by Selena Scott
Griff eased back on the throttle. “She’s off early tonight anyways. I guess I can handle watching her ass swish around for another ten minutes.”
“Ruby texted you,” John Alec said, glancing at Milla’s phone on the table, his eyes squinting hard to read it.
“John, for the last time. Just get some glasses.”
He scoffed. “I don’t need glasses.”
Griff and Milla glanced at one another. He definitely needed glasses.
But he was also a stubborn warrior who didn’t like the way glasses looked on people and therefore, he refused.
“Your aim might improve if you had glasses,” Griff muttered into his beer, just to tease John Alec. There was nothing wrong with his aim, but he knew the implication would ruffle the warrior’s feathers.
“Don’t make me turn that pretty girl into a widow, boy,” John Alec tipped the bottom of Griff’s beer glass as he took a sip.
Griff laughed, eyes widening and wiping beer off his chin. “I thought threatening a shifter was against your code of ethics, warrior.”
Milla and John Alec were both surprised that Griff would mention anything like that in a crowded bar, but they were too charmed by this lighthearted, teasing version of their friend to say anything about it.
“What are you smiling about?” Alayna asked as she leaned up against the table, her waitress tray tucked under one arm.
“I have lots of things to smile about these days,” Griff murmured, tucking his fingers into the waistband of her pants and sending her tumbling onto his lap. Hearts broke all around the bar. But Milla’s secretly tender heart swelled as she watched Griff nuzzle his face into Alayna’s neck, whisper something in her ear that had her eyes widening, a surprised laugh exploding out of her.
“You lovebirds ready to go?” John Alec asked.
Alayna nodded. “Yes, just let me get my things from the back.”
She attempted to rise, but Griff held on to her for just another moment. He liked the weight of her on his lap. He liked the brush of her hair on his cheek. He liked the scent of her all over him. He liked it all. John Alec’s words echoed in Griff’s head. He’d referred to Alayna as a widow. As if she and Griff were married. The thought didn’t strike so much as materialize within him. He wanted to be married to her.
Griff had never thought of their love as a teenaged love. They’d always had too much passion, too much commitment, too much longevity for that. His love for her had long since matured. Even in her absence. He wondered, though, as he pressed his mouth to hers before she stood to go get her things, if their relationship status matched their emotional status. Frankly, he was wondering if he should make her his wife.
It was with that thought on his face that he turned to Milla.
“Oh, boy,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she grinned. “I just know that look.”
“What look?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “That lovey-stubborn-holy-shit-me-Tarzan look that apparently all the men in this family come by honestly.”
Griff fixed his face back into his good old neutral expression. The one he’d been using for eight years to mask everything. The one that completely didn’t fit anymore. Not with Alayna grabbing her coat in the other room, about to come out and hold his hand. The smile flirted with the corners of his lips.
“See? You can’t even fully wipe it off.” Milla grinned, and in her trademark move, leaned over and kissed him full on the mouth. “It looks good on you, though, better than it did on my ugly brothers.”
She was up and out of her chair. “I’m gonna hit the bathroom before we leave.”
Griff finished his beer, then looked up to see John Alec frowning at him. “Hey, man, she kissed me.”
John Alec swiped a hand through the air like he didn’t for a second question the connection between him and his wife. “She kisses everyone.”
***
Ansel’s house was warm and bright and reminded Griff of Christmastime when he was a kid and his and Ruby’s parents were still alive. It was a silly thought. One he would have normally kept to himself. But Alayna was there, warm at his side, his sister had made lasagna from the smell of it, and Griff felt good.
He crossed the kitchen, patting Matt on the back, kissing Carmen in one of the dad’s arms and Mateo in the other. He bussed Inka on the cheek and nodded over at Kain who sat with Valentina across his lap in front of the fireplace. He finally made it to Ruby, who was just taking two huge sheets of lasagna out of the oven.
“It always feels like Christmas at your house,” Griff told her.
“What?” she asked, turning around and squinting at him. “Hi, by the way.” They hugged for a quick second.
“I mean that your house always feels the way Mom and Dad’s did at Christmas. When we were kids. I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Can’t explain it. Something about the good food and the, I don’t know, friendliness.”
To his horror, Ruby’s eyes filled with tears. This was what he got for running his mouth. But then she went up on her tiptoes and wrapped her arms around his neck. “That’s such a nice thing to say, Griffy.”
She went back down on her heels and wiped at her eyes with the hem of her red dress. “I’m sorry, I’m just really emotional right now.” Suddenly she grabbed his hand and pulled him out of the kitchen and down the back hall. She turned square toward him. “I have to tell you something before I tell anyone else.”
He immediately swooped down and picked her clear off the ground. “You’re pregnant.”
Her mouth dropped open, both at her reserved brother’s show of affection and that he’d gotten it in one. “How the hell did you know that?”
“Good guess. Plus you smell pregnant.” He carefully set her back down. “Oh my God, Rubes. That’s so fucking awesome. A kid. You’re gonna have a kid.”
“I know.” She blinked equally bemused eyes at him.
“Rubes, you’re gonna be the best mom in the entire world.” He said it with every ounce of sincerity that he possessed. “I should know. You already raised me.”
“Oh, Griffy.” Her eyes filled again.
Ansel stepped out of their bedroom, doing the buttons on his shirt, his hair damp from the shower. He looked up at the two of them.
Griff crossed the hall in two steps and threw his arms around Ansel. Not a back-slapping man hug. But a real hug. A hug between brothers.
Griff pulled back and his eyes were wet, too. He’d done more crying in the last few weeks than he had in his entire life before that, but it felt damn good. “That kid is lucky. To have you two. You think he or she will be a bear?”
Ansel chuckled. “Who knows? The kid’s from your family, too. Could end up being a catfish for all we could guess.”
Griff laughed.
A timer went off in the kitchen and Ruby wiped her eyes again.
“Ah, people?” Matt hovered at the kitchen end of the hallway. “I don’t mean to rush you, but there were a few things I wanted to say before I leave and my kids are reaching the danger zone.”
“Right,” Ruby said as she wiped her eyes again. “Right. Let’s get this show on the road.”
The group assembled in the living room with plates of lasagna and salad and bread on their laps. Griff sat on the floor, leaning on Alayna’s legs who sat on the couch behind him. He smiled when she took her leg away, rolled up her pants a few inches and replaced her bare ankle by his elbow, so they could be skin to skin. She seemed to have completely lost her worry about that.
“Right,” Matt said as he set his plate aside, baby Mateo in a bundle in his arms. “Thank you for coming. I just had a few things to say.”
“I thought me and Val called this meeting,” Kain called from where he lay spread on the ground, his hands behind his head.
“Oh,” Matt said, bouncing the baby when he started to fuss.
“I’m pregnant,” Ruby announced, standing up. Ansel stood behind her.
Pande
monium broke out.
“Oh my God!”
“You’re the man, Ansel!”
“How far along?”
“So this is a shotgun wedding, huh?”
“You’re glowing!”
Kisses and hugs all around and it surprised everyone when tough, reserved Valentina was the one who cried the hardest.
“And it looks like I’ll still be able to fit into my wedding dress in three weeks.”
Griff looked back at Alayna, who was glowing with the news, the happiness, and she widened her eyes in surprise.
A wedding?
She excitedly mouthed the words to Griff.
He grinned when he realized that that busy look on her face was her already deciding what she was going to wear.
When the excited hubbub died down, finally, Kain stood up. “I hate to put a damper on this mood. But Val and I have a few things we have to say about Herta. Things that really worried us when we were just there.”
Valentina rose up next to him, her hand laced through his. “There’s a group of shifters in revolt.”
“The ones who set fire to the main city?” Alayna asked and there was an unspoken question there, too, one that had Griff gripping the leg he was leaning back on. The ones who killed my father?
“Yes,” Valentina nodded. “And that’s good to have shifters in revolt. We’ve always wanted to find a way to get them to stand up for themselves, for what’s right.” She sighed and flipped her complicated braid back over one shoulder. “But there’s a problem as well. They don’t know any of the things we know about portals or getting back to Earth. The only thing they can do is kill hunters.”
“And in some cases,” Kain cut in, “innocent Hertian humans that they’ve come across.”
John Alec furrowed his brow and rose up from where he’d been seated next to Milla.
“They’re angry,” Valentina continued. “For very good reason. But they’re a large group, with no control or leadership, all of them are still struggling with Herta, they’re in constant pain, their brains always trying to force them back into slavery…” she trailed off at the magnitude of it.
“And what’s worse,” Kain said, “is that the rumor of them is scaring the shifters who haven’t joined the group. We had more than three shifters with us yesterday. We had five. But only three would come with us. The other two chose to stay in Herta, rather than come with me. Because they thought I was one of the radical shifters. They were scared of me.”
“Shit,” John Alec sat back down, dropping his head into one hand. Things had just gotten a lot more complicated.
“Maybe the radical shifters need a leader,” Inka suggested, stroking a hand over a sleeping Carmen’s back. “Or at least someone in their group who would be willing to parlay with us. It sounds like we’re generally on the same side here. Except for the killing civilians part. Which obviously has to stop immediately.”
“Right,” Valentina nodded. “We were thinking the same thing. We had an idea who that leader could be.” Her eyes landed on Griff. Actually, everyone’s eyes landed on Griff.
“Me?” Griff coughed on the dark beer he’d been swallowing.
“It makes sense, Griff,” Kain began, a cautious yet excited gleam in his eye. “Dude, you’re the Griffin, the one shifter who didn’t fold to Herta. You withstood public humiliation and torture for a year at the hands of the baddest mofo in Herta. You escaped Herta with the help of some other free shifter friends. You’re a badass. And all the shifters talk about you. Any of the shifters who aren’t sure they want to come with us, the second we tell them that the Griffin is waiting on the other side, immediately they’ll come.”
Griff opened his mouth; he saw a very big flaw in this plan. But he snapped it shut when Alayna spoke behind him.
“He’s right, baby.”
Griff felt the hairs on his arms stand up with surprised pleasure at the term of endearment from her. And so publicly. It just felt good. And so did her hand, cool and sweeping along the back of his neck.
“You have no idea what it’s like there, on Herta these days,” she continued. “The way other shifters talk about you. About the day you were rescued. About everything you endured, about your defiance toward my father… it inspires people. Humans and shifters alike. You could really make a difference. They would listen to you.”
Griff shook his head. “That may be. But there’s one humongous problem here.”
“Ah, I assume you’re referring to your inability to enter Herta?” Matt stood back up again, spit-up shining on his shirt and the baby asleep in his arms.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Well, great segue into what I was hoping to talk to everyone about. Two things, actually. One is a theory and one is a reality.” He handed the little bundled baby off to Kain, who was already holding his arms out for his nephew, and Matt turned to a folder of papers he’d brought with him.
Alayna recognized them immediately when he held them up. They were readouts, like the ones on his screen when he’d tested her before.
“You’ll all recognize these, since I’ve tested you all before. Here’s all of the Ketos’ readings and Griff’s, too.” Matt held them up as best as he could and all of them showed a line graph that started low and swooped upward before dropping down again.
Alayna’s heart dropped. She remembered what hers had looked like and it definitely wasn’t that.
“What’s it a reading of again?” Ansel asked as he leaned forward to squint at the papers.
“It’s a reading of your electromagnetic pulses. What kind of wavelengths your bodies give off. Your cells. Here’s me and Rube, and Alec and Val. AKA, the humans.” The charts were simply straight lines across the way. “Not too exciting. But here’s the really cool one. Alayna’s.”
He held up a single sheet of paper and sure enough, there was Alayna’s chart. It started high and swept low, only to swoop back up. It was the opposite of everyone else’s. Great. Just great. Why should she have expected anything any different than that? Again, she was on the outside.
Except, she wasn’t. Not really. Because the second her chart showed, Griff rose, lifted her up off the couch and rearranged them so she sat in his lap. His hand laced with hers and she remembered what he’d said before. He could be packed in thirty minutes. Ready to go wherever she wanted. As she looked around at his family, his loud, perfect family, she was just beginning to realize what a sacrifice that would have been for him. And he would have made it for her, no question.
“It’s the opposite of all of ours,” Milla noted, leaning forward as well.
“Not exactly,” Matt continued. “It’s the opposite shape of all of yours. But it’s actually the perfect opposite of only one of you. Of Griff.”
Again, all eyes on the two of them.
Matt held up a new sheet of paper. “When you combine Alayna and Griff’s wavelengths, mathematically, you get this.” The paper had a single straight line on it, just like the humans’ had.
Griff’s mouth dropped open.
“Griff, I think this is why you could survive on Herta for so long. I think contact with Alayna made your wavelengths much more human-like. So Herta couldn’t change you as fast. And Alayna, I think there’s a reason you shifted for the first time shortly after you weren’t seeing Griff anymore. I think he was making your wavelengths more human as well.”
Matt started pacing now. “I know that symbolically, Griff is the Griffin. The one defiant shifter who yadda yadda yadda. But practically, I think that you can’t have one of you without the other and get the same results. I think you’re both the Griffin.”
Alayna’s mouth dropped flat open to match Griff’s, but Matt didn’t give them a chance to respond.
“Which leads into the next part of my theory. Ansel told me what you did for Griff, Alayna, that you healed him after Herta damn near killed him,” Matt narrowed his eyes at Griff. “For the millionth time. Insanity is defined as repeating the same actions and expecting a dif
ferent result by the way.”
Griff grinned and gripped Alayna closer. He would have endured a hundred times that pain to have gotten the weekend directly afterward. All that naked Alayna time. God. Focus! Alayna pinched Griff’s arm, like she knew exactly where his mind had gone.
“But everything that Alayna has told me about her gift leads me to believe that the effects linger in a person, right?”
She nodded. “They fade. But it usually takes a few days for that person to stop feeling false affection for me, if that’s what you mean.”
Griff tightened his arms around her. He hated that she had to double guess who loved her and who didn’t. He’d spend the rest of his life trying to take that worry away from her.
“Alright, here it is,” Matt rubbed his hands together like he was warming them by a fire. “I think that if Griff was sort of ‘charged up’ by you before he went into Herta, and then you were there with him the whole time, I think he could go back. And stay there, for a while at least.”
Griff froze. The room froze. All except Kain who crowed with glee. “By ‘charged up’ you mean…”
Matt’s ears went pink.
“Oh my gawd!” Kain was having a field day. “Dr. Matt is prescribing a whole lot of naked time right before Herta. That’s incredible.”
“You’re honestly saying that I should sleep with my—” why did he want to say ‘wife’ so badly? “—girl right before we go through a portal and then everything will be alright?”
“Well, ah, I’m not sure that, ah, actual, ah, sex is necessary. But yes. You should be naked and you should be touching. A lot. For a long time, ah, prior.”
The room was all a little pink, grinning at one another and elbowing each other. Alayna regally ignored them all.
“Matt,” she called out. “I know that I’m a perfect match with Griff.” He squeezed her leg. “But would that wavelength still work with most shifters? Like, if I were to hold Milla’s hand in Herta and she were having a hard time, could I ease her discomfort?”
“I don’t think it would work as perfectly, but yes, I don’t see why it wouldn’t help.”