crumpled overpass. A line of people with flashlights appeared to be making their way forward along the shoulder of the road. The dragon barreled past the stalled cars directly for the helicopter.
Mara tensed, getting ready to strike out at the dragon, when it rolled onto its side. Mara’s feet slipped out from under her, and she dangled in the night sky, nothing between her and the pavement a few hundred feet below. Slowly she felt her grasp slip. Grabbing at the dragon’s hide with her fingernails, she could not gain purchase. Her stomach clenched.
The dragon jerked its head upward, sending a wave through its body that rippled all the way to its tail, a whip snapping at the wind. Mara’s left hand fell away, and her right cramped and trembled as it slipped to the end of the bony spine.
The dragon rolled over onto its back.
And Mara fell.
She watched the dragon fly on without her, as she slowly dropped toward the ground, her mind frozen in the moment, not comprehending her situation. The sound of the helicopter’s blades brought her back to reality, and her eyes flicked in that direction. The dragon plunged toward it, letting out a roar and a column of fire that grazed its fuselage. The tiny craft jogged to the right like a hummingbird, trying to get out of the monster’s path, but it did no good. The dragon corrected its course with the flick of its tail and zeroed in. When it was just a few feet away, the dragon flung open its wings, catching a cushion of air that allowed it to hover before the helicopter. The spotlight at the bottom of the helicopter rotated from the ground and pointed toward the dragon, illuminating the creature splayed in all its monstrous glory.
As Mara plunged, she slowly raised a hand toward the nightmare unfolding above her. She winced and closed her eyes.
The leathery wings of the dragon shimmered in the spotlight, blurred for a moment and melted away in a shower of glittering cubes that caught the wind like confetti. The remains of the creature plummeted below the edge of the spotlight where Mara could no longer see him.
Mara closed her eyes and waited for the inevitable.
But only silence came.
She opened her eyes and realized she no longer felt the wind whipping past her body. Still prone in the air but not falling, she twisted her neck to the right and saw the cluster of abandoned cars on McLaughlin Boulevard. She was suspended about ten feet in the air. Realizing she could no longer hear the helicopter, her head spun around, looking skyward. There it was, hanging motionless but intact a few hundred feet above, its spotlight now pointed downward, but not directly at the ground. The cone of light it cast was filled with a cloud of dense dust. Ping.
“What the hell are you doing?” Sam said.
He was below and to her left, walking toward where she hung in the air, her back to the ground. Mara twisted around and looked down at him.
“I appear stuck somehow,” she said.
He pointed the flashlight at her, ran it up and down her body as if he were looking for wires. “You ever been stuck like this before?”
“Well, I fell off the Oregon City Bridge that night and kinda got stuck like this right over the water,” she said, twisting back and forth straining leverage somehow.
“How’d you get out of that then?” he asked.
“Ping, or the dragon, plucked me from the air and took me for a ride, but I don’t think that’s an option this time,” she said.
“Well, you better figure out something fast,” Sam said. “You’re flickering again.”
Mara looked down at her body and watched it disappear. Everything went black for a second, and then she was back. Once again she disappeared. Only this time she stayed in the blackness longer. Then she hovered above the road again.
“Mara! Just release Time,” Sam yelled at her. “You’re going to fritz away if you don’t.”
She fell from the air, crashing to the pavement.
The sounds of traffic came back like a wave. Emergency vehicle lights swept over the horizon, and the thumping of the helicopter came over them.
Sam ran over to her, grabbed her arm and said, “Are you all right? Can you stand up?”
She leaned against him, as she tried to stand. “I think so.” It took her a minute to be sure she would not crumble to the ground, but her legs held, when her brother