by Zoe Chant
A chill shot down her spine. “What?”
Phil spoke only to Cooper, like he’d decided that she wasn’t worth talking to since she didn’t fit his narrow, idiotic ideas of what it meant to be a true shifter. “You might have gotten me with these,” he said, holding up his wrists and letting the shiftsilver cuffs dangle down, the blue-gray metal winking in the sunlight, “but unless you have more of them—I’m telling you what I told you before. You’re not getting off this mountain alive.”
“Gretchen’s going to fly you off this mountain,” Cooper said. “No problem there.”
“We’ll all fly,” Gretchen said firmly. “If you’re not up for it, then you can ride on my back while I carry Phil with my talons. I don’t care if it’s hard. I’m not leaving you behind.”
Cooper reached out and squeezed her hand. “All right. Then we’re all going. And there’s not a thing Roger and Monroe can do about it, not if we’re in the air.”
Phil laughed. The unpleasant sound rang off the stones around them, echoing.
“What do you say when someone’s had plastic surgery?” Phil said.
He was enjoying himself now, Gretchen realized, toying with them the way a cat played with a mouse.
“They’ve ‘had some work done,’ right? Well, Cooper, old buddy, partner, you could say Roger’s had some work done. He’s not exactly the man you remember.” His smile was so wide it looked like the edges of it would come off his face. “And now he’s here. I almost feel sorry for you.”
Let him feel sorry all he wanted. Gretchen wasn’t standing around here another minute, not with Cooper’s freedom at stake. She didn’t know what Phil could possibly be talking about, but she figured the open sky was still their best hope.
She touched Cooper’s shoulder. “Come on.” She let some of the urgency she was feeling bleed into her voice. “Let’s get out of here.”
But Cooper couldn’t take his eyes off the car, which was, as Phil had said, now practically on top of him. The same wind that was whistling around them and playing her nerves like violin strings was ruffling his hair, and Gretchen could guess a little at the tangled emotions he was feeling.
He was as free right now as anyone could possibly be—he was out in the great wide open wilderness, with the proof of his innocence right at his feet and nothing but safe blue sky all around him. But two of the people who’d hurt him were seconds away from confronting him, and as dangerous as it might be to come face to face with Roger and Monroe, maybe Cooper needed that. Some part of him clearly wanted to face down the last of his demons.
She was ready to let them stay, then. He’d been through so much, and there was no way she could begrudge him whatever satisfaction and sense of closure he would get from getting to trade a few choice words with the men who had almost ruined his life.
But Cooper finally tore his gaze away from his past and looked straight at her, with all his attention and all his love shining brightly in his eyes. It was enough to take Gretchen’s breath away.
He’s giving all that up for me, she realized. He wants the chance to face them, he wants to make sure they don’t get away—but he’ll give that up to make sure I’m safe.
No, it was even more than that. He would give that up just to choose his future over his past. He could walk away from everything he’d been through if it meant that he was walking towards her.
She was going to take him up on it, for his sake. She had a bad feeling about whatever Phil had been talking about, and the sooner they had him safely and officially in Martin’s custody, the better.
Cooper said, “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.” He felt along his back, wincing as he brushed against his wounds, but he clenched his jaw into place. “I think I’m strong enough to fly again. I can carry him.”
He transformed into his sleek, glorious griffin, and took a struggling Phil up in his talons, holding him more securely and gently than Gretchen thought Phil probably deserved.
Gretchen had just started melting into her own griffin—already it felt comfortable and natural, like stepping into a pair of old shoes that had been perfectly broken in—when another one of Phil’s contemptuous laughs rang out, echoing around them so she had to hear it another dozen times.
She could see why he was laughing. This time, she couldn’t really blame him: the joke was definitely on them.
The advancing car had come to a standstill.
And what had burst out of it was a monster like nothing Gretchen had seen before.
Even in a nightmare.
20
Fuck.
It was the only word Cooper could think of.
There was a monstrosity stalking towards him, something so grotesque and unnatural that his griffin shied away from it. It was repulsed in an instinctive, animal way that was even more powerful than Cooper’s own revulsion. The thing in front of them wasn’t right, and his griffin knew it even better than he did.
Gretchen, human again, reached over and clutched at him, her hand digging into the scruff at his shoulders where the feathers stopped and the fur started. He could feel cold sweat on her palm.
This was as scared as he had ever seen her, and considering everything they’d faced together—that meant she was having the exact same response he was.
Even Phil’s laughter had taken on a vaguely nauseated sound. He didn’t want to be around this thing, either, and he knew it was on his side.
“Maybe it’s Monroe again,” Gretchen whispered. Her lips were barely moving, and her face had gone as pale as it had been when she’d been half-frozen. “Maybe it’s not real. He’s just making us see things.”
For a second, that gave him a fantastic hope. But then he knew better.
Monroe’s visions had been disorienting, like some kind of low-grade acid trip. The constantly shifting colors of the car his creepy powers had painted had been dizzying. Monroe could mess with them, but he couldn’t make them miss that they were being messed with.
He could still leave them confused and half-blinded, but he couldn’t fully trick them, not when they were prepared for him. The only reason he’d gotten away with confusing them before was because they hadn’t known what they were dealing with—since it seemed so wrong to doubt the evidence of their senses, they’d doubted themselves instead. Now they understood, and he wouldn’t catch them off-guard.
Cooper had no doubt that Monroe could still make them feel sick to their stomachs, but he couldn’t do it in the coldly real way this monster did.
Because part of what made this monster hideous was that it was so obviously real, down to the warped shadows it cast against the rocks. It was consistent, not warping itself to make room for his own fears. It was straight out of a nightmare—but it was right there, an unreal thing that had never been meant to be flesh-and-blood.
It was an enormous patchwork monster made of leathery dragon wings—shining with an iridescent slime—snake eyes and a cobra hood, a long purple tongue, a scorpion tail, and blood-red scales scattered all over with tufts of mangy looking fur.
Jaguar fur.
Cooper shifted back to human. His griffin was freaking out too much right now—he had to contain it somehow.
His mouth was as dry as dust.
What little skin the creature had was covered with grotesque, disfiguring scars. Dozens of bite-marks, maybe even hundreds of them.
“Roger,” he said, naming the monster for the man he knew it was—or the man it used to be. “God, Roger, what did you do?”
The monster screeched out a kind of hideous victory cry. Even Phil recoiled from it, his face twisted in unmistakable disgust.
Then, unbelievably, the creature talked.
Roger’s voice was still the same, as familiar as ever. It only made the contrast with his new body worse.
“I did what I always wanted to do, Cooper. You wouldn’t understand.”
“You’re right about that,” Gretchen said, looking at him with horror.
It almost didn’t seem
to matter when Monroe got out of the car and shifted at once into a giant, poison-green snake with an enormous, leathery black cobra hood.
Sure, his fangs were dripping with venom. Sure, he could make them see things. But he was nothing compared to Roger. Even Gretchen, who’d said several times that she was scared of snakes, didn’t flinch.
Monroe’s ego had always been touchy. Cooper distantly wondered if it bothered him that he was no longer the scariest guy in any given room.
“Roger’s a chimera now,” Phil explained. His voice throbbed with a mixture of revulsion and awe.
“Chimeras aren’t like that,” Gretchen snapped. “They’re part lion, part goat, and part snake. They’re natural, they’re supposed to exist. They’re not... whatever the hell this is.”
“Details, details,” Phil said, and laughed. His laugh sounded nervous now, though. Maybe he didn’t like the way Roger was looking at him. “He’s a mutt, like you, only at least he did it on purpose. He finally broke through. He’s part basilisk, part jaguar, part dragon—and part who knows what.”
“The whole is greater than the sum of the parts,” Roger said, thrashing his long scorpion’s tail. His eyes were still fixed on Phil.
They were oil-black eyes, with slit-like pupils in a bloody crimson. No wonder Phil didn’t like having them trained on him.
“How?” Cooper finally said. He sounded just as stunned as he did horrified.
“It took a long time to wear down the immunity. And more bites, from more people, than you’d ever believe. I tested it on someone else first, obviously. After that first go-around with Monroe, I learned to always have a guinea pig. But when it worked on him, I knew it would work on me.”
“You did this to someone else?” Cooper said disbelievingly. “Did he agree to that?”
“Sacrifices had to be made.”
“Just not by you? What happened to the guy you did this to?”
“Who cares?” Roger said. “I’m finally what I’ve wanted to be my whole life. Phil’s right—I finally broke through.”
“You finally broke your own soul,” Cooper said.
“You’ve wanted to be this your whole life?” Gretchen said.
They were all treated to the terrifying sight of chimera-Roger smiling. A long, snakelike tongue flicked out of his mouth, tasting the air.
“No,” Roger said. “I always wanted everything. Now I have it, and I’m not losing it.”
In a flash, Cooper understood why Roger wasn’t looking at him even half as much as he was looking at Phil.
Cooper had never come face-to-face with Roger’s true nature before. Roger had always presented Cooper with a carefully maintained front, playacting the kind of benevolent, fatherly boss that Martin Powell just naturally was. The act had been good—good enough for Cooper to always dismiss the little niggling things that had bothered him, like Roger’s passionate desire to take on as many of Monroe’s basilisk skills as he could.
But now, he saw Roger for what he really was. He wasn’t much of a man anymore, if he had ever been much of one at all. He was a monstrosity who wanted only to grab and hold onto everything he could. He was cunning and manipulative.
And more than anything else, he was selfish.
Phil had been counting on his team loyally coming to his rescue—but Roger hadn’t come up the mountain to save him. Roger didn’t have any sense of loyalty, not really. All he had were temporary arrangements, places where his greed intersected with someone else’s enough for them to be useful to him.
Phil had been useful to him once. But now that Cooper and Gretchen knew the truth—and now that Roger knew that word of Cooper’s innocence might have spread—Phil was nothing more than a liability. Absolute, concrete proof that Phil was alive was the only thing that could irrevocably prove Cooper’s innocence—and the only thing that could destroy the lie that Roger had spent his life maintaining.
Roger wasn’t here to rescue Phil. Roger was here to kill him.
All of that flitted through Cooper’s mind in a millisecond, and then he barreled into Phil, knocking him down to the ground.
They hit the dust just in time to miss the jet of jade-colored acid that blistered the space where Phil had been standing.
So Roger was part wyvern now, too. That was fun.
“What the fuck?” Phil said, his voice shrill now, splitting the air.
“You’re a problem now,” Cooper said. “You know what Roger does with problems.”
He was surprised at how steady he sounded, even with everything that was going on, even with the fact that he’d landed belly-first on one of Phil’s sharply pointed elbows. It had knocked the wind out of him a little, but aside from that, he sounded fine. He almost felt fine.
Of course he did. For the first time in a long time, he was doing what he’d always done best.
Like Gretchen, he was a Marshal first. And now he had a witness to protect.
Admittedly, it was a witness he hated, but hey, you couldn’t have everything.
Ruffles around Roger’s scaly throat flared out as he began to gather up another deadly burst of acid. Cooper wasn’t waiting around to see how successful he’d be this time. He hauled Phil up to his feet and shoved him, hard, in the direction of the winding path down the mountain.
“Run.”
“Zigzag,” Gretchen advised, drawing her sidearm. “We’ll be right behind you.”
Her voice was splendidly cool, and Cooper was grateful yet again to have such a capable partner by his side. She took aim at Roger and fired, and while he mostly slithered/flew out of the way of the bullet, she at least skinned his hide a little, producing an ear-splitting wail.
“Nice shot,” Cooper said.
She nodded. Sweat was running down her face, and he could feel it on his own, too. The odds were against them. Only Gretchen had a gun (one that was already short on ammo), Cooper was already injured, and they had no idea of the extent of Roger’s hideous new capabilities. If they were going to survive this, they would have to be smart.
He heard the frantic beat of Phil’s feet against the ground. He might not have had much of a chance—it was hard to run in handcuffs, especially down a steep and dusty road—but at least he had a sliver of one.
Don’t think this means I like you, Cooper thought grimly at Phil’s departing back. I’m saving your life because it’s my get-out-of-jail free card. And because it’s my job—but I know you wouldn’t understand that.
“Fine,” Roger said. It was still surreal to hear such a creature talking—and in such an ordinary voice, too. “I’ll kill the two of you and then I’ll kill him. I’m not picky about the order.” He turned his enormous head to look at Monroe, and the only thing weirder than hearing him speak was seeing a kind of juvenile pissiness in a face that would otherwise have been completely alien. “Do you want to contribute to this?”
Monroe had shifted back to human, Cooper saw, and he’d gone so pale he looked almost bloodless. Maybe, despite everything, Monroe had still believed—at least a little—in honor among thieves. Either Roger hadn’t filled him in on all the details of the plan to kill Phil, or he had lost the stomach for it at the last moment.
Monroe had possibly been the one to take the lead back in their earlier shootout, Cooper realized. That one had been almost entirely dependent on skillfully done basilisk-related hallucinations, with none of Roger’s showboating. And in that fight, Monroe had concentrated all his fire on Cooper, trying hard to avoid hitting Gretchen.
Monroe wasn’t up for all of this. He touched his tongue to his lips and then said, “She’s a woman, Rog.”
Gretchen burst out laughing. “Seriously, that’s your objection? You’re fine with selling out witnesses and framing Cooper for murder, but it wouldn’t be chivalrous to kill me? Go to hell.”
Cooper agreed with her in principle, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to encourage people to try to kill her just on the grounds of gender equality.
It was bizarre for Gretchen a
nd Roger to be on the same side of the argument, because Roger was also looking at Monroe incredulously. “You’re such an infant. Don’t you know that she’s just as dangerous—”
Gretchen’s gaze flashed over to Cooper’s. The second he saw the anticipation in her eyes, he knew at once what she was going to do.
Oh, she was just as dangerous as he was, all right.
That’s my girl.
While Roger was focused on chewing out Monroe for not being sufficiently willing to murder women as well as men, Gretchen was melting into her griffin form and lunging at him, the coiled muscles of her lynx half creating a pounce that her falcon half carried forward in flight.
She crashed into Roger like a guided missile and fought him with the fury and energy of a whole life spent pent up in only half of herself. Her beak snapped at him, taking out mouthfuls of his own needle-like feathers, and her talons and claws raked over his tough hide.
Before Cooper could even shift to join in the fight, Roger flung Gretchen away from him with a high-pitched shriek of rage.
She hit the rocks hard. That would have been bad enough, but what was worse was the white smoke writhing up from her body.
He’d hit her with another venomous, acidic blast.
Everything in Cooper’s body wanted to run towards her and make sure that she was okay, but if he did that, all he’d be doing is letting Roger have free time to target them both. The best chance of keeping Gretchen safe was to keep fighting.
Then that was what he was going to do. He would save her life—or die trying.
You can’t just be horrified by him now, he told his griffin. We have to fight.
For Gretchen, his griffin agreed. He trusted its love for her as completely as he trusted his own—his griffin’s love for her was his own.
Cooper shifted as quickly as he could, dodging a claw-swipe from Roger in the process. He rushed forward. The pain in his hind legs and back was nothing more than a distant memory now that Gretchen’s life was at stake. All he could feel was pulse-pounding adrenaline.
If she dies—
