Total pages in book: 140
Estimated words: 131364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 525(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 525(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
—From the 2037 archives of Wild magazine (now known as Wild Woman magazine: “Skin Privileges, Style & Primal Sophistication”)
Adam watched the black SUV with tinted windows drive into Raintree’s small but active main street from his vantage point high above the town.
He didn’t know why the vehicle had caught his attention. Raintree was no metropolis but neither was it a dead-end town. Not only did it house WindHaven’s cutting-edge aeronautics facility and thus play host to the attendant business traffic, it was also home to a thriving arts scene that drew visitors from around the state and country. Its remote location meant Raintree would never be overrun, but the traffic in and out was steady.
Maybe it was the simple fact that it had been the only vehicle on the road at the time he stepped out onto the ledge and glanced down. He had the feeling the driver had been looking up, too—they’d pretty much stopped at one point.
An arm sliding around his waist, a head full of wild red-kissed mahogany curls tucking itself under his own arm when he lifted it. “Surveying your kingdom, oh great wing leader?” snarked his fifteen-year-old niece, Malia.
“As is my right as lord and master,” he said dryly.
She giggled, her pixie face hidden from view by that glorious mass of hair she’d inherited from Adam’s older sister, Saoirse. Both had a slight hint of red in their feathers in falcon form, too. As had Saoirse and Adam’s mother, Taazbaa’.
A living line of history.
He dropped a kiss on Malia’s hair. “Why haven’t you left for school, Mali-bug?” All WindHaven fledglings went to the Raintree schools—like most winged clans, WindHaven was a relatively small group; it didn’t make sense for them to have schools of their own.
They could have leveraged their long-held connections to other winged clans throughout the state to set up a joint school, but then the fledglings would have long commutes on the wing.
It also made sense for the kids to interact with the wider community. Especially in a clan such as WindHaven, where their home, which they simply called the Canyon, overlooked a settlement of humans—and the odd Psy who had decided to live in this quiet and striking landscape. It had been that way for centuries, humans and changelings living in relative harmony because the geography allowed it.
The humans stuck to the cool canyon floor, while the falcons claimed the space high above—but falcon territory was much wider. A mere few minutes of flight in one direction led to another canyon with a breathtaking blue-green pool, but turn their wings in another direction, and they’d soar over endless desert vistas.
“I won’t be late,” Malia said with cheerful self-assurance. “I’ve got a free period this morning and we’re allowed to come in after as long as we have something to show for it. I finished a week’s worth of physics homework already.” She buffed her pink-painted nails against her sweater. “You’re looking at the next aeronautical engineer in the family, Uncle Adam.”
He grinned, his falcon as proud of her spirit as he was of her intelligence. “You’re not planning to shift today, are you?”
“And lose my nail polish and my makeup?” She made a quintessentially teenage sound of disgust, her nose crinkling when she looked up at him. The morning sun brushed skin that wasn’t the deep copper-toned brown of Adam’s or Saoirse’s, rather a paler hue that was a meld of her parents’, but her eyes were pure Garrett: a pale tawny brown.
“Only drawback to being a changeling, honestly,” she added. “I can’t wait until I can afford that fancy DNA-encoded polish my friends in CloudNest swear doesn’t come off during a shift.” She sounded dubious. “Jessie, who’s talking it up the most, her sister’s like the CEO of the company making it, so I’m all eagle on it.”
She narrowed her eyes, as if imitating the extreme visual acuity of their cousins in the sky. Peregrine eyesight was one of the keenest in the animal kingdom, their raptors able to keep prey in sight even when diving at phenomenal speeds from the sky, but the eagles blew past them when it came to the sheer distances they could see.
Peregrines had eagles beat on speed, though, a point falcons never failed to bring up anytime the eagles got too smug.
Adam’s cheeks creased, while below, he saw the SUV—which had done a U-turn at the end of Main Street and headed back up the road as if leaving town—turn into a quiet street that led eventually to the small parking lot of the Raintree Inn. That inn was positioned at enough of a distance from Main Street that it was quiet and private—especially given that it sat nestled inside an oasis of greenery.
A figure in a black pantsuit got out of the now-parked vehicle, and his vision was sharp enough to make out that it was a woman. Going to the back of the car, she removed a small case, then headed toward the office area—at which point she disappeared from view. That part of the inn was overshadowed by cypress trees with large canopies of a green that held a bluish cast.