“Hey, Junior,” Ros muttered, still stamping her feet while keeping the trap down low in front of her. “Hey, sweetie.”
Junior swayed from side to side, making a soft crooning sound that would have been sweet if she couldn’t see how very sharp his claws and his beak were. He was the smallest fire condor in the flock, but he was still a large and dangerous animal.
It’s way too late to have second thoughts about this,Ros thought, but then another, more confident thought intruded.
Teagan thinks I can do this. That means that I can.
More confidently, she stamped her feet and swayed from side to side. Above, Teagan’s scream of challenge was answered by a raucous chorus of shrill cries from the flock, but she couldn’t take her eyes off of Junior.
Junior crooned, stamping, getting closer, his head low, and that was enough.
Ros raised the trap, which looked a little like a cross between a butterfly net and a folding chair. The handles opened up a pair of broad jaws lined with firm elastic webbbing, and with a single sure motion, she closed the jaws fully around Junior, sandwiching him between two sheets of netting. The jaws themselves latched together, holding the juvenile fire condor in place with his wings folded against his body and his legs tucked up tight.
“Awk?” he said in surprise, and Ros came around out of reach of his beak to grab up the handles from behind.
“It’s okay, baby, it’s okay,” she said as soothingly as she could. When she picked him up, she was momentarily surprised by how very light he was, for all of his size, but then he shrieked with belated offense.
“Oh God.”
She glanced up just in time to see the flock realize something was happening to their baby. One of the matriarchs turned, and then the other did, and Ros didn’t wait for the others to turn as well. Instead, she took a better grip on Junior’s trap and booked it for Teagan’s truck, which they had left running with the key in the ignition and the driver’s door open. She came around the house at a dead run, and behind her the flock shrieked in anger.
She pushed Junior in his trap into the passenger seat and climbed in, slamming the door just in time to see one of the older males almost hit the glass, coming straight for her before sheering up towards the sky with a thwarted scream of rage. Ros buckled herself in, unable to resist peering through the glass at the maddened flock. They circled the truck like a school of airborne piranha, and beside her, Junior uttered another indignant squawk.
“Sorry, pal,” she said, putting the truck into gear. “This will all be over very soon, I promise.”
As she pulled onto the country road, she glimpsed Teagan riding herd over the fire condors, distinct with his gray feathers and the broadness of his wingspan. Just seeing him gave her a surge of courage, and all right.
“Come on, Junior,” she said as she started to drive. “Let’s get you home, okay?”
Chapter Thirteen
∞∞∞
Four hours.
That was how long it was going to take to get to the rendezvous point, and flying at a safe distance beyond the fire condor flock, Teagan knew that in the grand scheme of things, four hours was nothing. Four hours meant this might all be settled by dinner time. Four hours was a long movie or a half-shift counting frogs in the swamp.
Four hours was nothing.
At the same time, he couldn’t stop his heart from pounding out of his chest, and every time one of the fire condors took a dive towards his truck, he had to prevent himself from going down there and driving the attacker off histrue mate.
Inside his head, his eagle didn’t get it. That was his true mate down there. She was indangerfrom these flaming assholes. She wasin peril.Why in the world wasn’t he going down there to protect her?
There was, unfortunately, no way to explain to his eagle what they were doing, about endangered birds or the necessity of getting them out of the county before things literally went up in flames.
I trust her,he finally told his eagle.We love her, but we also trust her. She’s going to do her part, and she trusts us to do ours. That’s it.
His eagle subsided after that, and a new kind of warmth suffused Teagan’s body, because it was true. He loved his mate, of course he did, but he also trusted her faith and her skills and her strength. If she said she could drive forty miles of country roads with a furious flock of endangered fire-setting birds behind her, he believed her, and so did his eagle.
And now that was taken care of, all he had to do was ride herd on a flock of increasingly furious fire condors.
The first part of his role, distracting the flock while Ros made a grab for the juvenile male, was done. It hadn’t been fun, and he was sporting fewer tail feathers than he had started the day with, but that was fine. It was done, and Ros had made it to his truck with her cargo in tow. Even better, the juvenile had screamed his head off, drawing the attention of the adults that cared for him, and now they were on to the second part of the plan.
This was a bigger flock than he had ever tried to handle. Hell, this might have been a bigger flock than anyone had ever dealt with. While they were clannish, he couldn’t rely on all of them going after the baby in distress. If some chose stay at the house or even to splinter off to do their own thing in the Northwoods, he would have to herd them back to the rest.
It was a good plan, but as Ros drove up the empty country road followed by a flock of birds that were looking distinctly more murderous with very mile that passed, he could tell they needn’t have worried. The fire condors were as coordinated as a marching band, every single eye focused on the truck that held their baby. Teagan, flying sometimes behind them and sometimes off to one side, barely merited a single glance now that there was something more important going on, and it made his stomach lurch with nerves.
I’m the biggest thing in the sky today,he thought.They should be more worried about me.