Rise of the Blood Read Online Free Page B

the feeling grew and grew as the sky darkened around us and seemed to charge with some ominous energy. I stopped paying attention to the Sky Mall and took to staring out the window.
    Rumbling rattled the windows and a flash fork of lightning chased itself from one bank of clouds to another. The plane veered sharply away, trying to escape the storm, but gale-force winds pushed at our tail in hot pursuit.
    An announcement came on about turbulence and returning to our seats. It was getting harder and harder to stay in mine. My internal alarms were now blaring full force, and I wanted to shout for the crew that the plane needed to be brought down now, now , NOW for an emergency landing while there was still a chance to control our descent. This was no natural storm. There’d been no warning before takeoff about rough weather ahead, and a storm like this would have been hard to miss on the radar.
    Paranoia? Maybe, if not for my internal alarms and the fact that Poseidon Stormbringer and Zeus of the fateful lightning were on the loose and that the people most responsible for their incarceration were all on this flight. Coincidence? Didn’t seem likely, but there was no time to think about that right now.
    To our left came a sudden crash like two monstrous hands clapping together and then bursting apart. The resultant shockwaves buffeted the airliner like a kite. Panic had me reaching for the armrest, but since Nick’s hand was already there, I nearly shredded him with my newly manicured nails. He hissed with pain, but didn’t draw back his hand. Instead, he turned it over to take mine. He looked into my eyes. I stared into his, and thought well, if the world ends, at least we’ll go out together . It was a shockingly romantic thought for me, and that, more than anything, snapped me to. We were not going to die. My cousin Tina would kill me. It would make her wedding party lopsided.
    I unbuckled my seatbelt and started to rise, to demand that we make an emergency landing or something, not caring how crazy I’d sound, when the lightning flashed again, cracking across the sky like a whip. The plane flinched as it struck, bucking like a thing alive desperate to escape the pain. I was flung forward, bashing myself on the overhead bin and falling into Nick’s lap. He gripped me close and held on tight.
    “Stay put,” he ordered. “There’s nowhere to go. We’ll get through this. It’ll be okay.”
    But I knew he was wrong. I struggled against him as the plane banked sharply. No, not banked . Sheared off, beginning to fall, as if something was off on one side…like an engine.
    “We have to land,” I yelled. “Now!” As if this was a newsflash.
    There was so much screaming going on—babies crying, grown men and women praying or wailing or whatever—that no one heard.
    Another crash of thunder came from the side of the plane, and punched into us like a fist, knocking us even farther off-kilter. The metal of the plane groaned in defiance, but it wasn’t a victorious sound. It was more like, “You’ll never take me alive.” And that’s exactly what I was afraid of.
    “We have to do something!” I shouted at Armani. Nick, dammit, Nick . Even as we rushed toward death, I couldn’t get it right. But that’s how I’d thought of him when I’d first met him, a defense mechanism against my attraction, one I’d never gotten over.
    “Like what?” he shouted back.
    I didn’t want questions, I wanted action , but I didn’t have any to suggest.
    Oxygen masks fell from the ceiling as the plane continued to drop altitude and the pilot was too busy, I supposed, trying to stop it to comfort his panicking passengers…as if an announcement would have made any difference. As if they, like me, couldn’t feel the ground rushing up to meet us.
    Armani lifted me off him to grab two masks before pushing me down into a seat and manhandling me to get my mask into place. I didn’t fight him, only because the sooner he knew I was