Free Vertigo: Aurora Rising Book Two by G. S. Jennsen Page B

them overnight.
    “I expect to see a herd of some sort of wildlife frolicking across the plain any second now.”
    “Would be the least astounding scene so far.”
    She glanced over her shoulder to smile at him—
    —and that was when the dragon attacked.
     

     
    A faint whoosh of air behind him was the sole warning Caleb had before he was catapulted thirty meters through the air. He caught a vague impression of reflected light off burnished scales attached to a massive wing—then his head slammed to the dirt with a sharp crack.
    He was out for mere seconds—four, five at most—because when he opened his eyes the dragon had barely left the ground, its wings mid-flap as they propelled it up and over the Siyane to soar into the sky.
    Yes, a dragon . The lustrous crimson scales covered an enormous body dwarfed only by its wingspan; the striking thickness of the torso contrasted with almost delicate skin pulled taut between lightweight bones comprising the wings. Distinctive horns curled back over its bony skull.
    He vaulted to his feet and swung the Daemon up, ignoring the multiple jarring pains of varying severity. His vision contracted to encompass a single image: Alex flailing in the grasp of the dragon’s front right claw as it flew away.
    She was visibly struggling; that meant she wasn’t dead. The claws gripping her hadn’t ripped open her lovely skin and shredded the fragile human organs which gave her life. Not yet.
    He could shoot a hole in the wing. The laser would shred the thin membrane. The dragon would plummet from the sky and plunge to the ground a hundred meters below. And Alex would die.
    “Fuck!”
    In a flash he was sprinting for the airlock, skipping through a stumble or two on the way. He recognized he was hurt but it hardly mattered.
    He slammed a palm on the airlock panel, fed it the secondary key and fell through the hatch as it opened. Then he half-crawled, half-scrambled to the cockpit and up into her chair. His fingers raced over the blank ledge until by dumb luck he found the trigger to activate the HUD. Unlike Alex, he wasn’t wired into the ship, and thus it did not respond to his thoughts.
    Thank you, Mia.
    Once the HUD came to life the controls and screens were easily identifiable. He fired up the pulse detonation engines and rose off the ground as the dragon shrank in the sky. The unparalleled smoothness of the ship’s motion beneath his fingertips shocked him. It responded to the slightest adjustment with incredible fluidity, like a sky glider instead of a machine constructed of hard, cold metal.
    He banked forty degrees starboard and climbed, the entirety of his attention focused on the tiny red dot against the pale blue sky.
    It had nearly disappeared when he started to gain on it. Bit by bit, meter by meter he closed the gap. He didn’t think about what he was gaining on, or what in the bloody hell a bloody dragon was doing on an impossible planet in an impossible place on the other side of an impossible portal. Instead he concentrated on catching it.
    He could see the sunlight from the nonexistent sun reflecting off the scales and the beat of its wings driving it toward the mountains now looming large in the distance. The mountains represented a problem; he risked losing the dragon in a crevasse or a shadowy valley. He’d need to draw close. Perhaps it might skim close enough to the mountainous terrain for him to risk a shot. He should—
    —the world spiraled out of control, as for the second time in as many days ‘down’ and ‘up’ lost all meaning. His head spun wildly, and he pressed a palm to his forehead in an effort to impose stability. Yet the images his eyes showed him refused to comport with reality, with what he knew to be true.
    Grassy plains spread placidly beneath him. No mountains were visible, even on the far horizon. Ahead and to the left rolled gentle hills, much like those they had camped at the night before. Exactly like the hills they had camped at