Burn the Night by Jocelynn Drake Page A

finally in need of meeting Our Liege. I could only hope that someone with extensive years of experience and power would know exactly how one took on a god and maybe survived to tell the tale.

    Eight

    R owe was struggled to keep pace with me. Shifting my wings to the right, I lowered onto a branch, catching the tree trunk with my left hand. The branch groaned and creaked beneath my feet but held. I turned back and watched for Rowe to catch up. Summoning up my powers, I lifted my free hand palm open toward him. A fresh gust of wind not only pushed him in my direction, but also lifted him higher in the air.

    Part of our ability to fly came from magic and being able to control the wind. The iron collar around Rowe’s neck was inhibiting his ability to control the winds, leaving me to assist him at regular intervals. He wasn’t happy about the arrangement, his muttered curses carried to me on the same wind.
    I could only shake my head. There was no way I could trust him without the collar. I had little doubt he would slit my throat and then be on his way in a flash otherwise, though I wasn’t sure he would run in the opposite direction of Aurora, even after encountering Greenwood’s daughters.

    “Why are you in such a hurry?” Rowe demanded when he drew close to me.

    Pulling my wings in for a second, I bent my legs before pushing off the tree and launching myself into the air. The wind swarmed beneath me as I threw out my wings again so I lifted higher, well above the treetops. The full moon was fading slowly, but it still painted the earth below with a silvery light that glistened over small pockets of snow dotting the mountains we were headed through.

    “We have someone that we need to talk to before we reach Cynnia.” I stretched out my arms and spread my fingers, enjoying the feel of the cold wind threading between them. “You’re not my only assignment.”

    “Who?”

    I ignored his question as I scanned the ground for a break in the thick pine trees that covered the earth below us. “There.”

    I looked over to find Rowe glaring at me, and for a moment I wondered if he would argue with me.

    To my surprise, he shifted his wings and started to slowly circle so he could land in the clearing I’d indicated. I followed behind him, giving him a wide enough berth so I would not land on his heels.

    The ground was soft beneath my feet from the melting of the last of the snows and from the recent rain that had passed through the area. Folding in my wings, I knelt down and embedded my fingers deep into the earth. I cocked my head to one side and listened with all of my senses. There were other naturi in the area, a lot of them, from the animal clan. We were very close to where we needed to be. In fact, if we weren’t being watched and followed already, we would be very soon.

    “Where are we?” Rowe demanded. I looked up to find him standing with his hands on his hips, his wings now missing. It was still hours before sunrise, meaning we could still travel by air for quite a while before I called a halt. But he could already tell that I planned to travel on by foot. I didn’t pull us out of the air unless it was absolutely necessary. For us, it was both safer and quicker to travel by air. On land, we became the target of too many other creatures I was hoping to avoid until we reached our next destination.

    Standing, I brushed off my hands on the legs of my pants before hooking a lock of hair behind my ear. “We’re within the Smoky Mountains. We need to head in that direction.” I pointed off toward the southeast, deeper into the woods and away from any signs of human life. There were only dots of humanity within the mountains, and all spaced far enough apart that we could tread through the region without attracting their attention even if we weren’t cloaked.

    “We’re walking?”

    “For now.”

    “So we’re headed into animal clan territory,” he stated, frowning over at me as I started to walk