Thunderbird Quotes

What could thunderbirds want with us?" I wondered aloud [...] "We'll find out when Big Bird wakes up," Marc said. My father shook his head. "We'll find out now. Wake him up and make him sing.

I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

..I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.) I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

We need you to do some reconnaissance. A simple flyby over our ranch. All you have to do is count the cars and tell us how many men you see hanging around the property.” Kai shook his head without a moment’s hesitation. “Not even if you fed me your firstborn, still wet and screaming.” I blinked, but for a long moment, his words made no sense. Not the refusal. The part about cannibalizing my theoretical future child. “Well, isn’t that…gruesome? Who are you, Rumpelstiltskin?” Kai frowned, as if I made no sense to him. “No thunderbird would claim a name so senselessly flamboyant.

...my father had been born from the minds of writers. I believed the Great Creator had flown these writers on the backs of thunderbirds to the moon and told them to write me a father. Writers like Mary Shelley, who wrote my father to have a gothic understanding of the tenderness of all monsters. It was Agatha Christie who created the mystery within my father and Edgar Allan Poe who gave darkness to him in ways that lifted him to the flight of the raven. William Shakespeare wrote my father a Romeo heart at the same time Susan Fenimore Cooper composed him to have sympathy toward nature and a longing for paradise to be regained. Emily Dickinson shared her poet self so my father would know the most sacred text of mankind is in the way we do and do not rhyme, leaving John Steinbeck to gift my father a compass in his mind so he would always appreciate he was east of Eden and a little south of heaven. Not to be left out, Sophia Alice Callahan made sure there was a part of my father that would always remain a child of the forest, while Louisa May Alcott penned the loyalty and hope within his soul. It was Theodore Dreiser who was left the task of writing my father the destiny of being an American tragedy only after Shirley Jackson prepared my father for the horrors of that very thing.

A trail of lightning spread across the clouds, and Shadow wondered if that was the thunderbird returning to its high crags, or just an atmospheric discharge, or whether the two ideas were, on some level, the same thing. And of course they were. That was the point after all.

I told myself that, too. It turned out myself was a skeptical bitch and didn’t believe me.

I give it a fifty-fifty chance of total failure. If Kai refuses to repay a debt he legitimately owes, he'll be dishonoured in front of his entire Flight. Thunderbirds always avenge their dead, honour their word, and pay their debts. Those seem to be the only laws they have." Based on what little time I'd spent with them. Marc frowned. "It's the 'legitimately owes' part that worries me." "Thus the fifty-fifty shot of failure." I stared up at the nest, watching for any sign of activity. "It all depends on whether or not I'm able to bullshit him into thinking he owes us." "The odds are always in your favour when bullshit's involved." Jace grinned, and I couldn't help returning his smile.

I would straight up fuck a snowman right now, she says. Just to cool down. - Miriam Black

You notice, by the way, that we never have a meeting with an alien. It’s always an encounter.

He smelled like Thunderbird wine and vomit waiting to happen.

Thunder rumbled, and it rattled the branches of the trees and shook deep inside the huge rocks, and the rain fell with cold violence. It was late afternoon, but it was dark as night. A trail of lightning speared across the clouds, and Shadow wondered if that was the thunderbird returning to its high crags, or just an atmospheric discharge, or whether the two ideas were, on some level, the same thing. And of course they were. That was the point, after all.

Every rhythm prepares a future. The prayers sung, the drums that beat around the stone circle of the fire pit so long ago, still rang. In the icy air, Shadow felt the tremendous rhythm of Thunderbird’s wings beating at his own ribs.

Will there be enough to go around, or must we compete for our kills?" "Unfortunately, I suspect there will be plenty, but that really depends on how many of you are willing to come." And that's when I lost track of who was speaking. They called out from everywhere, having apparently forgotten I was even there. "All of us!" "We will all go..." "It's only far..." "Someone must stay with the children..." "Someone must stay to hunt..." "Then we'll draw quills. Feathers into the pile! The twenty drawn will go and fight!" "Wait!" I had to shout to be heard. "Don't you want the details?" Kai frowned, one of the few birds paying me any attention. "No. We want the fight, and the feast." "No! I said there will be no feasting! It's a war, not a f***ing dinner banquet!" I threw up my hands in exasperation. Mentioning war to a Flight of thunderbirds was evidently like dangling candy in front of a class full of children! Ruthless, deadly children...

How was it? NEWT: They’re still convinced that you sent me to New York. DUMBLEDORE: You told them I didn’t? NEWT: Yes. Even though you did. A beat. DUMBLEDORE inscrutable, NEWT wanting answers. NEWT: You told me where to find that trafficked Thunderbird, Dumbledore. You knew that I would take him home and you knew I’d have to take him through a Muggle port. DUMBLEDORE: Well, I’ve always felt an affinity with the great magical birds. There’s a story in my family that a phoenix will come to any Dumbledore who is in desperate need. They say my great-great-grandfather had one, but that it took flight when he died, never to return. NEWT: With all due respect, I don’t believe for a minute that’s why you told me about the Thunderbird.

The thunderbirds, like dinosaurs, were now creatures of the past: lost long ago, with the coming of disease and famine brought by hairy strangers. Except, in today’s world dinosaurs were celebrated by palaeontologists and thunderbirds by cultural anthropologists. But John still remembered them, those magnificent creatures. (...) They, like the man on the motorcycle, had been born in an age when gods, monsters, humans and animals ate at the same table. Now man ate alone, while animals begged for scraps. The others were unable to survive in the new times and had disappeared into the folds of time. Who knew gods and monsters could and did fall victim to evolution?

No, that flapping isn't all the pigeons in the park zeroing in on some spilled popcorn! That antediluvian (old and prehistoric) scream that's numbing your brain isn't a subway on a curve! No, it's the one and only Thunderbird --just released from a long, long nap in a cave on the Kijowa reservation by Tom Tallwolf and J. Jay Jaye, known as The Big Promoter! But it looks like all he's promoted now is...trouble with wings!

I was already an atheist, and by my senior year I had became obsessed with the question “What is the meaning of life?” I wrote my personal statement for college admissions on the meaninglessness of life. I spent the winter of my senior year in a kind of philosophical depression—not a clinical depression, just a pervasive sense that everything was pointless. In the grand scheme of things, I thought, it really didn’t matter whether I got into college, or whether the Earth was destroyed by an asteroid or by nuclear war. My despair was particularly strange because, for the first time since the age of four, my life was perfect. I had a wonderful girlfriend, great friends, and loving parents. I was captain of the track team, and, perhaps most important for a seventeen-year-old boy, I got to drive around in my father’s 1966 Thunderbird convertible. Yet I kept wondering why any of it mattered. Like the author of Ecclesiastes, I thought that “all is vanity and a chasing after wind” (ECCLESIASTES 1:14) . I finally escaped when, after a week of thinking about suicide (in the abstract, not as a plan), I turned the problem inside out. There is no God and no externally given meaning to life, I thought, so from one perspective it really wouldn’t matter if I killed myself tomorrow. Very well, then everything beyond tomorrow is a gift with no strings and no expectations. There is no test to hand in at the end of life, so there is no way to fail. If this really is all there is, why not embrace it, rather than throw it away? I don’t know whether this realization lifted my mood or whether an improving mood helped me to reframe the problem with hope; but my existential depression lifted and I enjoyed the last months of high school.

Spring Lane burned with a mythology of chipped slates, pale wash-water blue and flaking at the seam. The summer yellow glow of an impending dawn diffused, diluted in the million-gallon sky above the tannery that occupied this low end of the ancient gradient, across the narrow street from where Phyllis and Michael stood outside the alley-mouth. The tannery’s high walls of browning brick with rusted wire mess over its high windows didn’t have the brutal aura that the building had down in the domain of the living. Rather it was softly iridescent with a sheen of fond remembrance – the cloisters of some mediaeval craft since disappeared – and had the homely perfume of manure and boiled sweets. Past the peeling wooden gates that lolled skew-whiff were yards where puddles stained a vivid tangerine harboured reflected chimney stacks, lamp black and wavering. Heaped leather shavings tinted with corrosive sapphire stood between the fire-opal pools, an azure down mounded into fantastic nests by thunderbirds to hatch their legendary fledglings. Rainspouts eaten through by time had diamond dribble beading on their chapped tin lips, and every splinter and subsided cobble sang with endless being. Michael Warren stood entranced and Phyllis Painter stood beside him, sharing his enchantment, looking at the heart-caressing vista through his eyes. The district’s summer sounds were, in her ears, reduced to a rich stock. The lengthy intervals between the bumbling drones of distant motorcars, the twittering filigree of birdsong strung along the guttered eaves, the silver gurgle of a buried torrent echoing deep in the night-throat of a drain, all these were boiled down to a single susurrus, the hissing tingling reverberation of a cymbal struck by a soft brush. The instant jingled in the breeze.

I had three friends. I still keep up with two of them. The other is a white cross on the Montana Hi-Line. His physical departure is marked there, I mean. As for his spirit, I carry that around with me in the form of a round black stone. He gave it to me when he found out what had happened to my mother. Virgil Lafournais was his name, or Cappy. He told me that the stone was one of those found at the base of a lightning-struck tree, that it was sacred. A thunderbird egg, he called it. He gave it to me the day I went back to school. Every time I got a pitying or curious look from another kid or a teacher that day, I touched the stone Cappy gave me

She propped her head on a hand. “So you had no idea you could do that? Take the energy from the Dead Gate and transform it into lightning and all that?” “No. It never occurred to me to channel anything into my lightning until the Prince of the Pit suggested it the other night. But … it made sense: you took the power out of the Heart Gate this spring, and Sofie Renast, as a thunderbird, could do something similar, so … even if the push came from the Prince of the Pit, trying it out seemed like a good alternative to being eaten.” “You went …” She wiggled her fingers in the air. “All lightning-berserker.” He kissed her brow, running a hand down her hip. “I get a little hysterical when your safety is involved.

Bavaria, May 8, 1945. While civilians embraced...and took to the streets around the globe...many infantrymen in Europe, brutalized and broken, sat alone with their grief or paced their rest areas in mournful silence. "There is V-E Day without, but no peace within," wrote the war's most decorated infantryman, Audie Murphy..."People were damaged," remembered Thunderbird Guy Prestia. "It was like we'd been in a car crash. There was trauma. It takes a while to get over that."..."There was great relief," recalled [Lieutenant Colonel Felix] Sparks, "but no celebrations."....It was hard to believe, hard to accept that the killing and dying were finally over. There would be no more Anzios, Salernos, or Reipertswillers. Finally, after the death of 135,576 young Americans, Europe was free.

ED ABBEY’S FBI file was a thick one, and makes for engrossing reading. The file begins in 1947, when Abbey, just twenty and freshly back from serving in the Army in Europe, posts a typewritten notice on the bulletin board at the State Teachers College in Pennsylvania. The note urges young men to send their draft cards to the president in protest of peacetime conscription, exhorting them to “emancipate themselves.” It is at that point that Abbey becomes “the subject of a Communist index card” at the FBI, and from then until the end of his life the Bureau will keep track of where Abbey is residing, following his many moves. They will note when he heads west and, as acting editor of the University of New Mexico’s literary magazine, The Thunderbird, decides to print an issue with a cover emblazoned with the words: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!” The quote is from Diderot, but Abbey thinks it funnier to attribute the words to Louisa May Alcott. And so he quickly loses his editorship while the FBI adds a few more pages to his file. The Bureau will become particularly intrigued when Mr. Abbey attends an international conference in defense of children in Vienna, Austria, since the conference, according to the FBI, was “initiated by Communists in 1952.” Also quoted in full in his files is a letter to the editor that he sends to the New Mexico Daily Lobo, in which he writes: “In this day of the cold war, which everyday [sic] shows signs of becoming warmer, the individual who finds himself opposed to war is apt to feel very much out of step with his fellow citizens” and then announces the need to form a group to “discuss implications and possibilities of resistance to war.

As if she had a fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint sensitivity. She could feel smoke against her skin. She could feel voice waves. She was beginning to feel color, light intensities, and she imagined that she could be put blindfolded in front of the signs at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which was which. 'Maria', she felt someone whisper one night, but when she turned there was nobody. She began to feel the pressure of Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of the water. When the pressure got great enough she drove out there. All that day she felt the power surging through her own body. All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam's face, elevators like coffins dropped into the bowels of the earth itself.

Looking at the sky, he suddenly saw that it had become black. Then white again, but with great rippling circles. The circles were vultures wheeling around the sun. The vultures disappeared, to be replaced by checkers squares ready to be played on. On the board, the pieces moved around incredibly rapidly, winning dozens of games every minute. They were scarcely lined up before they started rushing at each other again, banging into each other, forming fighting combinations, wiping the other side out in the wink of an eye. Then the squares scattered, giving way to the grille of a crossword puzzle, and here, too, words flashed, drove each other away, clustered, were erased. They were all very long words, like Catalepsy, Thunderbird, Superrequeteriquísímo and Anticonstitutionally. The grille faded away, and suddenly the whole sky was covered with linked words, long sentences full of semicolons and inverted commas. For the space of a few seconds, there was this gigantic sheet of paper on which were written sentences that moved forward jerkily, changing their meaning, modifying their construction, altering completely as they advanced. It was beautiful, so beautiful that nothing like that had ever been read anywhere, and yet it was impossible to decipher the writing. It was all about death, or pity, or the incredible secrets that are hidden somewhere, at one of the farthest points of time. It was about water, too, about vast lakes floating just above the mountains, lakes shimmering under the cold wind. For a split second, Y. M. H., by screwing up his eyes, managed to read the writing, but it vanished with lightning speed and he could not be sure. It seemed to go like this: There's no reason to be afraid. No, there's no reason to be afraid. There's no reason to be afraid. There's no reason to be afraid. No. No, there's no reason to be afraid. No, there's no reason to be afraid.

Alice told Shadow a magical tale of the green wreath and the red ribbon. In the story, Father Sky, who reigned over the spirit, came to Mother Earth, who bore the form of a woman of clay named Mary. Sky and Earth married, and together they conceived a beautiful star child made of both spirit and earth. The Star Child grew up and walked the world. The child of Father Sky and Mother Earth taught the world to live with the spirit in their clay hearts. Alice said the red of the holiday bow signified the Star Child’s sacrifice, and the green balsam of the wreath signified the everlasting life that was for all people born to the spirit of Father Sky. Shadow loved the story. It reminded him of his own sweet mother and the tales of Thunderbird who flew the skies in bird form in service to Gitche Manitou. Thunderbird was Shadow’s guardian, just like Shadow was the guardian for Theo. Shadow adored the season of light. He always felt warm and cozy when it came around.

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You want someone to come along and demand to be part of your life

This isn’t Grease. I’m not some Thunderbird who can only date a Pink Lady. As for the turf wars, this isn’t West Side Story, either. Do you think we settle disputes in song and dance?

The mythical Thunderbird, in one form or another, was held in awe by practically all of the Indian tribes. On the Great Plains, where the phenomena of thunderstorms was very striking, the Thunderbird was supposed to be a deity in the form of a bird of enormous size, which produced thunder by flapping its wings, and lightning by opening and closing its eyes. These great birds were thought to carry a lake of fresh water on their backs, which caused a great downpour when they flew through the air. Tribes of the Pacific Coast thought the Thunderbird caught whales during a thunderstorm and used its wings as a bow to shoot arrows. Each tribe interpreted the bird differently in its art, as shown on these two pages. The design of the Thunderbird was used to decorate war drums, pottery, and walls and was supposed to protect individuals and tribes from the Evil Spirits.

By the end of a week, she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other. She had the sense that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for even one micro-second, she would have what she had come to get. As if she had fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint sensitivity. She could feel smoke against her skin. She could feel voice waves. She was beginning to feel color, light intensities, and she imagined that she could be put blindfolded in front of the signs at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which was which. “Maria,” she felt someone whisper one night, but when she turned there was nobody.

would not be intimidated by a couple who may or may not have been brother and sister in a past life. Or Thunderbirds. I couldn’t help notice that they were both gifted in the shiny face and generous eyebrow department.

Little sister I see you even if you have yet to see yourself Even if you mask yourself in fragments of untruths of you Even when you cloak yourself because somewhere, sometime, Someone has made you feel that to hide is safer than to shine as you were meant to Little sister I wish to speak into your mind sacred words of you so loudly that they are like the thunderbirds when they come to visit and wash everything away I wish to make you a crown of sage to show all that rest their eyes on you, that you are made of medicine and of royalty Little sister I will sing you songs until your voice remembers it was meant to dance I will pray into being all that is needed to remind you, that you are where beauty and strength come together to embrace I will dance medicine into the path that we walk on so that it is again worthy of you Little sister I see you

Her shiny black eyes watched while I lit Mr. Peg’s funeral candles and opened the bottle and poured the Thunderbird into paper cups. It felt like church, the part where they say, Remember who died for your sins. For Dori and me, all our best people died on us early, before we had any good shot at sin. So we had catching up to do. Maybe that’s why nothing we ever did felt wrong.

I had to leave the Thunderbird parked entirely too close to a stop sign. But seriously, if the city meant for drivers to keep their cars thirty feet away from the corners, they’d mark the damn corners with paint or something. I’m convinced that it’s a conspiracy to write more tickets and bring in more revenue—so if I looked at it that way, then really, I was just doing my part to support Seattle’s public servants.

By the 1930s La Push was still isolated, and anyone wanting to get in or out either rode a canoe between the native village and Neah Bay or took a dirt road that had been built around 1920, so narrow that two small Model T Fords could only pass one another with difficulty on it.

drugged their despair with Thunderbird and buried their dead visions and dreams in the alley behind the Pastime, ignorant of the God at work beneath their emptiness.

Jake eyed the fire, remembering what Gene Bell had told him about attracting the Thunderbird. He thought about going over to say something, but quickly changed his mind. It would be just another reason for the older boys to tease him about flying creatures and make-believe. In fact, they would be right to tease, because Jake believed that the Thunderbird might be his only chance of a proper pioneering adventure on the boring Oregon Trail. Thinking about the Thunderbird made Jake Polson feel a little bit like his hero Julius Greengrass, and that had to be a good thing.

One of the CNN guys was literally yelling. “How can you say that? It’s too dangerous for us? We still have people in Syria!

If you’re going to get technical, you’re going to lose all your friends.

He has offered you his entire heart.  What I have given to him, he has offered to pass on to you.  By this great love he has shown that he truly is the prince for you.’ “So the girl returned to the prince, and with great joy the two of them exchanged hearts, and were married that very day, and from that point on, they lived happily ever after.

My child,’ the king said, lovingly, ‘go in peace.  For your heart has been restored, just as it was when I first gave it to you.  And remember this, as long as your heart remains whole and pure, I will be with you, always, and that is my greatest gift of all.  Go now to your prince, and share the good news.

And then one day, a young, handsome man came to the village who, like all the others, claimed to be a prince.  But unlike the others, he told the girl that although she was the most beautiful young woman he’d ever seen, what he was interested in the most was her heart.  He offered to give the girl all of his own heart if she was willing to give him all of hers.

As the days passed by, many other young men came along who claimed to be the girl’s prince, and she gave each one another small piece of her heart, but she soon found that the more of her heart she gave away, the colder she became.  Eventually, she began to wonder if any of her young suitors had really been a prince at all.

Time went on, and before long the girl met another handsome prince.  Again, she wondered if this prince might be the one for her.  She gave him a small piece of her heart, so that she might find out.  Much like the others, this prince wasn’t very interested in her heart, and seemed only to care for her beauty, and whenever she displeased him, he would strike her.  This made her certain that he was not the prince she was looking for.

A short time later, the girl met another handsome prince, and just like the first one, she gave this prince another small piece of her heart.  Before long, he started to treat her very badly, and she soon decided that this also was not the prince she was looking for.

As a case study of perceived miracles, let’s examine the belief in thunder gods within certain cultures. Throughout history, there have been many thunder gods, spread out across multiple continents and civilizations (1). In most cases, the god created thunderstorms directly through his actions, whether this meant Zeus throwing lightning bolts or the beating of a thunderbird's wings. Today, when the scientific causes of thunder are well-known, such myths seem absurd and antiquated. At the time, though, believers likely felt that thunder was a miraculous event requiring such divine explanation.

And so, although she was terrified to do so, the young woman sought an audience with the King.  When she was brought before him, she explained everything that had happened, and begged for his grace and mercy, asking for her heart to be restored just as it was before she had broken it up into so many pieces.

To the girl’s surprise, however, the prince told her that he knew of a way she could have her entire heart restored.  He assured her it would work, because he’d had to do the same thing himself after giving his own heart away in pieces.  He told her that she must go to the King, and beg for his forgiveness in squandering the precious gift he had given her, for it was he who had gifted the heart to her when she was born, though she had never known it.

This made the girl miserable, for she had given all of her heart away piece by piece, and nothing remained for her to give the young prince except for her tears, and she knew he wouldn’t be interested in those.  Reluctantly, she told him what had happened, and through anguished sobs explained that their love could never be, because she had so foolishly squandered her most precious gift of all.

young man who claimed to be a prince.  The girl wondered if this might be the prince who would make her a princess, and she decided to give him her heart, but not wanting to risk the whole thing, she gave him only a small piece.  If things went well, she decided, she would then give him the entire thing.  She soon found out however, that this young man wasn’t interested in her heart.  He only cared about her beauty, and so she knew that he wasn’t the prince she was looking for.

She begged his patience, and for permission to ask one more question, which he gladly gave.  She then asked him to confirm that this young man was truly the prince she was looking for, because she had been hurt so many times before.

As the girl grew older, she became so obsessed with finding herself a prince that she became neglectful of the other great gift she'd been given.  She had also been born with the largest and purest heart in the entire kingdom.  In fact, the greatness of her heart surpassed even her beauty, but this gift was not as easily seen, for her heart was on the inside while her beauty could be seen without. “One day, she met a handsome

The Greatest Gift of All “There once was a girl considered to be the most beautiful young woman in all her land.  All who met her said that she should have been born a princess, and that it was a waste for such beauty to have been given to a common peasant.  Hearing these things, the girl often wondered what it might have been like to have been born as a princess, and became determined to change her destiny and find a prince to marry.  He would be handsome and strong, and treat her like the princess that she always should have been in the first place.

All about her she saw that two thousand out of the horde had made it across the water. They were on the frontier of Eden. A mere two thousand combatants for the invasion of an impregnable fortress. Five out of six Nephilim had perished at the mercy of Rahab and her brood of Leviathan and the tentacled one. The devastation was inestimable. It could lose her the war. Still, she had two thousand warriors with her. They were on the shores of the entrance to the Garden that hid the Tree of Life deep in its midst. Thanks to the Cursed One, she knew exactly where that tree was. She looked for her Rephaim generals but could not find them. They had all been lost to the denizens of the deep. An earthquake rocked the land. It was deep, the precursor of something much bigger. “Now what?” Inanna complained. She looked onto the horizon of her destination. Black smoke billowing out of the mountaintops of not only Mount Sahand, but the more distant northern Mount Savalan. The earth rumbled again. She realized she did not have much time. She signaled for her Anzu bird, and called out to Utu, flying above them at a safe height. “SOUND THE CRY OF WAR!” she bellowed. Utu put the trumpet to his lips and blew with all his might. The war cry of Inanna echoed throughout the land. Her Nephilim gathered their arms and dashed toward the heart of Eden. Inanna mounted her thunderbird. She glanced out at the Lake. Rahab glided on the surface, its eyes watching her. It would not forget this day, nor the Watcher, who for one moment bested the sea dragon of the Abyss.               • • • • • At the top of the Mount Sahand ridge, six thousand Nephilim prepared their sail-chutes. They waited for the call of war. When it came, they jumped off the cliff edge by the dozens. They opened up their sails to float down into the Garden. Handfuls of them failed and Nephilim plummeted to their deaths a thousand feet below. But most of them worked. The Nephilim drifted from the heavens into the pristine paradise. Right into the flaming whirling swords of the Cherubim.

Behaving never got anybody anywhere fun,

There’s nothing worse than feeling alone, and I don’t want you to feel alone. Okay?

Falcon March 21 – April 19 Moon:   Budding Trees Plant:   Dandelion Substance:   Fire Opal Clan:   Thunderbird Color:   Yellow

I don’t think you understand, since you’re not married, but there’s no making Tallie do anything. Ever. If the thought strikes her that she wants something, then she and I both have to do everything required in order to be sure she gets it.” “You

Kids always know. And sometimes, they become adults who are all too aware of the darker, shadier sides of life.

Your soul dreams those dreams; not your body, not your mind. Those dreams come true.

Thunderbird ascended on the heady currents of air that bore her high above the vast landscape of Túwaqachi. She stretched her broad wings, the heat lifting her through the silence, her glossy brown feathers shimmering in the sunlight.

Too much had happened already. Mental and emotional exhaustion had completely taken over my life lately, and today had pushed me to the brink of what I could handle.

cuteness— it is, after all, a trap. A trap engineered by nature so that you want to take care of such ittle-bittle-widdle critters, or at least so that you don’t ditch them in a hole somewhere. Small head and big eyes? A ruse. A clever, careful, evolutionary ruse.

I would straight up fuck a snowman right now,

Of course it’s a wizard van.

He described his grand strategy as indirection. If General Motors hired Joe Schmo to sell cars, Joe Schmo would give an interview to Road & Track, telling them the specs of the Thunderbird, engine size in cubic inches, zero-to-sixty, and so on. Given the same job, Bernays would lobby Congress for higher speed limits, making it more fun to own a Thunderbird. Rather than fight for a single season of sales, he would make the world more friendly to his product.

Gordon: "I think we need an assist from Mr. Party." Alan: "Yeah, other than I'm using explosives. Thunderbird 3 to John, your housekeeper would like an access code." John: (sighs) "The code is, EOS, let them in or I'll swap your processors with a pocket calculator." EOS: "Code accepted." Gordon: "Thanks, John.

Gordon: "But I'm the obvious choice. John hates social, anything. Besides, who's gonna do space monitor duty?" John: "Funny you should mention that." Gordon: "I had to ask..." Alan: "Hmm, walked into that one." John: "And who do you think who's taking him up there?" (Alan groans)

Scott: "Now who's going with you?" Grandma Tracy: "Send me!" Scott: "Grandma?" Grandma Tracy: "That Kip Harris is a great ace silver fox, a hunk, a knockout!" Scott, Virgil, and Gordon: "Grandma!" Scott: "I think Gordon better go instead." Grandma Tracy: "Fine, but you boys find out if he's single and ready to mingle." Gordon: (shudders) "FAB.

Marion: "This is as normal as it gets for me. But I've grown a lot with the GDF." Scott: "I can tell. Last time we met, you were a little..." Marion: "Rude?" Scott: "You attacked me with a giant mech suit.

It’s good to realize that. Not everybody is meant to be a mother or a father, and the more of those assholes figure that out, the better. But for some reason, our biological urge to reproduce is given this gross social weight. Oh, are you pregnant? When are you going to have a baby? Are you? Will you? Won’t you? What’s wrong with you? It’s like if you’re not a breeder, you’re a nobody.

Tharion surveyed the screen. “A body.” The captain whistled. “You know the odds of that are—” “She was tied to lead blocks and dropped into the water around here.” By the Hind. “If she’s not in the House of Many Waters, she’s long dead.” No shit. “I just need to find her.” What remained of her, after two weeks at the bottom of the sea. Frankly, her bones and body had likely exploded from the pressure. His queen had learned of the poor girl’s fate through whatever the rivers and seas whispered to her. He’d known it was how the River Queen kept tabs on her sisters, who ruled the other bodies of water around Midgard, but he hadn’t realized how precise the information could be—she’d been able to tell him to hunt for lead blocks, and where to look. And what manner of Vanir, exactly, Sofie was: a thunderbird. Ogenas have mercy on them all. It was on the slim chance that Sofie’s Vanir body had survived the plunge—and hadn’t been picked apart yet by scavengers—that he’d come. His queen seemed to be under the impression that Sofie was an asset, even dead.

Do you even care that this oh-so-powerful thunderbird is a kid? Who survived a fucking death camp? And is now scared and alone?” Tharion blinked, and she could have strangled him. “I know this is a dick thing to say,” Ithan added, “but if the kid’s got that power, why didn’t he use it to get out of Kavalla himself?” “Maybe he doesn’t know how to use it yet,” Tharion mused. “Maybe he was too weak or tired. I don’t know. But I’ll see you guys later.” He made to step past Bryce. She blocked him again. “Emile aside, Danika wasn’t a rebel, and she didn’t know anyone named Sofie Renast.” Ithan said, “I agree.” Tharion said firmly, “The email was linked to her. And the email address was BansheeFan56—Danika was clearly a Banshees fan. Skim through any of her old social media profiles and there are ten thousand references to her love of that band.

Then the mer captain said, “I, ah … I was assigned to look into a human woman, Sofie Renast. She was a rebel who was captured by the Hind two weeks ago. But Sofie was no ordinary human, and neither was her younger brother—Emile. Both he and Sofie pass as human, yet they possess full thunderbird powers.” Bryce blew out a breath. Well, she hadn’t been expecting that. Hunt said, “I thought thunderbirds had been hunted to extinction by the Asteri.” Too dangerous and volatile to be allowed to live was the history they’d been spoon-fed at school. A grave threat to the empire. “They’re little more than myths now.” All true. Bryce remembered a Starlight Fancy horse called Thunderbird: a blue-and-white unicorn-pegasus who could wield all types of energy. She’d never gotten her hands on one, though she’d yearned to. But Tharion went on, “Well, somehow, somewhere, one survived. And bred. Emile was captured three years ago and sent to the Kavalla death camp. His captors were unaware of what they’d grabbed, and he wisely kept his gifts hidden. Sofie went into Kavalla and freed him. But from what I was told, Sofie was caught by the Hind before she reached safety. Emile got away—only to run from Ophion as well. It seems like he came this way, but various parties are still very interested in the powers he possesses. And Sofie, too, if she survived.” “No one survives the Hind,” Hunt said darkly. “Yeah, I know. But the chains attached to the lead blocks at the bottom of the ocean were empty. Unlocked. Seems like Sofie made it. Or someone snatched her corpse.

Bryce rubbed at her neck—then straightened. “Any chance that Dusk’s Truth is somehow related to the Lightfall squadron?” Tharion arched a brow. “Why?” Hunt picked up her thread immediately. “Lightfall. Also known as dusk.” “And Project Thurr … thunder god … Could it be related to the thunderbirds?” Bryce went on. “You think it involved some kind of intel about Pippa’s Lightfall squadron?” Ruhn asked. “It seemed to be some sort of groundbreaking info,” Tharion said. “And Thurr … It could have had something to do with the thunderbird stuff. Sofie sounded afraid of the Asteri’s wrath in her reply to Danika … Maybe it was because she was afraid of them knowing she had the gift.” “These are all hypotheticals,” Hunt said. “And big stretches. But they might lead somewhere. Sofie and Danika were certainly well aware of the threats posed by both Lightfall and the Asteri.

Bryce replied before she angled her head and asked Cormac, “The Hind’s a pretty big deal. She went to all that trouble to kill Sofie just for freeing her brother? Or was it because Sofie’s a thunderbird?” Cormac’s hands curled into fists at his side. “The Hind went to all that trouble because Sofie, as collateral to make sure the Ophion boat showed up for Emile, had gathered vital intel on the Asteri, and made sure Command knew it.” “What?” Hunt blurted, wings twitching. “What kind of intel?” Tharion asked, face darkening. Cormac shook his head. “Sofie was the only person who knew it. She just mentioned to me that it was something big—war-changing. That Ophion would kill to have it. And our enemies would kill to contain it.

I tracked him as far as these shores.” Cormac jerked his chin at Tharion. “I saw you in the marshes at the abandoned boat. I figured you were on his trail as well. And I watched you find the remains of the Lightfall soldier’s body—so you must have at least guessed that Pippa wants Emile for her Lightfall unit. If she catches him, she’ll drag him back to Ophion’s main base and turn him into a weapon. Into exactly what the Asteri feared when they hunted down the thunderbirds centuries ago.

But Pippa said, “The Vanir deserve everything that’s coming to them.” Bryce grinned. “So do you, terrorizing that poor boy and then deciding he’s not worth it.” “Emile?” Pippa laughed. “He’s not the helpless baby you think he is. He found allies to protect him. By all means, go retrieve him. I doubt he’ll help the Vanir win this war—not now that we have this technology in our hands. Thunderbirds are nothing compared to this.” She ran a hand over the rim of the box. Tharion cut in, “Where’s the kid?” Pippa smirked. “Somewhere even you, mer, would fear to tread. I’m content to leave him there, and so is Command. The boy is no longer our priority.

But the River Queen went on, “We remember the power the thunderbirds wielded. How the Asteri hunted them down. Because they feared them.

Are you faster than a bullet, thunderbird?

So Sofie leapt onto the lip of the fountain and smiled at the wolves closing in. They wouldn’t kill her. Not when the Hind was waiting to interrogate her. Too bad they didn’t know what Sofie truly was. Not a human, nor a witch. She let the power she’d gathered by the docks unspool. Crackling energy curled at her fingertips and amid the strands of her short brown hair. One of the dreadwolves understood then—matched what he was seeing with the myths Vanir whispered to their children. “She’s a fucking thunderbird!” the wolf roared—just as Sofie unleashed the power she’d gathered on the water flooding the square. On the dreadwolves standing ankle-deep in it. They didn’t stand a chance. Sofie pivoted toward the docks as the electricity finished slithering over the stones, hardly sparing a glance for the smoking, half-submerged carcasses. The silver darts along their collars glowed molten-hot.

The dreadwolf had been only half-right. She was part thunderbird—her great-grandmother had mated with a human long ago, before being executed. The gift, more legend than truth these days, had resurfaced in Sofie. It was why the rebels had wanted her so badly, why they’d sent her out on such dangerous missions. Why Pippa had come to value her. Sofie smelled like and could pass for a human, but in her veins lurked an ability that could kill in an instant. The Asteri had long ago hunted most thunderbirds to extinction. She’d never learned how her great-grandmother had survived, but the descendants had kept the bloodline secret. She had kept it secret. Until that day three years ago when her family had been killed and taken. When she’d found the nearest Ophion base and showed them exactly what she could do. When she told them what she wanted them to do for her in exchange.

vintage Thunderbird

She’s a fucking thunderbird!

Where was he staying?” Rice said, “We checked at El Tovar, Bright Angel, Thunderbird, and the rest of the possible places. He wasn’t booked at any of them.” “He had to stay somewhere.” “It could have been at one of the campgrounds, either inside the park or nearby,” noted Lambert. “Okay, he took the train up here. But if he came from DC he probably first flew into Sky Harbor. He might have stayed somewhere there until he went to Williams, Arizona. That’s where the train leaves from, right?” Lambert nodded. “There’s a hotel at the train depot. He might have stayed there.” “Have you made a search down here?” “We covered as much ground as we could. No trace so far. And we’re losing the light.” Pine took all this in. In the distance came the sharp bark of a coyote followed by the echoing rattle of a snake. There might be a standoff going on out there between predators as the lights of nature grew dim, thought Pine. The muscular walls of the canyon held a complex series of fragile ecosystems. It was the human factor that had intruded here. Nature always seemed to get on all right until people showed up. She turned her head to the left, where a long way away

Maybe she’d given her too much. It didn’t matter. She didn’t have time to think about Rachel now. Quinn was dead quiet. Ash-mud smeared thick across the windshield. She bent forward, straining to see through the streaks. Smoke was obliterating everything. Suddenly she made out the lights of the Thunderbird Lodge. With a shaking hand, she palmed her wet ball cap off her head, trying to think this through. It shouldn’t have been like this. Her only weapons were bear spray, ice ax. Ropes. Her strength and endurance. The ketamine was gone now. Shit. She’d gotten this far. There was no going back now, surely? Perspiration dampened her body. She pulled in next to the

I spend a lot of time in the penalty box and I get yelled at a lot by angry hockey fans. I expected Saskatoon fans to hate me.

I could have told him I’m one of the smallest guys on the ice. Can I help it if biggest players trip over my knee and smash into the boards? But the referee hadn’t believed my story. This guy probably wouldn’t either. Besides, he wasn’t getting to me. I’ve been called worse things than a boneheaded jerk.

Getting called into the coach’s office is like getting called into the principal’s office. And I never have good enough grades to hope it’s because the principal has nice news.

Some labels are bad enough: Troublemaker. Bad-tempered. Rebel. I could live with those. I deserved them. Other labels like thief hurt worse and follow you longer.

That’s a nice car you’ve got outside,” he remarked. “1979 Ford Thunderbird lowrider. It used to belong to Ice-T. I like my cars like my breasts,” Betty replied. “Low slung.

a hot Krispy Kreme donut stuffed with blood and voided bowels.

Poor lost girl nearly of heaven, surrounded by dangers unknown. One of few, never of many. Seldom would she be alone.

America, burning. Cornfields on fire. Sickness in the streets.

America, burning. Cornfields on fire. Sickness in the streets. The people poisoned by their own food and by each other. Red parachutes in the sky: invasion. Dead people in the streets: plague. The stars-and-stripes cut to ribbons and burned for warmth as a long winter sinks its teeth in and never lets go.

Past the crucifix on the wall with the poor, scary man named Jesus who hangs there, bleeding.

Here on the West Coast a soda jerk, willing to choose between a chick and a Thunderbird, can have the Thunderbird.

The guys on the team tell me that when I go crazy, my eyeballs roll back into my head. If that’s true, my eyeballs were spinning in circles as I wiped the spit off my cheek. And I lost it. Totally.