Before I could compose myself, Stanis’s wings and claws were all around me, grabbing me as he spun my body around in midair to face him. I forced my own wings back to life, pressing them between us, the tips driving against his shoulders.
Stanis’s eyes met mine, and there was anger in them.
“Why would you do this?” he shouted. “I warned you against telling me where Alexander’s secret lay. Now you force my hand to treat you like my enemy. I do not understand.”
Hurt rose within me, and I used it to fuel my efforts, flexing my wings to break his hold on me. I don’t think he expected such strength out of me, and, truthfully, I didn’t either, but with my emotions running high, my will was strong, and I pushed away from him, his claws losing their purchase on me. With one giant swoop of my wings, I shot myself above Stanis.
“I can’t stand seeing you like this,” I said. “You’re not yourself. I don’t know who you have become, but I won’t be afraid of you. I won’t.”
“But you should be,” he said, rising to catch the tip of one of my wings in his clawed hand. Stanis flapped his own, sending the two of us spinning in a circle. He closed his fist into the structure of my wing, his claws sinking into it until the tip crumbled apart in his hands.
Broken but free, the centrifugal force of my damaged wing sent me spinning up and away from him. I fought to focus, dropping my count.
Keeping a steady rhythm wouldn’t help me fly right at present. What I needed was stability, and up there that meant spreading my wings as far as they could go and steadying them. With the tip of one wing gone, I found myself, despite my efforts, slowly slipping into a descending arc back toward Stanis. The physics of flight were winning, whether it be magic-powered or no.
“Do you see the ease with which I can break you?” he shouted up at me. “You are far more delicate and fragile than that. Do not make me hurt you. Give me the secrets I have come for.”
“Sorry,” I said, pulling my wings in close to me, immediately plummeting toward him. “But I can’t. And either I save you here and now, or I go down trying.”
Stanis might have far more experience with flight, but what I hoped for was that he was far less equipped to deal with falling—especially since I was going to be the cause of it.
I dove straight for him, entirely giving up on controlling my flight and pressing my wings around me into a protective shell. I fell, and with the bulk of my wings sitting as deadweight, I fell fast. I slammed into Stanis. The impact had all the force of an auto accident, and despite bracing myself, my teeth came down hard on my tongue, the fresh and coppery taste of blood filling my mouth.
Focusing past that, I popped my wings open and entwined them with Stanis’s own. The strength in Stanis’s wings was superior; I felt that. In a slugfest, I’d probably be a smudged red spot on the side of a building already, but I had two things going for me.
Surprise was still on my side, first by using my new set of wings and actually engaging Stanis in aerial combat. There was no way he had been prepared for that.
The other was that at that moment, my basic knowledge of physics and gravity were my best friends. Even if Stanis was stronger than me, it didn’t matter in midtumble. If he couldn’t spread his wings, he couldn’t fly, and as long as I concentrated on keeping mine tangled with his, the strength in his couldn’t crush me like a bug.
The pride in my small bit of triumph, however, didn’t have much of a shelf life. We were, after all, falling out of the night sky at an alarming and accelerating rate. I needed to act, and immediately.
We were locked together, tumbling, Stanis trying to force my wings away from his, his claws tearing larger and larger chunks out of them. I had to keep mine in motion swirling just out of Stanis’s reach to minimize the damage, but there was another problem.
The roof was coming up fast, and I was relieved to see Caleb’s now visible X in fresh orange spray paint marking the target zone. If I wasn’t careful, I was going to be the one hitting it first, with Stanis’s entire weight coming down on top of me.
The tips of my wings shot forward and wrapped themselves just behind Stanis’s shoulders, near the base of his own wings. What I needed was leverage
Instead of wrestling with Stanis and fighting against his wings, I used his body as an anchor to shift my position around. Using the harness I wore as a focal point, I steered my body out of the danger zone by rolling to my left, pulling our tumble into another revolution. I shifted to my far right to compensate for the spin of our turn, so that Stanis would take the full brunt of the impact. Only in the last seconds did I attempt to disengage my wings from Stanis, hoping to catch a bit of air with them like an emergency parachute.
And while that seemed like a great plan, Stanis apparently had another, refusing to disengage his own wings from mine. I braced for impact with the rooftop. This wasn’t going to be pretty, not at the speed we were falling.
Thankfully, Caleb had pulled off his part of the plan. Stanis and I hit the X, but instead of crashing against the roof, the stone gave way like freshly poured concrete.
Hitting the surface jarred my whole body with pain, but the roof was more trampoline-y than stone had any right to be. The worst of the blow came from the impact of my flesh scraping against the hard stone of Stanis’s body, his wings finally going slack as the two of us sank down into the liquid stone.
The first time I had seen Caleb pull this arcane trick of his, I had lost a pair of boots in Alexander’s guild hall. With its happening in large scale, I was happy to have it save my life.
I went to moan, only to find my nose and mouth weren’t breathing air. This semiliquid stone went deeper than I had imagined it would, and my face had become submerged in its soupy, gluelike substance. Panicking, I struggled to pull myself out of it, praying that I wasn’t still too firmly entwined with Stanis’s wings.
My head broke the surface, my mouth gaping wide as I took my first free gulp of air, arms flailing. I fought to get my legs under me, pressing against Stanis’s submerged body to help me stand, but it was like trying to get out of quicksand while wearing a burlap sack. My own wings only added to my troubles in finding balance and keeping my footing.
Fingers clamped down over my wrist, and I screamed.
“Easy,” Caleb said, trying to pull me out of the liquid stone from where he stood safely on solid roof a foot or so away. “I don’t want to get pulled into that.”
“I’m covered in it,” I said, barely moving. “Did you have to make so big a pool of it?”
“We only had one shot to catch Stanis,” he said. He rocked himself back farther, and I started to move. “I didn’t want to miss our opportunity, even if it meant depleting our remaining Kimiya.”
I stopped and looked up at him, wiping the liquid stone away from my eyes. “We’re out of it now?” I asked.
“Almost,” he said. “I saved just enough to complete the rest of our plan, but essentially, yeah.”
“Shit,” I said, standing still knee deep in the liquid stone.
“You okay?”
“All things considered?” I said, doing a quick physical inventory, taking stock of the aches and pains of my body in all this. I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Good,” he said, and started pulling me out once again.
Slowly, I came free, the liquid stone running from my body and my damaged wings back into the pool below. I couldn’t help but notice some of it was the color of my blood. My own set of wings, still partially intact, drooped against me as I concentrated on my footing. When I was finally out of the pool, I let go of Caleb’s hand and turned to assess the situation.