by Zoe Chant
And while Cooper had sat behind bars, his griffin locked away inside him, his reputation ruined, his life destroyed—Phil had retired to the mountains.
And if he’d left them a few days ago, it had almost certainly been to wipe Cooper off the board once and for all.
“You’re quiet,” Gretchen said.
They were driving up into the mountains now, following a winding, steep road that was only barely wide enough to accommodate their car. They’d left Isabelle down in Ambergris, because—as she’d loftily said—she could fly herself home easily enough.
She had given him and Gretchen quick, fierce hugs, wishing them luck before adding, almost shyly, “And I go by Iz now... with my friends.”
Kid though she was, she was a friend worth having. It was funny to think that he owed her a lot for helping them and yet he might not ever see her again.
He might not ever even come down this mountain again.
“Of course,” Gretchen said, uncannily following his thinking, “you’ve got a lot to be quiet about.”
“I just can’t believe I missed who he really was. Who they all really were.” He was glad she was driving, because it let him briefly bury his head in his hands. He scrubbed his fingers up through his hair.
Bizarrely, that gesture was what reminded him that he had a lot to be thankful for. A few days ago, his hair would have been stiff and spiky from using nothing more than the lousy prison soap for shampoo. Now he finally felt clean again, and his hair was soft to the touch.
But that didn’t change the gut-level feeling of betrayal. Just because he’d gotten lucky now didn’t mean he hadn’t gotten spectacularly unlucky before—and he hadn’t even noticed at the time.
“They must have been laughing at me behind my back the whole time. I feel like such an idiot.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you for wanting to believe the best about people. No one walks into their office and wonders if everyone there is in on some criminal conspiracy, Coop. That wasn’t a problem you should have ever had to worry about.”
“I should have seen the signs.”
“You did see the signs. You knew you didn’t fit in. You knew Phil could be a dick and the other two could be strange. You saw everything that was there for you to see—these are sharp guys, and they know how criminals get caught. They were careful, and you still picked up on something being wrong.”
He opened his mouth to tear into himself again, but then his griffin pushed forward into his consciousness and said, She’s right.
Was she?
She was Gretchen, his mate, so that was definitely a point in favor of him trusting her argument.
Besides, he’d spent so long waiting to get his griffin back that he hated to think of ignoring it now.
When she first picked you up, you knew how good she was. And you thought that if you escaped, it wouldn’t be fair for anyone to blame her for it or think she was careless. You were a Marshal too, and you knew all the tricks, so you had one-up on all the other prisoners she had to escort. If it wouldn’t have been fair to blame Gretchen for letting you escape, even though she was on her guard, how is it fair to blame yourself for missing the truth about your team when you didn’t even have any reason to suspect them?
It was like his guilt had been a hand on his throat, choking him, and with this thought, it had finally eased off.
For the first time in months, he not only knew he was innocent, he felt like he was innocent. He hadn’t done anything to bring this down on himself.
He had deserved better than what he’d gotten.
Ever since the arrest, he’d been trying like hell to not seem angry, because anger only made him look scary to other people. Scary and probably guilty. But now, knowing that Gretchen knew him even better than he knew himself, he could let those feelings have free rein. He could finally feel the enormity of how Phil and Roger and Monroe had screwed him over, and he could be pissed about it.
“Coop?”
“You’re right,” he said. He still couldn’t get over what it felt like to finally be able to breathe freely.
She’d given that back to him. She hadn’t just given him the sky; she’d given him the air.
“You’re right,” Cooper said again. “There wasn’t a lot I could have done differently. They lied to me, they used me, and they framed me.” He took a huge breath, relishing the feeling it gave him. “And now we’re going to find them and drag them into the light of day, and they’re going to have to tell everyone what happened. And you know what matters to me most about all that?”
He was half-expecting her to make some joke about how it was probably the part where he’d get out of prison, but instead she just said softly, “What?”
“The fact that I started all that just saying ‘I’ and I get to end it saying ‘we.’”
A wide smile spread across Gretchen’s face. “My favorite part is getting you free so that we can be us all the time.”
“We make a good us,” Cooper agreed. “And then we can start figuring out what you—”
—might be able to turn into. That was what he’d been ready to say.
He was interrupted by an inferno.
Flames streaked down from the sky, tracing a circle that surrounded their car. Cooper’s heightened senses let him hear the paint blistering on the hood, boiling and popping: that was how close the fire was. It was lapping up against them like the tide against the beach.
Gretchen slammed on the brakes, throwing them to a halt so quickly that they snapped forward against their seatbelts. Her face had gone dead-white. “We have to get out.”
He knew what she was thinking. If the gas tank blew, they were dead. But if they got out, they’d roast anyway.
They couldn’t stay in a burning car. And they couldn’t get out in the middle of a fire.
They couldn’t go forward, they couldn’t go backwards, and they couldn’t stay where they were.
Cooper could only think of one thing to do.
He unbuckled his seatbelt.
“Hold onto me,” he said. “We’re going up.”
18
First, they had to get out of the car, and they had to do it in the middle of a vortex of flames. Unfortunately, Gretchen couldn’t help with that. She just had to sit there while Cooper shifted and tore through the mental frame of the car like it was nothing more than soft cheese.
Even in the midst of all her terror and panic, even with the temperature in the car climbing so high that sweat was starting to break out all over her, some part of Gretchen could still admire the sheer majesty of Cooper’s transformation.
He really was magnificent. The glossy white feathers on his head smoothed out almost imperceptibly into the mahogany brown wings and golden fur. She’d never seen a griffin before him, and she had always more or less imagined that they would look awkward, like two entirely different animals smashed together. She could almost have pictured a visible seam between the lion half and the eagle half.
But the real Cooper was nothing like that. He wasn’t half-lion and half-eagle. He was a griffin, a complete whole in and of himself.
And it was incredible to watch him in action. The same talons that had carefully cradled her and carried her to safety at Ford’s motel now sheared through the car roof, tearing their way to freedom. His enormous wings ruffled slightly, brushing against her, and then he turned his immense head to look at her with his liquid golden eyes.
Somehow, they were still recognizably his eyes. She would have known him anywhere.
And she knew what he was asking her. Ready?
She nodded. When it came to getting out of a burning car, she’d been born ready.
There was no room to climb on his back while they were still in the car, so she had to settle for locking her arms around his neck and holding on as tightly as she could. She squeezed him hard.
Ready.
They took flight.
There was so little space getting out that Gretchen felt the bur
ning slice of the torn metal against her skin, raking her arm raw, and she bit back a cry, not wanting Cooper to worry about her. She knew he’d probably gotten cut too.
As soon as she could, she fought through the pain enough to swing up onto his back, feeling like the move justified every chin-up she’d ever struggled through in her entire life. Hot blood was racing down her arm, steaming in the cold, and the pain was dizzying.
But none of that mattered. They were free.
Not that she had any time to enjoy it. They might have been free, but they weren’t safe. Another rippling jet of fire was shooting towards them now, and for the first time, she saw that it was coming from a huge, crimson-colored dragon with thick, leathery, bat-like wings.
Phil? She didn’t know who else it could be, unless some dragon back in Ambergris had decided they posed some kind of threat.
Either way, she could save the identification process for later. Right now, all that mattered was that this dragon was fast.
Gretchen didn’t need another sign from Cooper to know to hold on. She clung to him as they raced and spun through the sky, plunging and dodging the fire. It was coming close enough to leave behind the smell of singed hair, and neither of them had much of that to spare.
She’d never been in more danger than right now—but at the same time, there was something wonderful about the clarity of it. She knew exactly why she was risking her life, and she wouldn’t do a single thing differently.
She was riding a griffin, being chased by a dragon, and they were fighting their way up a mountaintop for a confrontation that would set Cooper free.
The clear air and the heat of the fire had burned off the last of her insecurities and uncertainties. She didn’t know that any basilisk would be able to prey on her right now. All her feelings of being muddled were gone.
No one was going to manipulate her now. Not even her.
She could tell that Cooper was steering them towards a crevice in the mountainside. It was too narrow for a dragon to enter it and too deep for the dragonfire to follow them all the way to the rear. It could help them force a one-on-one confrontation.
Correction: a two-on-one confrontation. She was going to have Coop’s back whether he liked it or not.
She didn’t want to risk taking one of her hands away from his shoulders, but she rolled her hip just enough to feel that the comfortable weight of her sidearm was still there. She thought she would probably need it just as much as she would need her handcuffs.
They were almost to the opening of the crevice when the dragon behind them must have put on one last desperate burst of speed.
In another few seconds, they would have been safe. In another few minutes, the dragon wouldn’t even have been able to breathe fire—the flames had become so weak and sputtering that Gretchen could tell it was running on fumes. They were so close to safety and the fair fight Cooper deserved. Close enough that it hurt.
But this last breath of flame fell against Cooper’s hindquarters like a lash, making the whole back half of his body sag down. It threw his center of gravity off, making his wings falter and his flight turn choppy. That single instant of delay was all the dragon needed to dart in and claw at him savagely, opening up his griffin’s broad lion back, just an inch from where Gretchen was seated.
Cooper let out a harsh, cawing cry, and tumbled out of the sky.
If his talons hadn’t hooked deep into the rock, splintering it just to make a foothold, the two of them would have fallen down the side of the mountain.
Gretchen was shaking, but she managed to dig her fingers into his sides, stroking him, urging him up. She couldn’t even imagine the strength it was taking for him to cling to the mountainside—couldn’t even imagine how he was staying conscious—and she hated to ask him for more than that, but she had to.
“Come on,” she said, her mouth close to his ear. “Come on, Coop, just get us level again. Please.”
His body lurched, the muscles rippling under his tawny fur, and for a second, Gretchen could picture them sliding back into thin air. It was sickeningly easy to imagine falling instead of flying. In the battle between gravity and injured Cooper, it was all too possible for gravity to win, for one person’s struggle not to make any difference.
But not today. Cooper fought his way upright again, propelling their way up the sheer rock face of the mountain with a combination of wing beats and brute strength.
The dragon lunged at them, and Gretchen’s mind almost whited out with rage. It thought Cooper was completely vulnerable right now, since he was wounded and fighting for their lives? Well, Cooper had a partner, and his partner had a gun.
The angle was horrible, but Gretchen managed to draw her sidearm and keep her shaking fingers locked on it so that it didn’t fall immediately out of her hand and down into the valley below. As she took aim, a familiar coolness fell over her, steadying her hand. This was part of the job, and she knew how to do the job.
She fired twice, sending the dragon spinning backwards through the air. Gretchen wasn’t sure if she’d hit him or not, given all the jostling of Cooper getting them to safety, but she’d at least driven him back.
And that had given Cooper enough time to finish hauling them up the mountain. Even with all his injuries and all his exhaustion, he didn’t collapse until they were on solid ground again.
Gretchen dismounted and stroked his sides, feeling him tremble beneath her touch. His fur was soaked through with sweat, and his chest was heaving unevenly as he fought the pain. Tears welled up in her eyes as she looked at the marks left by the dragonfire and the claw-slashes, and she was almost glad that her vision was blurred. Seeing his wounds in more detail wouldn’t make them look any better. He needed help, and he needed it as soon as possible. It wasn’t something that it would be easy to get when they were in the middle of nowhere.
The dragon’s shadow fell over her now. It breathed out little puffs of ineffective, weak flame. Its strength was mostly spent, at least for now. And it didn’t seem willing to risk another head-on, close-up charge while she still had a gun trained on it.
They still had a chance. Maybe.
Unless it decided to just hover there until its fire returned. If this was Phil, and if he could work out that facing them in human form was too much of a risk—and he probably could—then maybe they had no chance at all.
She leaned against the broad, darkly feathered expanse of Cooper’s shoulders and felt his wings ruffle around her, wrapping her in a kind of embrace.
“Can you still heal if you change back?”
He looked at her with his gold-bronze eyes and nodded so solemnly that she had to swallow down another lump of unshed tears.
“Good. Because not that this look doesn’t work for you, but on the off-chance that we’re going to die here—I want to be looking at your other face.”
He melted against her, the solid, wounded strength of his griffin’s body dissolving into the tense, wounded strength of his body. Gretchen herded him back into the crack in the mountainside before the dragon could make a move on them. It was only a temporary shelter, but it was better than nothing, and it gave her at least a minute or two to look over Coop.
She loved his griffin, but she loved his human shape even more. All else aside, it was only like this that he could really and truly hold her back.
He hugged her close, his embrace so tight it made her breathless. She knew he was hurting, but he still gave her all his strength and held none of it back for himself. She didn’t know how anyone could have ever thought he could be selfish enough to trade his honor for money.
“We’re not going to die here,” Cooper said against her hair.
Maybe they would. Maybe they wouldn’t. Gretchen realized that, as little sense as it made, she wasn’t afraid.
She was sorry for the time together that they might lose, sorry that she might not get the chance to say a real goodbye to her family and her team, and even sorry that she’d never have another bowl of mint chocol
ate chip ice cream again—but she wasn’t scared. Not of any of it.
Cooper had given her enough certainty to face down death—or any other future—without fear or regret. Because now that she had him, now that she really knew him, she knew everything else that mattered. She knew that she had been right to believe her own inner sense of herself. She knew that when the pressure was on, the choices that she would make were choices that she could stand by. She knew that when she messed up, she could deal with her mistakes.
And she knew how much she could trust the people around her. If this was the end of the line for them, she didn’t have to worry that Cooper would always be remembered as a criminal. Martin would carry on the quest to clear Cooper’s name. Theo and Colby would help him. Keith would grow into being a good Marshal, even if he never unwound enough to listen to the radio.
She wasn’t scared because all of that filled her with a sense of tremendous peace.
And, she realized slowly, a sense of burning rage. Because everything would be fine—and how dare this asshole interfere with that? How dare he try to keep Cooper facedown in the mud?
Her life was beautiful and whole now, and fuck Phil Locke for trying to keep her from having enough time to enjoy that.
It was like her feelings were pushing their way through her skin.
No, the old, familiar voice said from deep inside her. It had never been so loud before.
It would have scared her, if she’d still been capable of being scared.
No what?
No, your feelings aren’t pushing their way out. I’M pushing my way out. YOU’RE pushing your way out.
“Gretchen.” There was a crazy grin on Cooper’s face and a spark of wild, uncontrollable joy in his eyes. “You’re amazing.”
Was she?
She looked down at herself.
She was.
She was shifting.
Her body was flickering out of its familiar shape and into a new one, and—in what was maybe the most bizarre part—her eyes were changing too, with more colors leaping into blazing life as her vision opened up to let in ultraviolet shades her human eyes had never known.
