CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Frankie~
The roasting hot gale lifted her like a dry leaf and hurled her into the rock with such force that her tail feathers snapped and she spun to the right. Her right wing collided with the rock wall. The bones of that wing shattered like dry sticks. Shift and Van Buren. Stunned, she crouched on the floor while the hurricane raged over her head.
A cloud of acidic gas had come from the center of the earth propelled by the ferocious gale. It stank of danger. Even if she had not been injured, she could never have flown into this storm. The searing mist settled into her plumage, burning through to the skin. Her lungs shriveled in the vitriolic fog she was inhaling.
Coughing and choking, she hobbled back along the passage with the tailwind alternately lifting and dropping her like paper caught in a storm. It was too dangerous to fly, even had she been able. Her broken wing dragged on the ground making each step torture. If she had been above ground, she would have taken fire and regenerated. But who knew what other disasters might await her? She had to keep something in reserve.
Time stretched out into an eternity as sulfuric acid ate through her feathers. But eventually her agonizing retreat ended in the hot spring cave. Here the air was clean and pure. A cool, dry draft flowed through the enormous cavern bringing the scent of the desert air to mingle with the hot currents from below. The result was steamy, healing dampness. The cool draft informed her it was still dark. If the sun had risen, that air would be daytime hot.
Every muscle ached to get into the hot spring and neutralize the acid soaking her plumage. When she dove in, she must have lost consciousness, because the next thing she was aware of she was cupping her hands and drinking as if she were dying of thirst. Van Buren. Andrew Johnson. Taft. She hadn’t lost control of her talent since she was thirteen.
She moved cautiously. Rotated her right arm. Felt her tailbone. Returning to her human form had apparently mended her. Probably some property of the hot spring. At least her right arm and shoulder seemed strong. She was a little bruised, and her shoulder ached as badly as her tailbone, but she could raise her arm over her head and perform the crawl. And drink. How was she able to tolerate the scalding heat in human form?
The tightness in her chest had eased. The pain deep in her bones where birds had lung tissue had also stopped. Every breath now made her feel better. Every gulp of water soothed and healed her raw throat. The water was intoxicating. She felt ready to fly. Ready to hunt down the flaming rock. As if they were on fire, the walls of the cavern shimmered before her astonished human eyes. How was that possible?
Richard Milhous Nixon. She was drunk and incapable.
It was perilous for her to be in human form this far underground. The paranormal radiation was too intense. There were other hazards too, if Dad and Granddad were to be believed. But her priority had to be leaving the water. If she didn’t get her sorry drunken ass out of the hot spring, she would drown.
Her human legs did not reach the bottom. The rim was far above her outstretched arms. The sides of the basin did not slope at an angle that permitted her to crawl out. In order to leave it she had to shift.
Greater or lesser phoenix? She needed a clear head to choose, but the water she could not stop drinking clouded her judgment.
* * *
Cameron~
He threw off his suffocating blanket and sat up coughing and spluttering. Frankie was in danger. He had to go to her. He grabbed the bedside clock, 0300 hours. Where the hell was she? What was she doing? She needed him.
He was on his feet before he could think. He had forgotten that damned knee. It buckled. He stumbled and nearly fell. Had to catch himself on the bedroom door.
His eyes burned and watered. His skin felt as if it might peel off. Another spasm of coughing doubled him over. He peeled off his T-shirt but that didn’t help. He staggered into the bathroom and stood under the shower until the feeling of being eaten alive by fire ants passed.
His anxiety remained. Frankie was in danger. Drowning. He had to get dressed and find her. He was pulling on his pants when common sense asserted itself. What was he doing? Going off half-cocked was Frankie’s way. Not his. He was a plodding, prosaic bear to her flighty, flashy, volatile phoenix.
He sat on the edge of the bed to assess the situation. Deliberately controlled his breathing. The coughing had stopped. His lungs felt fine. There was no reason to be hyperventilating. He had had years of training in regulating every aspect of his nervous system. In the field, blind panic killed. He could do this.
Think, Reynolds, think. If he was going to help Frankie, he had to overcome this frantic sense of dread. Common sense told him that his mate was safely asleep in her parents’ house. So where had this impression of doom come from? As his heart slowed and his breathing calmed, his spirits rose. The pressure to act dissipated.
Shift. It was all in his head. Another hallucination. Or a nightmare. What danger could have her sprayed with acid one moment and then threatened with drowning in a hot tub next? Frankie was okay. And if she wasn’t, she hardly needed the aid of a cripple. It was a disheartening realization.
As the physical therapist had shown him, he straightened his left leg, pressed down on his thigh, forcing the new joint to fully extend the calf. Pointed his toes. Flexed them. Shift. It hurt like hell. No wonder he had been avoiding these exercises. Each repetition was more painful than the one before.
He practiced keeping his breathing even and his pulse steady in spite of the pain. Being calm was always useful, but never more so than in an emergency.
Sometime around zero four hundred hours he fell back asleep.
* * *
Frankie~
She swam around and around the pool trying to decide. “Greater or lesser?” she sang.
Van Buren. She had to pick and pick fast. With each gulp of water, she was only getting drunker. She did another lap, dove down and picked up a pebble from the bottom. Admired her treasure. Swirls of dark blue mingled with pink. The little stone glowed like a nightlight in her hand.
The bottom of the pool was sprinkled with these pretty stones. Euphoric, she dove down again and again until her hands could hold no more. Gleefully she tossed them up to the rim, enjoying the tinkle as they fell. Went back for more.
What was she doing? She didn’t need a collection of pebbles. She needed to return to phoenix or she would die in this delightful pool. It was as enticing and as dangerous to her as the La Brea tar pits had been to prehistoric animals. If she remained in it, she too would perish.
Greater phoenix had made the most sense before. She would stick with her first choice. Her shift took a long time. Longer than it had since her teens. But at last she exploded from the pool and could dry herself in the air. She avoided the cool currents and let the hot breeze fluff up her plumage before she carefully preened each feather.
As far as she could tell without flying, her right wing was perfect. So were her talons. And her tail feathers were two long trailing plumes. Restored by the hot spring. She could press on. Only she would have to find an alternate route. The Gateway to Hell was too active tonight. She must detour around that paranormal storm of unstable volcanic energy.
The pool cave had a great many openings. Each one totally uncharted and unknown. Her senses were still buzzed by the hot spring. The walls glistened and sparkled with paranormal light. It was difficult to choose.
Think, D’Angelo, think. What would Cam do? The thought of her stolid, prudent mate settled her. Cam would not shirk danger. But neither would he court it. He would ask what the objective was and seek the safest option.
Rising heat indicated that a passage led to a magma flow. The smell of rotten eggs suggested sulfuric acid lay ahead. Narrow openings might widen further on. Or not. The cavern was pockmarked with such openings. She was intoxicated. Could she trust her photographic memory to recall which passages she had rejected and which she had tried?
She could not. Not in this condition.
She used the pebbles from the pool to mark the openings that smelled like death. Found the widest crack from which a hot gust blew, and slipped cautiously through, a pebble in her beak. A vein of glowing rock ran along the wall like a string of Christmas lights. Captivated she followed the bright line until the roof dipped too low for her to continue. Drat.
That dead end she marked with her pebble. She picked up another and began a systematic search for the next best. She lost track of how many openings she had probed before she found one that branched out into a spacious cavern with bewildering number of possible pathways.
To her phoenix eyes, this cavern looked like a jewel box filled with delights. What appeared to be precious stones glittered on the ceilings and walls, as if she were inside some vast geode crammed with rubies, emeralds, sapphires and diamonds.
Focus, D’Angelo. Her family had often discussed the hazards of volcanoes, how their scintillating beauty created a level of danger for the unwary phoenix. She and Grant had felt the pull at Mt. St. Helens. Tonight, her senses were already befuddled by the hot spring. Now the blazing glory of this chamber dazzled them even more.
Desperately she croaked Cameron’s name. It echoed around the soaring cavern. Cam. Ron. Cam. Ron. There was power in a name. And his steadied her reeling senses.
She knew what she had to do. Exactly as she had done before. She must seek the hottest pathway. And mark each discarded trail. The stones that had dropped to the floor tempted her. But she knew that if she laid a trail of rubies or any other gems, it would be lost in the brilliant debris already on the floor.
There was only one thing to do. She would have to sacrifice her breast feathers one at a time. She didn’t require them to fly, and she could spare a few. This was why so many birds lined their nest with their own down. But unlike nesting birds, her feathers had not been loosened by a flood of hormones. She had to wrench each individual plume out.
After a while drops of her blood marked her passage. Deeper and deeper and lower and lower she flew, always trying to ignore the lure of the volcano which tempted her to follow the luminous delights away from her objective. The longer she stayed below, the more desperately she wished to merge with the volcano.
Cam, she chanted more and more despairingly. Using their bond to drive away the temptation to seek death.
Again and again she was turned back by blind ends. Her breast stopped dripping and she had to resume plucking. Blood drizzled steadily. The passage dead-ended around a bend. She turned back. Her bloody trail passed over a deep pit from which a scorching gale blew. In her fatigue she had missed this obvious entrance to the magma flow.
Did the howling wind rushing out of the pit indicate this was the same storm or a different one? Or was it possible she had attained her goal? There was no smell of sulfur. Singing Cam’s name, she plunged into the pit, angling her wings tightly against her body as she dived into the headwind. Fortunately, the fiery winds both energized her and slowed her descent, preventing her from plummeting into the river of lava that flowed at the bottom of the pit.
Victory. She needed only the tiniest globule of molten rock. But she knew that collecting that blob was perilous. Even if she had not listened to the stories told by her kinsfolk, she would have known that obeying the call of that flaming river was to perish. Yet every cell of her body urged her to become one with that glorious river of fire.
She ached to submerge herself in that molten stream. To flow forever as living rock. To be one with the earth. Only by keeping her mind on Cameron, was she able to resist. To dip down and delicately retrieve just the smallest sip of lava.
Now what? She had to leave. Possibly to retrace her journey. This pit appeared to lack a chimney. Probably she was in a different spot than the one the Gateway to Hell led to. She flew in cautious circles over the stream, reluctant to risk perching, lest she not be able to resist the beckoning of the magma.
She would fly upward. Seek a chimney in the passage in which the pit appeared. If there was not one, she would return the way she had come. Her mind felt clearer now. Whether because she had achieved her objective, or because the effects of the spring were wearing off.
She allowed the thermals from the molten river to lift her wings and carry her away, angling her feathers to keep herself from being flung around. She needed a slow and stately pace to get her to safety. Unbidden, a song issued from her beak. A way-finding song.
An ominous rumbling like the sound of a tumultuous fall of rock gave her the first inkling of a new threat. It came from directly above her. Had the passageway collapsed? There was no sign of dust. No gases roiled. The thunderous noise quieted to mere grumbling.
She would be vigilant. She would take a brief look and if there had been any sort of seismic activity, she would look for another exit. She would remember that discretion was the better part of valor. She continued her lazy, upward spiral. And emerged slowly and cautiously out of the pit, careful not to let any part of her body brush against rock.
Jaws of fire seized her right wing and crunched.