Sirocco Read online

  Sirocco

  T. Hearts

  Sirocco was first published in 2020

  Text copyright © T Hearts, 2020

  Cover Illustration by T Hearts, 2020

  Edited by N Haigh

  All rights reserved.

  All characters within are works of fiction and are property of the author and part of the same universe as Stormbite.

  ISBN 9798604942031

  ISBN9798-6049-4203-1

  Typeset in 11pt Garamond

  Cover font typeset in Blue Pen

  THE STORM SERIES

  Stormbite

  Silverbird

  THE COMPASS SERIES

  Sirocco

  Gregale

  Libeccio

  Mistral

  SHORT STORIES

  Broken Arrow

  Glasswing

  Chapters

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 1

  The sunshine was merciless. A mild spring day had turned into what felt like midsummer within the hour.

  It had no compassion for the scorched earth and parched rivers, cracking in the heat. No mercy for the animals and insects that scurried about for shade, and absolutely no mercy for lost hikers.

  “Jackass!”

  The insult echoed through the canyon as one brother threw his bag on the ground at the other and sat down on a boulder in protest.

  “Teddy, enough with the name calling.”

  “We’re in the middle of nowhere, I’m pretty sure the rocks don’t care what I call you.”

  “What are you, eight years old?” His older brother snapped, “Have some decorum.”

  “Give me the map then.”

  “No. I’m reading it so it’s mine.”

  “Now who’s eight years old?”

  His older brother huffed and marched off ahead, fanning himself every now and then with his hat. Several hours of walking in the sun was starting to take its toll and the stubbornness of each was leading progressively more towards anger and violence.

  “This wouldn’t have happened,” grumbled Teddy as he dragged his feet and his bag through the dust with growing contempt, “if you had given me the damn map. Jackass, are you even listening to me anymore?”

  No response. Glaring at his brother’s back, Teddy drew in a deep rebellious breath.

  “HEEEEEEELP!”

  “Teddy!”

  “Shut up James. HELP! IS THERE ANYONE OUT THERE WHO CAN HEAR ME?”

  “I swear to god,” James huffed under his breath. “I hope a mountain lion eats you.”

  A shadow fell across them. Circling them. Must have been the vultures getting ready to peck out their eyes Teddy thought.

  “Are you lost?” Someone shouted from high above them.

  Startled, Teddy stopped to look up as a huge bird dropped down between the gully walls towards them – except it wasn’t a bird. Birds didn’t have fingers, or clothes, or a mouthful of sharp smiling teeth.

  She landed, a massive wing stroke blowing the dust around her and knocking the hat from James’ head as he stared slack jawed.

  “You boys look like you’re in need of a ranger to set you back on the right path.” The Avio laughed, tucking her huge wings back with a smile and flicking her tailfeathers closed. “Lucky for you, you’ve got the best.”

  The brothers stared in shock silence, and without missing a beat James fainted clean away.

  -x-

  “So, you’re a park ranger here?” Asked Teddy, nervously drinking his water with a trembling hand, whilst the Avio read the map. She nodded, drawing on in pencil a route for them to follow, marking out visual markers for them to follow.

  “I have been for the last seven- wait no, that’s a lie- nine years.”

  “Well that wasn’t in the brochure.”

  “The marketing team had an extended debate about it along with, hey, should we mention the fact that all the campsites are on haunted ancient burial grounds, or should we not?”

  “Wait! Are they?”

  “Of course not.” She laughed, rolling her brightly vermillion eyes. Her eyes were hard to look at, they were just so inhuman.

  Then again, everything about her was alien.

  From the red eyes, to the peach and white feathers across the tan skin of her face and shoulders replacing her ears and eyebrows. The strange barrel shape chest, to the strange look of her fingers that ended in talons that had been filed down to a reasonable length, and the long tailfeathers that she kept on flicking and twitching behind her.

  There was nothing human here. Even her knee-length twist of pink and black hair looked more like plush fur than hair.

  “Okay so,” She said brightly and quickly, “y’all will want to follow this trail down here, heading towards the sun. That should put you back on track. You can get to San Elenora if you head right once you meet the main trail and get a bus from there to get back to your lodge.”

  “It was that easy?”

  “Yes. Your brother really can’t read maps at all, can he.”

  “No…no he can’t…” He looked down at his still unconscious brother laid with his head on their hiking pack, and one of the Avio’s huge wings outstretched to give him shade.

  “Jackass.” Teddy whispered.

  “Don’t beat him up about it. It’s demanding work thinking in this heat.”

  She gave her wings a quick little shake, dislodging a small cloud of orange dust that clung to every fibre and filament. They moved much faster than he anticipated. He had half expected them to move with elegantly smooth, slow, angelic movements rather than the sudden and deliberate flicks and fans.

  “Do you mind if I ask…” Teddy began cautiously, eyes fixed on her wings and feathers. “What are you?”

  “A park ranger.” She said playfully, looking up from the map to give him a wry smile.

  “That’s not- I mean what species.”

  “I’m an Avio.”

  “Right…and what is that. Is that like…some kind of…bird-human person?”

  “No.” She said with a thinly vailed tone of offence and a less than subtle eye-roll. The blue-white feathers along her shoulders moved – moved! – making her look fluffier for a moment before settling back down again. “You’re lucky my sisters aren’t here to hear you say that.”

  An uncomfortable pit began to settle in his stomach, the more he stared. Every look he gave her, the more differences he saw.

  Neck too long, too flexible. Walking on the balls of her feet rather than flat-footed, with long toes that were almost like fingers. Chest illusively deeper than he first thought, with so much muscle that he was sure that she could have thrown him up on top of the canyon without even straining. And teeth – he had seen monkeys bare their teeth before with their long canines that could easily puncture his skin, but these were like sabre-toothed razors.

  She smiled, flashing the fangs at him and unnerved he looked away, trying to crush the thought of what she could do to him before he let the hot panic get the better of him.

  “I’m a synthetically made being that just happens to look like a human with a bird body
. Or the other way around if you prefer. I’m actually neither.”

  He stared at her again. Confused. “Synthetic?”

  Grinning, from ear to feathered ear she chuckled. “Don’t think too hard on it. I don’t want you fainting as well.”

  That seemed almost impossible now with his racing mind. He felt hot and dizzy already and sweat was pouring down his face.

  “It’s hard. I understand.” She sighed, “Trying to break your head out of the idea that ‘if it looks like a duck, it must be a duck’ ideology.”

  “But you said you weren’t a duck.”

  “I said I wasn’t a bird, never said that I wasn’t a duck.”

  “I…”

  “I’m messing with you.” She laughed. “Not a duck. Not a bird. Not a human. Despite how it looks.”

  “You…oh god, you’re being serious.”

  “Deadly. Don’t think too hard on it or you’ll never be able to sleep again.

  “But they are real though? Right?”

  “What?”

  “The w-wings.”

  She rolled her eyes, again scaring him with a strange alien blink of a hidden eyelid that went across her eye. Now he was really starting to consider running away. There was no way any of this- any part of her- could have been real, he told himself.

  “As real and no different to the head attached to your body.”

  “C-can I…I mean if that’s alright with you…”

  She rolled her eyes again and extended a wing out, patiently sitting still so that he could walk around and get a full look.

  The entire wing must have been at least twelve feet long, and easily five-foot broad. The underside was simple, a nice warm peachy gradient of cream to coral pink edged with smoky black, then fading into red and then black at the tips with some faint dark banding across the first three primary feathers.

  However, as he circled around her, the patterns of the backs of her wings had him stunned. There was no bird alive that had markings like hers, not even a butterfly had such a look.

  The base a deep grey-black, but with a thick band of cobalt to arctic blue and white on the primaries, and stripes of cherry red along the secondaries, but was far more to it than that. Even the two-meter-long tailfeathers – forked in such a way that it made him think of the scissor-tailed flycatchers that mobbed about in the sky – were brilliantly coloured with the same cherry and arctic-cobalt pallet.

  Then, without even thinking, he reached out and lightly stroked them. Despite the sun, the feathers were cool to the touch.

  “Oh man. I wish I had wings.”

  “If you had wings with a chest like that your entire body would turn to mush before you even took off.”

  “What?”

  He looked at her and with a gasp, quickly recoiled away as she owlishly had nearly fully turned her head around to look directly at him behind her. The look on his face made her laugh lightly.

  “Like I said,” she said as righted her head, “don’t think too hard on it.”

  Then with a smooth movement, she rose to her feet and flourished her wings out with a sound like sheets in the wind. Hopping up onto a boulder in a single bound she examined her exit method out of the gully. Priming herself, she shook the dust off then gave every primary feather an individual twitch, shocking him with a glimmer of purple and turquoise iridescence that he hadn’t seen within the blacks and greys of her feathers. The long scissor-tails twitched in and out with quick little flicks. The control and awareness over where every little quill was, astounded him.

  “Your brother should wake up soon.” She said with a kind yet fanged smile. “Keep him hydrated as much as you can, then when you’re back on the trail call in for a pickup. Get him some ice for his head as soon as you’re back at the lodges and he should be fine. He might be a bit in shock and a little out-of-sorts for a few days, but he’ll get over it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “This happens a lot.”She grinned wider. “This is my second fainting today.”

  There was no need to convince him that she wasn’t joking.

  “If you get lost again, call out for a ranger again.”

  “What about if I call out for you to help me again?”

  “Then you’d better ask for IO.” Said the Avio with a cheery salute, then with a single bound, shot straight up out of the canyon and into the sky.

  Chapter 2

  The carpet of bluebonnets, Indian paintbrush, and desert marigold that lined the dry creek beds, danced and rolled beneath her as a sea of colour as she passed over them, stirring up loose petals and insects up into the sky in her wake. A grin spread across her face. She swept low across the basin floor, revelling in the way the short shrubby trees and cacti became a blur beneath her as she raced over them, being careful not to catch her wings on any branches that jutted out.

  As fun as it was, it was often also much safer to fly this way, keeping clear from the wide open skies during the peak seasons when all the bird watchers were about and to stop any possible poachers from seeing her until she was literally upon them and pinning down into the dust.

  It was always fun, seeing the looks of shock on the faces of both tourists and poachers alike. As much as she took pride in helping them and protecting the land, it still made her day to get at least one fainting person out of her interactions. Peyton hated it, but never gave her more than a gentle warning about her behaviour about making sure that she wasn’t drawing too much attention to herself.

  As soon as she reached the rocky walls of the mesas, she caught the updraft and skyrocketed upwards with a single sweep of her wings. Playfully twisted into a spin that took her straight up through the low streaks of clouds. The gentle mist was refreshingly cool, especially in the heat of summer.

  She picked a particularly fluffy cloud gliding along below her and with a grin angled her wings for a dive. The mist blocked her vision out in white for a moment and then as she began to surface on the other side–

  There was a flurry of black feathers around her as her wings hit something solid. Several things solid and sharp.

  It took a moment to realise that in her play she had collided with several vultures who were leisurely gliding on the sky road beneath the cloud and sent them scattering with panicked hisses.

  She back peddled her huge wings and did her best to keep out of their way as they gathered themselves up again.

  “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!”

  The black vultures hissed and honked at her in disapproval, fluttering and quickly arcing off out of her way.

  IO huffed loudly.

  “Rude.” She muttered, shaking off the cloud dew and scratches gained from the birds’ talons, and powered onwards, far over the canyons towards home. Her tower lay right on the border of the park and the vast expanse of the Chihuahua desert, on top of the mesa that overlooked the Rio Grande.

  Sighing with relief, as she landed upon the hot concrete of her home, she let her feathers brush against the various chimes and scraps of fluttering coloured cloth and flags that adorned the metal struts.

  Asher had told her that it once it had been used to boost telephone and television transmissions across the country, then had been retrofitted as a fallout shelter beneath the concrete base in its semi-submerged control room. Skyway network he said it’d been called.

  Now however, paintbrush and bluebonnets grew all about the land, whilst bits of flags fluttered from the metal framework that held up the rusted main platforms, and the control room had been torn apart and turned into her home. Various marks of paint that had been given to her by other rangers decorated the metal and concrete, whilst from each beam windchimes clanked and rung out in the afternoon breeze, whilst the turbines and solar panels that she had repurposed to give her electricity, hummed and rattled with a comforting ambiance that filled the silence.

  The huge horns that once sat on top of the tower had done their job as her new rain catchers, and with the spring rain had filled already up the large water ta
nk that Asher had acquired for her. He had even been kind enough to attach a filter and fixed everything up to work with the already existing shelter shower inside, as well as to feed the small crop planters on the roof, the hydroponic wall, and fill up a small barrel that she used to give the chickens water.

  “Hey babies!” She chirped loudly, jumping down onto the ground.

  The entire flock of chickens rushed the fencing with excited clucks and gurgles until she fed them all a head of lavender each that she had planted close by. She made sure to count all the chickens in the large coup that she had made for them.

  All ten present and accounted for, including the spangled black cock that spent most of its time poking his beak through the wire to peck at the lavender. They were a gift from the Rangers. Easter Eggers was what they had been called, and she’d be damned if anything ate them.

  Smiling, she checked their water and the fence for any damage and then went on inside the concrete base of the tower, where she lived and where lay all the treasures she had found.

  Dinosaur bones, volcanic rocks, feathers from birds, a few skulls of whitetail and javelina she had found and painted, cacti that she had painfully repotted and stacked on any surface she could make for them. It was years’ worth of decorating.

  Sighing deeply, she let her wings lazily drape across the dusty floor and flicked on the switch to the ancient speaker system and the radio, waiting a moment as the device fuzzily clicked into the right frequency. Music began to play across the tower, a lone echoing voice in the wilderness.

  “That was Get Out Alive performed by Pandemonium, and you my friend are listening to Strayfarer Radio, with your most beloved host, Cipher.” Said the host at the end of the song, “Coming up soon we’ll have our Ten-Of-Feathers tale with Sept, who will take you up to seven, and then we’ll be having a discussion on ghost towns we’ve travelled through. But don’t forget to stay tuned in for our World Tour hour at nine with Chase the Shun.”