by Chant, Zoe
Christmas Griffin
A Mate for Christmas #5
Zoe Chant
Christmas Griffin
A Mate for Christmas #5
© 2020 Zoe Chant
Created with Vellum
Chapter One
Delphine
Delphine Belgrave was completely fucked.
At least, she hoped she was.
She squinted through the windscreen. She’d spent enough time in the States that driving on the right-hand side of the road wasn’t a problem, but there was barely enough road here to have a right-hand side. And it was pitch dark, threatening snow, in the middle of the mountains.
For the last two hours the GPS on her phone had assured her she was going in the right direction. Then she’d accidentally bumped it while reaching for her water bottle, and when she picked it up she realized with a sort of expectant horror that although the app had indeed been meticulously tracing her car’s progress along the winding mountain roads, the roads on the map were not the roads she was actually on.
Expectant horror, because the way this vacation was going, she’d been expecting something else to go wrong any minute.
“Oh, good,” she’d breathed, like she was worried about upsetting her phone’s feelings. She tapped at the screen, trying to reset the map, and discovered she had precisely zero signal. And zero GPS. Were those different things? That was the sort of question she’d usually Google, probably to pre-empt her boss saying something stupid, but her boss was thousands of miles away on a mindfulness retreat and she was here in the mountains on the family holiday from hell and she had to face facts.
She was lost.
Stuck in the mountains in the middle of the night, who knew how many miles away from the quaint tourist village of Pine Valley where her entire extended family was gathered to celebrate Christmas.
It was the best news she’d had all week.
Oh, it would cause some problems, certainly. But she hadn’t volunteered to go and find a liquor store in the neighboring county because she wanted to spend every holly jolly minute of the holiday with her family. Oh, sure, she would have to make up some story—perhaps she could say that traffic was so bad that she hadn’t been able to make it to the nearest city to pick up a bottle of her grandfather’s favorite port wine and back in the same day, and had stayed overnight.
She couldn’t tell the truth. If she told her family that she’d driven back into the mountains, port safely stowed in the back seat, and merely gotten lost, then they would wonder why she hadn’t simply shifted into her winged lion form and flown up to look for the glow of the town lights.
The answer was that she couldn’t.
Delphine Belgrave came from a long line of winged lion shifters. Her younger twin brothers were winged lions, her late father had been one, and his father before him, and the family history stretched back further than even her Aunt Grizelda could trace. All lions, all the time.
Except for her.
Delphine came from a long line of shifters and that was the phrase she used, usually, when someone asked. It dodged neatly around the fact that she wasn’t one herself, and she made sure never to put herself into a situation where she was expected to transform, or use telepathy, or display any of the other magical powers shifters had. Faster healing, better resilience and enhanced senses were all gifts of a family heritage she had entirely missed out on.
She’d become an expert at faking it over the years.
Now, not even her own family suspected she was a break in the Belgrave shifter family tree.
And she intended it to stay that way. Which was why she’d done everything she could to miss the most recent family get-togethers. Her job as PA to a self-centered, high-flying pegasus shifter was a great excuse. Family birthdays? She would have to video call in; Mr. Petrakis was attending a conference. Reunions? She wished she could, but she had to prep for an emergency meeting with key clients. Christmas? Such a shame, but Mr. P needed her to manage his schedule, and his accommodations, and make sure the fridges were stocked with the latest brand of sparkling water he’d become convinced would re-align his chakras, or whatever he was believing this week.
Technically, that last one hadn’t been a lie this year. Mr. Petrakis wasn’t in the mountain town of Pine Valley somewhere in the frozen bit of the United States… yet. He was much further south, in a desert, learning mindfulness. Or possibly doing a variety of drugs. The brochure for the retreat had been very unclear.
Which should have left Delphine with a precious week to herself, soaking in Pine Valley’s cozily American Christmas atmosphere a whole ocean away from her family, and drinking mulled wine and eggnog until it ran in her veins.
Except then she’d driven into town and discovered every shop, restaurant and grocery store full of Belgraves, and all her plans had been pulled out of her hands like the last mince pie on Christmas Day.
She could handle it. She could. She was a Belgrave, after all, even if she hadn’t come out right. And the first way she was handling it was by leaving town—temporarily. Her grandfather, the patriarch of the Belgrave clan, had insisted that someone find him something to drink that was more palatable than the dross available in Pine Valley’s stores. Delphine had jumped at the chance. She always did. It made her feel a bit like Cinderella, doing everyone’s odd jobs and errands, but it got her out of the way. And this latest errand was an absolute winner. Spending a whole night away without worrying that someone was trying to speak to her telepathically or would insist she join them for a sneaky midnight flight…
Bliss.
She would wait until it was light, take her time getting her bearings, and slowly make her way back to Pine Valley. If she timed it right, she would miss family breakfast and perhaps even lunch as well. And she would pretend, as she always did, that the opportunity to get herself out of a fix by using shifter abilities had never arisen.
If only they hadn’t come at all—She pushed the thought away before it could take root. No point wishing for things that hadn’t happened or for things hadn’t happened that already had.
One night down, she told herself. After that, four to go. Tomorrow, then Christmas Eve. After that, the big day—she couldn’t exactly skip out on Christmas, but hopefully everyone would be so sozzled on food and drink that they wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary about her. One more day after that, for everyone to sleep off their hangovers, and then the great Belgrave clan would go their separate ways. Most of them would fly directly back to the UK, where they were all lived.
Five nights. Delphine closed her eyes. Five nights. Four days—four and a half, if she counted the final day, when everyone would be packing and leaving.
She could manage that.
She had better.
Because if she wasn’t very, very careful, then the lies she’d built up around herself over the last fifteen years would come crumbling down before Christmas was over.
She checked the time. It was past nine; if her GPS hadn’t failed her, she would have almost reached Pine Valley by now. Night seemed closer out here in the mountains. Darkness pressed against the side windows, and even the headlights seemed thin and weak, as though the night was too powerful for them. If she turned the car engine off…
Click.
Complete darkness. For a second, her eyes didn’t want to catch on; after-images of the light inside and outside the car lingered in her vision. She blinked them away and stared out at the full pitch black.
It was as though the world was completely empty, and she was utterly alone.
Something that had been knotted inside her for so long she’d forgotten it was there slowly released.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered, but that wasn’t enough to describe the feeling that filled her at the sight of all that nothing outside. It made her wish that—that—
She let out a hard, heavy breath and wrapped her arms around herself. Forget what she wished; she’d just found a little problem with her big plan to stay in her car overnight. With the car’s heating turned off, the darkness wasn’t the only thing pressing in.
Turned out, winter in the mountains was cold. Who’d have thought?
Delphine grimaced at herself and turned the key. The car roared back to life: engine, heating, defog all back on. The night’s enchanting emptiness faded away, replaced by a sight more troubling than Grandmother Elaine peering at the hotel’s wine list.
Tiny flecks of snow were dancing in the beams from her headlights. As she watched, some of them landed on the windshield and melted. Then bigger flakes joined them, flurrying more heavily through the air, and when these ones landed, they didn’t melt.
“Oh, good,” Delphine said again. It wasn’t like there was any point in saying oh, bad. She knew it was bad. Saying it out loud wasn’t going to change that.
Night was one thing. She could explain away staying out of town overnight. Snow? Oh no. If she got snowed in here, it’d be all Why didn’t you dig the car out yourself? and Why didn’t you take wing when the snow started?
Of course, that was a relatively best-case scenario. Worst case, she froze to death out here. She didn’t want to even imagine her relatives’ reaction to that.
What sort of a Belgrave freezes to death?
She straightened her shoulders. “I didn’t think you’d appreciate port slushies,” she murmured, rehearsing what she might say to her grandfather later. “You can’t think I’d have chosen to drive back, in these conditions?”
That was barely even a lie. It was hardly choosing when the alternative was three generations of Belgraves tutting over her pathetic human corpse.
She got out her phone again and compared the real map to the incorrect one from earlier, and her hazy recollection of the turns she’d taken. Biting back a sigh over the certainty that a real Belgrave would have perfect recollection, she tried to figure out where she actually was.
If only—
She shook her head sharply. There was no time for if onlys, here or in the rest of her life.
How would she manage this if she were comparing the map against, say, her boss’s directions? She wouldn’t trust Mr. Petrakis’s memory, for a start. She would assume he’d gotten himself turned around at least once, and that whenever the GPS instructions and the road in front of him hadn’t matched up, he would have taken the closest option and blamed the map for being wrong…
…Which wasn’t too different to what she had done herself, she realized. The GPS had sometimes told her to turn left where no left turn existed, or continue straight off the edge of a cliff, and she’d mentally edited the instructions: waiting for the next left, no matter how much further along it was, and so on.
Which, if she was figuring this right, meant that she was somewhere around…
The middle of nowhere.
“Oh good—” she began and cut herself off with an irritated huff. It was obvious to anyone that the situation wasn’t good. And it wasn’t as though there was anyone around she had to impress.
It wasn’t the utter middle of nowhere. Just deeper into the mountains than she had expected. She’d somehow managed to miss Pine Valley entirely. But it was only a few hours’ drive away, if she was right about where she actually was. She might even make it back before midnight.
She didn’t think the words ‘time to slink back home with my non-existent tail between my legs,’ but it was a near thing.
The car grumbled as she pulled onto the road again. First things first, she needed to turn around—but she couldn’t do that here. She’d have to keep going and keep an eye out for a wider bit in the road, where she wasn’t going to risk turning into a tree or snow-covered rocky outcrop as she tried to three-point-turn her way around.
The snow became thicker as the road climbed up the mountain. Once, when the trees opened up on the downhill side of the road, she thought she caught a glimpse of warm lights that might be Pine Valley. At least it was in the direction she’d decided Pine Valley was in, which she decided to take as reassuring.
Something like another light flickered through the trees above as she navigated a particularly sharp and narrow turn. A house, she wondered? Who would choose to stay this deep in the middle of nowhere? Even shifters, careful to keep their magical natures secret, would surely choose the warmth and camaraderie of a town filled with their kind over such solitude.
The car thudded over a hidden rock and she bit her lip, the light forgotten.
At no point did the road widen—if she’d come across another vehicle, after she’d died of shock she would have had a difficult time figuring out how they were meant to pass one another—but after a few more bends and another tempting glimpse of the glow of street lights far below, she found what looked like a stopping area on the side of the road. It was covered in pristine white snow, and she heaved a sigh of relief. The snow on the road itself had been getting deeper, and she didn’t want to drive any further up the mountain than was necessary. If she got stuck…
She shook her head. She couldn’t get stuck, because if she got stuck, she would have to be rescued, and then she would have to explain herself to her family, and everything would be ruined.
Delphine turned the wheel and backed onto the space. Snow crunched beneath the car, the crisp sound audible, even over the rumble of the engine. The car dipped slightly as it broke through the crust.
Then it dipped more.
Then it fell.
Delphine yelled as the car sank into what was not, after all, a pristine patch of perfectly flat ground perfect for turning around. It was, in fact, a ditch.
Chapter Two
Hardwick
Hardwick Jameson always planned ahead. Which was why when he arrived in Pine Valley and, instead of the half-abandoned ghost town his friend and ex-colleague Jackson Gilles had sold him on, had found a bustling tourist village full to the brim of locals, visitors and—he shuddered at the memory—Christmas cheer, he had a back-up plan ready to go.
An old hunting cabin in the middle of nowhere. The perfect place to spend Christmas by himself.
He winced as he remembered the few minutes he’d spent in town before he turned his car around and drove further up the mountain. It had been an automatic response.
A defensive response, he corrected himself, and sighed. There was no point him being here if he was going to lie to himself. And even white lies hurt this time of the year. Papering over his problems by tempering his words wasn’t going to help.
The hunting cabin was a rustic affair. The largest room acted as mixed kitchen, dining and lounge, with an ancient iron stove. To one side was a smaller bedroom and to the other, the bathroom and laundry. There was a smaller shack on the far side of the clearing, which he’d assumed was normally used for hanging meat, and had decided to use as an extra-cold storage during his stay.
He’d lit a fire in the large iron stove when he arrived and had been pleased to discover that it warmed the whole place well enough. He could have coped with the cold, but this trip wasn’t meant to be some sort of tortuous penance. It was a retreat. Recovery.
Hardwick made himself a cup of instant coffee and sank down into the worn sofa. From here, he could have looked out the window to the small clearing around the cabin and, beyond that, the ring of trees just lit up by the light coming from the house.
Instead, he looked inside himself.
Hardwick was a griffin shifter. When he was in human form, his inner griffin lived in what Hardwick could only describe as his soul. Not that he would have described it that way to anyone, if anyone had asked. Lying was one thing, but some things were private.
His soul was the same as it had always been.
He thought of it like a room inside his head. A nest, maybe. Reassuringly stable.
If he closed his eyes, he could see his griffin there. Some shifters could hear their inner animals, he knew, but his griffin was silent. It made its thoughts known through gestures—a sort of personal sign language, Hardwick called it. Gestures and feelings.
Mostly, the feeling was pain.
There was a reason Hardwick spent the end of each year alone. His griffin couldn’t talk, but it didn’t need to when it came to what it did best: sniffing out lies. Its senses were so finely attuned that it could tell when someone was lying from up to twenty feet. In the new year, when Hardwick returned to work refreshed, the lies would feel like a buzz at the back of his head, or a tight muscle in his neck. Now, at the ass-end of December? Each lie was like a hammer to his skull.
Right now, his griffin was still on edge. That didn’t surprise him. Pine Valley had been a bad shock not only the number of people filling its streets, but the number of shifters. For shifters, living among humans meant almost constantly lying about what they were.
And it was Christmas. If there was a better time of year for people to lie to themselves and everyone around them, Hardwick didn’t want to know about it.
Out here, though, he was far enough from even the most intrepid holidaymakers that nobody’s lies could touch him. Total peace, for the first time in a year.
He closed his eyes and sent reassurance to the griffin. A week with nobody but himself for company and they’d be back in action.
His griffin twitched its claws. He felt a tingle in his eyes and opened them to let it peer out into the world.
“See?” He looked around the room slowly, then out the window, letting his griffin take in the beautiful serenity. “There’s no one here but us. You can relax.”
He took a sip of coffee and grimaced.
“No one here but us and worse coffee than we get in the station,” he grumbled. His griffin clacked its beak in agreement and Hardwick relaxed.
