After catching her breath, she saw the dimly lit helicopter directly ahead but much lower, and facing away from the dragon, tilted toward the ground. It moved toward the darkened area of McLaughlin, back to the overpass. Once it approached the ground, its spotlight was illuminated again.
Mara was aghast. Are those people insane? That thing looks like a little bug, and it’s about to be swallowed whole by this flying lizard I’m riding.
Tucking its wings to its sides, the dragon let gravity take over, as it dove toward the helicopter.
Mara’s eyes widened, and she screamed into the wind, “No, Ping! You have got to stop this!” She tightened her grip on the dragon’s spine and stomped on its back, hoping to distract it somehow. Kicking at the scales, she gritted her teeth and screamed in frustration. It didn’t flinch. They continued to dive.
As they approached, the dragon swerved to the left, and Mara could see the silhouettes of two men in the cabin of the helicopter. Both wore headsets and were looking down at the street, not at the approaching menace from above. Mara fell to her knees and wedged her fingers beneath the scales of the creature’s back. Closing her eyes, she said under her breath, “Sorry, Ping.”
Arcs of blue lightning shot out from her hands, wrapped around the torso of the dragon and spidered across its wings, sending spasms throughout its body. A scream of agony tore through the night, as the dragon convulsed in midair, its course now flying wide of the helicopter but still heading toward the ground. Its body tumbled into a sideways roll with its wings flopping uselessly with each turn. The spinning flung Mara into the air and a passing wing smacked her back toward the dragon’s body. She tumbled freely along its flanks as it fell from the sky. At some point, she grabbed a bony protuberance and held on, not really having a sense of what was happening, apart from falling.
Buffeted by a wind whipping past her body, Mara could feel her heart pounding in her head and a heavy pressure built up in her chest. She gasped for air, feeling consciousness slip away. For a second she felt weightless, and then the tumbling stopped. She lifted her head from the dragon and found herself staring into lines of headlights. Horns honked. Cars crashed. They flew just feet above the roofs of the cars backed up on what she presumed was McLoughlin, though it could have been another street. Somewhere a woman screamed, but that sound faded as they gained altitude.
They disappeared into the clouds.
CHAPTER 35
Sam jogged out from under the overpass, and watched the dragon run down the road and leap into the air. He turned on his heel and called back to the pile of rubble, “Mara! Are you out here?”
Bohannon walked up, carrying a flashlight. He swept the roadway and the shoulder, making a point of looking behind mounds of debris scattered everywhere. No sign of Mara.
Sam pointed to the intact portion of the overpass on the right side of the road and said, “I think at some point she was up there. The lightning that hit the dragon was coming from above, and it wasn’t coming from the clouds.”
Bohannon pointed the light at the collapsed section of the overpass and ran it up toward the balustrade of the intact portion. “I’m not following you. What does Mara have to do with the lightning?”
“You saw her earlier. She was zapping it, you know, with bolts of electricity.”
“About that …”
“The dragon was perched up there, then it was down here. She must have swapped places with it at some point, after it became unfrozen.”
“Swapped places?” Bohannon repeated.
“She can move things, swap the locations of things. Like she moved all of us under the overpass before the dragon came crashing down.”
“She swapped us?” Bohannon asked. “With what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she got panicked and just moved us. She really doesn’t know what she’s doing half the time. She can do more than she’s willing to believe.”
Bohannon continued sweeping the overpass. “I don’t understand how all this comes together—the lightning, moving things, freezing things.”
“Mara’s a progenitor. She has the ability to alter reality, but she doesn’t really have a firm grasp on the whole thing, so she has this weird mix of stuff she does, mostly when she gets freaked-out. It makes sense when Ping explains it. You’ll need to ask him.”
“So I should ask the dragon.”
“Probably best to wait until