had already shifted back into a man.
He was panting and sweating, strain showing in the taut lines of his face. My heart sank like a stone in my breast. The shift had drained him of his power.
“Nisha, behind you!”
I swung around and met with two sets of feral eyes locked on me from the heads of an enormous hellhound who stood just an arm’s length away from me. It bared its terrible teeth and fangs, massive hind legs coiled and ready to spring into a leap.
I couldn’t run. There was nowhere to go. I went for my gun, but it was too late.
The hellhound leapt at me.
It knocked me off my feet, sent me reeling through the dark night air. I waited to feel the crushing blow of the ground coming up to meet my spine. It didn’t materialize. Instead, I fell and fell and fell . . . into a black void. A chasm so deep and wide it was all I could see.
“Nisha!” Drakor’s voice roared from somewhere high above. It echoed off the stone walls of the abyss that surrounded me. “Nisha, no!”
All my fears of flying--the inexplicable terror of finding myself airborne--pressed down on me like a lead weight. I plummeted faster.
From somewhere deep inside me, I knew it was my fear that would destroy me now. Not the hellhound that had pitched over the ledge with me and had since dropped out of my sight, but myself alone.
I thought of my mother, who sacrificed herself so that my father and I could live.
I thought of my father, who died of a broken heart because fate had torn her from his arms.
And I thought of Drakor, the Strange and noble man I didn’t want to love but couldn’t live without. I didn’t want him to know my father’s pain. Selfishly, I wanted to spend the rest of my days in Drakor’s sheltering arms, however long destiny might grant us.
Far above me now, I heard him call to me again. I saw him leap over the cliff’s edge, not in dragon form but as the man I loved.
I screamed, heartbroken and horrified.
Something fell away from me in that moment. I felt my fears dry up and swirl off on the breeze that rushed up all around me as I dropped. I watched Drakor diving toward me in the empty darkness, and something deep within me shook free of its tether.
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again I wasn’t falling anymore. I was floating. I was flying, suspended on the night wind, my arms and torso covered in glorious white feathers.
And there was Drakor beneath me now, his massive wings spread out as if to catch me, hovering as I was in the middle of the immense canyon that gaped as far as the eye could see.