Big Evan smiled slightly as I caught my balance, but the scent of his worry and fear abraded the air like burning sandpaper. “You don’t have to carry it now.” He climbed down to the snow, landing with a grunt. “Where do you want the tracker?” he asked.
“Tie like jessesssh?” I indicated my clawed foot, holding it into the air.
“Good. Yeah.” Evan dropped to one knee in the snow, his body heat a measurable force in the cold air, even through his winter gear. His hands were heated on my leg as he looped the ties of a small bag around my ankle and knotted them off. “I’ve set it with a soft audible tone. If you get within a mile of my son, it’ll make a fainttingingsound, like a tiny silver bell. As you get closer, the sound will get louder, more pure in tone, at least to your bird ears. No humans will be able to hear it. It won’t be loud enough, I hope, to attract the attention of any daywalking fanghead.”
“Mile high or a mile distant?”
“Think of EJ as being on the ground, centered beneath a large bowl, as deep as its radius. The higher you are, the angle of the reading will be less accurate.” He paused, testing the thong he had tied to my ankle. “I recommend a height of five hundred to a thousand feet above ground.” Big Evan had finished securing the tracker and his big hand rested on my even bigger foot. He met my eye. “If we had been home, we might all be dead. At the inn, we—not you—were responsible for his safety. Losing him is on us. But...” Tears gathered in his eyes, fury and fear shifting through behind the tears. “I’ll give you anything. Please save my son. Please.” A tear trickled down his cheek into his beard.
“Yesssh,” I said, discovering that birds couldn’t tear up. “Give me your friendship. Believe that I’ll alwaysssh put you and yoursssh first.”
“So. I’ve been an idiot where you’re concerned. Molly’s always said so.”
Beast leaned us down and touched his hand with my/ourbeak, then slid our head and neck along his hand, scent marking him.
“You really make it hard to hate you.”
I chirped. Tried to give a snarky bird grin.
It must have translated because Evan raised his bushy brows. “Alex said the proper blessing for this hunt is, ‘May your hunt be bloody. May you rend and eat the flesh of your prey.’”
“People really need to stop quoting Leo to me,” I said. The consonants sounded like sharp tocks, but my words were growing understandable. Mostly.
“We have a dozen hamburgers. They’re cold but they’re yours if you want.”
“Thanks. But I think a deer would suit better.” I had no idea what hamburgers would do to an Anzu digestive tract. I raised my wings, gently dislodging Evan, sending him lurching into the snow. I sat back on my heels and launched myself at the sky, stretching out my wings, angled for lift, and flapped hard, raising myself into the cold air.
Flying. Healthy. A gust of air flipped me over and I tumbled dozens of feet before I caught my wings under me.
Beast hate stupid bird. Beast hate flying. Beast—
I got it. I got it. Now, hush. I need to listen.
Gee DiMercy angled into my flight pattern and set himself to my right wingtip, still using my energy to soar. Dang bird. Sleet cut through the air. Buried itself in my feathers. I fluffed them out and settled them. Found a height above Asheville at what I felt like was about seven hundred feet. I hoped no local yahoo with a shotgun thought I was a trophy and shot me out of the sky.
To Gee, I said, “I have a bell-chime tracker, and the cell phone is on to Alex for as long as its battery and its minicharger stay active. Starting a grid flight pattern over the city proper, where I-26 meets I-40 and moving east all the way to the edge of the city, then back to starting point and moving west. If we don’t find anything in the city, we’ll expand, quartering the land along I-26 and I-40 in five-mile segments.”
His made an odd bobbing motion, like a pigeon on a window ledge.
Wisely, I didn’t say so.
***
We searched for three hours, silent, listening, and gave up on finding EJ inside the city limits. Expanding our flight pattern, we searched the quadrants from east to south to west to north. We got nothing. Nada. Zilch. I was despairing and my Anzu body was tiring. I was a skinwalker, but like any biological body, this one needed toning and training and its muscles came to me functional but not strong. Snow and ice were building up on my feathers and face. There were good reasons why birds didn’t fly in this kind of weather. I was frozen. “I need another break,” I said. “Alex, Gee, I need food.”
“Can’t help you, Janie, but my big bro says the weather is shifting off to the east and the helo can fly. So if you find the kid, you’ll have backup.”
“That’s good,” I said, barely stopping my bird beak from chattering with the cold.
“We will hunt deer.” Gee banked and dropped below me, swerving toward the Biltmore Estate and grounds and across the French Broad River, speeding toward a leafless, wooded area, near the Biltmore vineyards, where we circled, searching for life in the waning light.
The bell in my pouch gave a soft chime.
I nearly fell out of the sky. “Was that—?”
It chimed again. “Yes! Stay aloft, little goddess. You do not have the gift of cloaking. Their guards will see you.” Gee did a whirling, falling maneuver worthy of a fighter jet. Before I could stabilize and level out my flight, he vanished. Completely vanished. Like, poof. Gone.
“Crap. Either Gee transported there, or he went invisible.”
