I blinked, but for a long moment, his words made no sense. Not the refusal. The part about cannibalizing my theoretical future child. “Well, isn’t that…gruesome? Who are you, Rumpelstiltskin?”
Kai frowned, as if I made no sense to him. “No thunderbird would claim a name so senselessly flamboyant.”
Or any sign of a sense of humor, for that matter. What was I thinking?
“Never mind.” I rubbed my temples with half-frozen fingers, and when I licked my lips, I tasted blood. They’d cracked open from the cold. “Are you prepared to pay your debt or what?”“Yes. But failing to take my life when I was willing to lose it is not worth such a task.”
“You wouldn’t be in any danger—” I started.
“Of course not. I have nothing to fear from creatures who can’t even leave the surface of the planet under their own power,” Kai insisted, though he probably still bore the scars Owen had given him.
Grrr… I’d forgotten what a pain in the ass thunderbirds were. Inevitably.
“Okay, I get it. You’re scared. But maybe you could talk to one of your friends for me. Get someone else to—”
“No one else will do it. No member of our Flight would debase himself as your errand boy.”
I swallowed a growl of frustration. “You can’t answer for them. You guys may have this weird hive-mentality thing going on, but you don’t actually share a brain, right?”
Kai’s eyes narrowed as he frowned, obviously as impatient as I was. “They will say no. I know that like I know exactly how you’d taste, just from smelling you, but…”
Marc’s growl ripped through the air. Jace snarled and lunged at Kai. I threw myself between them, chest to chest with Jace. Cade and Coyt sprouted insta-feathers and beaks, facing off against Marc, two on one.
“Stop!” I shouted, desperate to avoid a confrontation we could not win. I wedged my arms between my body and Jace’s and shoved him as hard as I could, then held out one hand to stop his rebound. Only once he stayed back—eyes and canines already Shifted—did I dare take my gaze from him to glance at Marc. Marc stood with his legs spread wide for balance, eyes glittering with rage, fists high and close to his body. He was ready to throw down, and that could only end in death. Whose, I was afraid to speculate.
I stood with my arms spread in the universal signal for Stop! “There will be no tasting of any kind. Right?”
“Damn right,” Marc snapped, while Jace only growled.
When Kai made no reply, I glared at him. “Will you guys play nice if we do?”
He narrowed dark, small bird eyes at my phrasing. “We will not attack unprovoked. That would be dishonorable. But with provocation… Well, I’ve never actually tasted fresh cat, and while I typically find carnivore flesh distasteful, I’m feeling like something a little exotic tonight.”
Great. Somebody was obviously still bitter over his time underground….
“No provocation. Just take us up there so I can present a rational request to someone who isn’t looking to peck my eyes out.”
Kai made a high-pitched screeching sound in the back of his throat, and it took me a moment to realize he was laughing. “You won’t find that in the nest. But if I get you an audience…you will consider my debt paid?”
I hesitated just long enough to decide that was the best deal we’d get out of them. Unless they had another infant I could rescue. Finally I nodded. “Paid in full. Should we shake on it?” I stuck my hand out, but Kai only frowned.
“Is your word worth so little you must offer pointless physical gestures?”
I huffed and crossed my arms over my chest. “Fine. Never mind. Safe passage to your nest and an audience with someone more useful than you obviously are. Passage for all three of us,” I added as an afterthought.
Marc mumbled something behind me, and I twisted to hear him better. “What?”
He rolled his eyes. “Safe return passage, too. Don’t get us stranded up there.”
Oh, yeah. I turned back to the birds, trying to hide my embarrassment. “And safe return passage for all three of us. If you promise all of that, I’ll consider your debt absolved.”
Kai nodded quickly, looking so relieved that I wondered if I should have pressed for more. “Fine. You’re first.”
“Okay. Just one minute.” Already dreading the short, safety net–less flight, I turned to Marc and Jace and motioned them into an impromptu huddle. “Do not lose your temper in there. We’ll be safe as long as we don’t start anything. Got it?”
They both nodded reluctantly, and I turned to find all three thunderbirds already in full avian form—one of the scariest sights I’d ever seen in my life. Much scarier than either a bruin or a werecat in animal form, because we looked very much like our natural-born counterparts. But there was no bird in the world as big as a thunderbird, and by all the laws of physics—what little I understood of it, anyway—that meant they shouldn’t have been able to fly. They were too heavy. But then, they shouldn’t have been able to Shift so quickly, either. No wonder they held themselves apart from us.
The world had never seen anything like the thunderbirds, and with any luck, neither had our enemies on the council, other than Malone. They’d never know what hit them.
“Okay, let’s get this over with.” I held my arms out, and at my signal, Cade and Coyt rose into the air with several flaps of their huge, powerful wings. The air they moved blew hair back from my face and froze my already-dripping nose, but I barely had time to notice that before Cade—or Coyt—wrapped his thick talons around my upper arms in a bruising grip.
I closed my eyes as the earth abandoned my feet, and several seconds later, the other ferry-bird grabbed my ankles.
Don’tlookdon’tlookdon’tlook…
I didn’t exhale in relief until the weather-worn wooden porch boards came into sight beneath me. One bird dropped my ankles, and my shoulders were wrenched mercilessly when my body swung free beneath me. Then the other bird let me go, and I crashed to my knees on the porch, eye to eye with a sizable knothole, through which I could see the ground, two hundred feet below.
Heart racing, I lurched to my feet and scrambled away from the edge, pressing my back against the side of the building, irrationally afraid of being blown off the porch by the gust of wind beneath the approaching thunderbirds’ wings.
A minute later, Jace landed where I’d fallen, and I helped him up. “You okay?”
“Hell, no.” He actually wobbled on his feet and clung to me, his face whiter than a sun-bleached Texas sidewalk. “There’s a reason cats don’t have wings.”
“Yeah, but at least we always land on our feet.”
“Then why did I land on my ass?”
I didn’t have an answer for that one, so I just pulled him against the wall while we waited for Marc.Marc’s arrival was no better, and clearly no less traumatic. “Never. Again,” were his only words, as we followed Kai into the nest. I could not have agreed more.
Inside, my gaze was drawn upward, though I’d seen it all before. Twice. It was still impressive, in a how-many-ways-are-there-to-die kind of way. Most of the first floor was taken up by a large, open living space, scattered with worn but comfy-looking chairs and couches, all piled high with old, faded pillows, like little mininests. Along three sides of the room were several closed doors leading to other rooms, and directly across from the entrance stood the staircase.
There was no ceiling. The room was open all the way to the roof, six stories up, and along the way, platforms and long, thick beams jutted from the walls, each occupied with one or more birds in various stages of mid-Shift. And they all stared down at us.
The second and third floors were arranged like hotel rooms ringing a large, open lobby. Most of the doors were closed, and in the far corner I could see the room where Kaci and I had woken up on our previous trip.
“Kai!” We all whirled at the sharp, disharmonic screech, and I flinched as Kai soared over our heads in response to the summons. He landed in front of a nude elderly female thunderbird with a human face and long white hair.
“I’ve granted them an audience, to absolve myself of debt and uphold the honor of my word.”
The old bird turned from Kai to face us. “Come forward and state your business, then be gone. We want no contact with your species beyond removing ourselves from your debt.”
“Fair enough.” I wasn’t exactly tickled to be there, either. “Is anyone among you willing go on a reconnaissance mission for us?”
“Will this mission absolve us of our debt to you?” a softer but equally creepy dual-tone voice asked, and I turned to find a dark-haired mostly human man waiting for my answer.
“Not alone, no. This mission is simple and safe—hardly worth Wren’s life.” At a shuffling sound behind me, I turned to see the toddler safe in her mother’s arms. I smiled at them both, then continued. “I have something else in mind to erase that debt. This recon is…separate.” I hesitated, reluctant to say the next part, but I was out of options. “A favor, of sorts. Which I will gladly repay.”
“No. You are of no use to us,” the old crone half shrieked. “Now we are done. You will go.” With that, she turned her back and spread her wings, preparing to take to the air. We had been dismissed.