Sunny - Mona Lisa Blossoming

Gryphon had undressed completely, his clothes neatly folded on the ground. Gee, maybe it wasn't a girl-guy thing. Maybe they just had more practice than I did. A shimmer of energy, sparkles of light, and Gryphon was soaring in the air, wings spread over ten feet long, a giant, graceful snow-white gyrfalcon. A few beats of his gray-tipped wings and he was high in the sky, circling above us.

"They went north," Amber said, sprinting across the lawn, darting into the woods. I followed behind him, jumping over rocks and fallen tree trunks, ducking branches, brushing past bushes. I moved with natural grace and speed, but nothing like Amber. He flowed like water flowed in a river, naturally, skimming through the brush without disturbing a single leaf. He moved as if he knew where every rock, every tree, every branch was. He moved with a fluidity and swiftness that came from tapping into his beast, from utilizing his cat senses. And watching him, following him, slower, less sure, I wished that I could do as he did.

I caught brief glimpses through the trees of Gryphon winging overhead in a silent, graceful, effortless glide. And though my senses were less keen than Amber's or Gryphon's in their animal form, I could smell the brackish smell of still water, of decaying leaves. The ground beneath us grew wetter and softer. They'd gone into the marsh land, the bayou. There were nasty things that lived out there. Things that could eat you. What the fuck were they thinking?

I heard them now in the far distance.

"Wild Boy," Tersa called.

Then my brother's young tenor. "Wiley, buddy, where are you?"

Wiley?

Above us, the falcon gave a piercing shriek.

"Tersa, Thaddeus!" I shouted, still running, leaping, following Amber almost blindly as he headed toward the voices, feeling a tide of relief welling within me at finding them.

"Mona Lisa?" Thaddeus called out with surprise.

Then came a sound that abruptly changed relief into a quick flash of terror—a loud splash. A startled scream.

"Tersa!" Thaddeus shouted.

And then a second softer splash, more controlled, from the other end of the bayou, like a large predator entering the water, hunting its prey.

"Get her out of the water!" I threw myself forward without regard for quiet or stealth or whatever path may or may not be before me. I cleared my own path, leaping over things when I could, crashing through shoulder-high weeds and thicket when it was the shortest route, my heart pounding, drowning out all other sounds until I heard nothing but my panting, my running feet. My fear.

A scream splintered the air as I broke through to the edge of the bayou, and the sight that filled my eyes stopped my breath, the only reason I knew it was Tersa screaming and not I.

A dripping Thaddeus stood valiantly in front of a soaked, bedraggled Tersa where he had obviously dragged her a few feet up the bank. But getting out of the water had not guaranteed safety. My brother faced a hungry alligator, intent on its kill. Only it wasn't just an alligator, it was a damn leviathan. The creature's full length was hard to ascertain as its tail was still in the water. But it definitely stretched longer than my brother's five and a half feet. Maybe three times longer, three times heavier.

Most animals of nature have some redeeming beauty, but not so this creature. It was truly ugly, a bowlegged, stumpy, flat thing with a long powerful body that slither-crawled just above the ground. It's rock-armored hide had lumps and bumps jutting out of its surface like sharp, hideous growths. Like a thing of monstrous evil, a reality much worse than what you dreamed of in your nightmares. Its cold, flat light eyes were the only things that looked alive, although alive was a generous description. Looking into those cold gleaming eyes, you knew they possessed no mercy, no joy, no emotion other than hunger and the need to sate that hunger… cold, cunning, and calculating. Like my mother's eyes.

Thaddeus's power flickered in the air, appearing and disappearing like an invisible beat in rhythm to Tersa's screams. He wielded his right fiberglass cast like a shield before him. He'd broken his arm in the car crash that had ended his parent's life but had spared his. The cast was no longer pristine white but a muddy gray from his dunk in the bayou's dark chocolate waters.

Thaddeus leaped back as those yard-long jaws lunged forward incredibly fast, snapping shut bare inches from his ankles. A freaking too-near miss. But instead of retreating, Thaddeus stepped forward, swinging his cast like a club, cracking it against the flat snout and sending the gator's head flinging back. Unfortunately, the blow must have been swung during one of Thaddeus's off-power flickers; the power he packed behind the blow was nothing more than human strength. The low and heavy reptilian body stayed anchored, gripping the land. The head came swinging right back, those deadly jaws yawning open once more and suddenly time seemed to slow down. It was as if the very air had thickened and grown sluggish. I had all the time to see Amber leaping for Thaddeus and Tersa. All the time to see that he wasn't going to make it, not in time. Not before that monstrous jaw closed around my brother's leg. All the time to weep and realize that there was nothing I could do.

I watched with a horror that filled and engulfed me like an overpowering wave as those teeth came closer and closer, and knew what the creature felt: a hunger for meat, a thirst for blood.

A piercing shriek ripped away the sluggishness, and motion sped back to the normal passage of time. What happened next was so surreally fast, it was hard to follow with mere eyes. A large falcon—Gryphon—dove with incredible speed and force in a breath-taking stoop, like a hundred-pound bullet hurtling down from the sky, unrestrained. The alligator's snakelike eyes rolled upward, sighting the new threat. Those tender eyes snapped shut just barely in time, a fraction of a moment before the swooping predator struck, raking sharp talons over the gator's craggy face, the protective eyelids, but missing the eyes, the only vulnerable spot on its armored surface.

The force and momentum of the giant falcon's rush, the brush of its wings, flung Thaddeus back into Amber's arms and barreled the nightmarish creature away, tumbling it back into the water.

just barely in time, the bird pulled up, out of its death-defying dive, coming so close to the ground that dirt spewed into the air from where the talons scraped the bank. But as soon as the falcon pulled away, the alligator returned to its pursuit. It was right back there on the grassy bank as Amber swooped up Tersa with his other arm. For a bulky, hideous thing, it moved incredibly fast. But then, so did I. Only I wasn't on the bank, actually. I was in the water up to my thighs, behind the prehistoric beast, gripping its tail, yanking its swift rush to an abrupt, teeth-jarring stop.

I felt like I was holding a jagged rock. A rock that moved. A rock that had enormous force. Before I could flip the damn monster away from me, the tension in that long, long tail slackened.

Uh, oh.

With a striking blur almost Monère fast, it reversed and lunged for me. Sharp pain tore like hot searing iron through my meaty calf, and the sharp tang of blood rose into the air, dulled by the water, but unmistakable. My blood. Oh, shit was all I had time to think. Then with one easy toss from that strong jaw, I sailed in the air for a long brief moment and hit the water again, only deeper, sinking in the center of the bayou, water past my head. I bobbed back up and gasped for air.

Like a creature from hell, like a beast from a time long forgotten, the alligator sank into the water until nothing was seen but those cold, calculating eyes, rippling the water behind it in silent eddies with the powerful sway of its heavy tail, moving with a chilling speed in the water—oddly graceful, when it had lumbered so awkwardly on land—coming swiftly at me. For me.