I gave him a half grin. “I know, right? So we have one problem. Big Evan has the magical device that can track EJ. He said he could modify it to be used by anyone. If he already did that, then I need to pick it up, so I need you to find out if he succeeded in the modification, then arrange a rendezvous point, and convince him to stand on top of one of the vehicles with his hand in the air, holding up his marble, and let me pluck it out of his hand. In Anzu form. And my control isn’t very good.”
“So you might claw his arm off?”
“I hope not. But I’m not placing any bets. Now help me to my room so I can pack and strip and jump off the railing outside my second-story window.”
“Do I get to watch?”
It was an ongoing complaint that he had almost never seen me shift. “No. You do not get to watch me shift. But I’ll let you watch me leap out the window.”
“Almost as good.”
Alex stood slightly in front of me and I placed a hand on his shoulder as he led the way to the elevator. “Going up. Lingerie, undergarments, and naked bird ladies on two.”
CHAPTER 19
Beast Is Inside Stupid Anzu Bird
The team and my clan were still miles away when I settled to the floor of my bedroom with the draperies thrown back and the French doors open wide to the icy, dull day. I was naked and shivering, and my skin was tinged slightly bluish, the way flesh looks when it’s oxygen deprived. Or dead.
I pulled the special gobag over my head, situating it to lie beside the doubled gold chain and the gold nugget and the mountain lion tooth. Adjusted the strap for a larger neck. Inside the gobag were a pair of sweats, lightweight shoes, my cell phone (which had a call open to Alex), and a few weapons: a nine-millimeter, two extra mags loaded with silver-lead rounds, one vamp-killer, the arcenciel scale, and six stakes—three ash wood, three sterling. I added three packages of jerky strips and two protein bars. The gobag was heavier than usual, but I needed all the stuff in it, and as far as vamp-killing gear went, I was traveling light.
Vamp-killing. It’s what I did, or had done, prior to taking the gig as Leo’s Enforcer. I was a rogue-vamp hunter. And no way was I leaving home again without the tools of my trade, even if I was flying. I had done this beforeand it had sucked, but that didn’t matter. I had a job to do and not much time to do it in.
Wrapped safely in a length of bubble wrap and my sweats, tucked into the gobag, was the crystal holding mermaid-Soul. And the Glob. Just in case. Yeah. Just in case.
I dragged the comforter from the bed, over my shoulders, gripped the feather I had taken from a dead Anzu, closed my eyes, and calmed my breathing. Eventually, I felt my heart rate slow. My shoulders relaxed. I slipped into a deeper meditation, where the world was peaceful and calm and there was only soothing light.
I sought the Gray Between. The silver mist of my skinwalker gift rose around and within me. Slowly I fellinto the feather, into the bit of dried flesh at the base of the quill. Into the deeps of the Anzu, into the snake that lives at the center of all creatures: the double helix of DNA, as understood by the Cherokee of my own time. Except the genetic structure of the Anzu wasn’t like a human’s. So far as I knew, the feathered Anzu were not native to earth, and had once been worshipped as storm gods, back in Mesopotamia and Samaria, enormous storm gods with claws, wings, a raptor’s beak, sapphire blue blood, and a bad attitude.
Their DNA wasn’t the double helix of Earth creatures. It was a tangled mass of circular strands, glowing like spun glass, emitting light in pale blues and greens. One ovoid spot was denser and darker. It opened its eyes and looked at me. I flinched, knowing what was coming. Fighting my own tension, my own fear.
The oval slowly unfolded, unwound. The genetic structure was, literally, a snake, one holding its own tail in its mouth.Ouroboros, I remembered. The ouroboros focused on me, in the Gray Between, a place where energy and mass are one.
The snake opened its mouth. Let go of its tail. I tensed further but didn’t look away. It struck. Snake fangs pierced my soul. Pain zinged through me like lightning, a massive bolt from a major storm. My bones bent. Darkness took me, blazing and icy.
Through the darkness, I heard Sabina’s voice, fromthe only other time I had taken this shape, when she told me,“With this action, you walk the sharp edge of a blade between light and dark. You do not cross that edge into darkness, but if you slip, you may bleed.”Yeah, that made it all hunky-dory.
And softer, the words Frenchy and seductive in my memory, Leo Pellissier had written,May your hunt be bloody. May you rend and eat the flesh of your prey.Words he had once sent to me about hunting with an Anzu.
I woke. The night was warmer, strongly scented of the synthetics in the carpet, the drapes, and the cleaning supplies that kept the place Eli-sterile. The snow through the window smelled clean and sharp. Distant stinks of exhaust, gasoline, diesel fuel, added a dark twang to the mélange. The light bouncing off the snow outside and reflecting into the room was a magnitude of lumens brighter. Sounds were sharper. I could hear thedripdripdripof melting snow, the crack of warming ice, the patter of a rabbit exactly... there, in the front tree line.
I was supposed to call for Alex. I lifted my arms and my right finger-feathers brushed the bed behind me, and spread out to a full twenty-foot wingspan. I rose to my feet and stretched, my head swiveling. I had shifted into Anzu.
I was sapphire and scarlet and some sort of ultraviolet color. The glowing UV feathers were up under my wings and on my chest and belly. A darker shade overlay the tips of finger-flight-feathers and tail feathers, black-light glowing and intense to my Anzu eyes. My feet were ten inches from back claw and rear toe, called the hallux, to the longest front toe claw, and knobby joints were covered with glowing orange skin. My beak matched my orange legs, was pointed and curved, a vicious hook on the end. I inspected my spread wings carefully, sapphire flight feathers, the band of scarlet near my shoulder, and another on the back of my neck.
I shook, folded my wings and settled my feathers, feeling each one as it found its place. Like last time, I wasn’t hungry, which was a change from all my other shape-shifts. Usually I had to fuel my shifts with prodigiousamounts of food, but something about the soft-lit magic trembling along my wings again suggested that I had pulled the energy from elsewhere.
Beast?I thought, hopefully.
Beast is here. Beast is inside stupid Anzu bird with Jane. Anzu bird is stupid shape, but Anzu shape lets Beast be here with Jane. Beast hunted and killed mooses with claws and strong beak,she thought at me.Want to hunt cow or bison. In Edmund car.
Thank God,I thought.
Beast is not god. Edmund is not god. Anzu is not god.
Something like joy flitted through me.True. And yes, this is good.
I opened my beak and a warbling cry echoed in the heights of the room as I called out, my bird throat trying to make a word.Alexcame out as “Aulkxsh.”
