I was wrong. EJ wasn’t here. Grief boiled up in me, hot and scalding, my eyes full of tears that burned like acid, too long unshed. I didn’t know where to go now, yet I had to keep searching. Somewhere.
Exhaustion pulled at my bones and burned through my muscles. Hunger ached inside me from the calorie loss of flight. I didn’t know how to draw power from ley lines like a real Anzu, and I hadn’t fed. And... I had lost my godson.
I screamed out my rage, an Anzu shriek of fury and grief.
He was gone.
Jane will not give up,Beast thought at me. She shoved power into my wings.Jane will fight.
Right.I swept down, trying to gain lift.I won’t give up.
I landed on a third outcropping of stone. A cave rat poked his head out of a slit in the stone. Faster than he could move, I whipped right, struck, and grabbed him in my beak. Yanked him from the slit in the stone. Crunched down to kill him. Tossed the rat into the air and gulped him down, headfirst. He weighed a good three pounds. I needed more food than that to keep searching. Keep flying. I needed twenty or thirty pounds of meat. I’d be forced to hunt deer or boar when I got back to the surface.
And then it hit me. I’d just eaten a rat.
My stomach roiled at the thought.
I pecked at the gobag, which had twisted in my daylong flight. In the deeps of the earth, I had no cell signal, and in my tired, starved flight, I had forgotten to leave it at the rim of the crevice. Gripping the gobag in my beak, I slid it around me, out of the way.
From ahead, I heard soft sounds like sleigh bells ringing, a half tone off pure, both flat and sharp. Not a sound nature made. I sniffed again. Smelled nothing.
I hopped to the next protuberance, a downed log, moss covered. I had forgotten about the tracker tied to my leg in jesses, and the device made a softtonkas it impacted the log. I froze. But nothing changed, nothing happened, and since there had been no reaction to the anzu scream, I wasn’t sure why I thought there might be. No one came to look. The bells didn’t sound again. I heard only the odd vibration of the heated pool of water rising and lapping. Had another arcenciel come through the rift and made that odd sound, like bells laughing?
I flipped the tracker up around my ankle, once, twice, so it hung higher than my foot on the perch. Satisfied, I hopped to the next spot, this one higher, fluttering my wings. Which freaking hurt. My pecs were aching. My underarms were aching. In fact, everything was aching.
And I had eaten a rat... I’d never tell Eli that.Never.
Beast chuffed deep inside, amused.
The next outcropping of rock was higher. As was the next. Half winging, swearing inside my head, I made myway from perch to perch. Closer to the bend and the glow of the rift.
I landed, the water of the rift blue and brilliant just ahead. A layer of hoarfrost glittered on the moss above me, in crevices and across the upper side of fallen logs. Below me, heavy mist rose from the surface of the water, to bead when it reached cooler temps and plink back down as if from low-lying rain clouds. The air here was at least another ten degrees warmer. A gust of colder air blew through, carrying the rain made of melted sleet and snow. The drops created aplink-tap-rat-a-tat-tatrhythm, the music of nature. The place smelled green and alive, strongly of minerals and water, of warmth. This was a primeval scent my bird brain recognized and knew. A world my Anzu memories and instincts identified by its fragrance. It was something that had been unfamiliar to Beast’s brain. This... this was the pathway to home.
But. The area around the pool of water was empty. I could have screamed in fury. EJ wasn’t here. No one was. And I hadn’t seen a vehicle at the parking spot, a fact I hadn’t wanted to think about until now. I shook my wings in grief and fury, ready to leap high and fly home. Get food. Change back to my human form, help the clan think of the next move.
The next protrusion was on the far side of the rift, higher, too far to hop. Not a place I had gone when I was in Beast form. Another gust of colder air spun through the crevasse. As it blew through, I raised my wings and leaped, winging across the pool and up, ready to take advantage of the rising warmer air there. I wing-swept down, across to the far side, to a downed log lodged at an odd angle, roots caught between rocks, the tip balanced in a cleft. I landed. Turned. Prepared to shove off and fly home.
Across from me, below where I had perched before my last hop, some twenty feet down, was another opening in the rock. It was a cave mouth, thirty feet high and twenty feet across at the opening. On the floor of the cave a fire burned. My wings folded as if of their own accord. I went still as a vamp.
The smoke was scentless, which was strange with myimproved Anzu nose. From this angle, the cave appeared to be empty, but its floor had been swept clean, and deeper inside, I could make out only a quarter of an arc, perhaps a witch circle on the bare stone, the border made from salt. I spotted a small perch, too small for my feet, but I jumped there anyway. Caught my balance with wings that were too noisy, banging against the stone. Bruising what would be my wrists in human form. Ignoring the pain.
At the edge of the circle was EJ.
Kit!Beast shouted in our mind.
The boy was still. Unmoving. Until his chest rose and fell. Shock slashed a path through me. My heart beat so hard, it felt as if it would fly out of my chest. My godson was only asleep. Drugged or compelled or in stasis. Not dead.
My godchild was alive.
If the Flayer was timewalking, he’d had plenty of time to find this cave, prepare this cave. Do whatever he wanted in this cave. And he could come back and forth through time anywhere. Except for the fire, I had no idea if he was here, now, in this cave. And if he discovered me out here, if he took EJ back or forward through time with him, I’d lose my godchild.
Fear shivered thorough me. I hopped to a better perch, glad for the darkness of the crevasse, glad for the firelight in the cave, which would conceal my presence.
Beside the fire was a flayed vampire, blood tacky on the stone floor, half-dried across her exposed flesh. In the corner lay another vampire, partially skinned, a male. Beside him was a human, female, her wrists and the crown of her head wrapped in silver wire. Her throat was flawless, but her clothing was drenched in dried blood, showing she had been fed from and then healed. A witch? Bled and rolled? Immobilized with null amulets? Over her stood Shimon Bar-Judas. The mouth of his bleeding spokesperson—the female vamp—was moving as she spoke to the witch. I heard nothing, but no matter what words Shimon Bar-Judas spoke, they wouldn’t be good.
I couldn’t hear a thing, not a peep. There was some kind of energy thingy over the mouth of the cave, notallowing out scent or sound, but letting in fresh air, if the flickering flames of the fire pit were an indication. It wasn’t a proper ward, not a proper witch circle, because it seemed to cover the entrance only, and it wasn’t round. The energies were strange too. This was something I hadn’t seen before. My brain went immediately toStar Trekshields. If the shield let in air, it probably let in sound too. I’d been anything but silent. A tiny stem dropped from above and landed on the shield. It made a soft popping noise and gave a small tone of sound, like a dented brass bowl tapped with a fork. No one inside looked up. There were dozens of such bits of detritus on the shield, the noise of their falling having made the people inside deaf to exterior noise.
A shield meant I couldn’t get in.
