Page 88 of Red Boar's Baby

This would be easier if I shifted.She would definitely be faster as a roadrunner. However, she wasn’t sure she wanted to lose her human advantages, such as hands and height.

She spotted Jenny’s cabin by a light in the window, the sort of dim light that suggested a candle or emergency lamp. At the same time, she heard crashing nearby, off to the side of the road. Diana slowed her headlong run to a panting walk, pressing one hand to a stitch in her side.

She definitely should have shifted.

From somewhere in the darkness, there was a loud crunch and someone yelped, “Ow!” in a hoarse male voice.

Diana slowed further and began to furtively cast around for a weapon. A stick, anything. Costa had told her not to engage, but they were closer to Jenny’s cabin than she was.

“What is it with this place?” There were at least two of them; she could tell by the voices. “Was that a pit full of stakes back there? What kind of farm is this?”

“Stop getting distracted! We got a job to do here.”

They were almost to the cabin. Diana gave up on trying to find a stick or rock; it wouldn’t be much good against men with guns.

She’d have to fly, get to Jenny’s ahead of them, and get the door barred and Jenny and Jay in the attic or basement. It was the only thing she could think of to do.

With vague regret at losing yet more clothes, Diana tore off her shirt and jeans, and shifted as she went, spreading her wings as soon as she was clear of her clothes.

It was strangely difficult to get airborne. Something was wrong with her; she felt ungainly and weird. She ended up covering the distance to the cabin in a series of long, gliding hops. Everything was off kilter; nothing was where it ought to be. When she landed at the porch of the cabin with a thump, she found herself lookingdownat the steps, and she stood still for a moment in utter confusion.

Normally things around her got huge when she was a roadrunner. It was dark, that was true, but she definitely should not be able to look in the cabin window when she wasn’t perching on anything.

Oh,she thought.I think I know what that injection did to me now.

She couldn’t tell exactly how big she was, but she was much,muchlarger than a normal roadrunner. She thought from the sheer perspective of her height off the ground that she might be six or seven feet tall.

Just then two men came stumbling out of the dry brush alongside the cabin. Diana looked around. Her night vision wasn’t that much better as a roadrunner than a human, but with the light from the cabin window, she could see them vaguely, enough to tell that they both had body armor and guns.

They saw her too, and stopped.

“What the hell’s that?” one of them said.

“In this place, who knows?” said the other. From the voice, it was the one who had been complaining about the stake pit earlier. “Could be a big sculpture, maybe?”

“Could be a trap.”

Diana didn’t like the idea of moving while they had guns pointed at her, but she also didn’t want them to get close enough to start poking at her. She spread her wings, or tried to; they were much bigger than she was expecting, and one of them smashed into the porch railing.

Diana shrieked the scream of a furious roadrunner, but it came out much louder than it ever had before, almost deafening.

Both men yelled in abject shock and terror.

Diana sprang at them. Her reflexes were still roadrunner-swift, even at her new huge size. One of them snapped off a gunshot, but it went wildly astray, and then Diana landed on him with her entire body weight. She was still relatively light for her size, being a bird, but he was flattened.

Now that she had other people to compare herself to, she could tell she was even bigger than she’d assumed, with her head seven or eight feet off the ground. It turned out that a roadrunner’s spearlike beak, intimidating to lizards at its normal size but not to a human, was a formidable weapon on a roadrunner that was eight feet tall. She lunged at the other gunman, who shrieked as his gun was plucked out of his hands, and then screamed and simply fled when Diana started after him, stabbing forward with a beak that was a foot and a half long and sharp as a knife.

He fled off the road, and there was a sudden shriek and he disappeared.

That was definitely one of Uncle Roddy’s pit traps.

The other one was trying to pick himself up. Diana kicked him a couple of times, then shifted human again. There was a dizzying moment of perspective shift when she had to deal with not getting bigger, but getting smaller. Collecting her jangled equilibrium, she grabbed his gun and then padded swiftly, barefoot, toward the cabin porch.

The door opened, and she saw a woman in a long skirt framed in the dim light of the candlelit interior. The woman, presumably Jenny, had a shotgun in her hands. “Who’s out there?”

“Get inside!” Diana snapped. “Lock the door!”

She hurried in, and Jenny slammed the door, shot the deadbolt, and turned to look at her.

---