Feathered Friend

By Fiona Glass

Not your average peck on the cheek ...

Mild mannered Derek is a perfectly ordinary bloke living a perfectly ordinary life. He works at the library, supports Stoke City football team, and cares for the twelve beautiful racing pigeons he inherited from his father in his spare time. He isn’t into kink. He definitely isn’t into feathers, in spite of the birds. So when a mysterious young man appears in his home claiming to be a pigeon, it’s all a bit much.

Avery is eccentric, perching on the furniture, refusing to eat eggs and stealing Derek’s chocolate digestive biscuits when his back is turned. He’s also attractive, kind, mischievous, and a dab hand with a feather, and Derek finds himself falling madly in love. But when he discovers the truth about Avery, it causes him to question everything he thought he knew about himself. And when those doubts take him to a very dark place, it’s up to a library book, his own innate decency, and Avery himself, to make things right again.

This sweet, angsty romance is a contemporary, tongue-in-cheek take on the old northern European Swan Maiden fairy tale.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JMS Books LLC
• Release date: Jul 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781685504953

Fiona Glass

Most of Fiona's books involve history, the paranormal and romance in varying (and varyingly weird!) combinations. They include gay ghostly romances December Roses, Trench Warfare, and Ghosts Galore, and gay vampire romance Echoes of Blood.Fiona lives in a slate cottage within stone-throwing distance (never a good idea in Glass houses...) of England's largest lake. She enjoys history, gardening and photography, and rarely has her nose far from the pages of a book - or a cup of tea.You can sign up to her free monthly newsletter, with updates about her writing, books, trips out, history, ghosts, snippets, and occasional free stories, here: https://www.subscribepage.com/fionaglass

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 Feathered Friend

By Fiona Glass

Published by JMS Books LLC

Visit jms-books.com for more information.

Copyright 2023 Fiona Glass

ISBN 9781685504953

Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com

Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.

All rights reserved.

WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.

This book is for ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It may contain sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which might be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published in the United States of America.

* * * *

 Feathered Friend

By Fiona Glass

Derek was in his father’s pigeon loft when he first saw the strange bird. At least, it was his pigeon loft now; he kept forgetting that Dad had passed on over a year ago and left him a tall narrow house, a long narrow garden, and the glorified shed full of plump racing pigeons that had been the old man’s pride and joy.

Derek hadn’t been at all sure about the pigeons at first. He’d been used to them, growing up, and had enjoyed helping Dad out at weekends and in the school holidays. Making sure the birds had sufficient food and water; cleaning out their bedding; even holding them, wings neatly pinned and beak turned away so it couldn’t peck, while Dad put rings on their legs or clipped too-long claws or checked them over for mites.

On his own, though, it had suddenly seemed like far too much work, and he’d spent the first few weeks working out how to get rid of the birds. He couldn’t kill them; that would be unthinkable. He couldn’t release them into the wild because they were trained to come straight back home again. Nobody he knew wanted the bother of looking after a dozen feathered things. And by the time he’d found out how to advertise in one of Dad’s specialist racing pigeon magazines, he’d got too fond of them and couldn’t contemplate passing them on. So here he was, with twelve valuable—no, make that expensive—birds to groom and feed. And recently he’d even started racing them again.

Today had been one of those days. A meeting on the south coast, which he’d driven down to in the first light of dawn. A hot coffee, some chat with like-minded folk that he met at other meetings up and down the land. Setting the clock. The sudden adrenalin surge of releasing the birds, and watching them shoot up into the air, circle for a moment, then head firmly north. Driving back again, long hours on dull motorways, marvelling at the fact that the pigeons would easily beat him home. And sure enough, here they were.

Five, six, seven…nine…twelve. Derek counted the last one and closed the trap, shutting off the patch of darkening sky. Outside it was a chill late April afternoon but inside the loft it was warm and dim. The newly-woken street lights cast orange stripes through chinks in the walls; the flapping of many wings caused mini dust devils to caper and whirl; and the air was full of the scratchings and tappings and contented chesty coos of sleepy birds.

They had every right to be sleepy, having found their way back from the release site in record time. He never ceased to be amazed by their skill, or to feel the thrill and satisfaction of counting them all home. No matter how far away he released them—across the mountains, over the sea—they always found their way back. Every single preened and petted one of them. It was so routine he hardly needed to check.

He always did, though. He’d never had an injured bird yet, but Dad had told tales of pigeons attacked by hawks, or those that flew into windows and knocked themselves out. So after every race he waited until they’d settled before softly picking each one up to check for scratches or other signs of hurt.

Straight away he had the feeling something wasn’t right. There were twelve pigeons, but something odd or different had caught his eye. He stepped closer to the wire, counting in his head, mentally sorting the birds into individuals rather than flutters of feathers and wings. And…there! There was an extra pigeon today. That one, on the furthest perch, didn’t look like one of his. He could see from a glance, because his birds were all Janssens and this looked like a Kipp. The eyes were a paler red, for starters, and the tail feathers were all wrong. Dad had never kept Kipps in his life, and besides, there was something about the behaviour