Chapter Fifteen
Faint heart never won fair lady, nor fabulous bird either.
Birds Through a Sherry Glass , H.A. Quirm
Down the stairs and through the Arctic birds display chamber they raced, their boots thudding on the stone floor, Beth’s hat tumbling unnoticed from her head. Outraged museum patrons scattered before them with cries of Egad! How rude! and Good heavens, Agnes, did you see the thighs on that man?! In the courtyard outside, they found several people huddled on the grass, moaning and weeping, while others staggered about aimlessly, clutching their ears. A loud, thumping bass note of avian magic assaulted the air, but no bird was to be seen.
“Which way?” Devon shouted to a nearby woman. She stared at him dazedly, her face streaked with tears of blood.
“North!” called out a dark-suited man, waving his bowler hat.
“The park!” Beth said, seeing it in her mind’s eye: sunlit grass, gentle tree-lined paths, occupied by dozens of picnickers and pedestrians at this noon hour.
They ran from the courtyard and along the footpath, barely noticing people cowering behind trees and in doorways as screams echoed from the park ahead. Arriving in moments, they discovered a large black swan circling the field. It was shrieking intermittently and exuding a booming magic that sounded like an orchestra’s drum section had jammed itself into a tin box. Several groups of picnickers huddled beneath large umbrellas or blankets, clutching their cushions and hampers, unable to flee without risking attack.
“Major cygnus malleus,” Beth identified as she came to a halt beneath an elm tree.
“This one, you can’t touch,” Devon warned. “Its magic will break your bones.”
Beth abstained from rolling her eyes due to the urgency of the moment. Maybe later she would commission a badge showing her qualifications so that men would stop advising her on the basics of her job. “If we can get it to land,” she said, “we can use one of those umbrellas to pin it down.”
“It’s attracted to shiny metal objects,” Devon added, looking around as if expecting a mobile jewelry vendor to be in operation nearby.
“Hm. Perhaps if we—”
“FEAR NOT, GOOD PEOPLE! I SHALL SAVE YOU!”
Startled, they turned to see a young man emerge from the trees nearby, waving both hands in general greeting as he jogged onto the field. His shoulder-length hair and cheap, oversized suit fluttered in the breeze. Overhead, the whopper swan screeched.
“Who the hell is that?” Devon said.
Before Beth could supply a response, the man held up a coil of thin braided leather and, with a flick of his wrist, sent it unfurling dramatically. Then he whistled in three short, loud bursts to the bird.
“Oh my God,” Beth gasped.
“Jesus,” Devon muttered at the same time.
Eeeeeeeee! the swan added in a distinctly more pagan tone.
“STIFFEN YOUR SINEWS and STAY WHERE YOU ARE!” the young man urged the picnickers, none of whom appeared to require such instruction. “I’LL CATCH THE BIRD!”
He whistled again, and the whopper swan shrieked with aggravation. Soaring high, its wings rapping the air with every beat, it reached a pinnacle and began to turn…
“It’s going to dive,” Beth and Devon said in unison.
Crack! went the young man’s whip.
Boom! responded the swan’s magic.
The air shattered into a thousand discordant splinters. Beth and Devon clamped their hands over their ears, to little effect. Thaumaturgic noise slammed through every cell of their bodies, making them stagger in pain. People screamed, leaves exploded through the flashing sunlight, and the young man hollered as he cracked the whip again. The whopper swan tucked in its wings and began to plummet.
Once more the young man whistled, but the sound was lost in pounding shocks of magic. A tragedy in three acts played out rapidly on his face: smugness, confusion, horror. He dropped the whip and cowered, arms wrapping defensively over his head. The swan skimmed inches above him, then soared again. Thump thump thump went its wings, considerably more steady than Beth’s heartbeat. She shot an ornithological glance at Devon; he gave her a brief, silent nod, then took off running toward the nearest group of picnickers. Without hesitating, Beth dashed for the young man.
“Excuse me, may I?” she asked as she snatched his whip from the ground.
“Aahhh!” he replied from his hunched position, which she took for permission. Quickly tying the leather rope into a lasso, she began to spin it overhead, building momentum.
Boom! The swan emitted another thundering bass note as it circled, preparing to dive again. Assessing its likely trajectory, Beth adjusted her stance. From the corner of her eye she noted Devon hurrying toward her, picnic umbrella propped against his shoulder. Excitement rushed through her, intensifying as it synchronized with the swan’s magic, pounding hard until she began to feel more than human. Her vision filled with sunlight and sable wings.
She threw the lasso. It fell over the swan’s back and instantly she tugged, tightening the noose. The bird tumbled, its magic scattering like the discordant sound of grief.
Whoosh.
Devon swung the open picnic umbrella with a strength Beth could only imagine (i.e., him using it to lift her easily and set her against a wall, holding her there while he kissed every qualification out of her brain), and he ladled the swan out of the air. In one swift moment he brought it down safely, immediately tipping the umbrella over it as a shield.
Screeee! cried the bird in fear. But all that could be heard of wild, wing-rapped magic was a soft scratching against the canvas. Devon stomped on the umbrella’s long handle. It snapped, and the canopy dropped fully. Setting a booted foot upon it for added security, Devon shook the hair off his face and looked sidelong at Beth, bouncing his eyebrows.
“Good job,” she said. “Perhaps a Yale doctorate is worth something after all.”
“Why, Miss Pickering,” Devon replied wryly, “it seems the farther we travel into England, the more impolite you get.”
Beth pursed her lips in indignation (and because she could not immediately think of a witty reply). Luckily, just then the young man unfurled himself, rising on his knees. His nose was bleeding as a consequence of the bird’s percussive magic, but he appeared otherwise unharmed.
“Blimey!” he shouted. “That was awesome! How did you catch the bird with just one toss of the rope?”
“Expertise,” Beth told him.
“That’s what comes of being a UNIVERSITY-TRAINED ORNLITHOLOGIST!” he said, his voice ringing through the shivering silence across the field.
“Um,” Beth said, bewildered. “Are you all right?”
“I am now!” He leaped to his feet and began to applaud her with such loud enthusiasm, Beth winced. “You SAVED MY LIFE! This day shall be remember’d to the ENDING OF THE WORLD! HURRAH FOR ORNLITHOLOGISTS!”
Beth glanced at Devon, who appeared equally bemused. Behind him, picnickers were beginning to emerge from beneath their umbrellas and behind the shelter of trees. The young man turned to them, his clapping intensifying, and after a moment they obediently began to clap also.
“Who are you?” Devon asked with a suspicious frown.
“Laz Brady, good sir!” He used the back of his hand to wipe the blood dripping from his nose, then held out that same hand in an offer of a handshake. Devon didn’t even glance at it, and he snatched it back faster than a seagull snatching a sandwich from a picnic. “I’m a mere wag who DREAMS of becoming a proper ornlithologist one day! I thought perchance it was enough to know a bird’s song, and to be able to tell a blackbird from a starlink—”
“Starling,” Beth corrected.
“—but clearly if I WANT TO BE A HERO and SAVE LIVES, I need to ENROLL IN A UNIVERSITY SUCH AS OXFORD, CAMbrIDGE, OR THE SORE BONE—”
“Sorbonne,” Devon corrected.
“—and get a ** DEGREE IN ORNLITHOLOGY! **”
Beth and Devon looked at each other. “Huh,” they said in unison.
“What will you do with the bird now?” Laz Brady asked eagerly.
“Transport it to the departmental aviary,” Beth said. Pausing with her hands on her hips, she contemplated the umbrella, beneath which the whopper swan was chittering pathetically. “It might be difficult, however, without a cage or even a blackout bag.”
“You mean one of these?” Laz asked, whipping out from beneath his jacket a sack of black canvas.
“Gosh,” Beth said. “You just happened to have that on you?”
“Of course! When a man DREAMS of—”
“Never mind,” Devon interrupted, snatching the sack. He cast an impatient frown at the young man. “Just stand there. Quietly. ”
Laz nodded, bouncing on his heels and positively radiating mute excitement.
Together, Beth and Devon worked with swift efficiency to bag the swan, subduing its magic within quiet, heavy darkness. They had just completed this task when a small crowd began to approach them, pale and tremulous.
“You saved us!” exclaimed a woman, blinking eyes that were streaked with red from ruptured blood vessels. “I thought that noise would shatter me!”
“You’re heroes!” enthused an elderly man, and everyone nodded in agreement.
“Can I have your autograph?” asked a girl, holding out a handkerchief and pen.
“Um,” Beth said trepidatiously. This was the part of bird catching that Hippolyta managed, and quite frankly she’d rather face another dozen whopper swans than talk to these people.
“We were just doing our job,” Devon said with the precise degree of humility required to make it clear they profoundly excelled in that job.
“Hey, you’re the otholigists from the newspaper!” the woman said, pointing at them. “The ones having a romance.”
“Ooooh,” chorused the crowd.
“Are you betrothed?” asked the elderly man.
“Are you going to catch the caladrius together?” asked another. “It’s in Cardiff, you know!”
“Kiss for us!” urged the girl, flapping her handkerchief.
Immediately Laz took up the cry. “Kiss! Kiss!”
“Kiss! Kiss!” The crowd began to applaud, whistle, and stamp their feet.
“Goodness me,” Beth murmured. Inside her brain, etiquette squared up to a sudden rush of aroused nerves. She felt assured of its victory…then Devon grinned at her, and etiquette collapsed beneath a rappelling squad of desires, all bedecked in hot-pink armor.
“Ma’am?” he asked, sounding so American, the desires whipped out star-spangled flags and began fanning her into a high heat.
“Fine,” she said, brittle and haughty despite how shaky she actually was. She shook back her hair and tilted her face, lips stiff with anxiety as they awaited his kiss.
But instead, Devon took her hand gently in his, tugging on the glove finger by finger until he could slide it off.
The crowd went wild.
Beth’s nervous system did the same. A kiss would have been somehow safe in its familiarity, but this introduced a whole new kind of eroticism. Devon slipped the glove into his trouser pocket, and suddenly Beth apprehended she was in danger—beautiful, luscious, very real danger that she did not particularly want to escape. His thumb stroked her naked fingers, and just like that she was conquered by desire, colonized, and had an embassy of lust erected beneath her heart. She gazed into Devon’s eyes, bespelled by the coppery glints amid the darkness. He did not look away from her, even as he bent his head slowly, wickedly, holding her and the crowd in a moment of awed anticipation…
Then he kissed her hand.
“Aaaahhh,” gasped the crowd in unison with Beth’s heart.
It was the lightest of kisses, but it reached deep inside her to stroke some exquisitely sensitive nerve and illuminate her inner darkness like the magical flash of some bird whose name she could not even begin to remember in that moment. She could barely remember her own.
All around them, the crowd cheered, but might as well have been birds chirping in the trees. Devon closed his eyes, and Beth felt his breath sighing over her knuckles as he kissed her again, slower, heavier, as if he was sinking into a dream.
“Uh…” the crowd murmured awkwardly.
Beth’s stomach fluttered, and her brain released a thought it did not know it was thinking.
I want him so much.
She would have pulled away then, citing proper etiquette as a defense against getting hurt, but Devon seemed to sense it and straightened, his mouth sliding into a complacent smile that Beth suddenly realized was his own form of defense. As their eyes met, the wary, fragile truth leaped between them.
Devon laid her hand to his heart, holding it there with his own. A silent thunder beat against her palm, and Beth swallowed heavily. He’d caught her. He’d pulled her from the aching, empty summer and offered a sanctuary for her in his midnight. Etiquette, wounded and bleeding out, urged her to move back from him. But she could no more do that than she could believe in a conclusion based on uncontrolled experiments.
People forgotten, swan forgotten, they gazed at each other across a private, quiet sky.
The crowd began clearing their throats and shuffling impatiently.
This was not fun anymore , Beth thought. This was falling in love.
“ROMANCE: ANOTHER REASON TO STUDY ORNLITHOLOGY!” Laz declared, making them jolt. They stumbled back from each other, blinking in disorientation. Over Devon’s shoulder, Beth glimpsed two dark-suited figures lurking behind an elm tree.
Her instincts shook. “We have to go,” she whispered.
Devon regarded her soberly, taking in her sudden concern. Without a word he returned her glove, then bent to gather up the bagged swan. Turning away from the crowd, he set a hand against her back to guide her toward the park gates. The fact that he did not question her, nor hesitate to do as she advised, made Beth tingle all over again.
Then he gave Laz a frown that equated to a failing grade, and her tingling became a decided twang. “Do not even think of approaching a thaumaturgic bird again until you’ve had some training,” he ordered.
“Yes, sir!” Laz saluted briskly. “I shall follow your inspiring example of ornlithololgical study at one of the EXCELLENT UNIVERSITIES here in England and abroad!”
“Right.”
And they walked away, leaving a dozen blushing, whispering picnickers (and two highly satisfied publicists).