When you were out of options, you had no choice but to make it work.
His biggest problem remained missing the back lawn. There was only one clearing on the mountain. Everything else? Trees that were going to chew them up.
He needed to be lower, like now.
“Brace yourself!”
Even though it was counterintuitive, he shoved the drive shaft forward, and pointed them at the ground. There was an instant spike in speed, and he prayed that he could recover from it when he got into the strike zone. And shit, the intense shaking got even worse, to the point that it made him dizzy as hell, and his forearms stung from holding on to the wheel.
Faster. Closer. Faster. Louder. Closer.
And then it was time. The house and gardens were up ahead, and coming at them at a dead fucking run.
He pulled up hard, and the new velocity gave them a brief lift.
Over the house…
“Get ready!” he screamed at the top of his lungs.
As slow-mo took over, everything was magnified: the sounds, the seconds, the sting in his eyes as he stared straight ahead, the feel of his body thrusting back into the seat—
Fuck. He didn’t have any kind of harness on.
He hadn’t bothered with it. Too much else to think of.
Dumb-ass—
At that very instant, they made contact with something. Hard. The plane bounced up, hit something else, ricocheted off-kilter, bounced again. All the while, his head smacked into the panels above him, and his ass got spanked by the seat, and his—
Cue the paint mixer.
The next phase of the landing from hell was a shake-rattle-and-roll that nearly threw him out of the cockpit. This was the ground—had to be—and damn, they were going fast. Lights whipped by the side windows, everything going Studio 54 until he was practically blinded. And given which side the strobe lighting was on, he figured they were in the garden—but they were running out of space.
Wrenching the wheel, he sent them into a tailspin, hoping that the same laws of physics that applied to out-of-control cars could translate here: no brakes, limited field, and the only way to slow their momentum was drag coefficient.
Centrifugal force slammed him against the side of the cockpit, and snow pelted his face; then something sharp.
Shit, they weren’t slowing down at all.
And that twenty-foot-tall, eighteen-inch-wide security wall was coming up fast.
Talk about your full stops….
TWENTY-ONE
Blay dematerialized to the mansion the instant the last slayer in that clearing was sent back to the Omega. With Qhuinn up in the air with Z, there was no reason to waste time waiting for another squadron to make an appearance.
Although really, like there was anything anyone could do to help the pair of them?
Re-forming in the courtyard, he—
Directly above him, making no sound at all, that godforsaken airplane blocked out the moon.
Holy shit, they’d made it—and goddamn, they were so close, he felt like he could reach up and touch the undercarriage of the Cessna.
The stone silence was not a good sign, however….
The first impact came from the tops of the arborvitae hedge that confined the garden. The plane bounced off the pointed stops, caught some air, and then went out of sight.
Blay dematerialized around to the back terrace just in time to see the Cessna slam into the snow, the crash like a fat man doing a belly flop in a pool, great waves of white kicking up all over the place. And then the aircraft turned into the biggest Weedwacker known to man, the combination of its steel body and too-fast velocity ripping through stands of fruit trees, and beds of flowers that had been secured for the winter, and shit, even the lineup of bird fountains.
But fuck all that. He didn’t care if the whole place got regraded, as long as that plane stopped…before the retaining wall.
For a split second, he was of half a mind to materialize in front of the thing and put his hands out, but that was crazy. If the Cessna didn’t seem even annoyed at the marble statuary it was now mowing down, it wasn’t going to give two shits about a living, breathing male—
For no apparent reason, all that out-of-control began to spin, the wing facing Blay swinging around as if Qhuinn was trying to steer. The fishtail was the perfect move—it went without saying that there were no brakes, and assuming the corkscrew stayed tight, it would give them more area to lose forward momentum in.
Shit, they were getting really close to the retaining wall—
Sparks lit up the night, along with a metal-on-stone scream that announced that “really close to the wall” had been replaced with “right up against”—but thanks to the wrenching turn Qhuinn had pulled off, they had skidded into a parallel position, rather than a head-on one.
Blay started running in the direction of the light show, and as he did, others joined him, a whole cast of people falling in line. There was no stopping this, but they could damn well be on hand when things—