Just enough to send it spinning right over the edge, tumbling over the side of the bluff.

The kestrel went into another dive, but this one had the feeling of desperation about it. The Black Birds were right on her tail, and she was either going to plow into the dirt of the Arkansas bluffs, or fly right up into their claws. Do something! Larry Bushyhead told the white eye of the sun, fiercely. Help her! Do something!

And at that precise moment, someone did do something.

The kestrel skimmed the surface of the river, the Black Birds following—so intent on her that they paid no attention to anything else.

Like the pair of Bald Eagles that suddenly dove down out of the sun, straight for them.

Larry watched in stunned joy. He remembered something a falconer friend had once told him. “If you want to really know what the fastest bird alive is, ask someone who just had their prize peregrine falcon taken by an eagle.”

The Eagles were like twin thunderbolts—and evidently no one had ever told them that Bald Eagles were fish and carrion eaters, because they were obviously after those Black Birds, and the Black Birds didn’t even know they were there!

A second later, they knew all right—but by then it was too late.

It happened so quickly that Larry could hardly believe it. Just the two plummeting Eagles, and three little explosions of black feathers as the Eagles fisted their prey, knocking the birds out of the sky and into the river.

They fanned their wings and tails to brake down, then made a graceful, leisurely circle to land on the sandbar beside the skinny black bodies. Larry found himself cheering like a madman as they made their fly-by, and it seemed to him that they bowed once, like star performers for an appreciative audience, before bending to dine.

The kestrel soared wearily up into the air, and was lost in the blue of the sky.

Larry cheered himself hoarse, then turned—

And found himself staring into the face of his boss, Rod Calligan.

A face that was transfixed with such rage and hate that for a moment, Larry didn’t even recognize him.

The bus bounced off the wall of the bluff and skidded along it to a halt, the white-faced driver fighting the wheel and the momentum of multiple tons of steel and plastic and passengers. The passengers themselves screamed loudly enough to be heard over the shrieking of air brakes, the scrape of metal on rock, and the dull thud of an explosion as flame blossomed over the edge of the curve.

The bus slid to a stop mere inches away, just off her bumper. The driver stared down at her through his windshield, statuelike, whiter than marble.

Jennie just sat, frozen, her hands clutching her steering wheel, her heart trying to beat its way out of her rib cage.