As soon as we were a half-length behind her, I stretched out my hand. "Maybe you'll ride with me instead?"
She lifted her head enough to look at me. The wrist that had been caught in the stag's antlers was unhooked, and she was using both arms to keep her balance, so she probably wasn't injured. But she made up for that in the fear on her face.
Her eyes went to my hand. "You can't be serious! Do you know how hard it was just to get on this animal's back?"
"We've done a jump like this before." It would work again. It had to work again.
"Not at this speed!"
I raised up more groundwater in front of the stag, forcing it to slow down even further. Callistus matched its pace and got us closer to Aurelia.
She frowned over at me, though I was sure that was only to hide a slight grin. "I expected our first kiss to turn out differently than this," she said.
I stretched out my hand again. "Just imagine how the second kiss will end!"
She scowled, but reached for me. Our fingers brushed against each other's at first. With only moonlight above, I couldn't see most of what was ahead of us, but this was no smooth track like in the circus. We needed to hurry.
Finally, she was close enough to get a firm grip on my hand, but her other hand was still holding on to the stag's antlers. "Are you sure?" she asked.
"I'll pull you to me, but you have to let go." My voice was calm at this point. It was going to work.
"There's something dark ahead. What is it?"
I didn't know. As far as I could tell, everything ahead was dark. But when I really looked, I saw what she meant. We were still racing toward Lake Nemi, but the stag had led us on a slightly different route, one I wasn't familiar with. And I didn't know what might suddenly cause so much darkness. The moon had gone behind the clouds, and all I saw was sky, as if the ground ahead just disappeared.
It was a cliff!
"Now, Aurelia!" I yelled. "Hurry!"
She nodded, and started to swing her far leg over the stag's back, but then the stag took a sharp right, pulling her entirely away from me. To keep her balance, she threw her weight back with its movement. By then they had reached the cliff's edge.
The stag jumped into the air, accompanied by a scream of terror from Aurelia, one that chilled my spine.
Callistus careened to a halt, so quickly that I crashed into his neck. Aurelia's cry ended midscream, cut off too suddenly for it simply to have faded into the night air.
I leapt off the unicorn's back and saw, to some relief, that it wasn't a sheer cliff, but instead a steep downward slope, too steep for Callistus to navigate. Lake Nemi was far below us, and now the moonlight peeked out again enough to illuminate the hillside.
I scanned the slope and called out for Aurelia, but there was no answer.
There was nothing. Where was she?
I closed my eyes, trying to find Aurelia with my mind. I could see her ... almost. The stag wasn't running anymore, but everything was dark around her, darker than where I now stood. Wherever the stag had taken Aurelia, she was no longer in these hills, which meant Callistus had no chance to catch up to her.
The moon grew brighter, its light hitting the lake at the exact angle to make the water glow. Except where it should've had a white glow, the water seemed red, like the glow of fire. Dragon's fire.
The Mistress.
The stag must have delivered Aurelia to the Mistress.
I scurried down the hillside, hoping that if I got closer to the water, I'd get a better sense for where Aurelia was. If I could get to her exact location, before the Mistress knew I was there, I could make her disappear to as far away as I could imagine.
With the help of the moonlight, I was already getting close to the lake, spending the bulk of my energy searching for any feeling that connected me to Aurelia. Would Atroxia call to me here? If so, perhaps she would help.
Or were her cries part of a plot to get me back to the caves where the Mistress lay in wait? It was sometimes hard to separate Atroxia from the dragon, if there was any separation between them. Still, I continued running down the steep slope, dodging large oak trees and wading through thick brush, steadily getting closer to the lake.
Obviously, Diana wanted me to return to the dragon, a thought that filled me with dread, but if there were any chance Aurelia had been taken to the cave,
I had to go. I knew what the Mistress had done to Radulf. If she attempted even the smallest amount of that harm to Aurelia, it would kill her.