by JJ King
“No,” he choked out the word and shook his head when he could say no more.
“I’ll be alright,” I said, feeling comfort in reassuring him. It was like a promise to myself as well as to him. “I love you.”
His shoulders sagged. “Okay, but I’m only going for just one night instead of the weekend.” He shook his head and murmured, “Sometimes I hate him.”
Part of me wanted to tell him to cherish family, even when you can't stand them, but that was too hypocritical considering my refusal to even speak with my parents, so I put my arms around him and held on tight, instead. When his arms snaked out around me, the buzzing in my head lessened and my racing pulse slowed. He was my rock,
What was I going to do without him?
Chapter 12
I settled into the seat on the small passenger plane and stared out the window as my stomach churned.
This wasn’t like the last time I’d boarded an AWA plane. I wasn’t surrounded by friends, I didn’t have Bash’s hand to hold, and this wasn’t exactly up to par with the last plane.
Connor sat in the aisle directly across from me, his body straight and stiff like a soldier at attention. It annoyed the shit out of me to see him like that, so formal and fake. He’d never been like that when we’d been together.
I winced at the thought and immediately steered my mind elsewhere. I had plenty to obsess about at the moment, so it wasn’t hard to switch paths.
Bash had left via helicopter sent by his grandfather early this morning. The sun had just broken the horizon when it set down and he’d kissed me goodbye and whispered, “It’s just for one night. I’ll see you back at the academy tomorrow evening, alright?”
I’d nodded and pasted a convincing smile on my lips. I must have done a good job, because he’d kissed me again and climbed aboard.
Then he’d left.
I wondered vaguely if I should be worried about my newfound ability to tell a passable lie.
Then again, I thought with a quirk of my eyebrow, if I did end up going after Viktor’s Alphaship, I’d need that ability to run a nation.
That thought made my breakfast threaten to revisit. I squelched it, too.
The flight attendant, who was wearing a sharp navy blue suit cut with flattering curves, poked her head into the cockpit for a moment then turned to close the doors. She’d almost pulled them shut when her eyes went wide and she stopped.
My spine stiffened.
“Robert,” Connor snapped and moved with a speed I could barely believe to stand in front of me. His hands moved like lightning to dip beneath his jacket and came up with a gun while Robert, a middle-aged guard with kind eyes, moved to loom over me.
I sucked in air that got trapped in my chest and refused to leave. In the silence, my pulse thundered, and I waited for Viktor.
“Any room for six more?” A male voice asked in a mock begging tone.
The flight attendant’s mouth curved up and her eyes softened. She’d never noticed my guards’ response. Now, though, as she moved to push the door open again and Connor stepped up to stop her with his gun in hand, she froze.
Without saying a word, Connor pushed past her and looked for himself, then relaxed. As quickly as he’d pulled it out, he slipped the gun back into his coat and returned to his seat. I didn’t see the other guard move, but I felt his presence disappear from over my shoulder. My breath whooshed painfully out of me.
A guy I’d seen around campus several times appeared in the door, his shoulders wide enough that he had to turn a bit to get in. The flight attendant stepped back and motioned for him to move down the aisle as more students climbed the steps.
I heard Daniella’s distinctive ring of laughter before I saw her face and frowned. This early return trip was hard enough. Now I had to put up with her?
I turned to Connor, whose stoic face was a little tighter around the mouth than usual. I hated talking to him, but I was more than a little pissed. “I thought no one else was allowed on this flight?” Rory and Damien had received a hard no when they’d asked to accompany me.
“That was the plan,” he muttered through his teeth as he raised his phone to his ear. His murmured questions to whoever was on the other end of the line were tense and clipped. I wondered if I’d get the chance to watch Daniella get booted off the plane, but when he hung up and turned to give Robert a curt nod, my hope died.
The last student to board was familiar as well and made my already heightened annoyance spike even higher. Benson fucking Wellington III boarded as if he owned the plane and started down the aisle without so much as a nod of acknowledgment for the flight attendant or anyone not in his party.
I barely held back the urge to stick a foot out and trip the asshole.
When everyone was seated, including Ms. Morgan, the professor that had apparently drawn the short straw and been assigned to accompany me to AWA, the flight attendant faced us and went through the usual instructions. I reached into my bag and pulled out my earbuds, popped them in, and turned on my audiobook. I closed my eyes and slipped into a world of time traveling pirates as the plane took to the runway.
A hand on my arm disrupted a particularly action-packed scene, making me scowl as I paused the book. I looked up into the flight attendant’s smiling face and forced myself to be polite. She’d had enough rudeness from Benson and his group of idiot friends.
“Yes?” I even offered her a smile.
“Sorry to disturb you,” she said pleasantly. “I just wanted to see if you’d like your lunch now.” She held up a bowl of chicken alfredo that had my nose twitching. It smelled delicious. I tried to picture where a kitchen would be hidden on a plane this small.
“I could eat,” I said, feeling genuinely glad now that she’d interrupted my book.
I pulled the seat back tray down and waited while she laid down the bowl, a set of cutlery wrapped in a cloth napkin, and offered me a choice of beverage.
“I’ll just have water, thank you.”
The meal, however dubious its origins, was delicious, as was the slice of cherry cheesecake the flight attendant brought ten minutes later.
Stuffed and feeling more than a little tired after waking up so early to see Bash off, I leaned against the wall of the plane and closed my eyes. They shot open a moment later when the plane hit a pocket of air and dipped suddenly, before righting itself. The pasta in my stomach rolled precariously before settling back down as well.
The pretentious assholes that had stowed away on the plane didn’t even seem to notice the jolt. I guess they were so used to flying that they’d experienced every kind of turbulence possible.
When the plane dipped a second time, this one sharper, before leveling off, they noticed. Shrill cries of indignation leaped from a female throat. I leaned out into the aisle and glanced back to see the blonde that had boarded with Benson and his friends covering her chest with an impeccably manicured hand.
“Old Ones,” she said in a whiny tone that grated on my nerves. “Who’s flying this thing? A novice?”
“Excuse me.” The flight attendant waited for me to sit back then rushed down the aisle to assure the pretty blonde that their pilot and co-pilot were, in fact, highly qualified, but that they were experiencing some turbulence so could she please put her seatbelt back on. She walked back to the front of the plane and repeated the request in a louder, firmer tone, then disappeared into the cockpit.
I clicked my belt into place and pulled it tighter around my hips as my stomach churned uncomfortably. The sky outside the window was darkening and filling with heavy clouds that looked more ominous now than they had just moments ago. I caught myself chewing on my cheek and stopped before I got a mouthful of blood again.
To occupy my mind, which was imagining us going down in a blaze of fire, I reached for my earbuds again and was adjusting them when I saw dark smoke whip past my window.
“What the hell was that?” I asked aloud, pressing my face against the glass to see better.
Thick, black s
moke poured out of the engine in fits and bursts, then the sound of metal grating on metal screeched through the fuselage, and the smoke darkened the window until I could see nothing.
I turned my head to look out the opposite window and caught Connor’s gaze. All the cool and calm were gone now. In his eyes, I saw the truth.
The cockpit door burst open and the flight attendant, no longer elegant in her navy suit, raced down the aisle, shouting for everyone to put on their masks just as the tiny bags of oxygen she’d mimed putting on before we’d taken off dropped from the ceiling and hung like declarations of tragedy before our stunned faces.
Connor was on his feet in an instant, pulling the elastic band around the back of my head and settling the bright yellow mask over my mouth and nose. In desperate panic, I reached for his hands and gripped them, white knuckled, as he stared down at me.
He was on his feet when the plane’s nose dipped again, and went flying down the aisle as another screech of metal rang in my ears and something hard hit the side of the plane.
Time slowed down. I tried to move, to look into the aisle to help Connor. He’d been saving me and could be hurt. But the pressure was too much, I couldn’t move. It felt like my bones were being crushed in a vice, but I kept trying as the screams from behind me were cut off or muffled, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t hear right, couldn’t think straight.
Connor was gone. I bore down and screamed into the oxygen mask, pushing with every scrap of strength I had to turn my head and look out the window at the forest below us that was too quickly coming into clear focus.
I saw an expanse of trees and snow-covered mountains, then I saw endless blue and, for a moment that stretched into eternity, I saw my mother’s eyes, smiling down at me with such love and tenderness that it filled me with hope. My father was next to her, his bright smile the same one I’d loved all my life. Next to them was Bash, my love, the other half of my soul, and my best friends, Sara, Bethany, and Rory. They had their arms around her, as if she’d always been a part of their little unit. I saw my Nan, sipping tea while Poppy stoked the fire in their little house. I saw Connor, too, and his eyes were warm, not cold, as they gazed down at me.
Lightness lifted me, cradled me with reassurances that everything would be alright. That I was loved and strong enough to make it through. I frowned at them and wondered what I’d have to make it through.
Then my world went dark and cold.
Chapter 13
The fire is out.
I struggled out of my nightmare, a really vivid one that made me long to cry out for Nan like I did when I was a child. The darkness pressed in around me, so utterly devoid of light that I thought the power must have gone out, too. That happened sometimes at Nan’s place.
The blankets weighed me down, holding me firm against the bed as I struggled. I needed to light another fire, it was cold here, so cold. My bones felt brittle from it. My eyelids hung heavily, drowned in sleep, making it hard to see. I exhaled and pried them open and saw fire.
For a moment, the scene made no sense to me. Fire licked at a tree that was bent, toppled over at the halfway point, snapped in two like a twig. There was a plane, no, I thought, half a plane leaning up against it, with ripped metal hanging like torn flesh from its sides.
I was still in the nightmare, I thought, focusing on the cold inside my bones and the snapping heat of the fire that grew closer by the moment. It was nice, in a way, soothing. The chill in my blood, in my body, dissipated, and, for an instant, I was warm.
Then I was burning.
Screams burst from my throat, raw and feral, as the world snapped into sharp relief. I threw my arms up to get away from the fire, the flames that snapped and sputtered just inches away from my feet. My arms met something heavy and pushed as more screams tore from me.
I raised my head to see but something hard and white lay atop me, pinning me down. Not snow, I realized, something else. Something heavy.
“Elena! Hold on.” A face appeared above me, hovering over me, for an instant, then disappeared. I gritted my teeth and pushed with all I had, desperate to get out from under whatever it was that was trapping me. My mind reeled with images of dead bodies, torn metal, and fallen trees.
A grinding sound filled my ears, so close it had to be what was holding me down. I felt a shift in the weight and gasped, realizing it had been pressing down on my chest, keeping me from breathing. As oxygen rushed to my brain and the sounds of screams, crying, and raging fire met me, I remembered the plane crash episode of Grey's Anatomy and panic rushed through me.
“Stop!” I screamed with as much volume as I could manage. It came out a wheeze that blew away in the wind. Whoever was lifting never heard me and kept lifting.
Internal bleeding, organ damage, devastating fractures. The images from Grey’s flashed through my mind. Whatever it was that pinned me down could be saving my life.
It groaned again, as if it were bending and ready to snap. I had no time to think, no time to assess my injuries. I dug my elbows into the damp, cold earth and scrambled back.
My body responded. Flashes of light and dark overlaid by the sound of people in pain confused my senses. Funny, I thought absently, remembering the devastation of the episode. They got it right.
Everything was coming at me either too bright or faded somehow. Sound boomed in and out, too, like my ears were only working part of the time. I lifted a hand to my ear and touched gently, then raised it before my eyes, afraid of what I’d see.
Blood on my fingertips.
I wiped my hand on my jeans and bit back a sob of agony when my fingers encountered raw flesh. I looked down to see my jeans ripped open, revealing half my thigh and a gash as big as my hand. Through the bubbles of blood and flayed flesh, I saw the white of bone.
Not broken, I thought with a sigh. Not bleeding out, either from what I could see. The blood was spilling onto the already red snow, but it wasn’t spurting. I knew what imminent death looked and smelled like and this wasn’t it. I would be alright.
I’d been through worse.
“Elena,” a voice called from behind me. I twisted and immediately regretted the decision when a sharp spear of pain immobilized me for an agonizing minute. I breathed through the pain, counting off the seconds because, for some reason, it centered me. When I hit sixty, I opened my eyes and focused on the speaker, whose face was floating before me now.
It was Connor, my fractured mind thought, recognizing his icy blue eyes and the way his hair fell over his forehead. I’d always loved running my fingers through his hair. I reached up, letting my hand float in the air for a moment as memories of Bash and Alpha Wolf Academy came rushing back, stealing the lightness in my head. My hand dropped like lead.
“I’m alright,” I said in a voice that rasped. It hurt to speak, and I tasted ash in my throat, but there seemed to be no more damage to my vocal cords or lungs than that. I pushed against the ground to sit up, moving slowly this time since I knew quick movements would return in the spins.
I ran my hands lightly over my body and flexed muscle after muscle, searching for tears or breaks, and was almost swamped with relief when I found my body intact, except for the gash in my thigh. I wasn’t so sure my internal organs were intact, but with no way to check that, I pushed to my feet and swayed. The chaos around me tilted precariously, enough that I leaned on the body that held me, appreciative of its support even if it did belong to someone I despised.
“You’re bleeding,” he murmured close to my ear, so close I could feel the heat of his breath. For an instant, the screams and flames faded, and I was back in my hometown under a tree, leaning into a kiss that shattered my world.
I wrenched back and hissed, “I’m fine. Who’s screaming?” I turned in a circle trying to see through the thick black smoke that coated the air and my tongue. It poured from the plane or what was left of it, anyway. I frowned and knew there was something important there, something I should be able to think of but just couldn’t grasp it.
The ground was solid beneath my feet and coated in snow that was melting in areas closer to the flames. My gaze darted to the fire, searching for anyone too near or, Old Ones forbid, inside. I nearly sagged with relief when I saw only scraps of metal and torn seats. Everyone that had been inside had gotten out or had been thrown out.
I blinked and raised my fingers to rub my eyes. The smoke was hard to pierce, even with wolf senses. I needed to look, though, there had been others on board with me. The flight attendant, the pilots, my guards… Daniella.
My heart seized painfully in my chest at the thought of my mate’s twin sister. I didn’t like her, never had from the moment we’d met, but if he was the other half of my soul, she was part of his. They’d grown together inside their mother and lived as close as two siblings could for their entire lives. I couldn’t begin to imagine that bond and didn’t want to be responsible for telling Bash his sister was dead.
“Daniella!” I shouted into the dense smoke. My feet crunched on snow, then metal, then something hard surrounded by soft.
A moan of pain filtered through the haze and I dropped to the ground, forgetting about my leg. I squeezed my eyes shut at the stab of white-hot agony that exploded inside me. It took another minute or so to catch my breath.
Stay low, beneath the smoke. I remembered the lessons taught to us in school during fire drills. Stay low, the air is purer, you’ll be able to breathe.
I ignored the pain and flattened my body out on the cold hard ground, then turned my head to see who I’d walked on. It was a young guy, one of Benson’s friends, one of the assholes that had cornered Rory on the plane to the lodge.
He was lying on the ground, stomach down, head turned to the side and just staring.
My stomach curdled before I remembered that he’d moaned. He wasn’t dead, I reasoned, through the panic. Not yet.
“Hey!” I called out, scanning up and down his body for any obvious signs of injury. There were no bones sticking out, no dark spots of blood spreading over his clothes, but he wasn’t moving. He just lay there, staring, ignoring all the screams around us. My lip curled in disgust at his entitlement, until I recognized the terror in his eyes.