by Amelia Jade
Andrew came to his feet—or foot, she supposed, and with her support, they began to hop along awkwardly. She slipped an arm under his shoulder and wrapped it around his back as best she could. A second later she yanked it back at the warm, wet feeling that pressed against her.
“What the hell?” she said, gazing at her arm in the streetlight as they reached the sidewalk and turned left.
Her arm was covered in a dark sticky substance. The smell of iron hit her nose almost at the same instant she tasted the metallic tang in the air.
“Are you hit there too?” she gasped.
“Yeah. Come on. We’re almost free,” he said, trying to stifle a groan as he hobbled along.
Behind them her dad came closer, closing the distance with every second. He hadn’t fired again, and she hoped that was because he could see her and didn’t want to risk hitting his only daughter and eldest child.
But based on his earlier actions, she really wasn’t sure what he would do if a shot presented itself. He was clearly off his rocker at the moment.
“Where are you going?” she snapped as Andrew shrugged off her support and moved into the center of the street.
“Getting us out of here the only way I know how,” he replied.
Karri looked behind them, but they had moved far enough down the street that the building on the corner was blocking the immediate line of sight. For the moment, her father couldn’t see what was happening. Which was a shame, because Karri was witnessing the most amazing thing she’d ever seen.
Before her very eyes Andrew changed. Two huge lumps appeared on his shoulders, and a second later they burst open as the rest of his body increased in size as well. Huge wings, ten feet or more in length, shot straight up into the sky, feathers growing out from them even as she watched. Then they came down and obscured the rest of his body from her for a time, but not before she saw the golden-brown fur that had grown to cover the lower half of his body.
“Andrew?” she whispered in stunned shock as his body lengthened dramatically, still growing in size. The feathers on his wings continued to grow in, becoming thicker and thicker, until the entire apparatus tucked in at his side, revealing the changes to his face.
Gone was the hard angular lines of the man she knew, replaced by a curving yellow-orange beak that looked wickedly sharp. The yellow-orbed eyes of the bird half of his shifter flicked and focused on her. Paws the size of her head scraped gently at the pavement and the magnificent creature ducked low, extending one wing toward her.
So that’s what a gryphon shifter looks like.
Behind them tires screeched in the parking lot. Her father must have decided to run them down in his truck, thinking they were getting away from him.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
The gryphon—no, Andrew—flicked his wing at her. Never before had Karri realized that an avian face could display a look so similar to that of human impatience.
“Just what the hell does shaking your wing at me mean?” she snapped, striding toward him.
The eagle head let out a sort of soft shriek, and then pantomimed flapping its wings, while the head looked up into the sky.
Karri got it.
“Oh, right! Of course.” She ran toward him, scrambling awkwardly up his wing. More than once Andrew squawked in pain as she struggled to find a balance point. Finally she settled into place at the base of his neck, not a moment too soon.
“Go!” she shouted as headlights came screaming around the corner. “Go go go!”
Andrew began to move, but she knew it was too late. He was going too slow, and her father’s truck too fast. They were going to be caught.
Chapter Eighteen
Andrew
Once he was certain that Karri was as firmly seated on his back as she could be, he spread his wings and began to prepare for takeoff. The first step was to gain speed. He wished that he had more time to ease Karri into it, but speed was of the essence. The street in front of him lit up with a white glow as the headlights swung crazily around, the truck swiftly orienting on him. He didn’t exactly blend in with the cityscape.
Karri yelped and dug her fingers deep into the feathers on his neck, but he ignored the pain as his four powerful legs went into action, shooting them forward down the street. With each leaping bound he managed to stay just in front of the truck. The big diesel engine roared as Karri’s crazed father put the pedal to the floor in an attempt to catch up. Andrew knew he could accelerate faster, but there was no way he could beat the truck in a footrace.
Luckily, he wasn’t trying to engage in a race on the ground. With speed now on his side, he unfurled his wings and began to beat them. Slowly at first, but faster as the truck closed in.
“He’s going to hit us!”
With one last bounding stride he beat down hard with his wings and used the supernatural strength in his legs to launch himself high into the sky. Underneath the headlights on the roof of the truck cab scraped the bottom of his torso, a reminder of just how close things had been.
Tires screeched below them and her dad got out, aiming the shotgun at them, but it was too late for that now. Andrew banked as swiftly to the side as he felt comfortable with Karri on his back and moved out of range. He continued to drive them upward. The night was almost as hot as the day had been, so he wasn’t overly worried about Karri getting cold. The adrenaline would keep her warm for a time as well, but he made a mental note not to push it.
He could feel her still hanging on to him, her face buried into the long white feathers on his neck. At some point she would lean back and see that they were—
“Oh my God!”
Ah, there it is.
“Andrew…this is amazing!”
Although his bird couldn’t reflect it externally, on the inside he was grinning. Perhaps this would be how he got her to open back up, to at least inform him of why she’d decided to pull back from their budding relationship. It all really was quite confusing to him. It didn’t help that when her father had gone crazy, she’d decided to come run with him, instead of distance herself and try to stop her father. No one who completely detested him or didn’t want anything to do with him would do something like that. Something was clearly bothering her, leaving her conflicted toward her feelings for him. He just needed to find out what that thing was.
It’s kind of hard when she won’t even talk to you though.
“I can’t believe this is what you get to experience whenever you want!”
He uttered a soft shriek signaling his agreement that he loved the view. Banking to the left he angled in on their destination and began to descend, keeping his wings spread wide as he brought them slowly toward the ground, keeping an eye out for anything that might impede that, such as power lines.
Moments later he touched down on the roof of the embassy with a soft thump, his wings beating several times to slow himself down before they went over the edge. The flat part of the roof wasn’t overly suited to a landing with someone on his back. He knelt and extended his wing, allowing Karri to slide off. Thankfully she exited with much more grace than her climbing on.
Holding his left hind leg off the ground he sighed in relief at the absence of weight on his back. Thankfully he hadn’t been hit anywhere as a human that would have prevented him from flying in his shifter form, but it had been damn close. Karri’s weight had pulled on his fur enough that the large section on his back hadn’t quite been able to heal. It would be morning before he was ready to go. Andrew just hoped nothing else would happen in the meantime.
Closing his eyes, he reached out to his gryphon half, signaling to the animal that it was time to go. The creature balked at the idea and tried to resist, but the human mind is a far stronger thing than that of an eagle-lion hybrid. In the end, he caged it once more and resumed his human form, though he did promise to let it loose soon, to really stretch his wings. Once he’d acquiesced to that, the beast withdrew from him much more willingly.
A moment later he
was back in human form, still holding his left leg off the ground. It had stopped bleeding for the most part, but it was still a wreck. He wasn’t entirely sure it would have regrown entirely by morning; there was quite a large chunk missing. Andrew was going to have to be careful about that.
He hobbled toward the door, showing the way for Karri. “Over here.”
She followed him inside without a word, though it was clear from the expression on her face that the wonderment she’d experienced from the short flight was already dissipating, replaced with anger. The moment they emerged from the stairwell she whirled on him, her long blonde hair flying around her head.
“What the fuck was that?” she hissed, shaking with an anger that prevented her from yelling.
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” he asked. “You never told me that he’s your father! You said your last name was Blaine, not Kirttle!”
“It is Blaine,” she said. “That was my mother’s last name. It’s what our company is named after. She never took my father’s name, and they gave me hers.”
He ran his hands through his short gray-blond hair. “Your father is the single most xenophobic individual in the city! He’s the one I was telling you about that sends us the petitions, threatens us, hires protestors to try and get us out of here. He’s a maniac!”
It angered him that lately all he was doing with his mate was arguing. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. From what everyone had always told him, finding your mate was supposed to be a wondrous and miraculous time, an adventure that the two of them would work through together. Here though, all it seemed was that his mate wanted to tear a strip off his hide every time something happened, whether it was his fault or not.
If Andrew were to be honest with himself, he was beginning to wonder if the short woman with blue eyes and her lovely slim little nose was actually his mate. His gryphon still thought so. It was telling him right now even to just reach out and kiss her, to take her into his arms. It urged him to tell her that she was his mate, to reveal the truth of their connection. He couldn’t do that though. It would be too much for her to handle.
“My father is not a maniac!” she protested automatically, then looked away as the ridiculousness of that sentence set in.
“I’ve had run-ins with him before,” Andrew told her. “He’s always flown off the handle into an inconsolable rage. Never before has he threatened me with a gun. I’d be tempted to take the issue to the police.”
Her eyes focused on him. “Why won’t you?”
He winced. “Because I also broke the law, though not with attempted murder. But I shifted inside the city limits, Karri. That’s a big no-no. Your father knows the laws just as I do. I doubt he’ll report me, because then I’ll expose him as having tried to kill both of us.”
“He didn’t try to kill me,” she said, but he knew her heart wasn’t really in the argument.
“Not intentionally, no. But you were in my arms, and he shot at us several times while you were. In the eyes of the law, that will put him as having attempted to murder us both.”
Karri looked away, but not before he spied the tears welling up in her eyes. It pained him that they were apart like this. He wanted, no needed, to be at her side right now. To hold her tight and tell her that it was okay, that they were going to find a way out of it. But she wouldn’t let him!
“I still can’t believe that your father shot in your direction though,” he said. “I don’t understand it. It’s like he didn’t care.”
“A part of him doesn’t,” Karri said, looking away before she made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a sob.
“What do you mean?” This was the first he’d heard of something like this.
“I’m not his favorite,” she explained. “My stepbrother Liam is. He’s the one my father wishes he could turn the company over to, even if Liam is a useless twit who does nothing but party at the university. He’s never shown any true interest in taking over the company, in learning how to run it properly. Yet my father wants to appoint him as his successor anyway. He’d do just about anything to have me out of the way.”
Her blue eyes rose to look at his. They were begging him to understand. “I can’t let that happen, Andrew. I can’t. If he removes me as his successor, and appoints Liam, he’ll destroy the company. He’ll ruin it. I have to stop him. Too many people rely on us for a livelihood. It would destroy lives. I’ll do anything to stop that from happening.” Her eyes hardened briefly. “Anything.”
And suddenly he got it. Everything clicked into place. It wasn’t him that she had a problem with at all! It was the reality that being with him would bring, that her father would disown her and remove her from her current role as his successor. Karri had worked a long, long time and very hard to achieve what she had, and he loved that about her. She was an amazingly strong woman. Look at all that she’d gone through already, and yet she was still in one piece, and wasn’t falling apart because of it. It was that strength of character and personality that had lured him in and made him fall head over heels for her.
“I can’t change who I am,” he whispered. “I’m a shifter and I’ll always be a shifter.”
“I know,” she told him. “And I can’t change what I believe in.”
“You wouldn’t be my m—” He cut himself off with a shake of his head. “You wouldn’t be the woman I’m interested in if you did.”
Karri’s eyes narrowed at his slip of the tongue. Idiot! He’d almost told her outright that she was his mate. This would not be the time for that, not at all. There would be a time, later, once everything had been sorted out, where he could finally tell her the truth. That they were meant to be together, that he’d known it from the start. He’d ignored his animal a lot, its urges and desires, trying to do whatever it took to just be there for her, but it was getting harder. One of these times he was going to have to tell her. But not yet.
“Why did your father not just give the company to your brother?” he asked, trying to cover up his tracks and change the subject.
“Because he spoke far and wide for the first ten odd years of my life that I was going to be his heir, his successor. They tried for a second child, but it never happened, so for the longest time I was the only child. Then my parents split, my father remarried, and ta-da, Liam was born. The male child he’d always wanted. All of a sudden I was pushed by the wayside, no longer good enough,” she said bitterly. “But I worked my ass off to prove to him that I could do the job, that I was qualified. He knows it, but he hates to admit it. I’m not sure I could tell you the last time I got a word of praise.” She shook her head. “The man is an insufferable sexist of the old order, to the point it’s unbelievable such a thing still exists in this day and age.”
Andrew nodded. His society was often seen as backward by many modern humans, he knew that. But there were plenty of examples of shifter pairs where the women were the primary workers, and everyone knew they were the real bosses of the house. Just, perhaps, not the bedroom. It was all about choice. Shifter men like him, they would let their mates do whatever they pleased. That didn’t mean he didn’t want to spoil them rotten, to ensure that any work they did do was only work that they wanted to do, not something they were forced to. His goal was to give his mate the choice. She could not work, or she could find a job that actually interested her. All he wanted was to ensure she was happy in all aspects of her life, no matter what that meant. With Karri, that obviously meant running her father’s company, and looking after all the employees who worked there.
Her dedication to them was unbelievable. Willing to sacrifice her own personal happiness just to ensure that she could continue to be what was necessary to take over the company and keep it in business. Andrew wasn’t sure he could ever be quite so strong. Not that she should have to be, he thought, his anger rising. Nobody should ever be forced into such a decision.
If her father wasn’t such a bigoted son of a bitch, then this wouldn’t happen. His hatred for all shifte
rs was so powerful it was almost beyond belief. Clearly he hadn’t learned to grieve properly over the loss of his wife, and had instead focused that grief into an anger so intense he would shoot at his own offspring because of it.
“I am sorry you’ve been subject to that,” he said softly, longing to reach out and hold her. It was obvious she needed it, but he wasn’t going to do that. Karri had made it clear that she couldn’t pursue anything with him, and though it might destroy him, he was determined to respect her choice. “Nobody should have to choose, simply because of what I am.”
She nodded, her face scrunched up in pain. “I just…I can’t risk losing the company. If he…” Her eyes went wide. “Oh no. No no no. What have I done?” she asked, spinning in a circle as she grabbed her hair at its base. “What have I done? I went with you…” she said, her eyes darting around wildly. “He knows. He…oh no.”
“Karri,” he said sharply, recognizing the signs of post-traumatic stress.
She didn’t respond, continuing to just repeat the same few phrases over and over again. He called her name several times, but her eyes didn’t even look at him. They were lost in a nightmare of her own creation. He had to step in.
I’m sorry.
He reached out and grabbed her by the shoulders, forcing her to stay facing him. She resisted slightly, but then he cupped her chin and kissed her before she could pull away. Karri whimpered in pain, at the knowledge of what had just happened between them, but seconds later she melted into him, her resistance caving as he allowed his heat to roll over her, relaxing her.
She pushed one hand lower down his stomach, but he caught it with his left hand, holding it firm. Then he stepped back, hating himself for stopping things from going any further.
“I want to,” he said, holding her eyes firmly. “Believe me, I want this more badly than I think you can even imagine. But we can’t. You can’t. I’m sorry for doing that, but I had no other choice. You need to get a hold of yourself, and tell me what’s going on.”
