Chapter 1 of Obsidian Oath (Firebird Uncaged Book 3)
I was trying to decide between gummy cola and regular cola when I heard the shotgun rack.
My left eye twitched, and I snatched the gummies off the shelf. Crinkling the plastic loudly, I opened the bag and popped one in my mouth as I made my way up to the register of the rundown gas station, where Carina was staring down the shaking barrel of a weapon far too big for the boy holding it behind the counter.
I crinkled the bag again, chewing casually until the boy’s eyes shifted over to me. Then I smiled. Never sneak up on an amateur holding a gun unless you mean to take him down.
“You… have to pay for those,” he stammered, snapping his eyes back to Carina when she sighed dramatically. His fingers were turning white around the metal of the weapon.
“Happy to,” I said. “Should I come around there to ring myself up, or are you going to put that thing down?”
“I…” He glanced wildly between me and my little terror of a niece before his eyes narrowed on her again. “She’s not human.”
“And you’re not very smart,” Carina said, a wisp of smoke sneaking out from her nose. My eye twitched again as I realized it wasn’t just the boy behind the counter who needed to calm the fuck down.
“She looks pretty human to me,” I lied. “Just a harmless little girl.” Not taking any chances, I slid myself in between the two of them, putting the gummies on the counter and trying to ignore the weapon that was wavering right in front of my chest. “Well?”
“Get out of the way, ma’am. The police will be here soon.” The boy’s voice was surprisingly steady now, which was good. A steady voice meant a steady trigger finger less likely to accidentally shoot me.
“Did she try to steal something?” I asked, getting out my wallet.
“She turned it to stone.” The way he said it told me he expected it to mean something to me, so I twisted my head around to raise my eyebrows at Carina.
She shrugged, then pulled her hand out of her coat pocket. A single obsidian bunny sat in her palm, resting its shiny black head on her fingers. “You mean this?”
The boy clutched his weapon tighter when the bunny’s ears twitched. “Why is it still moving?”
“Because I didn’t kill it, dummy,” Carina said. “It was always made of stone. It’s a magic rabbit and it doesn’t like you.”
I breathed out a huff and made a mental note to teach my hot-headed niece about the merits of de-escalation. But when I turned back to the boy, he had miraculously lowered his weapon.
“So… it’s not like what happened last week?” he said, his jaw going slack.
“What happened last week?” I asked.
He shifted his eyes at me, a moment of confusion passing before he said, “You’re not from around here, are you?”
“Just passing through.”
The boy’s shoulders drooped, his whole body relaxing as he set the shotgun down behind the counter. “Sorry, it’s just… We don’t get a lot of magic types here, and last week…” He swallowed.
“What happened last week?” I repeated.
“My girlfriend’s parents,” he said. “I took her out on a date, and when we came back… they were just rocks.”
“Dumb as rocks, to let their daughter date someone like you,” Carina piped up from behind me.
The boy’s face hardened again, but he didn’t get a chance to say anything before I turned on my heel and wrapped my fingers tight around Carina’s upper arm.
“Hey!” she protested, but I dragged her over to the door and shoved her out of the store.
“Wait in the car,” I snapped before slamming the door shut, the chimes at the top jangling to make my words sound less threatening than I’d hoped. But then, nothing was going as I’d hoped it would lately. Every day, this road trip felt less like an escape and more like something both the angry little dragon and I wanted to escape from.
A beep at the register reminded me to turn around with a smile, only to see the boy frowning at me. “Three seventy-nine, please,” he said flatly.
“What did you mean about them being rocks?” I asked as I dug into my wallet for cash.
“Exactly what I said. Rocks. Stone. Statues. Like they were killed by Medusa or something.” He blinked, giving his head a small shake before softly saying, “They looked terrified.”
I had to stop myself from correcting him with “petrified.” That wouldn’t be helpful. Not to mention it was exactly the kind of thing Adrian would say. “Damn,” I said instead, shaking my own head to banish the thought of the man I’d left in DC. “Any idea what happened?”
“No. There were DSC agents in town the next day, but they didn’t do shit. Just asked a bunch of questions and then left.”
“No wonder you’re still jumpy,” I said as I placed a few bills on the counter. I wanted to tell this kid I’d look into it for him, that I knew some DSC agents and I’d call them. But that was one road I didn’t want to go down right now. I was supposed to be taking a break from all that.
“Not just me,” he said, a grim half-smile on his face. “I’d keep that rabbit out of sight around here. It’s a small town and people talk.”
“Noted.” Good thing he’d only seen the one. There was a whole horde of those obsidian bunnies along for the ride with me and Carina, and I wouldn’t know how to keep them all out of sight if I tried.
Red and blue lights flashed down the road as I walked out to my bunny-infested car, not looking forward to telling the tired little girl inside that we’d need to drive a few more hours before stopping for the night. The boy wasn’t kidding when he’d said the cops were on their way. Jumpy indeed.
Popping another cola gummy in my mouth, I frowned at the flavor that was not quite the same as I remembered it from when I was a kid. Sweet but disappointingly flat—just like my piss-poor attempt at this vacation.
Not that this was ever going to be a real vacation.
I picked up my pace and slid into the driver’s seat just in time to hit the gas before the cops pulled into the parking lot. Couldn’t risk having to answer their questions when the little girl quietly fuming in the passenger’s seat was technically a fugitive.
“I should have eaten him,” she said. It didn’t come across as intimidating as it might have had she not been scratching a content bunny between the ears while she said it.
Still, it was worrying, and I said nothing as I pressed my foot down harder on the gas pedal. I honestly didn’t know what to say. I was supposed to be driving this girl out of the country, helping her flee back to her god—our god—in Mexico after she’d been forced to murder a handful of innocent people a couple weeks ago in DC.
It hadn’t been her fault, not in the least. But at the end of the day, she was still a child with blood on her hands. Blood that hadn’t been there before. And now, she was joking about eating random humans when I was pretty sure she’d never actually eaten anything bigger than a baby goat.
“Did you see how skinny he was?” I eventually joked back, forcing myself to bury my worries. “Eat these instead.”
I tossed the open bag of gummies at her, and a couple fell into her lap when she caught them. A few more bunnies popped their shiny black heads up from beneath the edges of her seat, scurrying over her legs to snatch up the stray candy.
They might be spies for the ancient volcano god I was kind of running away from right now, but at least they kept my car clean.
“Am I wasting my time here?” I asked once Carina was chewing on a gummy. She swallowed and looked at me, and I tried to keep my eyes on the road as the dusk slowly overtook the clear sky above.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if you want to get caught and go to jail, it’d be way easier for me to just drop you off at the nearest police station. You don’t have to keep picking fights with everyone we meet.”
“I wasn’t—he started it!”
“This time, maybe. But we’ve gotten kicked out of nearly every place we’ve stopped.” I wasn’t even exaggerating, and if I weren’t so annoyed I might actually be impressed.
Carina huffed, another puff of smoke blowing out from her nostrils. Something I’d never seen her do before we set out on this trip.
“Look,” I said with a sigh. “We would be out of the country already if we were doing what your dad wanted us to do. And at this point, if you can’t control whatever this is…” I took my right hand off the wheel and waved it around at her. “I’m starting to think we should just head south. I can visit my family without you.”
“No!” Carina sat up straight, the bunnies scurrying off her lap at the surprising boom in her voice.
“Why not?” I asked calmly.
She deflated a bit, tucking her chin down and squeezing the bag of gummies tight in her fist. “I want to meet them,” she said eventually. “You said I could.”
“You can, sure, but only if you’ll let me get you there in one piece.” I decided not to press her on why she wanted to meet them so much. Not when we’d been so careful to avoid the subject this whole time. With Popo’s bunnies along for the ride, our godly benefactor had constant eyes and ears on us. It didn’t bother me that he knew where we were going, but I didn’t think it’d be a great idea for him to know what we were planning on doing when we got there.
I still wasn’t sure what my niece would decide, but I was going to ask my aunts and uncles to help me redo the tattoo—the mage mark—Carina had ripped off my ankle months ago. For most of my life, that tattoo had blocked Popo from influencing me, made me an independent magic user—a mage rather than a witch. And independent was how I preferred to live my life.
Was it duplicitous of me to try to get it back? Maybe. I had willingly accepted the god’s help in exchange for my witchy servitude, after all. But that had been in an emergency. I did a lot of crazy things when faced with emergencies, and I wasn’t above regretting the ones that made my life hell after the fact.
The road ahead was empty and Carina unusually quiet, so I turned my head to look at her. She was leaning against the window now, one of the bunnies pressed against her chin as her eyes focused on nothing. Deep in thought.
I turned back to the road and was met with blinding light.
“Ahh!” I squeezed my eyes shut and slammed on the brakes, tightening my grip on the wheel as the car started to spin out of control.
Carina was screaming something now, but I couldn’t understand it. The words melted into nonsense as they assaulted my ears, part of a humming cacophony that faded slowly into silence as the blinding light dimmed.
The car halted, and I opened my eyes.
Fire.
Something in front of us was on fire. A car wreck? But then why had it been so bright, so sudden—and why was it so quiet now?
The something in front of us moved. Flames burned in strange directions, not just upwards but sideways and down, almost like… feathers.
Great wings unfurled and tapped against the pavement before lifting into the air, scattering wisps of fire into the darkness on either side of the narrow road. The bird’s head lifted from the ground and turned to me, its dark eyes sucking me in like black holes as it opened its beak and shrieked.
And just as Carina’s words had turned into nonsense when they’d met my ears before, this shriek turned into something else.
“Darcy.” A voice inside my head, resonating disapproval strong enough it threatened to stop my heart.
I shut my eyes again, wanting to cover my ears even though I knew it wouldn’t help. The cacophony returned, humming and shrieking at once before exploding into silence.
“Darcy!” Carina’s little angry voice washed over me along with an immense feeling of relief.
I breathed out slowly, releasing the tension in my face and my arms as I opened my eyes and let go of the steering wheel.
The road was empty and dark again, the fiery bird gone. When I turned to Carina, licking my dry lips, she met me with wide eyes and a twisted mouth.
“What was that you were saying about getting me to California in one piece?”