by Chant, Zoe
They could deal with that when they got to it.
Delphine followed him out, wrapped up in his winter coat and gloves over her own jacket. Her own scarf and hat looked incongruous next to his clothing; his stuff was heavy and dark, thick wool half-felted with age and wear, while hers were dainty, pale blue with matching snowflake patterns.
She pushed her hands deep into his pockets and he hoped like hell he hadn’t left an old handkerchief or worse in there.
Hardwick rolled his shoulders back. “How much experience do you have flying?”
It wasn’t meant as a challenge. Delphine clearly took it as one, anyway. She gave him a long, hard sideways look.
“…None being flown around by someone else,” she said carefully, and it was the truth.
“Can’t say I have much experience flying anyone else around, myself.”
“How did you get me up here yesterday?”
“Grabbed you in my claws.”
She went slightly pale. “Let’s try something else,” she suggested. “Sometimes when my family’s all together, we—uh, my brothers and cousins—will shift mid-air and practice landing on each other’s backs. To mess up each other’s flying. And they take the younger kids for rides, sometimes…”
“But not you?”
Her expression jerked strangely. “We didn’t spend a lot of time with the family when I was big enough that my parents would have let me, and not yet the age where I… where… most Belgraves start being able to shift for themselves.” Her shoulders hunched.
That’s a story with a lot missing, Hardwick thought.
But it was more of a story than he’d expected. And more truth than he’d expected, too.
“We can try that,” he said out loud. “You on my shoulders?”
Delphine nodded, but didn’t make any move. He sighed. “I know some shifters don’t care about this sort of thing, but I’d prefer it if you turned around.”
“Oh!” Delphine spun around. “I’m sorry, I thought—”
“What?” Hardwick pulled off his shirt. The air was dry and still, but even with that and his natural shifter hardiness, he only had a few minutes before the cold started to get to him. “Belgraves are all nudists, or something?”
It wouldn’t be unusual. Plenty of shifters had lower boundaries around nudity than humans did. Hardwick was the same, when the person he was being ass naked in front of wasn’t his mate.
“Belgraves have jumped on the discovery that you can shift and take your clothes with you, actually.” Her voice sparkled with amusement.
“You’re shitting me.”
“No, it’s definitely a thing. They like to compete over how many expensive accessories they can bring with them without dissolving into a pile of sparks. One of my brothers has destroyed three phones in the last year messing it up.”
“You’ll have to tell me more about it—” Hardwick stopped himself. “Never mind.”
Because after he dropped her off, there weren’t going to be any opportunities for either of them to tell the other anything.
He checked to make sure she was still looking away, got ready to shuck off his pants and boots, and concentrated on his griffin. Just as he was about to shift, Delphine held up a hand.
“Wait!”
He cursed silently, held onto his pants, and waited.
Delphine didn’t turn around. “I won’t… be able to communicate with you when you’re in your griffin form,” she admitted.
“You can still talk to me. I’m the one who’ll have trouble making myself heard.”
The damned connection. It pricked at him, urging him to close the distance between them. He couldn’t let himself do that physically.
But that wasn’t the only option. She’d told him something of herself that she might not have intended, if she didn’t know he’d be able to tell she was lying. He could return the gesture.
“Talking isn’t the only way to communicate,” he said. “My griffin doesn’t talk at all, and we get on fine.”
“It doesn’t talk at all?” Delphine’s eyebrows disappeared under her woolly hat. “I didn’t know that was possible.”
Hardwick shrugged. “Some people don’t, so why not our animals? And like I said, we don’t need words to get the message across. It uses sign language, I guess.”
She spun around. “Does that mean you can see—”
He could sure as hell see the effort it took her to cut herself off. And the shame that tightened her face, pushing away the sudden, bright interest that had lit her up from the inside.
His jaw hardened. She never got to ask questions like this, did she? If she spent all her time pretending she already was a shifter and therefore knew all about it.
“Go on,” he urged her gently.
She looked guilty. She actually glanced around the clearing, as though she was worried someone was listening in. “You can see your griffin, even when you’re in human form?”
“Better than I can when I’m in griffin form. We don’t exactly spend a lot of time sitting in front of a mirror.” He watched her carefully. “If I close my eyes, I can bring it up. Like revisiting a memory, or a picture.”
“And it communicates to you through sign language?”
“Body language would be more accurate. Movements, gestures.”
Or it just stares at me like I’m the world’s biggest asshole. Like it was doing then. He huffed out a breath. All right, buddy. You want to be the one to tell her we’re meant to be together, but every minute in her presence leaves me this much closer to a weeklong migraine?
It shuffled its wings in unhappy acknowledgement.
“That’s—” Delphine shook her head slowly. Some of the light was back in her eyes, now. Not all. “That makes sense. It’s harder to lie with body language than with words.”
Hardwick’s jaw tightened again. That wasn’t the message he’d meant her to get! He sighed, rubbing the side of his jaw where the muscles were starting to jump. “Let’s just get moving.”
“Promise if you need to say something to me while we’re in the air, you’ll wait to land before you try to tell me anything that involves barrel rolls or loop-the-loops?”
Hardwick let out a surprised bark of laughter. “I’ll do my best.”
His head was spinning as he tried to concentrate on shifting. Every time he thought he could put Delphine in a box—a box labelled ‘liar’ or ‘too much trouble’—she said something that went straight to his heart. Or his funny bone, which was even more impressive. He hadn’t thought he had one of those left.
And that second box didn’t fit, anyway. He was the one who was too much trouble.
Delphine turned away again, and he focused on his griffin. Shifting was easier and harder than it had been the night before, when he and his griffin had both been frantic with worry for Delphine. Easier, because although he was used to managing his own fear response in difficult situations, he didn’t have any experience with his griffin being in those situations. Harder, because without the urgency of saving Delphine’s life, calling his griffin out was like trying to get a rusty engine to fire.
After a few moments, though, he began to transform. Lights danced in his eyes and he closed them, letting the shift take over as he cast off the rest of his clothing. There was a feeling like a cool wind blowing over his whole body and he dropped to all fours.
His griffin flexed its back, stretching out knots that his human body hadn’t acknowledged. He scooped up his discarded clothing in one foreclaw and tossed it over to the cabin door. He—
Shit.
He was going to need those clothes for the other end of this little trip.
He paced over to the door and hooked his trousers on one claw. While he was still trying to decide on the least embarrassing and most efficient way to act out ‘could you carry my clothes for me while I fly you to your car,’ Delphine turned to face him.
Her eyes went wide.
Hardwick’s griffin was nothing special.
He knew that. His parents had both been griffin shifters; his mom’s feathers were a brilliant, shimmering mahogany merging into silver-dusted hindquarters, and his father had gleaming black feathers with hints of gold at his chest and around his eyes.
Hardwick was grey. Shabby grey, from beak to tail.
“Gosh,” Delphine breathed. “You’re—I mean—I’ve never seen a griffin before.” Her eyebrows drew together, and she pursed her lips, as though she was thinking over something quickly. “Which I already told you, and it is the truth. I thought you’d be more like a winged lion, but you’re—”
He didn’t want to hear what he was. His griffin flicked its tail, indicating its desire to get moving and leave this conversation behind. To his surprise, Delphine caught on at once.
She walked closer to him, her footsteps slow and careful in the snow. He tried not to shuffle his feet as her eyes coasted from his huge, grey-feathered eagle’s head to his hindquarters the color of a lion who’d rolled around in a fireplace. “Behind your shoulders. Okay. Would you mind kneeling down?”
Standing, with his neck stooped, his eyes were almost level with Delphine’s. He crouched down, snow crunching beneath claws and heavy paws as she moved towards him.
“Nothing to worry about. Just like getting on a horse,” she muttered to herself, and his griffin hissed. Delphine jerked back. “Sorry! Sorry, I—wasn’t thinking. I’ll be more careful.”
He was the one who needed to be careful. It was so much harder to disguise his griffin’s reactions in this form. And although she knew he could tell when people were lying, he’d kept quiet about the pain it caused him. He didn’t want her to know that the reason he was all the way out here in the mountains was that he was hiding.
Delphine put a gentle hand out to rest against his side. Her touch was muffled by the thick gloves she was wearing, but it was still touch. Deliberate touch.
He curled his talons more securely around his trousers. He would need to get dressed fast once he shifted back into human form.
“I’m going to use your fore-leg as a step,” she warned him, then swung herself up. She overshot, and Hardwick moved beneath her to keep her balanced until she could steady herself. “Oof! I think I’ve got it now. Thank you.”
She put one hand on each shoulder, gripping the bases of his wings where they sprouted from his back. Hardwick held still.
“No mane,” she murmured. “I didn’t think of that. I don’t want to pull any of your feathers out.”
Hardwick tried to shrug without dislodging her. She shifted her weight slightly, and the strange feeling of having someone on his griffin’s back became, if no less strange, at least less precarious feeling.
“Okay.” Her voice was more confident now. “Try standing up?”
Hardwick got to his feet. Slowly. Delphine’s breathing shallowed nervously, but she didn’t overbalance.
He looked back at her over his shoulder. She wasn’t pale or showing any other tell-tale signs of fear. In fact, she looked cautiously excited.
He wondered if she would say as much. Ironic, really, that he was the one having to read her body language and not just the other way around.
His griffin tipped its head to one side. It wanted to get into the air; it wanted, Hardwick realized with a lurch, to show off.
“Is that you asking if I’m ready to take off?” Delphine looked over his head for a moment, past the ring of snow-covered trees around the edge of the clearing, to the cloud-thick sky. “Yes. I’m ready.”
All right, he told it. Easy, though.
His griffin stretched out its wings. From above, it must have looked like someone had spread gravel in front of the cabin. He beat the air once, twice, testing it for lift and the small eddies of breezes that sifted through the trees, then on the third stroke leapt into the air.
The icy air wasn’t the best for flying. It was even worse for flying from ground level, with a woman clinging to his back. He should have launched himself from the cabin roof—if he’d thought it would hold his weight.
Too late now. He beat his wings against the frigid air, fighting to gain enough height that he could simply glide the rest of the way to where Delphine had crashed her car.
Delphine’s knees dug into his sides. And her elbows. Her hands twisted in the feathers just above his shoulders. Could sheer terror break a mate bond? He was sure he was about to find out.
Finally, he was far enough above the canopy that he could stop flapping and stretch his wings out. He made sure he was flying steady, then snuck a look at Delphine over his shoulder.
She was smiling as though her heart was about to burst with joy.
A ripple of warmth went through him. She caught his eye and her smile changed. The first smile had been open, unintentional, a straight transfer of feelings to expression.
This smile was for him. And this new smile wasn’t hiding those feelings or translating them into something she thought he would prefer. It was inviting him to join in her happiness, her energy, the sheer joy radiating through her.
He didn’t want the flight to end.
But soon enough, it did.
Chapter Eleven
Delphine
The mood changed as soon as Hardwick landed. No, that wasn’t fair. There was no universal mood that changed. It was her. Her mood. Her workaday self, wrapping back around her true self like an old, itchy coat.
She wished the flight could have lasted longer. That she could have caught it and frozen it in place, like a scene in a snow globe, and never had to move on to deal with whatever was coming next.
Especially when what came next was this.
She frowned as she slipped down from Hardwick’s back into knee-deep snow. The road looked nothing like what she remembered from the previous night. But it had been night, after all. The whole world had seemed ghostly and strange.
A memory from the night before rose up in her mind. Sitting in the car with the engine and all the lights off, and the darkness all around. No one watching. No expectations.
“Is this the right place?” she asked to distract herself from the unsettling sensation in her stomach. “Where’s the car?”
Hardwick blinked at her. She could imagine the look that would have been on his face if he was in human form, and she didn’t need fifteen years of decoding her relatives’ moods when they were in animal form to translate the stiff-legged way he stalked to the side of the road. One swipe of his claws, then another, and the front bumper of her rental car appeared.
He shook snow off his legs and moved back. Delphine gaped.
She’d known it had been snowing, of course, but…
There was a good foot-and-a-half of snow above the car. Above the car’s front bumper. More, over the rest of the car where it had fallen deeper into the ditch.
More, over the hole she must have made for herself, falling backwards into it. Much more.
Delphine swallowed.
She’d forgotten. Or let herself forget. She’d let Hardwick’s lie-detecting powers, and what that meant, distract her. She’d twisted herself in circles trying to reason her way around the strange feelings that gripped her chest whenever she looked at Hardwick, or thought about him, or thought about him looking at her. And this part of yesterday’s adventure had faded into the background.
If Hardwick hadn’t gotten here when he did—
“Can you get it back on the road?” she blurted out.
The griffin gave her a sidelong glance that looked so much like his human expression that she had to bite her tongue to stop a burst of nervous laughter. Then he shrugged and moved closer to the snow-bound car.
He inspected the car, and she inspected him.
When he’d said he was a griffin shifter, she’d expected something like her winged lion relatives: a stocky, powerful lion body, with wings, and a bit of eagle. Hardwick’s griffin form was nothing like that. The front half of his body, the eagle part, was streamlined and sharp. The lion part was lean and graceful. He
looked like a creature made to glide through the air, not smash through it like winged lion shifters did. His feathers and fur melded seamlessly into one another, soft-looking grey that made her think of stones washed smooth by water, or the ash in a fireplace after a long, romantic evening.
Not romantic. A long something-else evening. Oh … good.
Hardwick jerked his head at her. She took his meaning and kicked her way through the snow until she was out of the way. She was beginning to wish she’d brought thicker trousers—or waterproof ones. When her boss did venture to colder regions for his work, it was to places that were more decoratively snowy than deeply snowy. Last Christmas had been an exception, but she’d barely ventured beyond the town then.
Had Hardwick been here last year, as well?
What if he had been? What if they had met, with only her mother and brothers to worry about, and not her whole extended family? Would she have been more willing to entertain the thought that her sudden attraction to him was more than just a crush?
What if it was more?
Her first instinct was to grab the thought and hide it away. She forced herself to let it go and it rolled over her like a cool breeze.
What if what she felt for Hardwick was more than she’d let herself believe?
She’d lain in bed the night before, aggravatingly awake, her ears straining for any sound from the next room. She’d pressed her face into the pillow, searching for any sign of his scent—she didn’t even know what he smelled like! They had barely touched. Just that moment on the sofa, when he’d gently checked the bruise on the back of her head.
Except he must have touched her before that. Carried her into the cabin, wrapped her in blankets. His hands around her back and legs, steadying her head as he laid her down, tucking the woolen blankets around her body.
Delphine gasped as heat surged through her. She could almost feel the ghostly pressure of Hardwick’s hands on her. She was making it up, of course. She couldn’t remember anything before she woke up on the sofa and by that time Hardwick had fled to the other side of the room.
But he’d been close to her. He’d touched her. Which meant he would know, surely, if they were mates.