up.
With the way shit was going, it was like he was going to float up here for frickin' ever, overshooting the only landing strip they had -
Abruptly, the rattling resumed, and he checked the altimeter. They'd sunk down about twenty-five feet, and he had to wonder if they'd penetrated the barrier.
Lights. Oh, sweet baby Jesus, lights.
Out the side window, down below, he could see the glow of the mansion, and the courtyard. It was too far away to make out the details, but it had to be - yup, the small offshoot had to be the Pit.
Instantly, his brain three-dimensionalized and reoriented everything.
Fuck. His angle was wrong. If he kept going like this, he was going to land front to back on the property rather than down that long side. And the bitch of it was, he didn't have enough lift to execute a nice fat circle to get them pointed in the right direction.
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....
Chapter 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