“What?” I ask as I flail wildly, finally get my legs wrapped around him and clamber up his body, trying hard not to clutch at any torn flesh in the process. It’s a messy, slippery business.

“About my opportunity. Bloody hell, she’s … coming!”

I can’t let go of him or I’ll fall. If I don’t let go of him, I’ll get lanced when she stabs him. I sincerely doubt she’s going to get close enough to us, with all the intruders she’s spotted on her mountain, for either of us to stab her.

I’m not leaving without what I came for. We’ll finish the Hag later.

I hiss, “Can you sift?”

“Iron. Manacles. Can’t. Too … wounded … anyway.”

Terrific. I can pry the rivets out but my spear is useless for cutting the manacles off his arms. I’d wondered how she was preventing an Unseelie Prince from sifting. With iron, the same way Inspector Jayne does with the Unseelie he captures and keeps until someone slays them. Speaking of which, his cages must be crammed to overflowing.

I’m not dying on this cliff.

I wrap one arm tightly around Christian’s neck, force myself up and to the left, dig my spear beneath the rivet holding his right hand. It won’t budge. There’s too much weight hanging on it. I dig the tip of the spear in deeper, start rocking it back and forth beneath the rivet, using my Unseelie-flesh-enhanced strength.

He looks up, growls, “What … the … fuck … Mac! No!”

The rivet suddenly shoots from the cliff like a missile being launched, and for the second time I go into a full free fall.

I hold on to him tightly and scream, “Fly, Christian! Fucking fly!”

36

“Forever trusting who we are and nothing else matters”

MAC

Once again, nothing goes as I expect it to.

I can’t call what Christian does flying, and he confounds me by going up not down. I expected him to, at worst, be able to unfurl his wings and use them as a sort of hang glider, to soar us to the floor of the gorge without killing us. Instead he scrabbles higher with short, fierce bursts of his wings, digging and clawing at the side of the cliff, using them like appendages, a hawk that can’t fly, scrambling desperately upward.

Closer to the freaking Hag.

“Why the hell don’t you go down?” I shout.

I hear roaring on top of the cliff, a scream and the rapid burst of gunfire.

The Hag shrieks and explodes up into the night sky. A whip cracks, followed by another banshee-like wail.

“Shut … the fuck … up,” Christian grits.

I’ve got both arms clamped around his neck, hanging on for dear life, getting repeatedly bashed against the side of the cliff with each scraping lunge of his wings. My shirt is being ripped to shreds and the back of my head and spine are taking a brutal beating.

“Keep her away from them until they reach the top,” I hear Ryodan bark.

“I’m trying to,” Jada fires back. “She moves erratically. It’s hard to compute.”

“Stop fucking trying to compute and feel,” he snarls. “She’s not a machine. She’s a goddamn pissed-off, bloodthirsty woman.”

I hear more cracks from the whip. The sound is bounced back and intensified by the surrounding mountains. I decide they must be using it to mess with the Hag’s echolocation.

“Behind the bitch, not to the side,” Ryodan orders.

“You’re almost there, lad,” Dageus shouts down at us. “Grab the bloody cable.” He’s hanging over the cliff’s edge swinging a length of thin black cord at us.

But Christian’s desperately trying to sustain our altitude and in no position to reach for it. I grope wildly for the cable, praying I have enough strength to pull us up because each time I get slammed into the cliff my vision goes a little dark and I can feel Christian growing weaker. Not even my Unseelie flesh rush is enough to stand this constant battering.

Looks like we may end up trying to hang glide after all.

“She’s coming back,” Barrons shouts. “Get the fuck away from the cliff’s edge, Highlander.”

I hear the whip cracking furiously again, and Barrons roars, a horrible, guttural sound, and I cringe to the bottom of my soul because I know without needing to see it that Barrons just got lanced. Doesn’t matter that I know he’ll be back. It’s one less person to protect the Keltar and Jada, and I despise the sound of that man dying. I have no doubt he stepped in the way to protect someone.

“Fuck.” Dageus snarls down at us. “Bloody grab the bloody cable.”

Then Drustan is beside Dageus and I hear Jada and Ryodan taunting the Hag, more gunfire and the sound of the whip cracking as they try to buy us time to get to solid ground.

I kick upward and Christian grunts with agony when my boot catches him in the stomach, but I close my fingers around the cord.

Moving quickly, Drustan and Dageus begin to pull us up.

We’re nearly there when Jada and Ryodan start shouting again, then suddenly something explodes out of the front of Dageus’s chest and he goes rigid, yanks upright and makes a soft grunt of shock and pain.

It takes my brain a second to process what just happened.

The Hag just lanced Dageus from behind.

Christian howls with such animalistic, inhuman fury that it chills my blood. It occurs to me how ironic it is that four of us on this mountain possess immense power but can’t use it. Barrons and Ryodan won’t turn into the beast in front of strangers. My inner Book has gone dead silent. Christian is too weak to use his Unseelie magic.