At the end of that time I noticed I was falling very very fast toward a flat glimmering surface a long, long way below me. I was reasonably sure the part where it didn’t hurt was going to come to an abrupt end in the near future.
Colin twisted in my arms, screaming outrage as he writhed. An elbow caught me in the nose and I nearly let go, then held on tighter. For some reason dropping him seemed careless, even as he flailed and shrieked. “It’s gonna be okay,” I yelled. The air tasted thick and sour, too muggy and too hot, even though we were making our own wind by falling through it.
He gave me a black-eyed look of unmitigated hatred, pulling his lips back from his teeth to hiss, more like a cat than a snake. “It’ll be fine,” I yelled again. I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince, but I suspected of the two of us, I was the one concerned about our future well-being.
Which led me to wonder what the hell I thought I was going to do next. The glittering surface below was slowly getting larger—I was pretty sure it was Lake Washington, although I hadn’t ever seen it from quite this vantage before—and I wondered how high up we were and how long it would take us to hit the water, and whether terminal velocity gave any kind of softening on the odds of survival if you hit liquid instead of solid earth. It was amazing the kinds of things that just flowed right through my mind when the other option to think about was impending death.
Colin screamed again, a long thin sound that had no business coming from a human throat. His whole body bucked in my arms, wrenching itself rigid before it softened, as if the bones were melting out from under his skin. I shuddered and took my eyes away from the looming lake to try to calm him, and instead let out a hoarse yell and let him go despite my best intentions.
Hewas melting, skin molting and blending into black scales, the rage in his eyes flattened by the deadly dullness of the serpent’s gaze. His body threaded longer, arms melding to his sides, legs growing together, and his hair became wild with tiny Medusa-tentacles. Spires ripped from his spine, glistening and deadly with poison, until the boy was gone entirely and I fell beside the serpent.
It flared wings, short and stubby, not nearly enough to lift its bulk through the air. Still, somehow, its fall slowed as its body thickened and lengthened, until it was the colossal monster I’d first met in the Dead Zone. I was still falling at a gravity-dictated rate of speed, but the serpent was above me now, black scales picking up sunlight and glancing the brightness through my eyes.
If I hadn’t promised once upon a time that it could eat me, I might’ve thought it was beautiful. As if the thought reminded the thing, it lunged forward, snapping massive jaws shut mere inches from my head.
Given the choice between being eaten alive and smashing at a billion miles an hour into Lake Washington, I decided smashing sounded good. I tucked myself into a pike, then straightened out so my head was pointed down and my body was streamlined. Maybe I could out-fall the thing. Anything was worth trying.
An unexpectedly powerful buffet of wind crashed into me, ignoring wholesale my attempts to streamline myself It knocked me back up into the air, far enough and fast enough that the serpent’s second lunge missed by yards instead of inches. For one startling instant, the whole thing felt very familiar, like every falling dream I’d ever dreamed had just come real.
Only it wasn’t a dream I was reminded of.
I arched back, closing my eyes against the warm wind, and let the thunderbird’s golden liquid fire burst free from my chest.
CHAPTER 33
I turned inside-out, my consciousness folding upward into the creature that I gave birth to. Disorientation and pain swept over me, bewildering in a muffled way. I felt like I’d turned a somersault that placed me firmly in a new body and put someone else in the driver’s seat. That was good: if I’d been in control of the thunderbird’s body, I’d be plummeting toward the lake at record speeds. Instead, massively powerful wings clapped against the muggy air so heavily I could hear thunder as I climbed higher into the sky.
I turned on a wingtip once I’d gained enough altitude, watching the world spiral below me in vivid colors that went beyond my second sight and into something purely inhuman. It was like discovering I’d been wearing sunglasses that’d been draining the life out of everything I looked at. Even through waves of heat rising off the earth, the leaves were more than just the emerald that gave Seattle its nickname. They had depth, wavering into gem-clear colors that made my hands—never mind that I didn’t seem to have any—ache with the desire to touch them. The sky around me was the same, so pure a blue I felt like I should draw my wings in for fear of being sliced apart on the clarity of air.
Amusement that wasn’t my own welled up from deep within the broad chest. Even that was so sharp it throbbed, making my own experiences and feelings shallow by comparison. Great. The thunderbird thought I was funny, with my tiny human emotions and my tiny human brain.
Disapproval, like another thunderclap. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to belittle myself while sharing flesh with mythical Native American archetypes. Morrison would approve.
I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what the hell we’re doing here? I asked internally, afraid to try speaking. God knows what might come out of the thunderbird’s beak if I did.
Fond exasperation, like you might feel toward a recalcitrant but cute child. This was not making me feel any better about myself. I added a hopeful, Please?, on the principle that people liked it when I was polite. At least, people who weren’t Morrison.
I wished I would stop thinking about him.
Memory hammered into me.
It was becoming familiar, this scene. I wondered how many more times I could see it played out from a new point of view, and then realized I’d never seen this actual moment before. The colors were still painfully vivid, white sun boiling cold in a pale blue sky, the frozen earth blinding with glare that made me squint until my eyes ached with the effort. No human saw in those colors, even if I seemed to be seeing through human eyes. I recognized the body I was in, but not the clarity of vision.
I stood in a power circle, holding Virissong’s hand. Nervousness bubbled in my stomach where I was used to feeling the ball of waiting power, and I clutched his fingers a little harder. He gave me a brief smile, squeezed my hand, and stepped away, moving into the absolute center of the circle.
Confidence fought the sickness in my belly. Virissong had spoken with the spirits and would save our people. I drew in a deep breath of cold air, straightening my shoulders, suddenly determined to do him proud. He had done things only the shamans could: spoken to the spirits, built a power circle that would protect us when the worlds opened up to give the spirits bodies that might be killed. My faith was born of love, and it warmed me even against the biting wind.
A spark of hope flew through me. Virissong hadn’t been born to the shamanic line. Perhaps I could learn to sense the magics that he’d learned, and stand with him as an equal. I saw nothing when I looked at the power circle, nothing more than lines etched in the ground. I took a few quick steps to the edge, brushing my fingers through the air.
Disappointment burst the nervousness in my stomach. I felt nothing, though Virissong swore that magic poured from the circle, protecting us. Only the true shamans among the People were meant to feel it. My shoulders slumped as I stepped away, knowing that pride would never buy the ability to sense magic.
Virissong’s hand touched my hair. I looked up with a sad smile that faded into uncertainty as I met his eyes. Their warmth was gone, the laughing brown that I knew so well drained all to hard, flat black. He saw my smile go and touched my cheek, lowering his head until his mouth almost brushed mine. “Sacrifice,” he murmured, “is the nature of power. I loved you, Nakaytah.”