• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 680 0

without getting naked first, and that would not only put me farther behind but would risk exposure in a couple of ways. Another possibility suggested itself to me as I continued pounding down the pavement after the witch, though it certainly carried the risk of revealing my true nature and I’d never tried it before. I reasoned that here on 10th Place, with no windows looking out at the street, I could manage it with minimal risk of witnesses. In my estimation, it was worth a gamble; I couldn’t let the witch get away without answering her blow somehow. If she wanted to pick a fight with me, she had to know there was going to be a price to pay.

I stripped off my shirt as I ran and tossed it into the street, then triggered the charm that would bind my form to an owl while still on the run. My arms unfurled into wings, and my legs shrank up into my body, leaving my jeans and sandals to tumble after my shirt. I didn’t crash and burn and no one saw me do it, including the witch, so I decided to chalk it up as a good idea.

Flapping powerfully to gain altitude, I banked northeast immediately to cut off the witch, who was now heading north on Roosevelt.

She came into view as soon as I cleared the last roof of 10th Place, churning her legs straight up the middle of the street. I climbed higher to get out of her peripheral vision. I lined myself up behind her and saw her check her six to see if I was still pursuing on foot. She didn’t see me closing from above. I dove at her just before she drew even with the widow MacDonagh’s property on the left. I kept my eyes on my target, so I didn’t know if the widow was on her porch or not. The witch saw no shadow as I descended, and when she heard the softest flutter of my feathers as I backwinged, there was not time enough for her to duck. My talons scratched into her scalp, and I clutched them convulsively and pulled away hard to my right, even as she screamed and ducked. I came away with a bunch of her hair in my talons, more than enough for me—or Malina—to do something mischievous with.

But first I had to get away. The witch knew almost immediately what had happened: Normal owls don’t attack running heads of hair for their nests. She knew it was me and what I could do with a handful (or taloned footful) of her hair. She stopped and shouted a curse at me in German, which hit me just like the last one did. My amulet slapped me hard in the chest and knocked me spinning through the air. I flapped my wings spastically, trying to regain control, but I was at low altitude already and could see that I was going to crash pretty hard—hard enough to break my delicate bird bones if I didn’t do something. I hurriedly unbound myself from the owl and crashed with a whuff of breath onto the street in my human form, rolling and skidding and scraping my hide up with a beautiful case of road rash. The witch’s hair floated free from the grasp of my human feet—which cannot be said to have much of a grasp at all. She spat that curse at me again, and I lost what little breath I had remaining as the amulet punched me once more. Well, that was enough of that.

I was still rolling from the fall and kept at it, diving naked for the lawn of the nearest house. I sank my fingers into the grass and got only the tiniest trickle of power into my bear charm before I was torn away and hauled up by my own hair into the street.

Instead of resisting and trying to tear free by lunging forward, I pushed into a backward somersault. The unexpected maneuver forced her to let go, because her single right arm could not hold my entire weight propelled by my legs. I tumbled ass over teakettle and rose to my feet, squaring my shoulders and crouching defensively, to find myself facing not one but two witches in the street. Where had the second one come from?

My back was to the widow’s house, and the witches guarded my approach to the lawn in front of me. They looked different now—the hellish juju was muted and I could see some of their features in the green haze of the faerie specs, so I presumed they were now visible to humans