FORTY-NINE

Caitlyn was in the air. She felt it rush against her face. A roar in her ears from the waterfall.

And stabbing pain in her right shoulder from Mason’s knife.

She’d seen the shift of his knife hand and had been preparing to jump even as Mason took the first step toward her.

She shouldn’t have answered when he said she wouldn’t jump. She should have just jumped, as her instincts screamed for her to do, and coldly left him there to die. She had done enough, offering that they both could live.

But he was a killer and she wasn’t, so she hesitated.

When his hand began to move, she’d finally leaped toward the chasm. Too late to avoid the knife, but enough of a shift that the knife struck her shoulder instead of the center of her chest, below the throat.

Now she was in the air, the spray of the waterfall reminding her that the water would slam her down if she ventured too close.

She banked away from it.

Banked. As in soaring. Through the air.

That’s when she realized what was happening. The pain had distracted her. Until now, discovering the sensation of banking in the air, with the updraft of cool air holding her aloft, making instinctive moves that she couldn’t have explained to anyone except herself.

Her arms were spread in the Iron Cross that she’d spent her entire life perfecting, and not even the embedded knife could diminish the strength in her locked joints and muscles.

Her outstretched fingers supported another incredible sensation. The ends of the wings that pressed against her arms, with tips that flexed as easily as moving fingers, subtly making adjustments to the flow of air.

Her wings.

She gloried in the sensation of freedom. The miner’s light on her forehead gave ample illumination for what she needed, bouncing off the face of the rock as she approached in a slow, wide circle.

She banked again, riding the updraft.

The light glinted off the waterfall, showing scattered diamonds of moisture as spectacular as a shower of stars.

Another slight flexing of her wing tips and she soared away from the danger.

She felt no fear. Just amazing comprehension, an understanding of the trembling that had first taken place at the edge of the chasm, the urge to throw herself into the depths, an understanding of the ache for freedom she’d always felt on mountainsides with Papa.

This was her destiny. Where she belonged.

That hideous bursting of her back had been like stepping from life through death into life again. Even then, she hadn’t quite comprehended what had sprung forth, folded inside the hunch, growing until her time had arrived.

But now she understood.

Her arms pressed against the wings, and her wings pressed against her arms, a fit so secure that by bringing her arms forward, her wings moved with them. It was a tentative movement, but she discovered that even this slight attempt gave her lift.

Another beat of her wings, levered by chest muscles that had become indefatigable through all the years of holding the Iron Cross. Another upward lift. She wasn’t just riding the draft like a glider but was actually able to move at will.

It gave her a deep, unspeakable peace. She longed for open air, a place to swoop and dive and rise again.

Yet even as she gloried in the realization that this was who she’d been meant to become since birth, the pain in her shoulder grew.

She felt faint as she banked again to dodge the other side of the chasm. Edges of blackness crept in at her vision.

Her light showed another ledge with a rope ladder in place for her to descend. This would be safest. If she lost consciousness in the air, she was dead.

But she would be just as dead if she crawled onto the ledge and let the blood seep from the knife wound in her shoulder. Except that death would be the death of a creature of the earth. Not one born for the sky.

She banked away again.

At the bottom of the chasm was the river that Jordan had described, a tremendous flow of water that disappeared into the rock, flowing for a mile underground before it came out. It would sweep her to a different kind of death, where water filled her lungs and matted her wings.

But also at the bottom of the chasm was the second rope bridge that Papa had promised, the one that would take her to the others.

If she could reach it, or reach the tunnel the bridge led to, she’d find the others. She didn’t want to die now, not so soon after discovering this glory.

She blinked away the pain, concentrating on the beam of light that came from the coal miner’s lamp. She didn’t know how long she could fight the blurring at the edge of her vision. But she couldn’t dive down. She didn’t know the limits of what she could do with her wings, didn’t know if she’d have the strength to pull out of a dive. And the river below was waiting to drag her into a different kind of darkness.

She circled and circled downward, her light showing the rock face, the fall of water, the rock face.

Each turn brought more weakness. The black edges continued to press into her vision. Then, dimly, she saw the rope stretched from one side of the chasm to the other, like a strand of web, shadows of the rope thrown onto the slickness of black water below it.

With a fierceness she didn’t know she had, she willed herself not to fade into oblivion. Her conscious mind screamed to keep at bay the encroaching walls of death, and her subconscious flexed her wings where she needed to hold herself aloft, doing it as naturally as the act of breathing.

Then the rope bridge was looming in front of her light, suddenly upon her, and she nearly overshot it. In her weakness, and in the newness of flight, she didn’t have the coordination to come down lightly and move her hands and arms separately from her wings to grab at the rope.

She tumbled into the bridge, entangling herself in the rope, nearly sliding through and off.

There was a horrible wrenching at her ankle again. This new sensation of pain was her last moment of awareness.