Chapter Fifteen Taissa
Chapter Fifteen
Taissa
Taissa couldn’t find her favorite sports bra, and it’s put her in a horrible mood.
(That, or the entirety of yesterday. Probably a combination of both.)
(Actually, probably just all of yesterday. Hauling dead bodies out of the wreckage does something to you.)
Sitting before Yggdrasil, Taissa blearily watches as Cronus’s beak snaps up half of her proffered gigantic chocolate muffin from the wee corner shop just near the Nexitory.
The cocoa has turned to ash in her mouth, but her stymphalian has no qualms devouring the other half of the baked good, which she’d broken apart with her hands.
Judging by the flood of happiness that assails her, and the strange, jerky wiggling movement Cronus’s body is doing as he gulps the muffin down, the old bird is a fan of chocolate.
“Delicious,” he squawks. “Give me more.”
“That’s all I have for you today, you old fart,” Taissa replies, watching as his scarlet eyes narrow and his feathers ruffle menacingly. She holds up the remaining treat. “I should try to eat some more. For energy—”
“Useless hatchling,” Cronus mutters with no shortage of acidity, but settles onto the turf beside her nonetheless, tucking in his wings. He even allows her to briefly stroke the soft down of the feathers’ topsides, before twitching in warning.
“Have you ever seen anything like what happened yesterday?” Taissa asks as Knox and óríon burst into the stables, bickering loudly.
Kion, the arse, hasn’t canceled practice despite the entire team’s near-unanimous vote to do so.
So she counts it as a small mercy that he acquiesced to cancel her pre-practice training.
And while it’s the handlers who typically saddle up their Wingeds before leading them out onto the pitch to save time, it seems that Knox and óríon had the same idea as Taissa—coming in early to check on their stymphs, worried that perhaps they may have ended up like the cockatrices overnight.
“Never,” says Cronus shortly, and that’s all Taissa needs to hear.
She feels his confusion and disorientation as keenly as if it’s her own.
He clucks his beak and glares upward as, overhead, there’s the flapping of wings.
Taissa raises her brows as Cato swoops toward them, landing gracefully a few meters away before moving closer.
“Does he know that he’s a stymph, not a vulture?
” Cronus mutters as Cato strides up to Taissa and stares in a pointed way at the rest of the muffin.
Cronus shifts closer to Taissa, and squawks something that sounds like, Away with you in stymph.
But he’s not attempting to bite Cato, which she counts as progress.
Cato makes that strange laughing noise in the back of his throat. He’s smaller than his father, but twice as broad, with dark wings untouched by the grays of age and eyes that aren’t red, but a purple so dark they’re almost black.
Taissa shakes her head.
Cato’s eyes widen. She wonders if he’s attempting to mimic a puppy, and then abruptly scowls as she realizes it’s working.
“Don’t you dare,” Cronus warns, also staring at the rest of the muffin. “If anyone should get that, it’s me.”
“You had your fill,” she sighs, reluctantly holding out the rest of the baked good to Cato, who delicately takes the muffin in his beak.
Cronus squawks in irritation, and Taissa watches curiously as Cato cocks his head, looks at his father, and slowly drops the muffin to the ground—only picking half of the half back up. In his gigantic beak, it’s minuscule.
“Meager crumbs,” mutters Cronus, but scoops them up all the same. Slow, confused gratitude—Cronus’s gratitude—blooms in her chest. Taissa bites back a smile as Cato winks at his father—and as Cronus blinks, slowly, back in something that looks…and feels…like a small softening.
It’s gone a moment later as Cato takes a jobbie right in front of his father and flies off with a theatrical flourish. Defecation as an insult runs in the family, apparently.
“UNGRATEFUL WRETCH!” roars Cronus, laboriously getting to his taloned feet and flapping his wings in fury. Cato laughs from Yggdrasil.
“He’s a lot like you,” Taissa informs her stymph, arching a knowing brow.
Cronus turns on her, eyes narrowing. “How dare you insult me—”
“I live in fear of your bird,” says Knox, leading red-feathered Robin over to where Taissa climbs to her own feet, attempting to calm a seething Cronus down.
Shadows rim his eyes, but that mischievous smile still twitches on his lips.
“I think he could take over a small country if he wanted to. Has the rage of ten thousand soldiers, him.”
“Ach, he’s nothing but a baby,” Taissa says, entertained by the way Cronus stills at this, solely to fix her with a deeply furious look. “A wee, colicky baby.”
“This ‘baby’ will peck out your spleen.”
“I could say the same for that one over there,” says Knox, jabbing a thumb toward órión, who’s grabbing a harness from one of the stable’s walls. His blue eyes flare as Knox grins at him.
“I don’t know what you just said, and I do not want to know,” he snaps.
Knox’s shit-eating grin grows.
A moment later, the rest of the team files in, heading for their stymphs. She hears Isla’s exhale of relief when she realizes Jemmy is okay, and Adriel’s laughter as Ahava chirps excitedly to him from her nest.
“Has Markus been bothering you?” she asks Cronus as they walk out onto the pitch together.
At the mention of the name, Cronus seems to shrink in on himself.
Fury warms her blood as she watches her menacing Winged cow at the name of a flabby man.
Her promise to break both of his hands should he lay them on Cronus hadn’t been a lie.
“No,” he mutters, and Taissa relaxes infinitesimally. Markus, to her disbelief, still hasn’t been let go from the staff. Perhaps she should move on to blackmailing Dodds.
“All right,” Kion barks. “Stretch up.”
Taissa seethes as they run through their stretches, glaring at Kion and wishing she could still be in her warm bed.
But as she looks at her captain, something in her whispers that this is how he copes.
Pushing himself until he collapses. Maybe he assumes that they do the same.
Maybe, in his own way, he’s trying to help.
Well, he’s not.
As they run drills, sparring in the air atop their stymphs with swords, Taissa counts down the minutes until Locke calls time.
Below them, sitting expectantly on the bleachers, are gaggles of reporters.
Oh, they’re just waiting for the right moment to pounce, Taissa can tell.
The Dust Bite is the largest tragedy to happen in the UK since a baobhan sith went on a biting spree last year in Scotland, luring hundreds of lacker victims into a deadly dance before pouncing on their exhausted bodies and drinking their blood.
The reporters are eating this up like a fine dinner.
Like foxes in a skip.
Sweat dribbles down the side of Taissa’s face as her sword clashes against óríon’s.
Both of them are fighting with the skill of unbalanced children.
Taissa stares in disbelief as, somehow, óríon’s blade cuts a notch into her own.
óríon tries to yank his away, but the two blades are stuck together.
Taissa grits her teeth as they begin a ridiculous game of tug-of-war while simultaneously flying in a wobbly circle.
“This is getting old,” grumbles Cronus. “Just wrench yours back.”
“What do you think I’m trying to do?”
“I don’t know,” snipes back Cronus, nastily, “because whatever it is, it’s failing spectacularly. You’re embarrassing me.”
“Give it,” demands óríon, pulling harder. Taissa nearly falls out of Cronus’s saddle despite her Balance glyph and the straps anchoring her down.
“No,” she bites back. “I need my sword.” With a mighty heave, she yanks it back, ignoring óríon’s frustrated stream of Icelandic.
“So do I, drullusokker.”
“Let—go—”
Today, clearly, is not Taissa’s day (but when is it ever, really?). It is, in fact, the opposite of her day. Right now, in this moment, it is a very, very bad time to be Taissa Cho.
Because impossibly, the force of her pull and backward heave has snapped the saddle-belt around her waist, the frayed leather ripping in half.
As Taissa jerks away with her (and óríon’s) sword in hand, there’s nothing to keep her even somewhat steady on Cronus—not even her Balance glyph, although it should.
Instead, Taissa tumbles off Cronus’s back into thin air, screaming some very tasteful profanities at the top of her lungs as Cronus squawks in disbelief.
“STUPID HATCHLING!” the old stymph roars, diving after her, red eyes widening in fear.
The swords in Taissa’s hand are whipped up by a heavy gust of wind, and her fingers slip from the hilt as she falls, her stomach dropping straight out of her arse. She plummets past Kion, howling, and hears his alarmed curse in return.
“CHO!” he shouts, and dimly, in the back of her mind, she notes that there’s a panicked hoarseness to his voice that she wouldn’t expect from him.
“Oooph!” Taissa hits Cronus’s feathered back with a wheeze, scrabbling to hold on to the saddle as he lands on the pitch and grudgingly lowers himself so she can climb off him without leaping. Her legs wobble, and she grabs on to her Winged to steady herself.
“You stupid, stupid hatchling!” Cronus repeats, but his beak is poking and prodding her gently, like he’s trying to see where she’s hurt as the rest of the team lands, faces ashen. “You idiotic, bumbling—”
“Cho!” barks Kion, grabbing her shoulders like he wants to shake her. He doesn’t let go, eyes running wildly over her face. “What in Merlin’s name—”