Jack did his best to roll with the hit. And as much as he tried to hang onto Kaisermann, he couldn’t.
He struggled to catch his breath, and he pushed himself onto his knees. Head hanging, he gasped for breath.
He needed to speak. To tell Kaisermann to run. The man would never leave his friends otherwise. He coughed and wheezed. Probably wouldn’t run even if Jack told him to. Finally, the thought surfaced that if he was this jacked, Kaisermann might not be in any shape to escape. Hopefully, Sally would keep the old guy from harm.
Head hanging down, Jack shoved hard against the ground in an attempt to get to his feet. Then he felt the cold, a sting, an angry pulsing pain—and he was wrenched into the air.
He must have screamed. He couldn’t hear—not anyone, not himself. But he must have screamed. Because it hurt.
A breeze on his wet face. Jarring pain. Breeze. Pain.
Sound returned and he heard the dull thump of Nate’s wings. Each beat was a nasty pulling sensation in his back. His brain scrambled, but no answer came.
His limbs dangled with no support. In the air—he was in the air. With the realization came a wave of disoriented dizziness. He spun like a spider at the end of a web. Like a man held aloft by the razor talons of an aswang.
Jack cracked his eyes open. His vision was blurry. Tears, pain, shock. He blinked and saw the SUV. Blinked and something?—nothing? Blinked and saw Marin. Blinked and saw a lot of Marin’s teeth.
“Dragon bitch, I know what your human attempts, and he’s too weak. Concede and I’ll give your humans a quick death.”
Jack would have laughed—except he couldn’t. Kill the humans fast, just for you, only if you surrender. Bullshit. The bastard always killed humans quickly. How else would he add their skin to his human body wardrobe?
If he wasn’t mistaken, that was about what Marin said to him.
In slow parts his mind had joined the land of full consciousness, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to be here. He couldn’t imagine the shape his back was in. The talons were dug deep into what meat and fat there was. Toes and fingers still moved, so far as he could tell. One shining light in the dark night of this massive cluster.
Then something shifted. Changed. Brightened.
Except the light was still the same, and nothing had changed. Jack was still so much meat in Nate’s claws.
And then he wasn’t. He was falling.
But he didn’t fall; he landed.
Be still!
Thank God for that. Jack lay prone, probably in the middle of a battlefield, and yet he had no desire to find cover because that meant a lot of hurt.
That lasted about three full seconds, then he rolled over. No way he was sleeping through this. It hurt like hell, but at least he could see. Jack squinted as he looked up into the sky. He could sort of see. There was Nate, moving in an odd zigzagging pattern. Maybe Jack had cattle on the brain because of Nate’s earlier comment, but it looked a lot like leather-butt was being herded in the sky—but for the fact that nothing else was there.
“Holy shit. Iris did it. She found her inner peace.” Jack chuckled which made him cough, which made him about pass out as he wrenched the wounds in his back.
“Hey, watch it. Take it easy now,” a familiar voice said.
Jack looked up into Kaisermann’s face. The smile that stretched his face was so broad it hurt his cheeks. “Damn, but it’s good to see you. Think you can help me up?”
“With a little help.” Kaisermann nodded to his left where Abi was standing.
“I’ve got a medical kit in the SUV,” she said. “Wait here, and I’ll bring it back.”
“No way in hell am I missing this,” Jack said. “There are a bunch of ghosts herding a flying leathery, bat-like, bald guy through the sky toward his eventual place of eternal rest. Not missing that for the world. And don’t think I didn’t notice Marin told me to stay put then hauled ass.” One small problem occurred to Jack. “How far are we from the crypt?”
“Too far for you to walk,” Kaisermann said with a raised eyebrow.
Since that could mean five feet or five miles, Jack opted for another option. “Don’t suppose the SUV is still running?”
Abi rolled her eyes. “If you die of blood loss, infection, or any other complication, I would like it to be known that I recommended against this course of action. Now that I know there are ghosts…well, I don’t want you to came back and haunt me.” As she spoke, she and Kaisermann hefted Jack into an upright position.
Her attempt at verbal distraction was commendable but not successful. He might have screamed like a little boy. But after he was done screaming, he figured it was all good. Pain made people do strange things.
While he caught his breath and Kaisermann propped him up, Abi brought around the SUV. It looked great minus the missing door. There wasn’t even a flat. The jerking that Jack had assumed was a tire mishap had been Nate sideswiping their SUV.
More sweat maybe mixed with some tears, and Jack was situated in the backseat. He sat sideways and Abi braced, while Kaisermann drove them to the crypt.
Jack tried to catch another glimpse of Nate being poked in the sky by pissed off ghosts, but he didn’t see anything. They were almost there when Jack started to worry. “Guys, did we ever find out if the ward was still standing? We’ve got three days before a spell-caster is expected down here. No way we catch Nate again in three days. And even then, who knows if our guy can cast the right kind of ward.”
“Let’s hope it’s there,” Abi said. Jack could hear the tension in her voice.
Kaisermann, on the other hand, didn’t seem ruffled. “I have faith. Sally wouldn’t have shown us this path if wasn’t going to work. She can’t see the future and there’s a lot I’m sure she doesn’t know, but she does have an intimate understanding of nature and the magic in it.” He met Jack’s gaze in the rearview mirror. “She would know, Jack.”
Jack didn’t have Kaisermann’s bone-deep faith in Sally, but communication issues aside, she had been very reliably on their side.
“Hey guys, do you see that?” Abi pointed to the sky.
Kaisermann pulled up as close as he could get to the crypt and parked, then he hung his head out the window.
Jack opened the door to better see then whispered to Abi, “Help me out?”
She jumped out the other side and ran around to Jack’s door, all the while continuing to check the sky above.
The three of them watched in fascination as the invisible hands of what must be ghosts pulled the flailing and screaming Nate from the sky. It looked more like a bar take-down than an arrest—a lot of power but not great control. For every two steps forward they went, Nate would scramble one back. He was terrified.
What did it take to pull an egomaniac down a few pegs? Apparently, an army of ghosts.