Page 17 of Dead Drop

We're still moving. Slower, spiraling down through the canopy levels, his wings beating in long controlled strokes. His arms across my chest, his tail around my thighs, the drop still a hundred and sixty feet below my feet.

I drive my elbow back into his ribs. His ribs don't move. I try again, harder, and get the same answer. I go for his jaw with the back of my head and catch something solid. My skull rings.

He shifts his grip exactly enough to prevent it happening again. Nothing else. He doesn't make a sound. He doesn't react.

"Let me go," I say. "Let me go right now, let me?—"

I get one arm free and claw at his forearm. He takes it back without looking.

I fight him. I fight him the whole way down. I try every angle I know—four years in the wasteland, a thorough education in fighting things bigger than me—none of them land, none of themmatter. He keeps descending in long spirals, his wings working above us, my boots kicking at nothing.

His tail finds my neck.

The tip of it. Almost careful, the way something enormous can be almost careful if it decides to try. It presses below my ear and what comes from that point is warmth—fast, spreading, reaching my shoulders before I can name it. Then my arms. Then my hands.

My hands open. The fight goes out of them and stays out.

I tell my hands to close. They don't close. I tell my whole body to keep fighting. My whole body goes quiet.

I'm awake—completely, furiously awake, feeling everything. The wind, his chest against my back, the blood on my lip, the cold rushing air. I can't make a single muscle do anything.

The nectar works on the muscles. I knew that. I know all of this. I was briefed.

His tail uncoils from my thighs and recoils wider, slower, taking its time. It winds from my knees to my hips in three heavy loops—warm, impossibly strong, each coil squeezing just enough to know it could squeeze harder—and settles.

My whole lower half is wrapped in him while his arms hold my chest and his wings hold the sky.

Knowing it is the most useless thing I've ever known.

Five miles east-northeast, my settlement is holding or it isn't. My fighters are on the wall or they're not. I'm the gate commander. I'm the intelligence network. I'm the only person with the full picture of what the Ordained are doing and when. And I am two hundred feet above all of it, held, my body taken by a drug that doesn't know anything about chain of command or what I'm supposed to be doing right now.

There is no move from here that gets me back. I have checked every angle I have. There is nothing.

"You bastard," I say, flat, because I can't get any force behind it. It's still true.

His body is against my back. His loincloth—leather, dark, worn—presses against the small of my back, and below it he's already hard. Hard before we touched.

Hard the moment the wind carried me to him and the switch flipped and he decided. I know it. I don't want to know it. I can't stop.

A hundred and forty feet above his nest now. I can see it below—a hollow in the canopy, wide and deep, lined with furs. That's where this ends. Not on the ground.

His fangs sink into my throat.

The nectar was warmth going quiet. The venom goes inward—goes deep, goes somewhere the nectar never touched. It spreads from the bite and finds every nerve I have and rewires them, all of them, at the same time. I flush hot from scalp to sole. My breath drops into my belly.

Something starts between my hips—thick, building, a pull I have no word for—that I absolutely do not want. Can't stop.

I know what venom does. I've read the briefings. I know exactly what is happening to me.

None of that changes a single thing.

His claws find the collar of my jacket. One pull and it splits down the back and is gone. Both hands at my shirt next—collar to hem, one motion—and that's gone too. Cold air on my chest while we're still spiraling down through canopy levels.

His hands move to my waistband.

"Don't you dare," I say. "I swear to god, I'll?—"

The seam splits hip to thigh. The trousers fall away into the air below us. I'm bare in the canopy wind, tan skin browned darker in places, freckled across my shoulders from the years on the wall. Held open and furious and unable to move.