It wasn’t just offense on his eagle’s behalf. Fire condors weren’t really smart birds. They weren’t like corvids that wanted to know how things came together and could be taken apart. They could usually only hold a few things in their head at any one point,foodorsexorbaby.Right now, from what Teagan could tell, they were down tobaby,and along with that, maybemurder.
As Teagan watched, one of the matriarchs peeled off from the rest, folding her wings tight to her body, and dropped almost straight down towards the truck. With a cry of rage, Teagan fell from the sky after her. She wasn’t going after the rear window like he thought, however.
Instead she landed on the truck bed, and before he could stop her, she rapped hard on the glass with her beak. It didn’t put a crack in the glass, but he could see Ros flinch, ducking forward instinctively before she straightened.
Didn’t even swerve,Teagan thought proudly, and then he had a fire condor in his face, screaming and beating her wings at him to make him back off.
Most of the time, he would have been happy to do so, but right then, he couldn’t let her stay on the truck, not if she was going to make more tries for the glass. Instead, he puffed up as large as he could, spreading out his wings and hissing as he flapped fiercely in return. She was taller than he was, but he was heavier, and after a moment, she decided he was too much to take on alone. She shrieked and took to the air again, and Teagan took a moment to get his breath back.
He turned his head and happened to catch a glimpse of Ros’s eyes in the rearview mirror. It was just a flash, just a moment, but they locked gazes. Suddenly, he knew what Ros was feeling, what she was thinking, and if he was in his human form instead of his eagle form, he would have laughed outright from joy.
She loved him–and she was having so much fun.
Suddenly, all of the stress and worry over the last few days melted off of him, and he remembered that as ridiculous as it was, as dangerous and as boring and as weird as it was, his job was fun.
Teagan shook himself out, and with one powerful flap of his wings, he threw himself into the air again.
Time to have some fun.
Chapter Fourteen
∞∞∞
Ros knew that it was about four hours to Camp Ma’iingan, where Teagan’s friends were meeting them. She knew how long four hours was, that it could fly by when she was watching a movie she liked and it would crawl when she was trying to get someone to forward her the information she needed.
Given that her phone was tucked in her pocket and Teagan’s truck didn’t have a working clock, she had no idea how long they'd been driving. From time to time, the flock trailing them screamed or cried out, and aside from Junior sometimes cooing in the seat next to her, there was no way to say how long she had been on the road.
I should be incredibly stressed out right now. I mean, I’m not exactly relaxed. But I’m not afraid, either.
All it had taken, she realized wryly, was a single look into Teagan’s eyes. When one of the fire condors had dropped into the truck bed, her heart had leapt into her throat, but then there was Teagan, and somehow, she knew that no matter what happened, she would not be facing it alone.
“I don’t know,” she said to Junior. “It seems like a lot to put on a single glance, but that’s what I feel.”
From the seat beside her, Junior squawked, and not taking her eyes off the road, Ros chuckled.
“Look, you’re very cute, but you’re pretty young for me. Teagan’s the guy I’m with, and the sooner you figure that out, the better it will be for everyone.”
Junior made a slightly offended grumbling sound, and she nodded.
"We can still be friends. I mean, whatever being friends means between a murderbird and an out-of-work accountant. I would need a very clear decrease in the number of your relatives that want to kill me, and I assume that I would maybe need dance lessons and a wildlife rehabilitation license, but of course we can be friends. You just have to respect my relationship with Teagan."
Ros heard herself, and she had to shake her own head.
"It sounds pretty nuts, doesn't it? I mean, I met the guy just a couple of days ago, and. And this. All of this."
She braked as one of the male fire condors took a dive at the windshield. The truck stopped, the bird pulled up, and she continued to drive, staring out the window so hard her eyes hurt.
"Seriously, if you could tell them to knock it off, I would really appreciate it."
It was four hours of white-knuckle driving before she came to the green metal gate Teagan had told her about. As he had said, it wasn't meant to be noticeable, and she almost drove past it, having to spin the wheel hard at the last minute. The crudely-painted sign tacked to the tree told her she had arrived at Camp Ma’iingan, and she carefully edged the truck up the drive, Junior peeping in pique the whole way.
"I know, I know. It'll be fine. In just a little bit, we'll get you to your family. Big family reunion, I promise."
Almost as if they could tell something was up, the birds redoubled their attacks, winging so close to the truck that Ros could hear their beaks and claws scraping the glass and metal. She determinedly ignored them, focusing on the road in front of her until something pinched her thigh.
“Oh!”
She looked over to see that Junior was half out of his trap and gotten her attention with a quick nip. At some point, probably while she was trying to keep his dad or uncles from driving them off the road, he had worked his beak and then his head and his neck out of the closure of the trap, and now he gazed up at her. Ros suddenly remembered in an intense way that as hilarious as the idea of a juvenile cryptid being in love with her was, this was a wild animal that she had pretty aptly dubbed a “murderbird.”