prey swooped down and alighted on the mailbox she’d parked beside. The street was quiet, probably because school hadn’t let out yet. The large, fierce-looking bird of prey looked especially incongruous with a suburban neighborhood as a backdrop. She could see a McDonald’s from her parking spot.
Curious, but not too strange, I guess. Maybe it nests around here. The river’s close, so are the bluffs. Lots of prey.
And then it stared at her. Not a glance, a stare. An intense, fixed glare.
Okay, that’s unsettling.
She took a couple of steps forward and the bird didn’t move. It had a dark body, mostly reddish-brown, with an amazing wingspan. The feathers were mostly black, with white tips at the wings. It looked sleek and dangerous, and Lila had seen those crystal blue eyes before.
“Oh, hey. I know you.”
The raptor immediately took flight, but only long enough to cross the distance between them and flutter onto her shoulder. She—Lila was certain the bird was female—wasn’t heavy at all, which was surprising; the thing was almost two feet tall, and the wingspan was amazing. Guess it’s true; birds are mostly feathers and air.
Lila slowly turned and walked back to her nonbulance, like a girl in the 1950s trying to fix her posture by walking around with a book on her head. She tried not to think about the sharp, hooked beak that could have her ear off quicker than a straight razor. Or the talons that could slash through skin and muscle with next to no effort.
“Is there a plan besides ‘make a distraction and then get the hell out of the way’?”
The bird screamed what Lila took to be “No.”
“Right in my ear? That struck you as a good idea?”
She got another shriek for her pains.
* * *
Crashing through the huge windows of the Reflections Dance Academy was so easy she couldn’t believe it. TV told the truth for a change! Truly a wondrous day.
She unbuckled her seat belt (thank you, George Cayley!) and hopped out of her nonbulance, fully prepared to—well, she didn’t know what she was prepared to do, that depended on what was happening, and what was happening was that Garsea and Berne and Oz were whaling the fuck out of three men she’d never seen before. One of them was punching Berne and yelling about how his shirt was ruined, and Berne was acting like he couldn’t even feel the hits, like he was being assaulted by a jar of marshmallow fluff. Uptight marshmallow fluff. Like he was waiting for the other guy to just knock it off already, so he could really go to work.
She heard gunfire and instinctively flinched, saw that Annette’s guy had gotten one off but missed her, tried to step back to get a better shot (not a great close-up weapon…that’s why God made knives), only to have the raptor swoop in and rake her talons across his face, blinding him in a slash and a flurry of feathers. Lila hadn’t known men could shriek so high.
And then there were people everywhere, pouring in from where she’d driven through the front of the building like they’d been waiting for a signal—was she the signal?—and more coming from behind—the back entrance?—and she had no idea what to do because she could no longer see Oz, much less rescue him, and that was the point, that he was in trouble and needed her, except maybe he didn’t, so this was now a piss-poor place to be and she had just decided to take cover in her nonbulance when a man in a turtleneck spotted her and just went crazy, spotted her and started toward her and screamed at her
“Who brought a fucking Stable into this?”
and then his gun was coming up but so was hers and she shot him and then she threw up.
Chapter 55
“Lila!” Oz stopped rearranging Mock’s facial bone structure and ran to her. He didn’t spare a glance at Turtleneck, who was on his back and clutching his chest and being the least aggravating he’d been all day. “What the hell are you doing here, Jesus, are you okay?”
She was leaning against her nonbulance, wiped her mouth, and took a couple of shaky steps forward. He caught her, steadied her, hugged her. She pulled back to look at him and he’d never seen a sweeter sight, not ever.
“I never shot anybody before. Just targets and pop cans and mailboxes I was mad at.”
“You did it like a champ.”
“Any other week,” she said tearfully, “this