“Very well.” He grabbed her about the waist and jumped off the building.
Psychiatrists and headshrinkers from realm to realm associate dreams of flight with sex for a reason. The thematic and mechanical differences are obvious—fewer bodily fluids tend to be involved in flight if all goes well, and the typical flight’s also short on funny faces. But there’s a breathless novelty to the first touch of both that experience tends to mellow. A flightless being’s first takeoff introduces her to a new dimension; the twentieth time her case team boards a dragon gondola to some mid-Kathic city that barely rates a dot on the map, the rush fades. Spend enough time away from skies or sheets, though, and the novelty returns.
It had been a long while since Tara last flew.
At first the sensations blurred together: rush of wind, lurch in stomach, pull of gravity, talons pressed against her ribs, terror of the monkey brain realizing its body has jumped from an impossibly tall tree toward a branch it can never, ever catch— And then the quaking of her obliques, because she hadn’t thought through the consequences of her entire weight resting against Shale’s hands. The gargoyle’s claws pressed into her diaphragm. Far below, streetlights bounced and circled, and streets wove together. “This isn’t comfortable,” she wheezed. “Maybe if I were to lie on your back?”
“It wouldn’t be steady. There are wings there.”
“Hm.” She puzzled through the issue as well as she could while hanging doubled over from a gargoyle’s claws.
“How did you find me?” Shale asked.
She’d hoped he wouldn’t ponder that particular detail. “I left a tracking glyph under your skin last year.”
He dropped her.
She screamed at first, no denying that. Best get the scream over with and turn one’s attention to the inciting issue, to wit: falling. Not quite enough altitude for the soul-parachute trick, too far from neighboring buildings for magnetism to help. She spun as she fell, which made things harder, the world by turns sky and walls and rapidly approaching road and walls and sky again—she spread her limbs, twisted to counter the spin and control her horizon line—she could lasso the buildings, or else Shale, if she could get a bead on him when she spun skyward again— She hit stone far too soon, which was an unpleasant surprise, but she wasn’t dead, which she found more agreeable. The stone she’d struck was moving, and warm to the touch. When her senses righted themselves, she realized she lay on Shale’s back. His wings beat three, four times—the ripple of his shoulder blades’ muscle reminded her of lying on an inflatable raft in surf on her spring break trip to the Fangs back in school—and they rose again. She swore in five languages, then started to slip; panicked, she caught his hold of his wing, which veered them abruptly left until she let go. At last she locked her arms around his neck, and her knees at his flanks. He was taller than her, which helped. His wings pressed against her sides on the updraft, but not tight enough to hurt.
“Jerk,” she said.
“Witch.”
“Fair.” She laughed. They spiraled higher into the night.
*
Matt and Sandy Sforza almost came to blows over the question of who would host the Rafferty girls. Neither wanted to let them go home alone. Sandy thought they’d be more comfortable with a woman, but the room Sandy and Lil shared was barely large enough for the pair of them, let alone three guests. Matt’s place was closer to the edge of town, and his boys could share a room, though Simon would complain.
All of which would have meant nothing if the Rafferty girls didn’t want to go with Matt, but when he asked, Claire said yes. She’d tended to Ellen and Hannah after their father collapsed, after the Stone Man left, after the Blacksuits came.