Chapter two

Phantina

It felt good to spread my wings again, they were the same size as Anya's but because I was "mixed" with a Golden Eagle they were golden with brown flecks in them. Long brown hair whipped my face as we were flying. I was going to have to cut it shorter as soon as I found something sharp, the white coats had never let us cut our hair.

I glanced over at Anya she looked like she was thinking hard about something… I was about to say something to her when a gust of wind hit us both, I shivered and realized we didn't exactly have proper clothing, only the old ripped garments the lab had given us.

Anya looked determined to continue on to the Grand Canyon though so I stayed quiet.

"The Grand Canyon eh?" I mumbled to myself. I wondered why she had decided to go there. Though it does seem to be the safest place right now, who knows what we might find there. Besides Arizona is nice and warm, which is my kind of weather!

We'd been flying for a few hours, I guess we hadn't anticipated the distance and we'd never flown this long before.

I looked over at Anya, her lips were blue from the weather and I was guessing that I didn't look any better.

"Hey!" I shouted over "m-maybe we should f-f-find someplace warm for the night, and start again in the morning?"

She looked over at me and nodded in recognition. We both hunted down a place with our avian vision and flew down to an abandoned cabin.

The grass crunched under our feet as we folded our wings and opened the door. It was dark, but warmer than outside.

There was a refrigerator and some cabinets that were empty except for a box of crackers (which we readily ate). We found some blankets in the closet, I let Anya take the bed since I was the shorter one and I crashed on the couch.

It wasn't long until the sun rose again, we finished off the rest of the crackers and took off again in the sunlight.

We were surprisingly closer than we had thought and we could soon see the canyon up ahead. We were flying closer when all of a sudden I heard a gunshot and a bullet whizzed by my ear. Anya saw it too and it wasn't long before we realized someone was shooting at us.

"Could it be a white coat?" I thought.

The trees were too dense to see into the woods. Anya must have been thinking the same thing, she flew closer and asked if I was okay, I was a little shaken up but that was all.

Suddenly we heard a lot more shots, we knew what was coming and tried steering more toward the right. It didn't seem to help though, the bullets continued to come at us.

We realized we were going to have to finish our trek to the canyon on foot, and soon touched down on the ground. Luckily it wasn't too far from where we were, we would just have to keep an eye out for the people who were shooting at us earlier.

We'd been walking a while, and my feet were hurting. I suppose I'm more used to flying than walking but Anya was toughing it out so I would too.

It was a strait path to the canyon and it didn't seem that far from the air. On foot it was different though.

Suddenly we heard a rustle and a voice "Hey, I think I found them!"

Anya recognized it before I did, and grabbed my wrist. We climbed up the nearest tree and watched from above as a white coat known as 'nurse' Vanpeircem looked around for us.

She was the doctor's assistant, she must have sent her out after us.

I looked at Anya and mouthed "what if she looks in the trees?" she looked at me and signaled to the next tree, she mouthed back "tree hop" and leapt to the next tree.

Vanpeircem looked up quickly as the realization slowly occurred to her.

"The trees!" she shouted, soon a bunch of them came along.

I didn't waste any more time and followed Anya into the next tree, and so on and so forth until it seemed like we'd lost them, but you could never know.

We saw the canyon soon enough, though it was still broad daylight, so the tourists were still around. If we had some proper clothing we might be able to blend in with them for the day and hide our wings.

I could see a gift shop, maybe there would be a tee-shirt or something we could smuggle out. But the front doors where swamped with the vacationers, so we decided it would be best to stick to the trees.