by Zoe Chant
She dropped to all fours, and the sound of her hitting the ground was weirdly... uneven. It took her a second to realize why.
Her back half had the paws she’d always subconsciously expected, but uncannily large, lion-sized even though she felt inexplicably sure that they were otherwise lynx-like. She could feel the knob of her tail and the sensitive pads of her back paws.
Her front half had talons.
They were a bright crayon-yellow, black-tipped at the points, which weren’t as wicked and curved as Cooper’s.
“You’re a falcon,” Cooper said. He was looking at her with a kind of awe. “You’re a griffin, but you’re part peregrine falcon and part lynx—supersized. I didn’t even know that kind of shift form could exist, Gretch.”
I didn’t either, Gretchen wanted to say.
But maybe she had. She’d always felt like there was some locked puzzle-box inside her that she couldn’t quite pick open. Then Cooper had come along and broken the lock for her, broken it by getting to embrace the woman she really was instead of just the girl she’d once been, and this crisis had made the box burst open for good. And everything that was inside might have been impossible and unheard-of, but it made sense to her all the same.
She’d always dreamed of flying.
She looked at the dark blot of Phil Locke. He was still hovering there outside the crevasse, high up like the sky was still the same refuge it had been two minutes ago.
He couldn’t see her well, not back in the shadows like this. If he could pick out the shape of a griffin, he probably just thought it was Cooper, who was still out of commission.
Not, in other words, a healthy, barely hurt, newly fledged lynx-falcon griffin eager to stretch her wings and flex her talons.
Cooper saw the direction of her gaze. He didn’t hesitate. All he did was grin, as if he knew exactly what she was feeling.
“Go get him.”
Gretchen launched herself into the air, her wings slicing furiously through the sky. Phil could have bested her on sheer size and muscle, and he had more experience on his side, but he was no match for the exhilaration and passionate anger coursing through her blood. He couldn’t be. He hadn’t expected this moment before today, and one way or the other, she’d been waiting for it her whole life.
She collided with him in midair, raking her talons across his scaly hide.
He let out a shrill shriek and puffed a little more weak flame at her—it was a pale yellow that almost seemed to dribble out of his mouth like water. It didn’t even hurt.
She thrashed against him, snapping at him with her beak, driving him to ground. He was going to have this confrontation with them whether he liked it or not, and he was going to talk to Cooper man-to-man. He couldn’t hide anymore—not behind his supposed grave and not behind his dragon. He was going to have to stand there and look at Cooper and explain himself.
Phil fought her, but there was no real contest there. Her strength was new and unbridled, and his was mostly spent.
He crashed against the rock with a last flurry of his leathery wings, beating up a cloud of dust that hung in the air like a glittering veil. It was just another illusion, Gretchen thought, another barrier Cooper’s team had thrown up between them and the truth.
And as far as distractions went, it wasn’t even Phil’s best work.
Gretchen opened her mouth—her beak—and let out a screeching, ear-splitting cry. It might not have been as satisfying as a lion’s roar, but it was just as effective. The dragon winced back. It looked like it was trying to tuck its skinny shoulders up around its ears.
Good. If he hated hearing her shriek at him so much, he could just turn human again. Facing the music had to be better than facing her griffin’s battle cry.
He must have understood that too, because slowly—agonizingly slowly—his body shrank. It was like he was withering away. All the crimson strength of his dragon bled out, leaving only pasty human skin behind.
It was Phil Locke.
It was one thing to know it had to be Phil and another thing to actually see it. Now that they were face-to-face, she remembered him from all the news coverage. The press had been particularly fond of using one very flattering photo of him, one where he had a warm, friendly look on his face. I’m a nice guy, the look had said. You can trust me.
He’d probably been thinking about murder at the time. Or money. Or both.
In contrast, the photos of Cooper had been notably terrible, and Gretchen suspected it had taken some time and effort for them to dig them up. Then again, his team had probably been happy to supply them to anyone who asked—or even anyone who didn’t.
Right now, Phil’s warmth and friendliness weren’t exactly evident.
To be fair, she had just finished pummeling him midair and dashing him against a mountainside. To be even more fair, she didn’t want to be fair to him at all. He had an ugly soul, and she liked to think that over half a year of relative solitude had made some of that ugliness start to show on his face. He wore a twisted sneer, and he looked straight at Cooper without even a hint of shame.
Gretchen wished she could have spent more time throttling him. She shifted back too, just so she could give him what she knew was a death glare.
Cooper had been slumped over a little with pain, but he straightened up now as he came out of the shadows of the crevasse. His gaze was clear and direct.
“Phil,” he said. “Long time, no see. I was starting to think you were dead.”
“You’re not going to get away with this,” Phil said.
“With what?” Gretchen threw in incredulously. “With telling the truth?”
He tossed that ugly sneer her way. “How did it work out for him the first time?”
Cooper smoothly stepped in between the two of them, as if, even wounded, he needed to do whatever he could to protect her from Phil. “Not that well, obviously. But I’m hopeful. If you and the team taught me anything, it’s that people can get away with a whole hell of a lot. Faked deaths, frame-ups, hallucinations. Proving my innocence should be a cinch compared to what you guys pulled off. I’m almost impressed.”
“It didn’t have to go down the way it did,” Phil said. Now he sounded almost wistful, but Gretchen suspected it was just a front. Even if he did feel bad, there was no possible way he felt bad enough. Not even close. “We were thinking of bringing you in. But you had to play the hero.”
“I had to do my job.”
“You could have been rich.”
“I didn’t want to be rich! I wanted a team, friends, people who would actually have my back. I wanted to protect people, the way we swore to do when we got our badges.”
You tell him, Coop.
But as Cooper and Phil really started to get into it, something seemed to prickle at the back of Gretchen’s neck, unsettling her.
Something was wrong. She couldn’t shake the memory of Phil’s sneer, even though he was too busy yelling and arguing now to still be wearing it. There had been a kind of smug confidence about it that had seemed out-of-place on a guy who had just gotten thrashed around. Maybe he was vile but tough, the kind of man who would refuse to give up even when he knew all the odds were against him. Maybe he was just the kind of man who never passed up the chance to throw a temper tantrum. Cooper had said Phil had a terrible temper, but—
But he had also said that Phil had some control over it. He didn’t break it out around witnesses, not when it might hurt his friendly image. He kept strategic control of his anger, and he concealed and used it for his own advantage.
If this was a tantrum, maybe there was a point to it.
Gretchen had a hunch that she knew what it was. Unlike Cooper, Phil really had had a team. He’d had friends—or at least equally scummy business partners—who had his back.
And since at least one of his friends could make their knees buckle from nauseating, disorienting visions, Phil would be really happy to see his old pals right now.
He wasn’t really arguing with
Cooper. He was stalling him.
And what really worried Gretchen was that the creepy smile on his face was getting wider with every second.
19
“Coop.”
Gretchen’s voice was maybe the only thing that could have cut through the turmoil currently inside his head. He turned to her.
She had gone eerily pale. A few minutes ago, there had been a savage joy on her face. No matter how tense their situation was and how much trouble they were in, she had been relishing the newfound feeling of her griffin and the thought of finally getting him justice. Now she looked almost sick to her stomach.
He stepped towards her, holding out his hand to touch her shoulder and reassure himself that she was still really there. “What is it?”
“He’s stalling,” Gretchen said. “He’s waiting for the rest of his team to get here.”
If he’d had any doubt at all that she was right, it would have vanished the second he saw Phil’s snarling reaction to her. He looked like he could have breathed engulfing flames at her without even shifting first.
“You—you mutant,” Phil said, spitting out the word like it was a vicious insult. “You don’t look like any griffin I’ve ever seen. You’re like a mutt.”
“Mutts are healthier than most purebreds,” Gretchen said, unruffled. She was getting some of the color back in her face, like she was feeding off Phil’s anger. “And you’re not going to play me, buddy. I don’t care what you think of me and my totally awesome lynx-falcon. You’re not dragging this out a second longer. We’re getting off this mountain, and we’re taking you to the police, and you’re going to confess and spend the rest of your life in prison.”
“Your dragon might leave you,” Cooper said.
He didn’t even mean it as a taunt. The feeling of his griffin ebbing away from him had been so awful that he couldn’t even wish that fate on Phil, who had been the one to slam him into a coffin and nail it shut. All he wanted to do was warn Phil that it could happen.
But Phil just looked at him blankly for a minute and then burst out laughing.
It was a really belly laugh, the kind that couldn’t have been faked. Not unless Phil had some secret acting career he didn’t know about.
Though at this point, even that wouldn’t surprise him.
“My dragon might leave me,” Phil said, sputtering, wiping at his eyes. “That’s just classic, Cooper. It really is.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Gretchen said, and then added, “Not that we have time for the whole list...”
“My dragon’s not going anywhere,” Phil said. His bright blue eyes looked like the sky Cooper had been kept from for so long, and they were twinkling with a manic good humor. “I am my dragon. You always believe everything people tell you, Cooper? Your griffin was fine. You could have sat in that prison for fifty years and come out and taken flight. Maybe you were having trouble, but it would always have been reversible.”
That was what Gretchen had thought, of course. But Roger had said—
He didn’t need Phil to tell him what was wrong with that statement. Roger had lied. Of course he had. Roger was a liar; it was what he did.
Cooper just didn’t know why he’d bothered to lie about that. What good had that really done Roger and the team?
“We had to pay somebody to take you out,” Phil said. “Leaving you around was just too risky. Roger thought you wouldn’t fight as hard to stay alive if you figured your griffin was gone.”
The world seemed to telescope in around him, darkness narrowing in.
Roger had thought Cooper would solve their Cooper problem for him.
All those times he’d visited, he hadn’t been feeling kind or even guilty. He’d been showing up to plant little seeds in Cooper’s head, seeds that he’d hoped would grow into a full-blown depression. He had probably pushed Cooper’s griffin down further into the shadows of his mind just by the power of suggestion.
“You bastard,” Gretchen was saying. She was coming around Cooper’s side, boiling with rage. “What’s wrong with all of you? He was your friend!”
Phil shrugged. “He could have been. He’s the one who threw that away.” He looked at Cooper, and he had the gall to look like he was the wronged one. “You always went around acting like you were a saint. Like you were better than the rest of us.”
“I’m going to be so glad to watch the cell doors close on you,” Gretchen said.
They had wanted him dead. He’d known that. They hadn’t wanted to risk him putting the pieces together—though he didn’t think he would have, not without Gretchen’s help.
He was more okay with them paying the ferret-faced guy with the shiv than he was with this. They had tried to drive him to a horrible kind of despair, tried to push him into a black and bottomless pit that he could never get out of again.
But they didn’t, his griffin said.
Like Gretchen had said, he’d stayed good, and he’d stayed whole. He had held on to the core of himself, and he hadn’t broken no matter how much pressure they’d put on him. He hadn’t lost his griffin, and he hadn’t lost his will to live.
He had held on, and in the end, he had found Gretchen, who had been like the sun burning through all the dark clouds around him.
He hadn’t lost then, and he wasn’t going to lose now.
He said, “You’re still trying to distract us, Phil. And I’m done listening.” He held out his hand, and Gretchen, understanding him at once, slapped her handcuffs into it.
Phil laughed. “You’re such a Boy Scout, Cooper. Always have to do things by the book.”
He went ahead and held out his hands for Cooper to fasten the cuffs on him. The smile on his face was playfully condescending, like an adult pretending to allow a child to win a game. Cooper knew exactly what he was thinking: what chance did handcuffs have against the strength of a dragon? The second Phil transformed, his powerful forelegs would snap ordinary steel like it was nothing but a bunch of toothpicks.
Let him smile all he wanted.
Phil was forgetting that there were other Marshals—particularly other shifter Marshals—who actually cared about doing their jobs. These were Gretchen’s handcuffs, the ones with shiftsilver threaded through them. As long as he had them around his wrists, Phil wasn’t transforming into anything.
It was good to have one opponent thoroughly and definitely restrained. Because even as he looked up from Phil’s cuffs in satisfaction, he could see a car racing up the winding mountain road. The driver was taking the sharp turns and dangerous curves much faster than Gretchen had been willing to, and Cooper had already come to understand that Gretchen was a pretty daring driver. These were people who knew they had a deadline.
He looked at Gretchen, whose gaze was also fixed on the speeding car. Her mouth quirked.
“It’s not black this time,” she said.
He nodded. “And it’s not changing colors, either.” He turned to Phil. “Monroe must be pretty preoccupied if he’s not keeping up the camouflage anymore.”
“Oh, you figured that out.” Phil almost sounded disappointed, but he brightened as he went on. “He’s not preoccupied. He just knows there’s no reason to care what the two of you have seen. You’re not getting off this mountain. You’re going to be victims, not witnesses. Even you.” He spat the last word at Gretchen. “We’re past caring about collateral damage.”
Cooper bristled at the threat to Gretchen. But he was thinking more clearly than Phil: no big rescue was going to happen here. He and Gretchen were going up against a basilisk and a jaguar shifter—dangerous creatures, definitely, but ones that were thoroughly stuck on the ground. Now that Gretchen could fly, she, at least, could get back in the air. A trip dangling from her talons might do Phil some good.
He didn’t know if he could make it down the mountain in his griffin form, not as sore and bloodied as he was, but Gretchen getting away was the important thing. And her new lynx-falcon shape meant she could get away at any time.
P
hil was watching the car’s approach with that same hateful arrogance on his face. His eyes flashed a deep, unnatural crimson as he started to shift—
—only to smack into the mystical barrier of the shiftsilver handcuffs.
His reaction was priceless. Gretchen didn’t know that she’d ever seen anyone’s jaw literally drop like that.
“You,” Phil snarled, turning to her. “You’d use these on another shifter?”
It seemed so unreal for Phil Locke, of all people, to be questioning Gretchen’s honor that they both actually laughed. Gretchen was the one who’d flown in the face of all loyalty and duty? Sure, Phil.
It was nice to have a little levity as the car streaked up towards them.
Gretchen said incredulously, “On a shifter who’s a criminal? A shifter like you, who framed his partner for a murder that didn’t even happen? A shifter who sold out the people who were counting on him to protect them? Um, yes. A thousand times yes.”
“You’re not really a shifter at all,” he said, spitting the words at her.
“Oh, she definitely is,” Cooper said.
A smile spread across Gretchen’s face, as beautiful and natural as the sun coming up. She almost glowed with it.
If Cooper never made it down this mountain again, he was going to try to die thinking of that smile.
“I’m a shifter,” Gretchen said simply. “But I’m a Marshal first.”
“Then it’s time we did some Marshaling,” Cooper said, “because they’re almost here. Gretch, it looks like you’re back on prisoner transport after all. Ready for a ride, Phil?”
*
It was almost over. They’d bring Phil back to her home office and explain everything that had happened, and after they all waded through an ocean of red tape...
Cooper would be free. They’d have a life together.
Thinking about that was such a beautiful distraction that Gretchen almost missed the poisonous delight in Phil’s eyes. Almost, but not quite.
