Grand Theft Griffin

by Michael Angel

“Then how did he bear this crystal into the Council sanctum? I see no hole at its base to hang it on a cord or chain. If he carried it in paw or mouth, surely the Council would have seen it and forbid him entry.”

  “He didn’t have much choice as to his time of entry, but I see what you mean.” I turned to Shaw, who sat close-beaked in his spot after finishing his meal. “You’re awfully quiet all of a sudden, my friend. What are you thinking?”

  Shaw’s expression was crestfallen. “I am thinking that thou art avoiding an obvious conclusion. If the drake in question could not have brought the crystal in by himself, then it was placed upon him by the one who found it.”

  “Hollyhock.” The name came out of my mouth in a croak.

  “Dost thou not think she must have some share of the guilt? Thou need not spare my feelings in the matter any further.”

  “I have my suspicions,” I said, hating myself as I said it. “But I haven’t found any motive for her to do any of this. Obviously, she and her brothers aren’t pleased with the Council, nor were they fans of Thundercrack. But was that enough to create a situation where someone would be killed?”

  Galen broke into our conversation. “Dayna, do you bear a wound of some sort? You appear to be bleeding.”

  Startled, I touched my shirt near my left shoulder. It felt damp. I quickly shucked my jacket and blouse. I still retained a little prudishness about being nude around my male friends, no matter that they went without clothes all the time. But they had seen me in bra and panties before and made no big deal of it.

  A small red blotch stained the cloth up by the shoulder. But the wizard was more interested in the matching abrasions between my neck and shoulders. I bore a pair of V-shaped bruises, complete with dots of blood where the skin had been torn.

  Shaw remained stock-still, staring at the marks.

  “It’s nothing,” I said, embarrassed. “Holly gave me those when our sparring got a little heated. She said they were ‘marks of friendship’ or something.”

  “Interesting,” Galen observed. “From my understanding, these kinds of bites denote only one thing in griffin culture: the commencement of the courtship and mating ritual.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Okay, I thought. So maybe Shaw’s daughter has a crush on me. I’m got to put that aside for later. That’s got no relevance to the case in front of me. I need more answers, and I’m not going to find them in Andeluvia right now.

  After receiving the cultural bombshell about the twin bruises Holly gave me, I had Galen put Shaw up at Fitzwilliam’s palace until I returned. Then he recharged my medallion and sent me back home in a flash-bang of ozone and white light.

  The first thing I did on my return was get the fleck-spattered stone and branch clippings out of my pocket and onto the work desk in my study. Since I still had custody of the OME van, I went out to the garage to fetch my forensic equipment and do a little detective work on my own.

  Using a tool kit from one of the crime-scene cases, I managed to scrape off what I was interested in. I went after some of the gluey residue that coated one whole side of the stone, and then followed it up with both persimmon-colored and speckled black flecks. I put each bit onto an individual acrylic glass plate and swung my gooseneck desk lamp over to take a good, long look at them.

  I’d send all the samples in for genetic analysis to be sure, but it was obvious to me what I was looking at: dried egg yolk and flecks of egg shell.

  Heart beating fast in my chest, I went back over the rock again. I didn’t find any other color groups on the surface of the stone. And it was pretty likely that I was looking at two separate color groups. The persimmon and the black-and-white speckled shells were distinct, and I didn’t see any evidence of shading between one set and another. I began packaging up the samples, adding selected pieces of leaf and bark from the smashed branch segments.

  My mind was awhirl with possibilities. Just as with the ‘friendly’ nips Holly had given me, I was starting to look at a lot of her behavior, and even more of what she’d said to me in a new light.

  What about her quick mood changes? Holly seemed to be a happy griffin on the whole. But she’d also shown pensiveness, absent-mindedness, and quick flashes of anger. For the most part, these emotional swings had happened at critical moments. When she’d shown me where the True Born were being hatched, for one. And during the mating rituals of the Autumn Rites.

  Flashes of our heart-to-heart talk that night kept coming to mind.

  Is unapproved egg laying a source of shame in your world?

  Have you ever offered counsel for someone who did something for love?

  Something that others might find questionable?

  Dammit, what the hell was I looking at here?

  I leaned back to think. The chair let out a piteous creak to remind me I needed to oil it, but I ignored that for the minute. I had other problems. And a problem was what Holly had asked me, in a roundabout way, to solve – or at least listen to.

  I couldn’t see Holly smashing her own eggs. That would take a degree of sociopathy that I just didn’t sense in her. But someone must have done this, and destroyed her nest in the bargain.

  What if that someone was Thundercrack?

  That would provide the motive I was looking for. Motive enough to frame him and engineer the situation to allow her brothers to kill him in front of the Council, with no one the wiser.

  The problem was, that explanation didn’t quite cover all of the bases. Griffins treated those half-walled houses as complete units, true. But those eggs and the branches that made up the nest were utterly destroyed. It would have taken some time, and made a lot of noise. Had Holly been present, she’d have screamed bloody murder and attacked. If she’d been out? I still couldn’t see the griffins turning a blind eye to someone violating another’s private sanctuary and…

  Wait.

  Set aside the ‘who’ and the ‘what’.

  There was one more ‘why’ to throw into the mix.

  Whether Holly was present for the destruction of her offspring and nest or not, why didn’t she remove the debris? Holly had scooped sand over the remains, but she still slept there. The human equivalent would be like someone coming home to find that a burglar had smashed up their bedframe and left a pair of corpses atop the mess. And the response? Simply throw a blanket over everything and continue slumbering there like nothing had happened.

  I knew that griffins weren’t overly sentimental about death. I’d seen a couple first-hand examples of that.

  But that behavior was a stretch, to put it mildly.

  Neither did it explain a damned thing about the theft of the crystals from the Natural History Museum.

  I grabbed the packaged samples and just managed to beat the L.A. rush-hour traffic into the far reaches of the San Gabriel Valley. My destination was the genetics lab I’d been mailing all of my samples to. Then I sweet-talked the lab supervisor into adding these items to the ‘rush’ order I’d put in.

  The freeway had transmogrified into the rush-hour parking lot, so I got to play my part as a single snowflake in a glacier as it crawled along towards my exit. The rank smell of oil on the freeway crawled up my nose, shimmed in heat mirages off the hot asphalt. I closed my eyes and smelled the clean-tasting air of the sea, felt the movement of air pushed by a griffin’s wings.

  Someone honked at me. That got me moving into the six feet of space that had opened up ahead of my front bumper, which was enough to satisfy my frustrated fellow motorist.

  It was past sunset by the time I finally got back to my neighborhood. I wasted another twenty minutes at a drive-thru Chinese place to pick up a late dinner. At home, I dug into a carton of unidentifiable pan-seared meat and veggies I lumped under the category of ‘chicken scary-yaki’ and did my best to plow through the grease with a pair of disposable wooden chopsticks.

  Finally, with a full belly to quiet a fuller mind, I went to bed. For the first time in a while, I wondered what I would dream about
. But at least I knew that I wasn’t going to be having any more dreams about blue flowers and purple crystals.

  * * *

  I ended up at my desk in the OME building a full thirty-five minutes early.

  I went to see Shelly, not sure of what I was going to say, but a scrawled note on her door informed me that she was out sick again. I got back to my office and tried calling her home number, but all I got was her voicemail. She’d recorded a new message, where her tired-sounding voice assured everyone that she was fine, and that she’d be in by Friday.

  I left her a message telling her that despite the note on her door, I was worried as heck, and that she needed to call me pronto. Then I had to put all of that aside and focus as best I could on paperwork until the results of my first buccal swab tests arrived. Of course, I’d thought that trying to get work done while waiting for Hector to come in was hard.

  That was nothing compared to now.

  I re-read the same damned office memo again, trying desperately to concentrate. I didn’t even want to think about how I was going to study for the firearms certification test. My mind kept running through the same things over and over: Holly taking the crystal off of Thundercrack, Holly telling me the griffin fable about Oddmarr, Holly sparring with me, Holly holding me under her body and nipping me with her beak.

  A rap on my doorframe.

  I looked up to see a courier in a red and yellow uniform. He searched for a clear landing spot on my desk. Failing to find one, he smiled and then placed a fattish softpack envelope on the visitor’s chair.

  “This package contains medical data,” he said, almost apologetically. “Since it’s considered sensitive information, I need to get a signature from you before I can leave.”

  I nodded, thanked him, and signed the electronic pad he held out. No sooner had the young man left my office than I pounced on the envelope like a griffin grasping her prey. I tore back the opening strip and shook out both a storage device and a pile of color printouts.

  The top sheet was a formal letter of apology from the company. Apparently, my samples had been contaminated, so it couldn’t stand by any of the results for legal or medical purposes. That said, the letter noted with some astonishment that the contamination of both avian and feline elements in the samples was remarkably consistent.

  Yeah, no kidding, I thought, as I copied over the test results from the storage device onto my own computer. Then I dragged the copied information into a folder where I could use a program to work over the raw data. Software was simply better than poor human eyes in sifting through interminable genetic code sequences, looking for markers to identify both unique species and individuals within that subgroup.

  The tech department had just upgraded my machine to something less than a decade out of date. That was a good thing, too, since it took several minutes for my computer to grind its way through the mountain of G-T-A-Cs that made up the four components of all DNA segments.

  Finally, the sifting was complete, and the dozens of samples I’d taken showed eighty-nine unique genetic markers that showed up across all samples. Forty were coded as avian, while the remainder were categorized as feline DNA sequences. I’m sure that a real geneticist would have had a field day with this information – not to mention a possible nervous breakdown – but I was able to save the sets of markers as the ‘griffin species’ profile.

  Next, I wanted to select two individual griffins to compare and contrast. I picked Grimshaw and Elder Ulrik. They were the same gender, and from a similar age group. But if the program could distinguish them adequately, then it was highly likely that I’d be able to single out a particular griffin’s DNA when the time came.

  I ran the program a second time.

  All the species markers showed up, as well as twenty more unique differences between the two males, showing without a doubt that they were two genetically distinct individuals. I almost did a little fist-pump in the air, I was so elated.

  “Okay,” I said aloud. “Now that we’re ready for prime time, let’s find out who burgled the Hall of Gems.”

  I brought up the information that had been inputted by Shelly’s boys in the lab downstairs. This was the DNA test done on that feather found at the Natural History Museum. My fingers quivered as I typed in the commands to compare the test against the griffin species outline.

  The result popped up on my screen.

  SPECIES PROFILE: MATCH

  If there was any doubt in my mind that the feather had come from an Andeluvian griffin, it was gone now. I changed the settings to compare the data from individual griffins next. Then I ran the feather’s genetic sequence against Elder Ulrik’s profile, since I had his information up already. Again, my screen flashed immediately.

  SAMPLE: NO MATCH

  Just as expected. I clicked on the sample I’d taken from Lance Captain Thundercrack next.

  SAMPLE: NO MATCH

  I’d known this result was coming, but it still hurt to see it on the screen. Like an electronic finger damning me for my mistakes.

  I decided to click on Shaw’s information a second time.

  SAMPLE: NO MATCH

  I searched for Lance Captain Ironwood’s entry and entered it.

  SAMPLE: NO MATCH

  His brother Blackthorn came up next. I held my breath as I selected the file.

  SAMPLE: NO MATCH

  My forehead immediately began to perspire.

  “If neither of you drakes are my quarry, then it must be your little sister,” I said under my breath. Hands shaking, I fed Holly’s information into the program.

  SAMPLE: NO MATCH

  Air whistled out of my lungs.

  I had been so sure, so sure!

  One by one, I ran through each of the profiles. Every single one of the griffins was a match for the species, and no match for the individual sample. Not only did the feather not belong to any of Shaw’s offspring, it didn’t belong to anyone from the Reykajar Aerie at all.

  I’d been on dead-end investigations before. I knew what it was like to be knocked all the way back to square one.

  This was different.

  I’d just been knocked back to square none.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  I rested my elbows on an ice-cold iron railing, watching a sixty pound brass-coated lead bob swing back and forth on its wire tether. The viewing area next to the Hall of Gems was quiet, as the Natural History Museum was almost deserted mid-week after 4pm. That was fine by me, as I found the tick-tock motion of the museum’s Foucault pendulum strangely comforting.

  Perhaps it was because the pendulum’s motion was dictated in purely scientific terms. The rotation of the Earth, the adherence to Newton’s Laws. It was neat, tidy. It was only when people got involved, and in the fantasy world of Andeluvia, that the rules seemed to get thrown out the window.

  Things got messy.

  Things got broken.

  People got killed.

  No matter if they were human or griffin, I found that I couldn’t distinguish between the deaths of one versus the other. I hadn’t liked Lance Captain Thundercrack the few times I’d met him, yet in a strange way, I owed him. I’d played an unwitting part in his destruction, and that hurt me. Badly.

  I wanted whoever had set him up exposed to the world. I wanted them to face justice.

  So when I’d sat in front of my computer, slack-jawed with astonishment that none of my swabs had matched the feather sample, a voice popped into my head. Specifically, the voice of Professor Gerber, my instructor in Trace and Impression Evidence. The man was so ridiculously Swiss that he wore an alpine fedora to class, complete with a little cuckoo feather jutting out of the side. He was also so brilliant that I never met anyone who made fun of it.

  Gerber’s one dictum, which he hammered home on every lesson, was “When in doubt, wieder von vorn anfangen – go back to the source! Only then will the scales shall fall from your eyes!”

  So I went.

  I walked through the Hall of Gems, no
ting that the skylight’s entire frame had been emptied of glass. The opening had been replaced with a wooden cover held fast by steel bracing. In fact, the temporary repairs helped plunge the hall into the same type of pre-dawn gloom as before. Those same sodium-arc lights cast their subtle color changes all over the place; I held out my hand and now saw that my pale skin had taken on an ever-so-slight orange tint.

  I paced three circuits around the place, and nothing new jumped out at me. The makeshift vault was still there, and a new mineral exhibit put in its place. The wrecked door had been hauled away and probably sold for scrap.

  No matter how I cudgeled my brain, I didn’t get any random flashes of brilliance. I reached into a pocket and drew out a folded sheet of paper, the printout I’d made from a still shot of the security camera footage.

  I wandered over to stand underneath the camera that had filmed the events that had driven me to this unique point in my life. The vault looked smaller from this vantage point. The shadowy form by the vault had been huge even for your average griffin.

  A chime sounded, followed by a cultured-sounding recording from an overhead speaker.

  “Attention, all patrons,” it said, “The museum is due to close in fifteen minutes. Please return to the lobby.”

  My thoughts were decidedly gloomy as I made my way towards the exit. Even if, by some miracle, I did unveil treachery to the griffins…would they believe me? I couldn’t keep up the farce I had going with Belladonna much longer. What if she wanted me flayed? Could the Council refuse? I wasn’t sure if there was any sort of ‘checks and balances’ on a griffin ruler who was a full sandwich short of a picnic.

  Then again, the positive outcome of the scenario wasn’t much better. If I accused any griffin – or pair of griffins – and everyone believed me, what would happen? The accused would be sure to fight to the death. It would be suicide for me to be there without backup.

  Would my friends come? Shaw had to be there, of course. But Galen had his king’s project to work on. Liam the Protector sounded like he was busy training his replacements. Smart thing, too. The mad Fayleene prince Wyeth was still out there and Fayleene society was as restless as the griffin one, with unruly stags and back-biting does to keep in line. I knew that for a fact, ever since…