The portal spat her into open sky.
No ground. Just cold air rushing past her body at a speed that turned the world into a smear of grey cloud and distant earth.
She fell.
Fifteen hundred feet below her there was snow and mountains.
Kael came through the portal two seconds after she did.
His boots cleared the closing edge, and the fae realm snapped shut behind him with the wet sound of a wound sealing. He hit open air, registered the altitude, registered the woman falling three hundred feet below him, and shifted.
The black dragon tore out of his human. Iron eyes locked onto her with the precision of a predator who had calculated a dive ten thousand times and had never missed.
He folded his wings and dropped.
Terminal velocity for a black dragon was faster than anything with mass had a right to move. The wind screamed across his scales. The distance between them closed in seconds, three hundred feet to two hundred, two hundred to one hundred, one hundred to fifty.
