Serenity overcame my fear of falling. It was peaceful to float out here, a peace I hadn’t felt in months.
Don’t take a nap, Luna; the wake-up call will be painful. I shook my head and brought my head back into the present.
Mike and I were falling as one, locked together by my death-grip on his parachute harness. It reminded me of our first tandem dive. We were both facing the sky, watching the aircraft float away. I barely noticed the tiny figure that jumped out of the hatch after us. Those smooth movements, like a ballerina’s, showed that Ariel was coming after me to get answers.
The explosion of the aircraft was all the answer she would get. My premonition had been accurate, and I hoped the bitch had been close enough to the blast to die. I blinked to clear away the afterimage and saw pieces of Israeli soldiers and airplane tumble toward the ground.
At my side, Mike was waving to get my attention, then he started pulling his mask off. The hose to my oxygen mask flapped wildly in the wind, cut in half. Ariel hadn’t been quick enough to stop us, but she had managed to sabotage me. My oxygen mask spell, controlled by my werewolf side, had appeared, making the military oxygen mask unnecessary. I extended my oxygen mask spell to cover Mike’s head as well. The rush of wind around our heads stopped, and all I could hear was his breathing, coming in gasps.
“It’s okay, Mike,” I said, stopping him from removing his mask. “I don’t need the mask.”
All I got in return was a confused expression and slow blinks. It took me a moment to realize: In response to the emergency, I had sped up my metabolism to its maximum, to stretch out my reaction time. At this rate, instead of hitting the ground in ten seconds, it would feel like one hundred seconds. But the result was that talking to Mike was impossible.
We didn’t have time to waste. Assuming I could speak slowly enough to be understood, what was the shortest message I could give him?
“H…a…v…e … f…a…i…t…h, … M…i…k…e.”
Have faith? We were parachuting into a foreign country with no team, no backup, and no way home. Things couldn’t get any worse.
A shot rang out, and a bullet passed by—close enough that I could hear the thwipping sound it made as it passed.
Ariel had survived the explosion and was bearing down on us. She had straightened out into a headfirst dive position to cut wind resistance and get closer to us before shooting. Shooting from that position at two targets should be impossible, but the woman was impressive. A second shot glanced off Mike’s combat helmet, leaving a trail of torn Kevlar, and his eyes unfocused at the impact.
I had a spell that would render the primer in cartridges inert, but it took time and concentration to perform. Mason could do it in an instant. Could I do it in midair while dodging random shots? No way.
I scrambled to put myself between Ariel and Mike. I wasn’t bulletproof, but the same premonition that had driven me to jump out of the aircraft meant I could predict the path of her shots.
Ariel spread out her body and slowed her descent, now matching our velocity but slightly above us. She snarled and fired again. I didn’t bother jerking as the shot passed harmlessly to our right. I gave her the finger and raised my weapon. I’m a terrible shot with a rifle but was hoping to ‘spray-and-pray’ and get a lucky hit.
I set the fire selector to multiple fire and pulled the trigger. The damn gun didn’t work. Had we been hit with some kind of sabotage curse? If so, why was Ariel’s weapon still working? I checked the safety and tried to cycle the action to clear the weapon, but it still wouldn’t work.
Ariel grinned around werewolf fangs and took aim. I felt the ‘hot spot’ that my premonition showed as the bullet’s target on my forehead. I threw the useless rifle at her, missing by ten meters or more, but the movement of the throw sent Mike and me into a spin.
Luckily, the spin made Ariel’s shot miss. Mike and I scrambled to straighten out without drifting apart. Once we were stabilized, I wondered why Ariel hadn’t taken another shot. I looked around and grinned to see her tumbling. She must have jerked at my throw, causing her to spin too. Take that, bitch! I’m the only one up here with bullet radar.
Her own grin widened as she stabilized and drifted even closer. She raised her weapon, then glanced down toward the ground. She stopped smiling, dropped her weapon, and popped her chute.
Shit! How close were we to the ground? Instead of looking at a possibly sabotaged altimeter, I used the position of the moon and the sun to determine our height. Eight hundred feet? No time to worry about Ariel. Time to deploy.
Mike and I were floating head-to-head. He had thrown off the momentary confusion from the near miss on his helmet, and his eyes were clear.
I reached for my chute release and he duplicated the motion. I realized my hyper-speed had faded, exhausted from overuse.
We pulled our chute releases simultaneously and braced for the jerk.
But they didn’t open.
2
Seconds from a collision with Earth, I desperately gathered magical energy, forcing it into the air below us. With no time to calculate, I forced the air to rush upward at hurricane speed. I had once stopped a runaway car this way, and as the force of the wind blew us back into the air, I regretted not perfecting that spell when I’d had the chance.
Luck was with us. We didn’t get blown apart, we didn’t get blown hundreds of feet into the air, and we didn’t smash into the ground. Instead, we bounced as if on a trampoline and came
