Page 45 of An Accident Waiting to Dragon
Terror sent ice through her blood.
But she refused to beg.
“I don’t even have the damn egg. It’s down there?—”
A shadowed hand clamped over her mouth. Or maybe not a hand, because the thing holding her was still using two arms. The smell of sulphur blended with a metallic taste against her tongue, making it hard to breathe.
Why didn’t they want her to speak? To know where the egg was hidden? Wasn’t that what they had come for?
The wraiths closed in, and darkness cut off her sense of sight. Like being swallowed. Like nothing existed in the world except the shadowy hands reaching for her. Terror tried to claw through her, managing to paralyze her for several seconds, but the need to fight kicked in hard, and she tried to thrash in their hold.
Gwen clawed and bit and scratched and kicked.
But she might as well have lain still and accepted her death for all the good it did.
She swore between gusts of wind, and the wraith holding her chuckled in her ear. A scratchy sound, otherworldly. She jerked away from it, revulsion turning her stomach.
This is it.
It’s over.
Asher was dying, and she couldn’t save him now.
They’d squandered the second chance the fates had given them.
She’d squandered it.
For nothing.
“Meet me in the afterlife,” she sent the thought careening toward him.
Maybe there they’d be able to start over with fresh hearts and fresh eyes.
“When I give…the signal…drop.”
At the deep, thready voice tiptoeing around in her head, Gwen jolted against the wraith binding her. “Asher?”
Gods his voice was barely audible, and not because of the raging storm.
He was awake? He was…here?
She looked around frantically like she couldn’t see out of the godsforsaken darkness. “Don’t try to fly when they let you go,” he said.
Suddenly, a roar shattered even the storm’s fury, and blue flames slammed into the wraiths, the heat immediately so intense, she felt flash boiled. Luckily, the wraiths were thick enough around her that the fire didn’t touch Gwen.
Or it had nothing to do with luck. Asher had learned impressive control in the last decade.
The wraith holding her let go, its whistling screams joining the others. Somehow, either being frozen with shock or her body obeying Asher’s order, Gwen dropped below the fray. She didn’t fly. Instead, she looked up in time to see the massive navy-colored dragon—appearing black in the darkness—as it looped away from the wraiths, taking out two or three of the shadowed monsters with a swipe of his half-barbed tail.
At the same time, he used the fire spewing from his maw with impressive precision, targeting wraith after wraith and hitting them dead on.
All in the seconds she fell away.
Gods, he was incredible.
All it took was those few moments to see the hunter he was. The warrior he had become. And for the smallest beat of time, hope cut like a knife through the fear, and she thought that maybe they could get through this.
Except when he went to turn, stretching out his right wing with a maneuver he was clearly used to doing, it buckled under the strain of the turn. That arm still not healed.