CHAPTER NINETEEN
Cameron~
It was excruciating pain that brought him awake this time. His right shoulder and upper arm throbbed as if he had been clobbered by a baseball bat. Or as if T-Rex had him by the shoulder and was giving him a good shake. George Washington. About the only part of his body that had not been injured, was his right arm. He rubbed it with his left hand, but the pain only increased.
And then Cam was on fire. Literally. He was burning up from within. Fire was consuming his guts. Whatever pain he had felt before was as nothing compared to the raging torment of being burned alive. He went headfirst through the bedroom window and tumbled into the fish pond. The pain became manageable.
He swam in the darkness. Round and round. The water seemed to boil around his skin. The skies overhead were still studded with stars even though on the horizon a gray line indicated dawn. Gradually the pain leeched from his right arm. His left knee limbered up. He remembered how much he loved to swim and fish.
He dove down into the muddy water and chased silver-bellied trout. Caught them too. They were delicious. He was incredibly ravenous. As if he hadn’t eaten in months. The sun was glinting through the trees before he was satiated enough to just float belly up under the trees in the cool green water.
The dappled light sparkled and glinted, promising a beautiful day. He might have slept, for when he next looked about, he was hungry again. He swam upstream, following the meandering creek that filled this pond. On either bank, there were patches of fresh wintergreen and delicious irises.
He ate huge mouthfuls of spicy wintergreen and dug up purple-headed irises to munch on their starchy and delicious roots. Still famished, he swam steadily upstream in search of his next meal. Up ahead he could scent bass. Umm. His favorite.
* * *
Frankie~
George Washington. She was held fast by the savage jaws of a Cerberus. The great flaming beast had seized her and was shaking hard. One set of teeth gripped her right wing at the shoulder. Another was going after her breast.
In her first confusion, she swallowed the chunk of lava in her beak. This seemed to give her a burst of energy because she wrenched herself away from the slavering jaws. Feathers flew.
What had she been taught about dealing with a Hellhound? Fight fire with fire. Very well. She was injured. Again. Blood from her bitten shoulder dripped onto her attacker. And where it fell, his flaming skin sizzled and was extinguished. He raised two of his three heads and howled. The vicious noise echoed and re-echoed.
The Hellhound’s howls brought fist-sized jewels raining down from the cavern roof. They fell indiscriminately, striking her and her assailant. They hurt like hell. Battered her almost to her enemy’s snapping jaws.
The Hellhound was the size of a rhino. It looked like an enormous, stocky three-headed hyena with eyes like five red hot coals. The sixth was an empty hole. Three enormous maws dripped acid onto the rock. As the rock dissolved, steam rose and stung her eyes.
The hot wind blew the feathers the Cerberus had torn out back onto her enemy. The great brute reared in agony and bellowed even louder. More gems fell from the cavern roof. Frankie was no longer maneuverable. She could not evade the blows. Beaten by the stony hail she was forced lower and lower toward those furious mouths.
Luckily for her, this brute had lost a few battles over the centuries, for one of its heads drooped limply on its thick neck. And the second had only one eye. But that still left the third to snap at her floundering body.
Frankie never knew how she evaded those two sets of ravening jaws. But she did. She used her last strength to force herself upward as high as she could. Then she took fire. Gravity did the rest. She fell onto the Cerberus. Her blaze overwhelmed his. Her phoenix fire burned him to ash.
Becoming fire was miraculous. It hurt. No question. But there was an intense pleasure in this agony. It felt like the ultimate orgasm. She wanted to relax into the experience of immolation. To burn away to ash like her enemy. To meld with the earth. To savor death and true immortality.
Van Buren. She was succumbing. Cam. She must remember Cam. She had to return to her mate.
With a mighty effort of will, she became a woman. Naked, defenseless, vulnerable in the bowels of the earth. The intoxication of the hot spring, the energy from consuming lava, had vanished. Used up by the conflagration. Or by adrenaline. She had triumphed over the immortal enemy of the phoenix, but her reserves were gone.
She would have to take lesser phoenix now. Now, before she collapsed from exhaustion. And in this hawk-sized form, breathing the acrid fumes rising from her defeated foe, she would have to complete her mission and find her way home. Back to Texas. Back to Cam. If she could find her way.
* * *
Cameron~
Gorged on smallmouth bass, he was suddenly conscious of overwhelming fatigue. He clambered out of the river and scouted around for a safe place to sleep. The enormous cottonwoods were strong enough to bear his weight. But their branches started way above his head. Even when he stood on his hind legs, he lacked the energy for such an arduous climb.
He settled for scoring the rough bark to mark his presence. The ten long, deep scars, white against the dark bark, signaled his size and strength. Excellent. He curled up in a hollow, allowing the tall weeds to cover his body. He could rest here, concealed, regain his strength.
If he was not mistaken, this warm sweet air indicated that it was spring. Mating season. He needed to find his mate and fill her belly with cub. But first, he needed sleep. He felt as if he had been on a month-long bender. But sleep would fix that. He buried his nose in his paws and let go.
* * *
Frankie~
It was slow-going in lesser phoenix. She was bone-tired. The exhilaration of the hot springs and of battle had vanished, leaving her feeling wrung out. But she still had to harvest more lava to replace the bit she had swallowed. Focus, D’Angelo. Complete your mission.
The lava flow looked even more dangerous, now that she was weary. It called even more enticingly to her exhausted senses. And now she was only the size of a hawk. Caution wasn’t the word for what she needed. Common sense told her to fly away. But would she find the guts to ever return if she aborted the job today? Cam needed this lava.
The bubbling magma glowed every shade of gold, ruby and diamond. Flickers of blue flame erupted here and there. Occasionally bubbles burst in the boiling rock, sending lava and gas spewing into the air. She ducked and dove, avoiding them. Trying to get close enough to take a sip from the molten stream.
After several passes, her tired brain awoke to the fact that her best hope lay in snatching some of the burning spray she was trying so hard to evade. Her reflexes were slower than usual, but soon she was flying away with a blob of lava. Which she promptly ate.
Van Buren! At this rate she would never get home to Cam. But she had no control over her voracity. She was soon swooping and snatching living rock from the air and consuming it as fast as she could. All the while, her brain beat out a warning. She had to leave this place and soon or she would never do so.
Yet her heart could not be convinced. She was delirious with the joy of her ambrosial meal. With every swallow she could feel her strength return and her weariness fall away. She had never heard of any phoenix making a meal of living rock, yet she had never felt more powerful.
And then suddenly she knew how to make that impossible transition from lesser to greater phoenix! In order to get to her smaller or larger morph, she had always passed through her human stage. Always. She had been carefully taught to do this. Trained to be fast at it, lest delay cost her the battle.
She stretched her wings and neck, snatched a last piece of glowing rock in mid-air and exploded into greater phoenix. She flew upward. She had incinerated the Cerberus, but in her pain and shock, after the battle, had she scattered his ashes so there was no chance he could regenerate?
She could not recall. Best to assume the worst. She had defeated the Hellhound once, and now she felt larger, stronger, smarter than before. Far above her the shrieks of a thousand devils rattled the cavern. A hailstorm of gems fell. But now she was more agile, faster. She avoided them and spiraled ever upward.
The banshee wailing got louder and more intense. But she could see no other exit from this place. She must risk passing the sentry from Hades once again. The danger was not so great now that she knew her enemy’s weakness. She needed to stay on his blind side.
The wailing changed to hoarse barking. The hail of precious stones stopped. Frankie cautiously flew into the chamber prepared to immolate the Cerberus again. But the beast that lay in wait for her was larger. All six eyes glowed red hot. Gigantic dugs hung from its belly, swaying heavily as she lunged for the phoenix that had killed her mate.
George Washington. This bitch was larger than her mate. More vicious. Nimbler too. Her necks stretched out and visibly grew as she pursued Frankie around the chamber. The Cerberus snapped and came away with part of one tail feather. It was cold comfort that the feather seemed to sear the creature’s mouth. She approached more cautiously after that, but still she lay between Frankie and the passageway back to the hot spring.
The three heads on their long stalks attempted to encircle and capture Frankie. She flapped hard and sailed just out of reach. The Cerberus snarled. Three mouths growling and dripping acid saliva that dissolved rock, soon filled the cavern with steaming acidic gas.
Far above her, there was a narrow fissure in the roof through which the steam was slowly escaping. But the clouds of noxious gas were densest the higher she flew. Caught between the prospect of asphyxiation and being eaten alive, she had to choose and choose fast.
She chose to die of suffocation. She soared away. Caught a thermal and let it lift her into the stinking gray fog. The vapor made her eyes stream. Below her the Hellhound danced and twisted in a paroxysm of rage and pain as phoenix tears fell on her blazing hide. Great smoldering black patches spread in the flaming pelt, like some sort of paranormal mange.
The fissure was lost in the swirling murk. Frankie strained every sense to follow the pathway of the rising smog. She circled once, looking for a larger opening. Found none.
Below her the Hellhound bayed for blood as her fiery fur melted under Frankie’s dripping tears. The bitch’s first impulse to rid herself of the blistering teardrops had turned to renewed fury. Her central neck began to grow even longer, and the head and jaws ever larger.
Frankie did another circuit. Found no opening. Stifling her overwhelming desire to cough, which would have expelled her precious egg, she performed another impossible, lightning transition. This time from greater to lesser phoenix. She slipped easily through the crack and flew upward while behind her the infuriated howling of the Cerberus diminished.
The rest of her journey to the surface was comparatively uneventful. Comparatively. The crack was narrow enough that it caught her flight feathers and she left bits behind as she made her slow upward progress. And then without warning the chimney bent sideways. To keep going she had to stop flying and waddle, bent double, wings tightly folded.
And all the while, the biting, acrid smoke stayed with her. Her lungs burned. Her throat ached. She longed to cough. Her hollow bones filled with pulsing pain so sharp she could barely keep moving. The gas was slowly filling the spaces that should store oxygen. She was slowly suffocating.
Cam. Cam. Cam. He needed her prize. Cam was waking, wondering where she was. She had to return to him.
Doggedly, head down, she scratched her painful way forward. One more stinging breath. One more step on legs that were made of lead. On talons broken to the quick. One more suppressed cough from lungs that burned. She felt the trickle of sunlight before she breathed fresh air with no taint of hell.
She longed to rest, but she was as certain as she had ever been of anything, that she had used up all her luck tonight. She had run out of options. She had to get above ground before she could stop moving.