Holly took me aside. “Well, that should travel faster than the wind. Where shall we hold your slaughter? I mean, contest.”
I gave her a look. “You could have a little faith in me.”
Holly lowered her head to murmur in my ear. “Dayna, you can see how large this drake is, correct?”
I smiled grimly. “Size doesn’t worry me so much as smarts.”
Griffins’ beaks had limited motion, so they couldn’t grin, but I got the sense that Holly just did. “Wise words. Mount up so that I may take you where you wish.”
“Can you find me a beach along the north shore? One with more rock than sand?”
She nodded, and with a beat of her wings she took off. Thundercrack followed suit and remained at a distance. My stomach clenched up, expecting the worst, for I didn’t even have the security of a saddle this time. But Holly’s torso was slimmer than Shaw’s, and I was able to grip her body with my legs a lot more easily. It also helped that she kept her flight reasonably slow and level as we soared over the coastline.
“What you want is just short of the far point, where we landed to meet the Elders,” she said, over the stiff wind. “I will circle it a dozen times. Make sure that my judgement is correct.”
“You have to circle the beach that many times?”
“Not at all. But that will give enough time for as many warriors as can cram themselves into viewing points to arrive. As we say, if you must use up your luck on one attack, put all of your strength behind it.”
“Go big, or go home,” I agreed.
Holly called it correctly. By the time she and Thundercrack landed, the entire rocky slope above the beach was jammed with curious onlookers from elderly gray-furred veterans to spiky-feathered fledglings. They kept their voices low, but an expectant hum, punctuated with the occasional birdlike chirrup of excitement, permeated the air.
“If all here have not heard,” Thundercrack announced, “This human whelp has challenged me to a throw of rocks into the ocean. Distance shall determine the winner. As is our custom, the challenged shall go first.”
With that, the drake grabbed a nearby rock the size of a sofa cushion. He lifted it in one smooth motion as he raised himself to his hind legs. His wings half-unfurled as he pivoted like a shot-putter. I couldn’t help but marvel at the definition of muscle in his back and flanks as his golden fur flexed in the sunlight.
He launched his stone in a high arc, winning a cheer from the assembled griffins. I hardly noticed. There, as the sun caught his wings, I spotted a shimmer of green. It came from a pattern of feathers along the underside of his wings. The same shimmer of green one could see on a male peacock’s plumage. Only it was toned so far down that the sunlight had to catch it just right to show.
Thundercrack’s rock made a mighty splash as it plopped into the ocean. There was more cheering, though I heard it as just white noise in the background. My mind had flashed back to what Hector Reyes had said about what his cousin had witnessed in the Hall of Gems.
Whatever it was, it got close enough to him so that all he saw was a blur of colors. White, gold, and green. I asked him twice, he says he saw the color green.
“Dayna!” Holly hissed.
I snapped back to the present, where the assembled griffins looked on curiously. A fledgling with dirty white feathers flapped out over the ocean, landing neatly in the spot where the rock had fallen, bobbing in place, marking the spot. Thundercrack had retreated to the side with a look of idle male smugness.
Well, I was about to wipe that expression off his face. Ever since second grade in Pike County Elementary, I’d regularly win lunches from boys foolish enough to bet against me when it came to skipping stones off the nearby pond. That was why I’d picked the northern side of the griffin aerie – it lay in the lee of the wind that came off the sea on the opposite side. The water was relatively calm and still here. Well, it should have been obvious as to why I asked for a beach with more stones than sand.
Dozens of feathered necks craned to watch me as I wandered around, eyes on the ground. It probably looked like I was just trying to eat up time, delaying my inevitable concession. It certainly must have seemed like it to the audience, since the murmuring slowly built up in pitch, and if anything the smugness radiating from Thundercrack got even more intense.
But, I found what I was looking for. A flattened triangle of stone about the size of my palm and as heavy as a tennis ball. I let out a breath. A lot lay riding on this little rock; among other things, I damn sure wanted to get a DNA sample from the drake I’d challenged.
I held the stone aloft. Thundercrack dropped his smug look, trading it for a puzzled one. More murmurs, a few shouted caws, and various voices raised themselves in laughter.
“Oh, ‘tis a good one! Thou hadst never said how big a stone one had to choose!”
“Nice try, human, but you still can’t throw that as far as the drake!”
“Give up now, while you can still cling to honor!”
I got into my stone-throwing position during all of this, cocked my arm, wound up, and released the rock with a quick snap of my wrist. Just like riding a bike, this was one skill I’d never lost. The stone spun out, hit just before the swell of an incoming wave, and then flew out in a flat arc over the water.
The griffins around me went dead silent, holding their breaths, as the stone bounced. Once, twice, thrice, four times. On the fifth bounce, the fledgling marking the spot of the first throw had to lean to one side as the stone skipped on past and then finally sank with a little plop!
As one, the drakes and reeves all around the little beach went wild.
Cheers, trills and screeches echoed from the cliffs above. It was hard to hear anything for a while. Then, into the middle of the pandemonium, a steel-gray armored griffin flew, hovering above where we’d done the stone casting.
“By the four great winds!” Elder Ulrik swore. “We are trying to hold a council hearing! Take your sparring cheers and noise somewhere else, or Belladonna shall be adding new figures to the chains that hang in the Lair of the Elders!”
With some good-natured jibes in return the crowd broke up, clearing the headlands above the beach. Ulrik shook his head and soared back to where the council was getting on with their business. Holly simply sat as if rooted to the spot, a bemused look on her eagle face. Thundercrack came up to me, standing close enough to put me completely in his shadow.
“I am honor-bound to accept your win,” he said slowly, “Though I think that it was due to the trickery of your kind, nothing more.”
“There was no–”
He held up a paw, and I quieted down. “Be still. The high-pitch of your voice rattles my ear. I shall bring my pride to your testing after noon of the next day. That said, I demand a re-match.”
I shook my head. “I wasn’t playing for two out of three.”
“Not with you. With Lance Captain Ironwood and the Reyka Pride.”
“A pride-spar match between Reyka and Valkir?” Holly asked, perking up. “Gladly. On the morn of the Rite of the Autumn Winds, at the combat grounds.”
“Good. Have the human as your nest keeper.”
“As you wish. To the first touch?”
“No, Hollyhock. To the blood.”
Holly’s eyes narrowed. “You play a dangerous game, drake.”
“No more dangerous than yours.”
I couldn’t help myself; I had to step in again. I felt the situation, which I thought I’d just salvaged, begin to slip away. Plus, my being involved in anything called ‘to first blood’ worried me. Especially if my blood might be on the line.
“This isn’t necessary!” I protested, but this time Holly shushed me.
“It is, Dayna. You triumphed over him, and you did so publically. He must have his chance to win some of his pride’s honor back. And you must be there, at least in some small way.”
“Aye, it shall be a small way.” The scar by Thundercrack’s beak writhed as the drake tried to suppress so
me dark emotion. “I am curious to see how humans fare without their tricks.”
“We do just fine,” I gritted.
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end as he said, in a voice soft and full of menace, “I wonder. I daresay you would not be much without your gun, Dragon-Hand. Or without all the things of metal and plastic and gasoline from your world.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“You can’t give all this up for Andeluvia,” Esteban said, smiling in that seductive way he had. “Come with me and see for yourself!”
With that, he doffed his top hat and made a sweeping gesture for me to enter the room. His tuxedo should have looked faintly ridiculous, but somehow he pulled it off. I adjusted my shimmery green evening gown, stepped down out of the pumpkin-shaped carriage and onto the red carpet. Around us swirled a rush of traffic on Hollywood Boulevard, their lights glaring in the evening dusk.
He held the door to the restaurant open. I gasped as I stepped through and my nose filled with the salty brine of the sea. Instead of a conventional interior, I saw the tumbled stone walls of the Reykajar aerie. Griffins swirled around us in a rush, golden eyes gleaming like headlights.
Esteban reclined on a red-and-white picnic blanket. His tux had changed to an LAPD cop uniform. He held up a bottle, wiping the beads of moisture off with his palm as he read the label.
“Tomás’ best,” he said. “How could you leave me when you have all this?”
He held up a plate of purple berries. They had been pressed somehow, or crystallized. They looked like flat, cut gemstones.
“This…can’t be real,” I said cautiously, as I sat next to him.
“Nonsense. You just need to see properly!”
The griffin aerie turned into a sun-kissed field dotted with bright blue cornflowers. Esteban plucked one and held it up to me. The intense blue of the flower, shaped like a miniature carnation, pulled me in like the coolness of the ocean depths.
I had to sniff it. Dust from the Hall of Gems puffed out like pollen. My nose wrinkled up and before I could bring my hand to my face, I let out a horrific sneeze.
I woke up back in my own bed.
The alarm wasn’t about to ring for another fifteen minutes, so I shut it off and decided to get ready for work a little early. It never hurt, and sometimes it even gave me the illusion that somehow I’d beaten the other twenty million Los Angelenos to the rush hour.
One shower, clothes change, and cup of java later, I stopped-and-go’ed along the ironically named ‘freeway’. My mood was as unsettled as the traffic. Again, I hadn’t woken from a nightmare per se, but I knew how quirky my brain could get when sending me messages.
It was obvious that something was tickling my subconscious. Telling me that I’d missed a step somewhere. That was all very well and good. But part of me dreaded that I might not figure out what I’d missed until it just a little too late.
With that happy thought, I pulled into a handy parking spot. I pulled out the bag containing my collected swab kits, jammed it under my arm, and headed into the trapezoid of smoky glass that made up the OME building. The carefully sterilized, neutral scent of the gray lobby had been overlaid with the soapy spoor of carpet cleaner, so I held my nose until I got to my office. Someone had taped a note to my door.
Hey there Annie Oakley,
Don’t forget: we got targets to shoot at high noon.
See you at the firing range.
Alanzo
That managed to pry the first smile out of me for the day. I peeled off the note and folded it into a pocket as I programmed in a reminder on my phone then jammed my door key in the lock and pushed my way into my office. The mess of paper on my desk had piled up so high that a hamster would have moved out for health code violations. But at least the piles hadn’t risen up to the level of the Mad Hatter’s tea party cookie jar.
I dug around in one of my cabinets until I found a padded envelope for the OME branch of the packaged mail service. Luckily, it was just big enough for the buccal brush samples I’d taken so far to fit inside. With a flurry of pen strokes I put in the mail stop number, marked it as urgent, then put in my independent contractor’s billing code in the payment field. I definitely didn’t want the LAPD to be questioning this particular expenditure. I took the package down to the administration area and placed it in the appropriate bin. One of the admin assistants spotted me and waved me down from her cubicle.
“Package just came in for you,” she said, picking up a large, bulky box the size and shape of a throw pillow. “And an envelope from Shelly Richardson.”
I took the package in one hand; it weighed almost nothing. With the other, I took the inter-office manila envelope labeled LAB REPORT. I frowned. Shelly would normally give these to me directly, usually with a helping of down-home Southern advice to go with it.
“She’s out sick,” the admin added, seeing the question on my face.
“Again?” I asked. “That’s the third or fourth time this month alone.”
A shrug in reply. The admins had to handle requests and scheduling for the entire department; it was hard for anyone to keep track of everyone. That said, up until now I’d never known Shelly to take a single day off. As far as I knew, she’d never come down with so much as a cold.
I went back to my office, set the box down, and opened Shelly’s report first. It was probably my imagination, but even her handwriting looked a little unsteady, as if she’d gone out drinking before putting pen to paper. The results were terse, but clear: the metal shaving I’d found at the Hall of Gems’ vault were made of blister steel. Specifically, the kind that matched what we’d found on ‘Connor McCloud’ when he’d been transported to our world.
So, my hunch was right. Someone wearing Andeluvian steel gauntlets had torn open the vault door.
Next, I turned my attention to the box, which was addressed from the Natural History Museum. I managed to pry it open, reach in, and pull out a pair of ventilation duct filters. Each had been nicely sealed inside a taped-up plastic baggie. Another score for the day.
I settled in to handling the most urgent paperwork with a will for a while. I’d just finished tagging the baggie set with a lab request form when the phone on my desk buzzed. I had to push aside a couple mounds of paper to get to the receiver, but I managed to get to it by the third ring. A quick glance at the number on the display screen told me it was from the imaging department.
Hector Reyes’ familiar voice boomed out over the receiver. “Dayna, it’s your favorite shutter bug. Got a minute to come down to the digital lab? There’s something here you ought to see. It’s from that oddball case we got stuck with.”
Yeah, I definitely had a minute for that.
“I’ll be right down.”
I took a slight detour in order to put the duct filters into Shelly’s sample station downstairs, then made my way to Hector’s wing. The photo lab, which everyone called either the ‘digital lab’ or just ‘the digital’ was in one of the newer parts of the OME building. The smell of fresh latex paint mixed with new plastic surfaces gave off a faint scent of marker pens. I knocked on the door to the lab, heard a faint entra in reply, and pushed my way in.
“Hey, have a seat and check this out,” Hector said without ceremony. He sat at one of a pair of faux-leather seats drawn up to an executive-size desk. Perched on said desk was a high-definition monitor larger than my office’s window. I took the empty seat as he typed a few commands into the keyboard to blip the film back to his starting point.
“Sweet setup you have here,” I observed. “I’d love to watch a movie on this gear.”
A knowing chuckle. “Believe me, I’ve been tempted to try an online game with this thing, check out a little of what my son is playing. But no dice.”
“Yeah, I think the LAPD would object.”
“That, and the fact that kids these days have trigger reflexes like no one’s business. It’d be a massacre for old folks like me, who’re pushing thirty-five.” He finished typin
g in a couple of extra commands, then added, “This security camera footage actually arrived yesterday afternoon, but I had to transfer the tape to our kind of digital media, which took some time.”
“They actually used physical tape?”
“Nobody does that anymore, thank goodness. Just an old term we all still use. But the hardware they use is really old. Couldn’t view the stuff they sent until I copied it into a file format our machines can recognize. I don’t think it affected the quality at all. That’s a good thing, because this half-minute of tape is difficult enough to believe without additional distortion.”
With that, he set the film in motion. The vast oval shape of the Hall of Gems appeared, dimly illuminated by the after-hours lighting. Given the downward slant of the viewing angle, the security camera must have been installed above a doorway or below a second-story landing. I could clearly see the exhibit cases and, about sixty or seventy yards across the hall, the vault door to the ‘phantom quartz’ crystal exhibit. Off to the right I was just able to make out signs promoting the about-to-open sapphire display.
“There’s Tomás doing his rounds,” Hector noted. For a couple moments a cap-wearing man pushing a cart laden with cleaning supplies appeared at the lower left edge, then vanished off screen. “And…here’s where it gets interesting.”
The image shook as a shattering boom echoed throughout the hall, followed by the unmistakable, jangling cascade of shattering glass. Tomás let out a scream, which was echoed by a loud screech that could have come from an eagle the size of a small aircraft.
Next came a blur of images and sounds.
A shimmering blast of glass particles was blown as if by a fierce wind over the exhibit cases. Tomás kept up a raw cry of fear from somewhere as the air thrummed with a pounding beat. A blur of colors appeared on the screen, close enough to show a rough texture that caught the light from a nearby wall lamp.
At the same moment there was a metallic keening, followed by a crash. The blur in front of the camera vanished. A dark shape disappeared off camera from its position by the now-wrecked vault door.
Grand Theft Griffin Page 12
