Chapter Fifteen

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The situation grew more chaotic by the moment as cult members fled in a panic around us. There was already at least one death in this situation, and I had the sense that more were on the horizon if we didn’t figure something out. I had to get to Debbie, she was within my grasp, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that Birdie watched me with a hawk’s gaze. With the two behind me gathering power, with the growing panic, I was the one she wouldn’t take her eyes off of.

“Well, is the harpy our friend or foe?” Ann asked hesitantly.

“I get a distinct impression that Birdie isn’t exactly willing to let us do what we came here to do, but she did just save our lives, so at the moment I’d call it a wash. Though I expect that this might change shortly one way or the other.” I never broke eye contact with Birdie as I answered. “How about you? If we give you another tenner, do you think you could just forget this whole thing?”

Birdie offered something like a laugh. “And miss the opportunity to kill one of the god’s forgotten? I wouldn’t do that for anything less than twenty.”

The gaunt man from the circle earlier stepped forward, power now radiating off of him in steady pulses. If I could feel this much with no magical talent of my own, I could only imagine what Ann was sensing. “Foul creature! Murderous abomination!” He challenged in a voice I wouldn’t expect from a man of his frame. “Your cowardly attack on the Abbot shall not—!”

Even seeing it coming, the man didn’t stand a chance of getting out of the way as the blades from the birdcage sank into his neck. At least he wasn’t decapitated.

Ann looked like she was going to be sick, and I didn’t know if that was from the sudden gore or from experiencing the death of two magic wielders in her proximity in such a short amount of time. I caught a glimpse of the woman who interestingly enough, rolled her eyes at the death of her comrade. Interesting indeed.

“Quiet, dearie. The women are talking.” Birdie tsked at the fallen man. “You know, I never got to know his name. I’ll bet it was something really neat too, like Pyrus or Xerxes or—”

“Birdie?” I interrupted.

Birdie shrugged. “Nicknames stick. No one in this town pronounces Greek names correctly anyway.”

“What are you doing?” I finally shouted impatiently. “We’re both after the same person, aren’t you concerned about—”

I don’t want to think about what would have happened if I’d taken my eyes off the harpy. The cage shot towards me at a disturbing speed, and I only just got my bow up in time to intercept the blow. My bow was carved from an Ain’thond tree, incredibly rare and nearly indestructible, it was perhaps my favorite bow. Birdie’s saw managed to cut halfway through it. So the blades were no ordinary metal, either. That complicated things. Before she could retract the cage, I snatched the rope with my off hand, in an attempt to pull her down to ground level.

I immediately regretted the decision.

I yelped loudly, equal parts pain and surprise. My hand burned as hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny shards of some kind dug their way into my palm. I glanced up in time to notice that something more important had grabbed Birdie’s attention as she retrieved her cage and flew to the other side of the house.

“I’ve indulged enough of this,” the woman said from behind me, impatience evident in her voice. I’d nearly forgotten about her for just a moment, and I turned towards her just in time to see a shimmering wave of air tinted with a bluish hue explode in front of me with a rising hum. Pure concussive force propelled me backward, tumbling through a stone garden as the woman strode away.

Ann rushed to my side with something like shock and panic on her face. It would be a moment before I could reassure her. “Chalsarda! Are you—what should I do?”

The wind had been knocked out of me, but with an effort, I managed to force out a couple of words. “You... need to go...”

“I am not leaving you like this!” She nearly screamed in response.

I vigorously shook my head, given that it was easier than speaking at the moment. When I’d gotten a bit more air in my lungs, I added, “Not what I’m asking. Get... get to your car. If it will still drive, try to keep an eye... on Birdie. I’ll catch up.”

Ann looked at me hard for a split second but didn’t argue, and instead bolted for her car. To my relief, I could hear the engine turn over, and with a horrible grinding noise, the car managed to reverse. A couple of tell-tale thumps later and it was gone. I managed to get back onto my feet but now faced a dilemma. Do I follow the deceptively powerful magic user or the insane harpy? And more importantly, did I have it in me at this point to fight either of them?

It was a simple answer, and not just because fighting someone practiced in magic would be foolhardy on the best of days. No, it was simple logic. Presumably, the cult members wanted Debbie alive, one way or the other. Birdie wanted her dead. If fighting a cruel and bloodthirsty harpy wasn’t a big enough problem as it was, I had to contend with her flying out in the open without so much as a glamour. Most non-humans tend to keep hidden with excellent reason and the longer she kept this up, the more likely we were to find out exactly what that reason was.

The yard having emptied at this point, I took an extra moment to collect my arrows and examine my bow. Ain’thond wood was legendarily strong, but my bow wouldn’t be safe to pull in this condition. It might fire, but it might just as easily explode in my face. Still, if Birdie were airborne, I wouldn’t have a choice, should I choose to fight her. Which meant I’d need a plan. A plan, a lot of luck, and about a week to sleep off this headache.

It, fortunately, did not take me long to find something I could use, more specifically a rather long length of jute rope. I presumed the rope was meant to tie me down for whatever ritual they’d had planned for me, but the sheer amount of bundles gave me the chills. I could guess that I had not been the first, and I was not intended to be the last. Still, I only needed the one. I didn’t trust my bow had more than one good draw left in it anyway, and more likely not even that, but I intended to make that shot count.

I removed a broadhead arrow from my quiver and left the rest of them behind. The rest of the arrows weren’t about to do me any good, besides. I tied one of the ropes to the arrow’s shaft and the other to an improvised hold in my trousers. Wherever this arrow went, I was going with it. On shaky legs I readied myself and scaled the house, looking to the skies. I saw her at once. She looked like a gargoyle the way she was perched on that telephone pole a couple of blocks away, watching the streets below her with some interest. It was too early to take my shot, but I couldn’t chance her getting away. Without giving it a second thought, I took a running leap from the roof of that house and onto the next, making each of my jumps without allowing myself to feel pain or fatigue.

I was maybe three houses away when Birdie decided to acknowledge me and chose to head for the skies. This was my moment. She was airborne and dangerous, but at her most vulnerable during her ascent. Using all my momentum, I angled my leap towards the street, and at my apex, I unleashed my shot in time with where I felt her body would rise to. The bow groaned with a hideous creak, the string raked viciously across my exposed forearm, but I was not disappointed with the result. The arrow tore through the sky and didn’t stop until it was halfway through her shoulder with a sickening thump. I landed awkwardly on a telephone pole of my own, dropping my bow as I did, and when the rope tugged as Birdie tested its length, I took that as my cue. With every bit of remaining strength in me, I pulled her down with both hands in one massive tug.

It had worked. Birdie had lost control of her flight, and the torn muscles in her shoulder and sudden blood loss had robbed her of her ability to stay aloft. Even her birdcage went loose from her grasp in the process. The harpy plummeted towards the earth and directly into the path of a moving van, too slow and unaware to stop for her in time. There was a screech of tires as Birdie smashed into the windshield and bounced off into the street. To my dismay, she began to rise to her feet almost immediately, but I wasn’t about to give her the chance to recover. I made the twenty-foot jump to the ground below, planting both feet into her back. The blow was enough to send her into the pavement, but it was like landing on a parade float. Her body was thin and light, and the wings sprouting out of her back seemed to absorb much of the kick.

I rolled to my feet half a second before she managed to get to hers, a look of fury and hunger touching her face before a sick grin replaced it. And behind her, I could see the driver of the van was terrified out of his mind as he threw the vehicle recklessly into reverse, sideswiping several cars before he sped off and around us. This was it. Out in the middle of the street, neither of us whole. And about to fight for our lives.

Birdie was breathing heavily as she began to circle me, eyes scarily fixed on me. “I assume this wasn’t the entirety of your plan. You wouldn’t think something like this would stop me, would you?”

“I’m still here, aren’t I?” I asked, assuming a defensive stance.

“You are, and I’m not surprised by that the same way I’m not surprised that you didn’t put that arrow through my heart,” Birdie responded. “See, I know all about you. But what do you know about me?”

Not much, I had to admit to myself. And even less about what Birdie was capable of. I knew about harpies from stories and reputation only. This was my first time fighting one, and I wasn’t confident that I would survive the encounter.

Birdie took the silence as an opportunity to rake two claws at my face, and when I managed to avoid them, she spotted a weakness and sent me stumbling back into a parked car.

I composed myself and continued to keep an eye on her. This fight had deadly implications. She was at least as fast as I was and twice as vicious. Between her clawed hands and the talons on her feet, I could be gutted in the blink of an eye if I made a mistake.

Birdie continued, matching my gaze. “I can see it in your eyes, you know. And you see, I want you to look right back at me, deep in my eyes, and realize that you don’t have what it takes to stop me. And I’m not in a rush to get out of here. I’ll find the Battle Born again, and next time I won’t have you around to annoy me.”

“But why are you so intent on killing her?” I pressed, looking for an angle to get her off her guard. “Isn’t the reward enough?”

The harpy’s face managed more of a sneer than I had expected. “Yeah, I was right. You don’t know shit about me. You think I need some trinket? It’s a hunk of metal to me; you can keep it. And the money? What can money do for me? Nuh-uh, money just brings problems, makes you lazy and weak. No thank you, I’ll take what I need when I need it. No, I don’t want the prizes or the reputation or any of it! What I want is that mistake of a creature’s bloody head in my hands and—!”

It was my turn to capitalize by way of interruption, and I shot into her bad side where the punctured arrow was still dripping blood and went to stomp on the side of her knee. I was half a second too slow, as her leg raised just a hair off the ground, preventing any leverage I might have had in buckling it. I tried to follow that up by pivoting behind her, but a wing flapped open and shoved me away with a shocking amount of force.

“Maybe there is something to you after all,” Birdie pondered aloud, circling me again, this time to protect her bad side. “But I know you’re not supposed to be here. I know something went wrong with your master. Something very wrong happened if you’re befriending humans. I can kind of relate. I’m not supposed to be here either, but here I am. I was never supposed to be anything but loyal to Zeus, but he’s not here. I was never supposed to leave Tartarus, but the underworld gets along just fine without me. But that’s the difference between us. You were made to love trees and commune with nature, I was made to do violence, but when I do what I’m supposed to do, I’m a monster? Is that right?”

I rushed in just then, closing the distance on her, pushing her out of the street and into a tree, pinning a forearm under her chin. “Yes! You are a monster, and not because of how or why you were created, but because of how little you care for life!”

“Good! So you understand me then!” Birdie rasped back at me. “And I’m going to keep killing my way up the food chain until something puts me down or until I get to Zeus himself and there’s nothing left for me to kill! So how about it? Are you going to stop being prey long enough to put me out of my misery? Or am I going to have to use your pretty corpse to send a message that I am not screwing around?”

I lost my temper and removed my forearm long enough to swing at her face and wildly miss. I tried to turn on my heel to follow up, but I was too slow and knocked back again by a wing flap suddenly opening up into me, sending me into a parked car hard enough to shatter glass. The movements of Birdie were fluid despite their chaotic appearance. No sooner than I slammed into the hood than she dove at me, claw extended. This time I wasn’t quite fast enough, and even though it was a grazing strike, the tips of her claws opened up my arms with a razor’s precision. It burned, and that burning told me that enough was enough.

If she could fight dirty, so could I. Birdie had overextended herself with that attack, and rather than trying to get away, this time I reached up and clutched at the arrow still sitting in the meat of her shoulder, and pressing my feet into her chest, I pushed her off as hard as I could.

If you’re shot with an arrow, the best you could hope for is that it goes clean through. If you have one resting in between a large clump of muscle, your best option is not to move it, maybe get someone to cut it out of you and patch up the hole. Birdie had already been moving around quite a bit with my arrow inside of her. And now, I just showed her exactly why you don’t want to pull a broadhead arrow back the way it came.

She howled a bestial sound, the kind of noise that makes even skeptics lock their doors and shut their windows. I could hear the barbed tips rend muscle as she fell away, the blood coming out of that wound no longer a gentle drip but a steady pump. Clutching the arrow in my fist I willed my body forward, knowing instinctively that someone like her was going to be far more dangerous injured than not. I was on top of her before she could react, and with a sound of my own to rival her previous howl, I slammed a knee into her wound, pinning her to the ground.

It was just then; arrow raised over my head as I prepared a deathblow that I heard it. From down the street, Ann’s car, now significantly more damaged than it had been this morning, came toward us, picking up speed as the two of us came into her view. And it was at that moment that I hesitated. Everything that I had been conditioned to do up until that moment told me that I had exactly one second to put this harpy down or else I might not get another chance before she and I traded positions. And yet, something stopped me. I didn’t want to kill anyone, not even someone as vile as Birdie.

And I hesitated just a moment too long.

I had somehow managed to completely forget the rope I’d attached to the arrow was still connected to me. All at once, my wrist was somehow pulled back, and the rope tied it over my head and to my shoulder. My back arched in sudden strain as the remainder of the rope went up and over a tree branch in a flash, pulling me awkwardly to my feet. Birdie spun on a talon in my direction, and in a miracle among miracles, I managed to twist my body just enough to avoid a puncture wound. The back of her leg still caught me behind my ribs, however, and that hurt more than enough.

Birdie looked at me for a moment, helpless as I was tied up in the tree. Then at the approaching car, and I knew, deep down, that Ann wouldn’t make it to me in time.

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