“Babe?” Eli asked. And he started laughing.
I lifted a clawed foot and said, very distinctly, if slowly, “Crack your skull like walnut.”
Eli shut up, but there was still laughter on his face. The Kid went back inside where I could hear him laughing his head off saying, “Big bird. Big blue bird. Holy shit.” Laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe.
I narrowed my eyes at Eli.
“Babe. I know you could crack my skull like a nut. But you’re also funny-looking.”
I swiped at him with my wing, which banged into the porch support with athumpthat freaking hurt. I warbled a word that I never would have spoken in English. Which made Eli laugh harder. Midlaugh he drew a weapon and injected a round into the chamber. Aimed at me. I ducked. But he didn’t fire.
Air whooshed down. Nearly knocked me off my perch on the cracked boulders. A foreign warble, an interrogative, carried on the air as I regained my balance. I turned to see an Anzu, smaller than my hundred forty-five pounds but a far brighter blue, alight on the brick wall surrounding the backyard.
He gleamed in my bird vision, ultraviolet blues and purples and a shocking ruby at shoulders and throat. He smelled like feathers, heat, and the down we line our nests with. He settled his feathers and cooed.
“Gee?” I managed.
“Jane? How have you...?” His words wisped, warbling but crisp and clear.
“Ummm. I had a feather.” The consonants sounded like sharptocks, but it was understandable. Sorta.
“You took a feather from Urgggglllaaammmaaah’s body.” He tilted his head. “Did you ask her consent?”
“She was kinda dead. So I asked Sabina. She said it was okay.”
“Did she?” Gee considered that. “This is acceptable to me. Come. We must hurry or our prey will escape us.”
I cocked my head at my partner. “I’ll call when I’m back.” He nodded. I hunched down and leaped, hopping to the top of the brick fence surrounding the backyard. It was easier than I had expected.
“ ’Tis only the launch that is difficult,” Gee said, trilling what might have been laughter, expecting me to face-plant. He threw himself into the air.
I know the glory of soaring, wingtips splayed, tail feathers twisting in subtle harmony with updrafts. And how to land, wings tilting just so, feathering down into a controlled fall with flight-feather positional changes and wing angle alterations, the variation slowing the descent, carrying me to a perch.
I gathered myself and dropped down until my knobby toes touched my breastbone, a position I might achieve in human form—if I broke my legs first. I leaped and threw out my arms. Wings. Air caught beneath me and I beat down. The long wingtips hit the earth and brushed brick before I managed a second stroke. And then I was lifting, wind in my face, air heavy, full of moisture. I tucked my feet, caught a rising thermal over the street, hot asphalt stink in my lungs. Beat downward again and again.
Below me, New Orleans glittered like diamonds, the Mississippi a black snake slithering through. I caught a second thermal and soared upward, Gee just ahead. I adjusted my flight position to his left, which decreased my wind resistance, things I knew by instinct and genetics. We rose higher, leaving the earth behind. Intermixed below us I could see circles and triangles in all the colors of the rainbow and long lines of something blue below the surface.
In this form, I could see magic far better than I could in human orBeast-form. It was the magic of full circles and smaller workings. The long blue lines beneath the surface were... ley lines. I had never seen them like this. They were so beautiful they made my soul ache.
Anzu is good, Beast thought at me, sniffing the air.Like Anzu.
I cooed back at her.
I had no idea where we were going and I didn’t care as my wings carried me, untiring, across the darkness of the world. Hours passed.
—
After midnight, Gee descended toward the faint lights of a small township. In the distance, ley lines glowed bright. They seemed like a nexus of some sort, a snarled clump of earth magics. I knew next to nothing about ley lines but they looked dangerous. Overloaded. As we spiraled down, they fell from view and I smelled freshwater lakes and streams, the richness of untouched earth and uncut forests, stone, crude oil, and much more faintly, the stink of old blood.
The scent grew stronger. A lot of old blood. And the stink of were, species unknown. It was a type I had never scented before. Not wolf, not big-cat, something more musky, though the scent was overpowered, fading even as we flew by.
Gee circled and dove, alighting on the edge of a house roof. I landed atop an abandoned car. The huge ranch house was in a clearing, at the end of a long empty road, the sharp piney scent of trees all around, trying to overcome the stink of vampire and human blood. The battle was at least a month old, the season having frozen, melted, and washed most of it away. What was left was the stench of fury, desperation, fear, and death.
I remembered Leo’s words, quoted by the blood-servant who had delivered my invitation. “May your hunt be bloody. May you rend and eat the flesh of your prey.”
Leo had known what Gee was taking me to hunt. “Well, crap,” I said.
Gee trilled with mocking laughter.
