Page 13 of The Ice Prince's Fated Mate
Impact.
The globe bounced. Hard. It shook free of the wings and shattered, the crystalline ice structures scattering everywhere as they absorbed the force of the impact. That force alone should have killed me.
Instead, shaken and battered but very much alive, I rolled across the ground and went headfirst over a small embankment. Plunging into the thick snow, I was stuck fast. Too fast.
I couldn’t move. My body from the thighs up was thoroughly embedded in a snowbank, unable to move. I couldn’t free myself. Couldn’t scrape a pocket of air about my face. The snow pressed in, a thick, unmovable weight.
No. No, no, no. Not like this.
I forced down the panic, keeping my body still. I hadn’t survived the fall just to die upside down in the snow. Me. An ice dragon, dying in the snow. I would never live it down.
Focus. Stay calm, and don’t use up more air than you need to.
I tried to wriggle one arm free. My legs were in the air, exposed. I couldn’t bend at the waist, but from the knee down was free. Air wasclose. I just had to go about it smoothly.
But the burning in my lungs was growing, and I couldn’t get an arm free. It was pinned too tightly, the snow too heavy, and my muscles weakened from everything that had already happened.
I called to my dragon. She was there. She had become free. I had used her strength to rip the door free to knock down the Red. Iknewshe existed. All I needed was a bit of her power tocommand the snow to do as I needed—to melt and free me from its embrace.
Try as I might, scream, cajole, promise it everything I could think of, nothing worked. All I received was silence.
I thrashed but couldn’t move as panic took hold. Adrenaline pumped into every muscle, but it was no use. I was pinned. And going to die.
A wave of sadness followed that grim reality. Pain for all the things I would not get to see or do. My friends. Watching Anna become who she was meant to be. She was always the greatest of the three of us, and now the world was beginning to see it.
But not me. I would miss everything.
A pit formed in my stomach as the edges of my vision darkened with the lack of oxygen. I would never get my chance to break free of the shackles society had put upon Clippys.
And it’s all your fault for taking off like that. You should have known better. Should have had a better plan in place. But like always, you …
I toppled over as the snow melted on one side of me. Air rushed into my lungs and I gasped and heaved, desperate to inhale each and every spare molecule I could.
A low groan nearby clued my scrambled brain in to how my rescue might have been affected.
Digging myself out fully, I crawled up the embankment. Another moan. This one weaker than before.
Dirk. It had to be.
As I crested the top of the embankment, I feared what I would see. But the sight waiting for me was worse than anything I could have imagined.
Just as I’d suspected, Dirk had saved me, both in the air, and now from the snow, having used his powers to melt it away from me. But the price. By the orb, the price …
I pulled myself fully onto the flat ground and toward him, trying to figure out how he was alive.
Naked and covered in blood, he lay at the base of a brellwood tree. The trunk—fully as wide as three men standing on top of each other and composed of tough, incredibly strong wood akin to steel—had been smashed inward from the impact, leaving a huge dragon-sized dent twenty feet in the air. Blood leaked down the side of the trunk, leading right to his broken body.
“Dirk.” I pulled myself to my feet, fresh adrenaline propelling me to his side.
It was worse up close. I didn’t know where to begin. One eye was fully closed, so swollen as to be invisible. Something had torn a ragged line down the other side of his face, leaving the skin uneven and bleeding. One arm was pinned beneath him. The angle was not possible without at least two things being broken. Bone was visible from his lower leg, having pierced the skin during the fall.
How he was still alive was a miracle. The blood was so thick it could have been a blanket I lifted off him. I stared in horror at the sight. I wasn’t a healer. This was beyond me, but I was the only one there. I had to dosomething!
“But what?” I whispered, looking him over, too concerned for his well-being to do more than distantly note that he was completely naked.
A loud creaking noise interrupted my initial thoughts. I looked around but saw nothing, so I returned to Dirk. My fingers were coated in his blood as I pushed wounds together, trying to stem some of the bleeding so his healing could take over.
“There are so many.”
