And maybe that wasn’t the best thing to think about right now.
Anyway, the point of this experiment was not crashing into the ground. Her instincts should kick in, her procedural memory should take over. All right. She filled her lungs with a deep breath, and gave a small prayer that it wouldn’t be smashed out of her at the bottom.
Gathering her body, using the tree trunk as a spring, she leapt out over the clearing . . . and began to fall. Quickly. Oh, shit. Something needed to happen here, her wings needed to pop out and—
The muscles of her back suddenly locked. Ash cried out in surprise. Sensation exploded through her, strange and new, in places she’d never felt anything before. Places that hadn’t been there before. Cold air rushed over wide expanses of skin. New muscles strained against the onslaught of the wind. From the corner of her eye, she saw one of her wings. Black and leathery, it stretched over a thin frame, like a bat’s wing.
How did she move them? Why weren’t they flapping? Ash rolled her shoulder, tried to flex the new muscles. Pain ripped along the frame. She’d pushed something the wrong way, and like a fragile kite folding beneath a strong wind, her wing seemed to collapse. Unbalanced, she flipped over, went into a flat spin.
Oh, God.
Ash slammed into the snow. White erupted around her, a bit of a cushion but not enough. The impact smacked the breath from her lungs in a painful slap, a punch to the belly, and she didn’t want to fly anymore but just curl up and not move again for a while, but she couldn’t even manage that yet. Everything still spun and she couldn’t quite focus.
Now the cold surrounded her. The pain wasn’t the same but she could almost hear the screaming—
No. Not now. She wasn’t going there.
More rhythmic thuds. Nicholas? These were different, not the sound of an axe, but boots smashing through the snow toward her. Dizzy shock began to fade into awareness.
Strong hands gripped her shoulders. “Ash!”
Her wings had already vanished again. Moving still hurt too much. So did breathing. She groaned an answer instead, and Nicholas swore.
“I’m going to turn you over. Tell me if I hurt you.”
He didn’t hurt her. Everything just hurt. He pulled her against him, half-propped up against his leg, and she opened her eyes. Tiny snow clumps clung to her lashes, framing her view with white flakes before they melted from the heat of her skin. His face taut, Nicholas brushed more snow from her hair, her jacket.
“What the hell were you doing? Trying to kill yourself?”
“No.” Her voice came out thin and hoarse, but her chest was working again. “Trying to fly. But I only managed the worst belly flop ever.”
He didn’t laugh. His lips thinned, paled with anger. “Do you have any idea what it was like watching that? I can’t even—God.”
His fingers tightened in her hair. He stared into her eyes, wild emotions chasing across his expression, each one too fleeting for Ash to catch.
Then he bent his head, and captured her mouth in a kiss.
Surprise held Ash motionless, then flooded away the pain in a sweet rush. Oh, she’d waited for this. Wanted this. His lips parted over hers, searching out her response. Shuddering, she opened for him.
He swept in, taking possession. Oh, God. This was nothing like his first kiss. That had been controlled, and this was all searing hunger unleashed with teeth and tongue. Ash’s fingers curled into his sleeves, holding on as his need fed hers, until she was moaning low in her throat, desperate for more.
But he must have mistaken the sound for pain. He lifted his head—and no, she couldn’t grab him, pull him back down. She couldn’t follow him up and take what she needed. And now that she’d had it, now that she knew the feel of him, the sweetness, the heat, only the fear of death and breaking the damned Rules held her back. She’d have crawled across the frozen field for more of this.
She could only ask. “More.”
“No. I shouldn’t have—” Nicholas broke off. Looking almost shaken, he drew back. “I’ll help you inside. Are you still hurting?”
“Not really,” she said.
He pulled her up, so close, and when she looked up, the world stilled again. Would he kiss her? She watched the struggle play across his face, the war between what he wanted and what he believed.
Belief won. He didn’t put distance between them this time, but he might as well have. His expression hardened—not cold now, but solid . . . and effective.
Now she was hurting again, pain centered near her heart. Throat aching, she started back to the cabin.
Nicholas trudged through the snow beside her. “So what the hell were you doing?”
“We’re here to train. But if I’m going to do it right, I need to fly.”
“So you just decided to jump?”
“Yes. I needed to be fast, so we worked that out. Now I need to know how to make my wings appear, and if I can force them through some survival instinct, maybe eventually I’ll just be able to control them—just like I can be fast whenever I like now.”
“So you’ll keep jumping?”
“Yes.”
“God.” A heavy breath clouded the air. “Tell me next time, then. So I can be there.”
“I would have this time, but I thought you’d try to stop me.” His smile was grim. “I probably would have.”
They reached the porch. Nicholas paused to stomp the snow off his boots. Ash’s were already clean and dry. She didn’t know how they did that. Sometimes she thought about what she’d like them to be, then looked down, and they were.
“There’s something else,” she said, and waiting for him to glance up. “They weren’t familiar.”
“What weren’t?”
“My wings. They’re completely new to me.”
He frowned. “Do you mean you just don’t remember—”
“No. There’s familiar, and there’s not. The wings were not familiar.” And not in the same way the Boyles’ picture had been unfamiliar. There had been no surprise when she’d seen them, no sense of something new. “And I was falling, falling . . . but I didn’t know how to fly. It’s not in my procedural memory. Just as fighting isn’t, even though I supposedly fought in a war in Heaven. You’d think that would leave a stamp on someone’s memory, wouldn’t it?”
Nicholas’s brows drew together. “So you don’t remember that. All right.”
“No. I’m saying that being a demon is new to me. How can I put in a security code or drive but not know how to fly? It doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t,” he agreed, but she could see by the cold front coming in that the explanation that first occurred to him was: If it doesn’t make sense, then maybe the demon is lying. Even if he did agree, even if he believed her, Nicholas was reminding himself that he shouldn’t.
Disappointment weighed on her chest. God, she was an idiot. Disappointment meant expectations, and that meant she’d expected something different from him.
That had to be stupider than jumping from a tree.
With a sigh, she left him standing on the porch and pushed open the cabin door, but stopped halfway through. She faced him again.
The expression he wore was familiar. Battling himself again. Well, she wasn’t stupid enough to get involved in that fight.