The air seemed to brighten. The glow reappeared and intensified. Grew closer. The chasm widened and I spread my wings, the temps still rising, the change giving me lift. I was silent, eyes on the bend ahead, the curve where the glow originated. I back-winged. Reached out with my claws. Gripped and settled onto a stub of rock.
The temperature was probably fifty degrees in the microclimate of the rift, but it felt like a sauna after the hours aloft in frozen air. I fluttered my feathers, shook my wings, sending droplets in fine sprays. Another outcropping was just ahead and I hopped, robin-like, to it and perched. I held my wings wide, letting the ice melt and drip off, giving myself a whole minute to thaw. I fluttered my plumage, shaking water off of me, breathing and dripping and trying to gather myself. I ached all over. With all my senses, I searched for Shimon. For EJ. My nose and eyes found nothing except the mineral scent of heated water and the life scents of birds, lizards, mice, and rats, hibernating. Not another thing. No scent of my godchild. No scent of vampire. Nothing new or different from my earlier visit to the crevasse.
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 soft tonk as 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 my way 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