“Stay close to them,” Zenobia suggested.
“I will.”
And then they were off, Zenobia’s stomach swooping as they fell into a shallow dive—keeping the airship’s bulk between them and the other flyers, she realized. Hiding until they gained more distance from the battleship.
She glanced back. Oh, dear God. The flames had completely engulfed the upper decks. Smoke billowed around the airship’s balloons in an angry cloud, almost obscuring their white envelopes. As if a giant hand had snapped off the tip of the ship, the bow had broken away from the hull and hung suspended over the water by the forward balloon’s tethering cables.
In the ocean below, aviators in lifeboats rowed from beneath the hovering battleship. Silvery, deflated balloons floated on the swells around them. Some of the flyers had been shot down, then. How many more were there?
Her gaze searched the air. At least four or five, their shapes barely visible through the smoke.
Then not-so-barely visible.
Zenobia’s grip tightened on Mara’s hips. “Flyers are coming this way!”
Though not in a straight line toward them. The three flyers at the head were bobbing and weaving—though the two behind held a steadier course.
As if they were giving chase, and the three ahead were fleeing.
Gunshots cracked. One of the retreating flyers’s balloon collapsed, the silvery envelope crumpling in on itself. Engine whining, the machine dropped into a spinning dive, the metal frame flashing beneath the bright sun. The marauder’s scream scraped terror down Zenobia’s spine, then he slammed into the water and the silence was even more horrifying.
But better him than her friends.
“There’s still four!” she cried out when Mara banked right, her gun in hand. Cooper did the same—intending to face the flyers down rather than risk a bullet in the back, Zenobia realized. “But the two behind shot out another’s balloon!”
“I saw,” Mara said. “Hold tight.”
Zenobia did, as tight as she could without restricting the other woman’s movements. Their flyer slowed and turned.
The others were closer now, not coming directly toward Zenobia’s flyer but on a path that would pass by about a hundred yards to their right. The two in front looked just like the other marauders, prepared for flight in goggles and helmets. She’d assumed their pursuers were aviators who’d managed to commandeer the flyers, just as Mara and Cooper had, but they didn’t wear naval uniforms. They weren’t near enough for her to make out their features, just dark hair and white shirts.
The two men in pursuit veered apart, as if flanking their prey. One of the flyers in front turned and shot wildly behind him—then his balloon collapsed, the report of a gunshot echoing through his cry of terror.
The last of the three hunted flyers banked toward them. Arm raised, the pilot leveled his gun in their direction.
Zenobia stiffened, her heart pounding wildly. “Mara?”
“He’s too far away for an accurate shot.” The mercenary’s voice was tense. “But so are we.”
Cooper didn’t seem to care about that. He’d opened fire with both pistols. Maybe hoping for a lucky hit. Behind him, Helene had pressed her face between his shoulders and was desperately waving her handkerchief over her head.
“Come on, you bastard,” Mara muttered. “Just a little closer . . .
Ah
.”
It was like a sigh of pleasure. The hammer of her pistol fell. A puff of smoke accompanied the loud
crack
. The marauder’s face exploded and his body toppled backward, his arms swinging up.
Another
crack
sounded. Not Mara’s or Cooper’s guns. Zenobia had half a second to wonder whether the marauder had managed to get off a shot before Mara’s bullet had killed him or if the squeezing the trigger had been a dying reflex, then the balloon over her head collapsed in a sickening rush of air.
Oh, God.
“Zenobia!” Mara screamed. “We need to jump for Cooper’s—”
Then they were dropping, dropping, but Zenobia had done this before. She and her brother had leapt out of balloons so many times, because he’d needed the excitement, and she’d needed to imagine that it was her father’s airship they were escaping—and that she was free, finally free of his fists and his rules and his locked closets.
She wrapped her arms around Mara’s waist and jumped.
The deflated balloon flipped past them, spinning around and around, and Mara’s weight felt as if it would tear her arm out of its socket when she let go with one hand to yank the lever on the side of her pack.
The glider’s wings snapped open. The frame creaked as the canvas caught air, and Mara was almost ripped out of her grip, but Zenobia held on as the mercenary began to laugh wildly.
Zenobia couldn’t laugh. She could barely breathe. Wind tore at her eyes. Her arms shook with strain. She couldn’t control their direction, there was too much weight and none of it evenly balanced. They descended toward the ocean—but there was nowhere else to go, anyway. At least the landing would be softer than it would have been on the flyer.
Clear turquoise water rolled gently below. She didn’t see any shadows beneath the surface, no monsters of the deep, and she couldn’t believe that she’d ever wanted a glimpse of one.
A flyer engine whined behind them. She couldn’t look around, but wasn’t surprised that Cooper was following.
“Let me go now!” Mara called when they skimmed closer to the water. “It’ll be easier for you to land without me!”
True. And it was only a ten- or fifteen-foot drop.
Letting go was almost as painful as holding on. Her muscles screamed as she eased her arms open, and Mara splashed feet-first into the water.
Zenobia shifted her weight to slowly turn, gliding in a circle back to Mara’s position so that she wouldn’t land too far away from her guard. As it was, she’d probably have to swim until they figured out how to get four people aboard a flyer designed to carry only one.
Swim. Even though her arms were dead things, and she had a heavy bag of gold strapped to her back.
Oh, dear God. Frantically she tried to unbuckle the straps, but her hands were weak and the tension of her weight suspended from the glider prevented her from wriggling out. She pushed at the wing lever and dropped when the wings folded.
The water rushed up, slapping at her feet and her stomach then dragging her down, warmer than she expected, but no less salty and terrifying when it closed over her head. Her skirt tangled around her thrashing legs. A watery buzz filled her ears and the wavering shape of a flyer appeared overhead. Cooper. She just had to reach the surface. She pushed her thumbs under the leather straps at her shoulders, trying to force them off, but they were tight, even tighter now, as if she were still hanging from the glider.
Or being pulled upward. She broke the surface, coughing and grabbing for the flyer’s foot runner.
But that wasn’t Cooper’s boot. Instead of hard brown leather, it was soft and supple, and covered in a fine red dust.
She looked up. Black hair. Dark eyes over high, arching cheekbones. A firm mouth and an angular jaw clenched with effort. He was close, so close, leaning out of his seat and holding her up with his fingers wrapped around the glider’s straps. Then he lifted her out of the water with just one hand, even though she was a tall woman, her pack filled with heavy gold and her skirts soaking wet.
The ocean rained from her dress, splattering his loose trousers and a white tunic streaked with dirt the color of rust. He set her on the runner and slid forward a little, an unspoken invitation to fill the space behind him.
What to do? She looked for Mara. The mercenary was climbing onto another flyer, taking the seat behind the pilot—her rescuer’s companion. Cooper looked on and nodded at Zenobia when she sent him a questioning glance.
Very well, then. She glanced down at the seat. She couldn’t straddle it properly unless her skirts were up by her knees, but she wouldn’t be missish. She yanked them up and swung her leg over, her dress squelching as she sat.
A moment later they rose into the air—heading toward the ironship. Her body stiff, she gripped her rescuer’s sides. This shouldn’t be any different than sitting behind Mara.
But it was.
He was much taller than she. Even sitting, her eyes were only level with the back of his neck. His shoulders were broad, and his thick black hair was tied up in a short knot. With so little room, she had no choice but to press up against him, and he was hard with muscle everywhere they touched—against her breasts, cradled between her inner thighs, beneath her hands. His abdomen was ridged steel against her fingers.
And she was wet. Dripping everywhere, and she’d soaked him through. He had to be just as uncomfortable as she was.
More so. Blood stained his left sleeve. He’d been shot—yet he’d still pulled her from the drink.
With one hand, and a marvelously strong arm.
She’d never been so glad that Helene had taught her a few Nipponese phrases, including expressions of gratitude. “
Arigatou gozaimasu,
” she said against the back of his neck, and hoped that she hadn’t garbled the pronunciation.
His body tensed against hers and he responded with a terse nod.
Well. Now this was awkward.
She leaned back a tiny bit, trying to put a little space between her breasts and his back. Saturated, his tunic was all but transparent. The silk clung to the thick muscle hugging the groove of his spine, revealing a design tattooed across his shoulders, black against smooth brown skin. An animal, she thought, but with too many limbs and a cone-shaped head—
Oh, dear God.
Her stomach clenched into a tight ball. Those weren’t limbs. They were tentacles.
He had a kraken inked across his back.
And she’d seen that tattoo before. Not on a man, but in a letter that her brother had sent in the days when he’d still been smuggling weapons. The tattoo had belonged to one of the most powerful men in the Horde rebellion. Archimedes hadn’t known the man’s real name, only the name the others had called him—a man who was just as ruthless as the creature tattooed across his back, a man who became just as fixated when something attracted his attention, a man who never loosened his grasp.
This was far more adventure than she’d hoped for. She’d only wanted to see a little danger from a distance.
Instead she’d fallen straight into the clutches of the Kraken King.
***
The calm of the battle had given way to fire. Ariq’s arm burned. His blood raced. His flesh hardened. He only had to glance down to see the woman’s leg, smooth and as pale as a fish belly. But he didn’t need to look. The image had been painted behind his eyes.
A yellow ribbon tied the stocking over her left knee. The right stocking had slipped down her calf. Above that was only skin.
Ariq didn’t know if she was bare all the way up, where she cradled him between taut thighs.
He forced himself not to wonder. He forced himself not to feel her slim form against his. He forced himself to forget the sight of her bare skin.
Instead he remembered her expression when she’d jumped from the falling balloon. Serenity. Acceptance. As if her entire life had been leading to that moment and she faced it without fear. Her expression mirrored how Ariq imagined Taka would look before going over the cliffs, and through Ariq’s calm had crashed the thought that, once again, he’d waited too long. He’d left too late. And he’d narrowly avoided the agony of finding his brother’s body only to watch this woman leap to her death.
Then her pack had become a glider. By the relief and gratitude that had burst through Ariq’s heart, it was as if she’d saved both herself and Taka—and saved Ariq from watching his brother die.
It made no sense. Ariq knew it didn’t. He was still grateful to her.
So he didn’t look down—only ahead, his eyes slitted against the wind. In the distance, a sailor on the deck of the ironship waved a yellow flag. They’d spotted him and were inviting him in.
Behind him, the woman shifted her weight. Looking at her companions or at the burning airship.
Zenobia.
The mercenary had shouted her name when their balloon had collapsed.
What sort of woman hired mercenaries to provide additional protection while traveling aboard a military vessel?
Highly skilled mercenaries—and Zenobia their primary concern. They protected the other woman, but every maneuver the mercenaries made had given Zenobia another layer of defense. Even now, the man had positioned his flyer so that he could watch over her, though it exposed the other woman’s back to Taka, who was bringing up the rear. And the female mercenary riding with Taka could cover them both.
So Zenobia was the priority. Or the pack she carried was.
He’d never seen a contraption like it. Brilliantly designed. An emergency glider and waterproof satchel in one. Ariq thought she carried gold in it; not even the water saturating her clothes could account for her weight. But money was easy to come by—and coins didn’t need to be kept in a waterproofed pack.