Ensnared (Splintered, #3)(75)
Jeb’s jaw falls. He half laughs. “Using your role as the Red Queen for a bargaining chip. That’s ingenious.”
I push aside his dark bangs. “I have great potential as a diplomat, yeah?” The teasing is a hollow ploy to cover that I’m struggling to breathe without my chest hurting. I have to get to Red. Make her undo everything she’s done.
Jeb smiles—a genuine Jebediah Holt grin, complete with dimples. Such a beautiful distraction. “I love you, skater girl.”
The nickname winds through me, comforting and sweet. I smooth my palm across his shoulder. “Say it again.”
“I love you.”
“No . . . the other part,” I plead.
He pulls my body to his, so our mouths come together in a warm, soft kiss. “Skater girl,” he whispers against me, brushing hair from my face.
We kiss again—his touch no longer illusory but confident and urgent. He lays me back, covering my body with his delicious weight as he teases my mouth open. I hold his face to savor the movements of his jaw, the flavor of his skin captured in droplets left by the ocean, the feel of his crooked incisor against my tongue, reacquainting my favorite parts of him.
“I missed you, Al.” His kisses trail my chin, my neck, and down the center of my collarbone, following traces of dried water. The splitting fire behind my sternum soothes to tolerable under his lips. I sigh and arch into him, but he freezes.
“Shh. Do you hear that?” he murmurs.
A cacophony builds from somewhere in the distance across the ocean’s lapping tide: thrashing wings and screeching wails. I lift my head as a flock of condor-size flying beasts soars toward us. Goon birds are straddled atop their backs, wearing diving helmets that look like brass gumball machines with glass viewing holes.
“Bats!” Jeb shouts, rolling off. “Get to the lighthouse, now!”
Carroll’s rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle blinks through my mind, but the giant creatures flying toward us are the antithesis to all things whimsical and little. And they look nothing like tea trays.
Fierce gusts rip through our hair. I choke on a puff of blowing sand. Jeb pushes me behind him the instant a bat swoops down. Sleek as crimson leather, the mutant creature lifts off, carrying Jeb into the sky with its talons.
An eagle-faced goon opens the glass window on his helmet and laughs from his seat atop the bat’s back. “Easy as catching sunning snails.”
“You fool. It’s the girl Manti wants!” another one shouts from his winged perch. “And remember, she’s to be kept intact!”
“Then I’d say we got here in the nick of time,” blurts a chicken-beaked goon crudely. His compatriots howl with laughter before turning their airborne mounts toward me.
“Jeb!” I scream.
“Get to the lighthouse!” he yells from up high as he wrestles the claws curled around him.
No way. I release my wings. As I launch toward Jeb, three bats swoop at me from different directions. So tuned in to their target, their goon riders don’t notice each other. The closest bat dips a swanlike neck. The center of its starfish-shaped muzzle opens, thrusting out a cluster of six-foot long, slimy tentacles lined with sharp fangs. One of the teeth snatches my diary necklace and breaks the cord.
Shrieking, I toss out my hand to pry the string off the bat’s fanged tongue, but the bat swallows the tiny book. The other two goon birds veer deathly close. I dive at the last minute. The bats collide and plunge into the ocean with their riders. Flattening out my wings along a current of wind, I skim over the water and ascend.
Silhouetted against the starry sky, Jeb breaks free of his captor and hangs on to a talon while calling upon a wave. The water lifts high enough for him to drop into place. He slides down a slanted plane of foam toward me, catches me around the waist, and skates us both to the lighthouse’s entrance.
We rush inside and slam the door, locking it behind us.
Upstairs, Dad is still sleeping. Jeb and I inch toward the porthole. Amid screeches and thundering wings, our tower shakes. Bits of the wall crumble away, forming a wide crack. More bats gather at the opening, trying to dig through the rock. The sky thickens as they circle overhead, taking turns attacking our sanctuary.
The beacon flashes across them in intervals, spotlighting hideous tentacles and veined wings. More and more holes appear in the tower as the walls fail to withstand the collisions.
Gusts from giant wings filter through the openings. The curtains swirl around Dad’s canopied bed and my bare skin chills.
Another bat hammers the tower. I struggle to keep balance. “We’re outnumbered!”
“Not even close,” Jeb answers calmly. His eyes sparkle with netherling sorcery. With a sweep of his fingers through the porthole, grainy cyclones stir up from the ground surrounding the lighthouse. “We have regiments as innumerable as the sands.”
Inspired by his ingenuity, I try my hand. “And arsenals as uncountable as the stars.” Using the trick Morpheus taught me, I reassign Jeb’s night sky a new task: guided missiles.
The stars careen in the direction of our attackers like giant flaming rocks, herding them toward Jeb’s sand funnels. Several goons avoid the cyclones by diving off their bats. They flap deteriorated wings across the ocean in hopes of escape. My star missiles catch them, ripping through feathered chests and knocking off helmeted heads. All that’s left are their corpses—bright orange cinders and black ash afloat atop the frothy waves.