Chapter 16

Harper

A fine spray of blood struck my cheek and dotted the glass of my goggles. If not for that blood, I might not have realized that Nick had been struck. He didn't make a sound; he didn't miss a beat with his wings and kept us steadily flying higher and further away from the shuttle.

I twisted against him when it happened, frantically searching for the wound. There, on his neck, where his armor failed to protect him. A lucky shot had burned an angry, bloody path just below his jaw. It was bleeding, but not much. That was a good sign, wasn't it? "Nick, are you okay?" Of course, he wasn't. That was a stupid question, but it slipped out anyway.

His eyes were still laser-focused on anything happening below us; his pupils were just small pinpricks. "Fine," he said, his wings beating harder. There was no further laser fire, but blood still trickled slowly from his wound. I pulled my sleeve down over my hand and reached up to apply pressure. He rattled out a growl, his eyes snapped to my face; fangs on display. That hurt him, but he didn't direct that threatening posturing at me; a response to the pain. He jerked his attention back to the ground when the growl faded.

"We need to hide and regroup. Figure out what is going on," he said. His visor glowed blue as it slid over his left eye. "My drones located the shooter. He had a spotter, but that was it. They appear to be calling reinforcements." I see how his eyes darted behind his visor as he absorbed data, I couldn't even begin to tell what. "I have located a good hiding spot on my maps," he said, and he abruptly adjusted his course.

His wings dipped, his body moving like an acrobat as we turned, and then we were soaring toward a mountainous shape in the distance, crowned by one of those huge surveying spikes. It looked like someone had made a giant sword-in-the-stone type of statue, made of a mountain and a spike. It was impressive and a little terrifying to look at.

The blood trickling from the wound on his neck wasn't stopping, it had soaked my sleeve and was now sliding down my arm. "Nick, I think you need to land. We need to take care of this injury…" I tried. There were many more thickets of wood between us and that mountain, some even had leaves. We could find cover there.

He didn't answer, and his wings continued beating at a steady pace. His visor flickered with footage from his drones, maybe even that map he'd mentioned, but I thought he wasn't seeing any of it. He was focused on the mountain in the distance, his huge wings propelling us toward it at a dazzling speed. Still, given how big that mountain was, I didn't think we'd reach it soon. It was still very far away. How much longer was he going to keep going?

"Nick, you have to land! We're out of their range. I'm sure it's safe enough to take a moment to patch you up. You're wounded!" He tilted his head slowly, reminding me of the way a bird of prey could angle their head when they tried to focus on something. I got caught in that gaze just like a prey animal might, feeling small, intensely scrutinized. Trapped.

"Must keep you safe," he growled, but the words were followed by an erratic dip in his flying, his wings were faltering. He was pale beneath his eyes, and he lost that intense focus as suddenly as he'd aimed it at me. His eyes grew distant and dim. My heart skipped a beat, fearing the worst. If he passed out now, we'd plummet to our freaking deaths.

I cupped my free hand around his jaw. "You are. You have kept me safe. I'm unharmed. Now you have to land. Now, Nick!" My words were met with another rumble. He bared his fangs as though I'd displeased him, but his spread wings stopped their erratic beats to catch the air. We now coasted to the ground.

I swiveled my head to search the area beneath us. Where would we end up if we kept losing altitude at this pace? We were going down fast, and the tops of trees were rushing by at a rapid pace and getting closer by the minute. If he kept this up, we'd crash into them, we needed a clearing. "Nick, there! Can you land over there?" I pointed as I spotted such a spot and he jerked, wings flapping, swinging us drunkenly through to the air to go where I'd aimed him.

The landing was rough. It was nothing like the last one when he'd put us down so gracefully that his wings had barely disturbed the sand and dirt. He landed feet first, but his knees gave way and we collapsed in a pile of tangled limbs. I was pinned beneath him, and I'd lost my grip on his wound. Blood wasn't trickling from it but spurting out in a steady river of red.

He groaned above me, arms trembling and sweat clinging to his forehead from the effort, but he managed to roll over and collapse at my side. He didn't move again. My indomitable Nick, my winged warrior, had passed out. His injury would be fatal if I didn't stop that bleeding.

I scrambled to my knees and yanked off my coat so I could wad it up and press it against his neck. That eased the flow to a trickle, but it wasn't good enough. While leaning as much as I dared to apply enough pressure, I searched his body with my free hand. He'd strapped all kinds of supplies to himself before we set out that morning. There had to be a med kit in one of the pouches or the bag he wore at the small of his back.

My fingers felt clumsy, and they were sticky from blood, but I managed to yank open a pocket and found some strange see-through bandages. I wasn't sure if they were the right move, but the one I yanked from its packaging clung to my fingers. It was big enough to cover the wound, and I did the switch with a pounding heart.

It glued itself to his flesh, and I watched with my breath stuck in my throat to make sure it stopped the bleeding. Though a gruesome sight, it was actually helpful to be able to see through the bandage down to the wound. It was like everything beneath the thick transparent film had frozen, no trickling, no change.

"Thank God," I sighed, relief filling me now that it looked like I'd stopped him from bleeding to death. That didn't mean we were safe. We were in a clearing in the middle of nowhere, far removed from civilization. I didn't know if those people shooting at us knew where we were, and how quickly they could get to us.

I glanced uneasily around me at the tall, warped shapes of the trees that surrounded this spot. We were in the foothills of the mountain, and the terrain was rough and sharply rising ahead of me. I didn't think I could climb that, not as out of shape as I was, and not while dragging an unconscious Nick with me.

He was not nearly as heavy as he looked, given his muscle mass and size, but he was still too heavy for me to move anywhere. I was pretty sure he didn't have damage to his spine; the wound was almost more of a graze, though it had clearly torn open a major vein. But he could have hurt himself during our rough landing. I had felt how hard we'd impacted, and my feet hadn't even touched the ground until after he'd collapsed.

"What would grandma do?" I muttered out loud. My badass granny would have already gotten all the supplies we had sorted and come up with a plan of action. I eyed the guns that Nick had strapped to his thighs and wondered if I should take one of those to protect myself with. My grandma was an ace shot, me? I had never even held a gun before, I'd probably shoot myself in the foot.

"The pen is mightier than the sword anyway," I said, but I sounded dubious to my own ears. I had food and water on me; I knew we wouldn't starve anytime soon. It was still a compulsion to count my ration bars and then check how much more Nick was carrying on him.

He was lying awkwardly on his wings, one arm pinned beneath him. Taking a moment to straighten him out so he'd be more comfortable left me with aching, screaming muscles from the exertion. Those wings were heavy ; it was a shock to discover how heavy. No wonder Nick packed so much muscle onto his frame, he needed it.

Okay, he didn't appear to have broken a leg, and we had enough food to last us at least a week. The wind was starting to pick up, furiously whipping around the clearing. I wasn't entirely sure, but it looked like it was also getting dark. We needed to find shelter, and soon.

I looked around, but all I saw were the bent and gnarled trunks of the trees and the steep, rocky slope. It felt like the wind was funneling past that sharp flank and hitting us extra hard, starting to obstruct my vision. Dust and dirt were carried along on the air currents, and the goggles now seemed like flimsy protection against it.

When a particularly strong gust of wind knocked me forward, on top of Nick, I growled with frustration. None of my skills were useful in this situation, and my indecisiveness wasn't helping. I needed to come up with a plan and do it. Shelter was our most basic need. If I couldn't get Nick to the shelter, the shelter had to come here.

Riffling through his pockets again, I searched for something useful. Maybe he had a tent with him, I just didn't recognize it because hello, future? It was probably the size of a phone until it magically unfolded. Thankfully, my brand-new translator contact thingies were making all the text on his things read to me like English. When I dug up a folded square only a little bigger than my hand, I whooped with relief. That definitely said 'tent,' and it had a clearly labeled 'pull here' cord, along with instructions on how to secure the thing to the ground. Easy peasy.

It was not an easy task. I fought with the tent and the wind that threatened to rip it from my grasp at any moment. The ground was soft and sandy, which didn't make it ideal for securing a tent. I had to move the tent closer to the trees so I could secure the attached bolts in the dirt. That meant I had another tough battle ahead of me: dragging Nick across the clearing and into the shelter.

The temptation was powerful to sit down for a minute and cry, but those winds were getting more powerful, and the sand had started to sting against any exposed skin. This was turning into a major sandstorm, and if I didn't get us into that shelter soon, we could get seriously hurt.

The sky had turned so dark with brown sand and roiling clouds that I couldn't see much. Nick probably had a flashlight, but I didn't have the time to find it and make it work. My body ached all over, tired from the fight with the tent, but I forced myself to crawl across the clearing to where I'd left Nick. I didn't give myself a chance to rest when I reached him, worried that he was getting worse rather than better.

My fingers were clammy and the sand was sticking to them, and my flesh was turning raw beneath it. I fumbled around as I tried to check how he was doing; I thought I could still feel the steady beat of his heart on the good side of his neck. Next, I tried to pull him from beneath his armpits, my heels digging into the loose sand beneath him as I tried to get him to move. "Fuck! Why are you so damn heavy?" I shouted, but my words were snatched away by the wind. I got a mouthful of sand for my efforts.

Come on! I had to get us into that tent now! I couldn't even see it anymore because the sand was swirling thickly in the air around me. My face felt like it had a close encounter with sandpaper. More of it and I'd have to give up. Nick's skin seemed to be weathering this better than mine… If I couldn't move him, I knew he'd tell me to take shelter alone and leave him outside. I didn't know if I could do that; abandon him that way.

"Nick! Wake up!" I shouted desperately while giving him another heave. My heart leaped in hope when it seemed like I'd managed to move him an inch. So I did it again, heaving and pulling and shoving to make the smallest bit of progress to what I hoped would be safety from this sandstorm.

My breathing came in short, painful bursts, wheezing as sand filtered into my nose and mouth. My muscles were screaming in agony, but I didn't let up, didn't take a break. If I did, we'd never make it, and I could already picture the two of us after the sandstorm passed, scoured down to nothing but a pile of bones. We weren't going to make it, and where was the tent? Was I still going in the right direction?