Flying Blind Ch. 01

"I mean what is she talking about?!" Heda was exasperated. This girl obviously had violence on her mind. Madison strode up to her and her foot shot out, a spinning roundhouse kick aimed right at Heda's head.

Heda's mother was a warrior, and she had started her daughter in martial arts when she was six. Heda rolled her eyes, invoking her gift. With her eyes glowing blue, she caught Madison's angle and picked the girl up off the ground, holding her there like a pinata. "Why are you trying to kick me? I just saved your cute little ass!" An ass that Heda was getting a good look at as the struggling girl dangled helplessly. Heda was twice as strong as a man Billy's size, so holding a hundred-and-twenty pound girl aloft wasn't exactly difficult. 'She's in pretty good shape,' Heda thought absently.

"Put me down you bitch!" Madison was tempted to shift and try again, but she wasn't sure she'd be able to slip that tenacious grip. "How are you doing that?"

Heda looked at Billy, perplexed and annoyed beyond all reason. "What is she babbling about?"

Billy just covered his face for a moment, unsure whether or not it would be appropriate to laugh at his friend considering all she'd been through. "That young lady you're holding is Madison Sloan."

"Okay, I knew that."

"You know Alvin Hannity?"

"Not personally. A friend told me that he's the vampire bat fuck-tard that keeps hassling her," Heda said, spitting out the word "her" like it was acid. "I tried to introduce myself to her 'cause I hate shitheads like that and she goes apeshit on me. So now I've been called a Trojan Horse twice now and she's tried to kick me and my patience is just about out and . . . fuck! The bet!" Heda dumped Madison unceremoniously on the ground, hoping like hell that Joanna hadn't caught anything yet. She'd tried to be nice here, and she'd gotten yelled at and assaulted . . . kind of. She shifted into eagle form and flapped her wings, gradually gaining altitude.

'And the girl's eyes were fucking glowing,' she thought. 'Nobody told me she was Gifted. A Gifted blind girl? I've never heard of anything like that before.' Then she thought back to the sunglasses the girl had worn before. 'Does anyone even know? Why wouldn't she tell them? Gifts are beautiful things, so people might actually cut her a break.' But she decided she was done thinking about that ungrateful bitch. She had a bet to win.

On the ground, Madison lay quietly, breathing hard and stretching out with her echolocation, trying to find her escaped quarry. Then she noticed that Billy was looking at her and shaking his head.

"What? I could've taken her . . . except for that whole super-fast and super-strong thing. You could've helped you know!"

Billy grabbed her clothes out of the car and then dropped them on Madison's body. "She was able to manhandle you because she's Gifted."

"Gifted?" Madison's face blanked, then looked annoyed again. "Cheating slut!" she screamed at the night sky.

Billy knelt next to her. "I think I know who that was."

"Heda-I'm-too-chickenshit-to-fight-without-my-Gift," Madison muttered.

"One, you're being childish. Two, you were using your Gift too."

"Hey, my Gift --"

"Three, you probably exposed your Gift to someone else."

Madison's eyes were open wide now. She put her hands to her faces, remembering for the first time that she hadn't had anything covering her glowing eyes. Just white-film lenses with a brown glow. "Shit!"

"Four, I think that was Heda Adler. As in Jessica Adler's daughter."

Madison's mouth was moving but no sound was coming out.

"Unless there's another new female eagle shifter with lightning-fast reflexes on campus."

Madison's mouth kept moving silently.

He sighed. "Madison, it wouldn't hurt you to at least TRY to let people get to know you. Without cussing at them or attempting to kick them in the head."

Madison's face fell. "That's what you said the first time." The first time Alvin played his sick little games. "Listen, let's just get back to campus. We've got to be at the station in a couple of hours anyway."

Billy got dressed and watched his friend climb quietly back into the truck. Sometime, he knew when it was time not to argue with her anymore.

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Elsewhere . . .

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Heda had given up the hunt when she realized that the sun was almost down and that she was too hopping mad to hunt anyway. She actually landed and most people hadn't returned yet. Then she saw a black-and-white furred critter sniffing around an overturned log looking for bugs. It saw her staring at it so the skunk wandered over. It reached her, turned around, lifted its tail and then --

"Do it and I'll punt you into the middle of next week," she said. "I'll smell bad, but your balls will pop out of your mouth when you cough."

The skunk looked back at her, then morphed back into Anthony. "You say the sweetest things," he said, he voice low and seductive. He leaned against her jeep, his generous manhood dangling off to one side.

Heda's retort was cut off when she saw Joanna slithering out of the woods with a lump halfway down her midsection. She morphed back into a beautiful naked blond who looked mightily vexed.

"You got back already? Damn, you are good!"

It would have been so easy to say she'd already devoured her kill. 'Damn Mom and her damn honor,' Heda's mind grumbled. "You won. I didn't catch anything."

She looked confused but pleased. "So . . . why'd you stop?"

Heda growled and then told them everything that had happened. "Who do I report this to? What's the chain of command for this?"

Anthony looked at her. "Think they'll actually do anything? I mean, if they've been harassing her all this time --"

Heda shot him another one of those looks. "We do something because it's what we're supposed to do. Even if Madison Sloan is a complete bitch."

"It'll be your word against theirs. Yours and Madison's." Joanna actually felt surprisingly good when Heda shrugged her shoulders, indicating that it didn't matter. "I'd go straight to Reichert if I were you. You might be able to get his attention more easily than the rest of us could."

"I should changed my last name to 'Smith' or something." Heda sighed. Unfortunately, this was a time where she actually needed to use that last name.

Joanna smiled and placed a hand on her new friend's shoulder. "You're one of the good guys, aren't you? Well, that isn't EVEN going to keep you from paying up on our bet." She hugged Heda.

"I hate you," Heda replied.

"I know you do."

"Don't I get a hug?" Anthony asked.

'Okay,' Heda thought. She put a little sway in her hips as she walked over, pressing her body against his. It didn't take much to feel him rising to the occasion as their heat merged. She traced one finger along his stiffening member, leaned in and whispered into his ear. "I'm a lesbian." She raised her face to the sky as she laughed and walked away, leaving him pointing in the wind like a flagpole.

Anthony just stared while Joanna laughed at him, then started to get dressed.

"That's not funny!" Anthony said. "You're not serious? Are you? C'mon!"

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Two weeks later . . .

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Heda had been pissed for all of practice. Professor Reichert had actually gone out of town for the weeks before school started, so she hadn't been able to tell him what had happened, and her complaints to the local Changeling Council had been met with red tape and "Well, we'll see what the Reptile King says when he gets back." She had almost broken down and called her mother for help, but then she'd kicked herself. Literally. She wanted to break out of her mother's shadow, so she'd see this through on her own. The people she had talked to didn't seem surprised, so she guessed they'd already heard from Madison. She hadn't seen hide nor hair of the blind bitch of the west since the incident.

So Heda had taken out her aggression on the other side of the practice squad. She'd pancaked two girls, spiked one ball so hard it bounced off the lumber and cracked a window, and people were so scared of the shots she was throwing that no one would set to her . . . even in setting drills. The coach decided that she "needed a nap" and sent her home. Napping was the furthest thing from her mind. Her coach had told her to call the campus dorm escort service so someone could walk her home. That suggestion lasted as far as the locker room before being summarily dismissed. She WANTED the perp who had taken the horse shifter to show up. She was itching for a fight.

'I can be way too much like Mom,' she thought. It amused her to think of that same woman puttering around a kitchen at her five-star restaurant holding a knife that she wasn't supposed to stab anyone with. There was a wild and primal world just below the horizon on normal humans' reality, and sometimes wars were made there. The last one had been a huge uprising of insect shifters in South America, led by a maniacal Queen who thought the human race had blown its shot at running the planet. Shutting them down had been costly, but a coalition of the warriors of the different animal families had gotten the job done. Jessica Adler had taken time off from being a wife, mother, and restaurant entrepreneur to general the effort.

"I guess I should get back into weapons classes at some point," she told herself as she started a jog across campus. Her father had actually convinced her to take some time off before getting to involved in the warrior culture and had finally made her mother relent. Her father, a well-off architect in his own right, was less enthusiastic about Heda getting caught up in changeling politics. She didn't blame him. He was pure human with a Noah Strain that never manifested itself, and he had almost lost his wife to that world. He was the calm to her mother's storm. Maybe she should call him? He was the thinker in the family. He had encouraged her ridiculous reading habit and desire to become a writer herself.

There was only another week until class started and she was already getting nervous. The English classes were going to be cake, but Physics and Intro to Calculus were daunting. The campus still had a quiet hush to it, and no progress had been made in finding the perp who had kidnapped the horse shifter, or how they had gotten her and her cage onto campus without anyone seeing. Heda made it a point to go visit the girl, as she had refused to withdraw from her classes. No way was she letting whoever it was stop her from her life. Heda admired that.

She got back to her dorm without incident and crashed onto her bed. The dorm rooms at FCU were actually pretty large, with the semi-secret reason being that shifters needed their space. So there was a good amount of room between her and Joanna, who was sitting in front of her trendy little MacBook making sure that her MySpace page was up to spec.

"You're back early."

"My coach thinks I have anger management issues and sent me home."

Joanna turned around. "You ran home? Alone? Are you nuts?"

"Duh."

"Well . . . go shower. You smell like my Aunt Paula."

"Was she hot?"

"She's my Aunt."

"So?" Heda grinned and got up, peeling off her clothes and hook-shotting them into the laundry hamper. It was empty, since Joanna had called in her "servant for a day" winnings and made Heda clean everything in the apartment before giving her a foot rub and watching the most god-awful chick flick while feeding her popcorn. Someday, Heda would have her revenge.

Heda clambered into the shower after tossing aside the frilly unmentionables that Joanna had hung up to dry. 'She does have good taste in underwear,' she thought, holding out a silky piece that was too small to be used as an eye patch. 'If only she were bi.' But Heda didn't play "seduce the straight chick," so she finished making room and turned on the water. Something about a hot shower was so therapeutic that she'd almost forgot about the kidnapping and the fight with Alvin and his goons and that ungrateful --

"Hey, hurry up and get out of the shower!" Joanna shouted. "Anthony is coming over, and he's got Kevin and Peter with him. They both got back early and Anthony's convinced that if you don't throw yourself on Peter then there's no hope for you."

Heda toweled off and trotted naked out into the main room. "He isn't just going to take my word that I'm gay?"

"Nope. He's hoping that Peter will be able to break down your defenses and when that happens, you'll publicly give up the whole lesbian charade. Then he sweeps in and steals you away before you and Paul consummate your re-discovered heterosexuality and he . . . okay, even I can't guess what he wants after that. Besides sex, I mean."

"You've put way too much thought into this. Or he has, and you know him way too well. Either way scares me." She stopped looking for clean clothes to glance at her roommate. "Was he like this with you?"

Joanna shook her head. "I didn't make things nearly this hard on him. He came over, said 'hi,' started the whole smooth operator shit . . . I just thought he looked yummy, so I told him to shut up and then blew him behind the bowling alley."

"How romantic."

The blond girl grinned. "He bought me a beer and nachos afterward. It was one of the nicer dates I've been on."

Heda squeezed into a pair of unnaturally tight terrycloth shorts and a baby-doll tee-shirt with "I'm Pooh's Honey" on the front with a picture of Winnie in gangsta clothing. Heda dug Winnie the Pooh. That was when the door knocked and the "boys" arrived. Anthony looked good as always, and his friends weren't exactly hard on the eyes. Kevin was easy to recognize, as Heda had been told all about him. He was a red-haired, green-eyed elfish looking human whose eyes were a little too clouded to be in his right mind. He was known for having some of the best pharmaceutical recreation available, some of which he grew/brewed himself. And to his credit, there had been no serious injuries or any real illness associated with his drugs. The guy was good at what he did.

Peter was also pretty easy to pick out, and Heda couldn't deny a very sudden and very prominent draw to the man. While the Adler family was good friends with the Bird Queen, Peter was the Bird King's nephew. No, the King and Queen weren't actually married or even involved. The most powerful male member of an animal family became its King and the most power woman its Queen. If looks could tell the story, the Peter Smith might be king some day. He was six-feet three-inches tall of lean, defined muscle. He wasn't actually as good looking in the face as Anthony was or as physically imposing as Billy had been, but the combination of his looks and build made him drool-worthy. But what attracted Heda was that he was an alpha in the bird realm, and that almost forced other bird shifters to react.

Peter was staring at Heda with an oddly confused smile on his face, so she stared back. Anthony was looking between them like he was watching a tennis match. Heda widened her eyes and stepped closer to the peregrine shifter, touching her fingers to his chest. She parted her lips and --

"Sorry," she said, stepping away and flopping down on her bed, "but I just am not driven to throw myself on him and ravish him silly. Still a lesbian. Tough break there Anthony."

"Damn it!" the skunk shifter said while attempted to growl. "You can't be gay! Not with that body!"

Peter glared at his friend. "THAT'S why you dragged my ass over here when I haven't even unpacked yet? You were trying to get me to seduce a lesbian? Dude, just because she's a bird doesn't mean she'll fall over me." He turned to Heda. "Sorry. He just grabbed me and told me there was someone I needed to meet. You're Heda Adler?"

"Yep. Yes, THAT Heda Adler."

He smiled. "Heard your going to take our volleyball team to the NCAA tournament this year."
 Heda smiled back. "I will if they let me play. I was a bit on edge this evening, so they sent me home."

"Why on edge?" He sat down in the spare chair.

Heda noticed that Joanna was staring at Peter intently. She was hunting, but in a good way. "You hear about the kidnapped girl?" He nodded. "Well, that's one thing. Then I got caught up with Madison and Alvin and that whole pile of batshit --" She told them what had happened the other night.

"Dude, that's shit," Kevin said. "I don't really know her, but that shit shouldn't be going down."

"Yeah, well I'm getting stonewalled by powers that be and Reichert is out of town. Hell, I don't think that the blind bitch even wants my help."

Peter slumped. He even looked good slumping. "It's going to be your word against theirs. I don't know this girl either but I know Alvin Hannity. He's a prick, and his family is disgustingly rich. They've donated a ton of money to FCU, so knocking him off his pedestal won't be easy. And be careful, because his half-form is nasty if he fights you in it." Vampire bat half-forms were one of the causes of all the vampire legends and while they couldn't actually turn into mist or dogs, they were damn fast and damn strong. Vampire bats were the air warriors of the mammal family, and that made them valuable.

"So's mine," Heda promised.

"I think I'd like to see that fight," Peter said softly. Heda realized why Anthony might think she'd fall for him. There was something special about him.

"Oh, you two are total buzz killers," Joanna said brightly. "Kev, got anything to lighten the mood?"

"Always!"

"NOT in the dorm!" Heda said. "You can go outside for that shit."

"You ain't smoking?" the redhead asked.

"No way."

"Peter?"

"You know I get tested for that a lot, right?"

"I'm in," Anthony said. He, Kevin, and Joanna disappeared out the door and over to the park.

"So --" Peter said.

"I really am gay," Heda replied with a grin.

"Damn. Well, . . . Hey, speaking of Madison --" he started, then reached for the radio.

Heda was confused again, watching him fumble with the dial on the radio until it settled where he wanted it. They were playing "Brown Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison, and Heda found herself grooving along before she even got around to asking, "What does this have to do with Madison?"

About thirty seconds later, she got her answer. The song ended and a voice came on. "That was Van Morrison and one of the all time great songs. Something kinda sexy about a brown-eyed girl, don't you think? Of course, I'm not to sure what 'brown' looks like, but I'm thinking its warm and full and melts on your tongue. Someone once told me that chocolate is brown, and it kinda makes sense don't it? A girl like that should be sweet. Maybe that's why Van Morrison wrote a song about her."

"That voice," Heda said, "It's familiar." But more than familiar, that voice was sexy! It had a sultry tang to it, a Southern richness and a hint of Cajun spice. It rolled around each word like sweet strawberry wine, but the tingle it left was on your ears rather than your tongue. It made Heda tingle just a little somewhere else too. She was a sucker for a sexy voice.

"Next up," the Voice continued, "we've got a block from one of my all-time favorites, the incomparable Jim Croce. Here's 'Car Wash Blues,' and this is your hostess Madison asking you all to stick with us through the midnight hour."

Heda's mouth fell open. "That's Madison? No way it's the same --"

"Yep," Peter said. "It's her. Her show's actually pretty popular, especially amongst the pure human population. Hell, there's a lot of shifters that listen to it, though they won't admit it."

"It just can't be. I've had her yelling at me, and her voice doesn't sound like that." But it did in a way. Heda realized that the faint Louisiana drawl had definitely been there, though only faintly. All the components had been there. "Where's the radio station?" she asked.