Born to Run by Mercedes Lackey

Author:Mercedes Lackey [Lackey, Mercedes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epic, Fantasy, Contemporary, General, Science Fiction, Fantasy fiction; American, Fiction, Elves
ISBN: 9780671721107
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 1992-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Although she had every sense at her command locked onto her quarry, Aurilia "lost" the pair to everything but sight the moment they entered Tannim's car—and she lost the vehicle itself to President Street traffic soon after. The protections on the vehicle might have been set by Keighvin Silverhair, but Aurilia doubted it. Whatever other powers the boy had, he certainly drove like a demon. Once again she found herself forced to admit to a kind of grudging admiration for one of the enemy. . . .

But not for long. The aggravation of losing quickly overwhelmed the admiration. Damn him, anyway. Crafty little monster. Where did he learn all that? Surely not from Silverhair. If I didn't know better, I'd suspect they'd managed to find some devil actually interested in buying his skinny little soul. . . .

Still, Aurilia hadn't practiced her own particular brand of subterfuge for so many centuries without learning patience. She found herself an out-of-the-way spot in one of the little "pocket parks" and sat in her Mercedes. Tannim could cloak himself, and even his car—but once the girl left his presence, she would register to Aurilia's mage-senses. And the girl was really what Aurilia was after at the moment.

It took longer than Aurilia had thought it would, but towards sunset, the girl finally "appeared" to Aurilia's inner eye. She quickly triangulated with a mental map of the town, and determined that the girl was at the corner of Bee and Wheaton streets.

She reached out in thought, and seized mentally on the nearest pigeon, taking over what little mind it had with her own. Pigeons were possibly the stupidest creatures on the planet, but that stupidity made them remarkably easy to enslave. When she was done with it, it would drop dead of shock, of course, but that didn't matter. One more dead pigeon on the sidewalk would excite no one except a feral cat or dog.

She sent the bird winging in a direct line to the area where the girl loitered. With sunset coming, a pigeon was perhaps not the best choice of slave-eyes, but it would do. A grackle would have been better, but like all the corbies, it would have fought back too much, wasting time and energy before she could take it. An owl was the best, but Silverhair used those, the bastard. And frequently owls were not what they appeared to be.

She caught only glimpses of what the pigeon saw; just enough to guide it to her target. Fortunately, the girl was fairly conspicuous with her bleached-blond hair, even from above. Though darkness had fallen, the shock of pale straw made a kind of beacon for the bird's dimmed eyesight. So although the pigeon was not much good at flying by street-lamps, once the bird had the girl in sight, Aurilia had it land on a rooftop, and follow her in short flights, from tree to phone-line, to rooftop again.

Even by daylight the pigeon's eyesight wasn't particularly good, as birds

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