Thorne snickered as his distressed advisor clutched the armrests of his seat for the third time on their journey. Clenching his teeth and staring out the helm with wide eyes, Ram appeared as if he was thrown out from a tower window rather than riding in the comforts of a military ship. Unlike most sensible pilots, Thorne took the terrified expression of his friend as a compliment.
Whipping past the pointed tips of pine trees, the ship tore through blades of frosty wind and snow-filled clouds. Thorne kept them bobbing in and out of the sky's dark cover, dipping lower to scan the mountainsides for life. Their search, however, did not stop Thorne from practicing every trick he ever learned in the flight academy.
"My prince, please!" Ram begged, his face paling – could androids pale? – after the ship twisted sharply to the left. He cast his gaze behind the two toward the body of the ship where the soldiers escorting them were seated. "At least be considerate of the soldiers."
"Oh they'll be fine," Thorne grinned. Leaning heavily on the steering wheel, he sent their vehicle spinning like the tip of a drill. His corkscrew jostled an actual groan out of Ram, a feat he originally thought impossible. It fueled his hunger for more thrilling tricks.
"Right men?" Thorne shot over his soldier once the ship had been leveled again. He expected a lively response as his squad mates at the academy had always given; whoops and hollers, just as pleased by Thorne's recklessness as he was. Instead, he was met with the moans of men ready to toss their dinners in the cockpit.
"We'll never find Princess Cinder at these speeds," Ram protested. He reached over the dash and adjusted the speed to a trudging pace that drove Thorne mad. "At least let us rest for a moment."
Throne's eyes narrowed. "I thought we agreed I would be the pilot."
"And you are, Captain." Ram gently pressed the button that read Autopilot. "I'm just suggesting you get your sleep before the more pressing search tomorrow. There is little chance we will find the Princess in this blizzard."
Sending a resentful glance out the window, Thorne held the comment sticking to the tip of his tongue about the likeliness of surviving a blizzard on foot. He doubted the loyal Iceland soldiers needed to hear that if they didn't find their princess that night, they might not find her ever. Alive anyway.
Scoffing, he stood from his piloting seat and stormed into the small living rooms in the ship's tail. There were only six beds – which was surprising enough with a vehicle its size – and most of the room was taken up by the hiking equipment that wouldn't fit in storage. Ram had said everyone would take shifts going to sleep, but so far it seemed as if Thorne was the only one expected to use the room.
Guiltily, he thought things better this way. Of course he wanted the men to stay healthy and fit for battle, but it would be a lot easier for him to hide his secret if no one even ambled in.
Thorne slid the door closed behind him, listening for sounds of nearby movement before walking deeper into the room. Certain no one would invade, he snuck over to his bedframe sticking out from the wall. Lifting the thin cushion masquerading as a mattress, Thorne dug out the blue box, plain except for the intricate crest decorating its cover.
Sitting himself on his cot, Thorne turned the smooth box in his hands while pondering why he took it in the first place. He didn't mean to steal something belonging to the Iceland royalty, but something about the box struck him. Was it the way it was so craftily hidden beneath piles of bland documents? Was it the unscathed condition of the box like it had been treasured for a very long time? Or was it that Thorne could not pry the box open for the life of him?
Whatever it was, he couldn't let the Artemisia ambassador get his hands on it.
The longer he stared at the moon-and-snowflake crest, painted with silvers and blues as it were crafted from real ice, the more he felt certain it was of the Luna Family. Where King Garan got his hands on such an artifact – or how – Thorne couldn't even guess. All he did know about the object was that it could be a cause for unnecessary bloodshed.
Bustling from beyond the door had Thorne scrambling to hide the box back under his mattress. Placing his pillow artfully over the bulge it created, he quickly tossed his legs up to appear as if he truly had been resting. By the time he shut his eyelids, a very rattled soldier burst his way in without apology.
"What is it?" Thorne groaned, acting as if his rest was actually disturbed. A quick glance at the clock told him an hour had passed at most.
The soldier saluted stiffly before answering. "Smoke, sir."
"Smoke?" He rose from his relaxed position, genuinely intrigued. Smoke could only mean one thing in the mountains – humans.
Following the soldier back into the cockpit, Thorne saw a bustle of people hovering by the dash and leaning into the window. They pressed themselves so close to the glass, fog began coating the inside. Parting the sea of uniformed bodies, he returned to his seat at the helm of his vessel. Ram decided to fill him in without needing to be asked.
In the distance, contrasting the darkness of the fading night, billows of a recently started fire filled the sky. Thin and light in color, the smoke came up in a thin line – a chimney, Throne guessed, as opposed to a wildfire. Pressing some small buttons on the ship's dashboard, he pulled up a map of the terrain below them. A small shack emerged on the screen, at least a few hours away, with at least one red form from the heat detectors.
No one said anything – there wasn't a need. Only one person they could think of would be occupying a decaying cabin in the middle of a snowstorm.
Throne turned to Ram with a smug grin. "We're going to have to go pretty fast to make it there before the fire dims."
In response, his advisor gave a long, robotic-equivalent to a sigh. The light behind his irises flickered to a dull grey before his eyelids slid to cover them – Ram had shut down his sensors, Thorne guessed. Iron claws of artificial flesh and a metallic skeleton clung to the co-pilot's armrests with enough strength to leave the imprint of fingers. If his seatbelt tightened anymore, Thorne couldn't help but wonder if androids could suffocate.
"Just get it over with," his advisor murmured, sounding as green as he appeared. On cue, Thorne reeved the ship's engine and merely called a meaningless "Brace yourselves!" at his men before shooting through the sky.
If Iceland had any restrictions on the speed of flying vehicles, Throne would have been breaking every one of them.
Swerving, diving, and spinning to avoid the trees as he dipped closer to the ground, Thorne's eyes never diverged from the smoke. He spared himself the occasional glance at the rising sun to measure his time. In the back of his mind, he couldn't help but commend Cinder for her resourcefulness in a blizzard. It was regrettable it was the very thing that would lead to her capture.
The smoke dwindled with the hours, but Thorne's hopes remained strong. His mind had drawn an exact replica of smoke's position against the tree-line. He only hoped Cinder hadn't already fled by the time they arrived.
A small radar on the bottom of Thorne's screen flashed the distance between the ship and the cabin, a thirty minute gap. Alerting the soldiers to their fast approach, he could hear the men standing at the ready for whatever orders he gave. Another grin split across his face; he was back at the military academy, he was back in his element.
Ram's eyes opened to the sound of his prince's voice and homed in on the one detail Thorne wasn't able to keep track of. "There are more bodies appearing on the heat detector."
As always, Ram was correct. The two forms of heat within the cabin had stepped out into the open, eight other forms surrounding them. Instead of the fiery reds and yellows living creatures usually showed on the detector, these forms swirled in dark blues and purples. They showed a lack of heat – a lack of life – that unnerved Thorne.
"Be advised," he warned the soldiers through gritted teeth. "She's not alone."
The men needed no more confirmation. Unstrapping the weapons from their chest, the soldiers filled the cockpit with the clicks of cocking weapons. Their boots thumped across the ground as they marched to the landing bay door, awaiting the sudden landing Throne had warned them earlier about.
Chaos erupted the heat detector's screen as the forms – hot and cold – began clashing together. The blue forms lunged after the fleeting red forms, faster than the tiny pixels of the machine could keep up with. When another red form appeared in the fray, Thorne wondered if the thing hadn't gone berserk. Tearing his eyes away from the screen, he focused on arriving to the cabin before the red forms went as cold as the blue ones.
"Prince," Ram instructed, fear from his piloting gone without any trace. "I will complete the landing procedures. Assist the men with retrieving Princess Cinder."
"Who said anything about landing?" Thorne leapt out of his seat anyway, awakening the small hand-held weapon bolstered at his side. Energy sprang to life behind the metal structure and caused the skin in Thorne's hand to tingle in anticipation. "Make a hard left on our approach and open the bay doors."
"But Your Highness–" Ram's protests were lost to barracks as Thorne strutted back to the crowd of soldiers hunkered in the launch bay. Adjusting the sleek yet protective armor beneath his wool jacket, he stood in line with the stone soldiers flanking both his sides. Hard faces, strained senses, fingers hungry to curl around the trigger, shoulders braced for recoil – this is where Thorne belonged.
The bitter chill of the previous night's blizzard barely fazed Thorne as the floor beneath him fell open. His arm coiled around an overhead strap was the only thing keeping him from dropping a good fifty feet into the snow. He waited with the soldiers for the ship's sharp turn, closing in on the ground, and released his grip.
Freefalling took his breath away, even from such a small distance. For those three seconds, freedom overtook his body and mind. The war did not exist. His parents had not been murdered. Queen Levana and her kin were frightening bedtime stories.
The he landed in a pile of frozen fluff. And hell found him.
Bodies already stained the snow with an impure color, from injuries not caused by military weapons. Deformed creatures dripping venomous saliva – and even blood – turned on the men with monstrous snarls that made Thorne's skin crawl. He remembered returning from a hunting trip with his father once, with a grey wolf swung over his father's shoulder. These beasts resembled that wolf – bred with something more sinister.
One of the creatures howled a deafening shriek, fury and hunger seeping from inside of it. Thorne turned toward its direction and found himself face to face with a beast mostly human in shape. Wildness sent his body in erratic shudders as patches of fur began spotting whatever bare skin his uniform left showing. His shoulders hunched, exposing two angles shoulder blades ripping new seams into his shirt.
An insignia gleamed on the monster's military jacket. The same one that gleamed on the box Thorne hid under his mattress in the ship.
Raising his weapon, Thorne prepared to fire with little indecisiveness. He would have too, had he not seen the frail being caught in the beast's clawed grip. Hovering off the ground a good foot, the girl was being hung by her scarf as she coughed for breath that would not come. Fear radiated off her face as much of the creature as of Thorne himself. Her watering eyes darted between them, deciding which of the two was more likely to kill her.
"Ran," a warning voice snapped, this one more human than not. Another creature slithered from the darkness of the thicker trees, as soundless as a predator on the prowl. His vengeful eyes were mostly black, a sliver of red lining the outside. The color matched the liquid dripping down a wide hole in his chin ragged with raw flesh. A bullet wound, Thorne thought with a stirring stomach, through his mouth. "I told you to put her down."
Seeing his concerns laid elsewhere, the wild one tossed the girl into the snow with painful force. Gapping for breath no matter how much the cold must have burned her throat, the girl remained the center of Thorne's immediate attention. She couldn't have been older than a teenager, the bright eyes behind her glasses still holding on to threads of innocence. A welt lit her cheek where something slapped her. Hard.
To Thorne's surprise, she crawled behind the long legs of the red-eyed beast before cowering. If she found protection in something so vile, Thorne could only diagnose that she too was an enemy.
The red-eyed creature cracked his neck. "Miss Cress, I would advise you to keep your distance."
At the mention of her name, the girl's fearful eyes widened at Thorne spilling over with terror. The terror didn't seem to be of him, however. It seemed to be for him.
Stepping forward with calculated movements, the two beasts circled Thorne in a formation he recognized. Around him, he could hear the lively engine of his ship, the fire of his men's weapons, and the growls of deranged animals. Watching the steady gazes of his enemies, Thorne realized they had won in numbers but the moon soldiers had won in power.
Then something struck him, a feeling as real as if one of the beasts had lunged for him. Subtly, he cast his gaze over the area to confirm his suspicions while keeping his senses on alert were his opponents to attack.
Cinder was nowhere in sight.
"Where's the princess?" he asked with an icy voice. Lifting his weapon to eye-level he aimed it at the seemingly more sane of the two monsters.
Agitation flashed across the red-eyed one's face as if remembering a very unpleasant encounter. Laughter licked the back of Thorne's throat wondering if Cinder had somehow caused the bullet wound to the beast's mouth.
"What's it to you?" he sneered back, voice thick with blood. In the corner of Thorne's eye, he caught sight of the young girl hiding behind a lump of freshly fallen snow. Something glowed in her lap – a screen? – and Thorne could just barely make out the coordinates of a map. So she was their navigator.
"Consider me her knight in shining armor," Thorne smirked. Then he did something so reckless, so unexpected, so irrational, it could only be an action belonging to Prince Carswell Thorne of Greenland.
He dove for the girl.
She never saw it coming of course – nor did his opponents as he had expected. Flattening her into the pile of white flakes, he was surprised to find her skin warm to the touch. Something crunched between the armor on his chest and the soft contours of her face. Mumbling an apology into her hair – her mass of long, tangled hair – he hoped she would know it was meant for his sudden collapse on top of her, as well as what he was about to do.
Swinging her light body into his arms, he shouted for his men to retreat. Before the moon soldiers could even comprehend what he was doing, he and his soldiers were already jumping into the open launch bay. Recognizing his cue, Ram hummed the engine to life as Thorne watched a handful of mutated wolves and men chase after them.
They were far too late. The launch door shut, splitting them from any hopes they had of finding Princess Cinder.
Finals are over! Winter break is here! And I finally have time to write.
Sorry it took so long! My writing life took a nose dive when I got a second job - but I'm here now! I expect to put up a handful of chapters over break while I have the time. (For those reading Hybrid, I mean that story as well) As a token of my apology, here is an extra long chapter with Cress and Thorne :)
Cheesehead101 was my 50th reviewer! I never got the chance to properly thank your for this so - THANK YOU! If fireworks could appear in text, this line would be glowing.
Cheesehead101: Your advice was greatly appreciated! I am liking the pace more now as well. And thank you so much for another wonderful review!
lunartic: So glad you liked it! Yes the leader was Wolf, honestly I had no idea what to call him from Cinder's perspective. In this chapter he's 'the red-eyed beast' (poor Wolf). My thanks to you!
I Am The Black Werewolf: Reviews are greatly appreciated, so I've started to address each with the thanks it deserves. Like yours! Thanks!
geekofthe21stcentury: Thank you so much! And thanks for your review which reminded me I needed to update :)
Expect the next chapter in a few days! Thanks to everyone reading and reviewing!