by Zoe Chant
“Not even your family?”
He shrugged, feeling awkward about the whole thing. There was no way to talk about his childhood without making the other person feel like they’d been put on the spot.
Nobody ever wants to come to a pity party, his uncle had told him once, so he’d learned a long time ago how to be brief.
“My parents were fly-by-night kind of people, always looking for the next get-rich-quick scheme, and I don’t think a kid really fit into their plans. They just kind of shuttled me off from relative to relative, and nobody was too happy about it. I guess I just never really settled down anywhere. I always felt like I was a board game piece that had wound up in the wrong box, like a Monopoly top hat in with a bunch of Scrabble tiles. Then I’d move again—but only over to a box of Yahtzee dice. It was even like that with my team, and I was—”
He had almost slipped up and said something about shifters. That would have made her trust in him plummet for sure. The last thing he needed to give her was a curveball revelation about people turning into animals.
He picked the story back up relatively smoothly, though: “And I was supposed to have more in common with them than with anyone. We were all doing the same job, and you know you have to care a lot about this job to stick with it and do it right.”
To be fair, that was part of it. The job should have given them something huge in common. Their inner animals—Roger’s jaguar, Cooper’s griffin, Phil’s dragon, and Monroe’s basilisk—should have just given them even more.
But Cooper had felt as far away from them as he’d always felt from everyone else.
“I figured if I couldn’t fit in there, I wasn’t going to fit in anywhere else, either, so I just decided to make the best of it and stop hauling up stakes all the time. I didn’t want to be like my parents. But it never did click. And no one in my office believed me.” He’d never let that hurt him before, but now that he knew what it felt like to have someone trust him, he realized how much that lack of trust had ached all along. “Roger, my old chief, visited me sometimes at Stridmont. But that’s just because he feels responsible for me even though he thinks I’m a bad seed. He doesn’t actually like me.”
Then again, he realized he couldn’t know for sure that Roger really liked Phil or Monroe, either. Roger was affable in a cliché, fatherly kind of way: he handed out shoulder pats and back slaps, he told bad jokes instead of making conversation, and he never said a harsh word about anybody. But underneath, there was never any real sense of warmth.
And when Roger concentrated on the thing he cared about the most—his research into shifter types—his chummy, dad-like looks had changed completely. In those moments, he had looked strange and relentless.
Roger’s slightly cheesy good nature had seemed real enough when it was all Cooper had had. But now that he’d spent time with Gretchen, now that he’d seen Martin Powell again, he could feel how flimsy Roger’s friendliness had always been.
Maybe—just maybe—Roger not warming up to him had had as much to do with Roger as it had with him.
“I’m sorry,” Gretchen said. She reached over and clasped his hand. “For what it’s worth, I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t have fit in. I like you. Martin likes you. Keith didn’t want to like you, but he still loosened up enough to make a joke with you, which means he likes you as much as I’ve ever seen him like anyone.”
He got a chuckle out of that but then immediately felt guilty about it, considering poor Keith was still back at the hospital with bandages wrapped around his head. “He is going to be okay, right?”
“One hundred percent. He’s... got good genes.”
Good genes?
His heart sank a little, and he scolded himself for it. If what Gretchen meant was that Keith, for all his prissiness, looked basically like a bronze statue of a Greek god, well, that wasn’t any of Cooper’s business. Maybe the sparring Gretchen and Keith had done was just a barbed form of flirting.
It was enough that Gretchen trusted him. He couldn’t possibly ask her to feel the same electric charge he’d felt.
She couldn’t possibly fall for him the way he’d fallen for her.
“Oh, sure,” he said. He was trying for “upbeat” and had landed more on “squeaky.”
“Are you okay?”
Get a grip, he advised himself.
If Gretchen had feelings for Keith, then Cooper was even more obligated to hope the kid came through all this okay.
He made himself very firmly say, “Good,” before he looked frantically for a change of subject. Luckily, they weren’t short on options. He redirected to a classic: “So, um, who do you think is trying to kill us?”
“Besides my wizards suggestion from earlier?”
“Besides that. I’m keeping it in mind, though.”
“Whoever is trying to kill us is mostly trying to kill you,” Gretchen said, and Cooper could tell by the sound of her voice that she was thinking out loud, trusting him to act as a sounding board. “They had a go at you in Stridmont, and they didn’t give up there. Unless you think that was unrelated. The guard I talked to didn’t seem to have a clue why it had happened, but he didn’t strike me as somebody who wanted to break a sweat trying to figure it out, either.”
He told her everything he remembered about the incident in the exercise yard, but it all boiled down to the fact that it was hard to say for sure. The guy with the shiv had sure seemed like he’d had someone else pulling his strings—and helping him get high as a kite—but drugs could make people paranoid, and Ferret Face might have been seeing conspiracies where they didn’t exist.
“Occam’s razor, though,” Gretchen said. “Simplest explanation is always the best. That’s the rule that gave us the chameleon car, and I think it gives us a murder conspiracy here, too. Someone paid your Ferret Face guy to go after you, and when he didn’t get the job done, they either came after you themselves or sent someone else.”
“Yeah. I think so too.” He took a deep breath. “And I think—I’ve thought since they pulled me out of Stridmont—that the same person is behind everything else, too. Phil’s death. The leaked Witness Protection information. They framed me, but it wasn’t enough. They decided to get rid of me, too.”
Because why take any chances? If he ever did find someone to take his appeal, there was always the hope that some new evidence would come to light.
The actual culprit must have sweated each and every day Cooper was still alive. Their first murder attempt hadn’t worked, but they were rolling with the punches. They’d realized this long-haul trip was the perfect chance to stop all that nervousness once and for all.
“Well, good,” Gretchen said, more perkily than he would have guessed. “That consolidates things. We’re only in a chase with one guilty party. It’s nice to have a bright side.”
She was the only bright side he needed. The days in prison had been long, and the nights had been even longer. He’d known that much—but he hadn’t realized how narrow and dark his life had been before that, too. He hadn’t realized how long he’d really been lonely.
All his life—until her.
So as long as she was on his side, he didn’t know that he even cared about anything else. He could give up his freedom for her without even thinking about it. It wasn’t even about trading a sure-thing escape for an uncertain exoneration, it was about knowing that Gretchen Miller had found him to be somebody worth trusting. Gretchen, who could afford to pick and choose the people she cared about, had chosen him, even when there were a thousand reasons not to. She’d trusted him—she’d shaken his hand and taken his chains off.
Nothing else mattered even half as much as that.
But if there was some hope of being exonerated, however faint, he had to try for it.
I could live a whole life with her.
That was a fantasy. He might never get out. She might already like Keith, or she might already be dating someone he knew nothing about. But at least for right now, he could let himself
dream. It would be a little sweetness to cut through all the darkness they were dealing with.
“I like a bright side too,” Cooper said, letting himself look at her for just a second too long. He hoped she didn’t notice.
“So we have a long car ride to solve a mystery,” Gretchen said, still sounding purposefully upbeat. Cooper figured that meant that she was as worried about the gathering clouds as he was. “We’ll be like Nero Wolfe—some great detective who doesn’t even have to leave his house to solve a murder.”
“Brilliant traveling detectives,” Cooper agreed. “That’s us.”
“Only...” She trailed off.
“Only you don’t know where to start?”
“Not a clue. You?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been thinking it over for six months, and I haven’t gotten anywhere. The only people who would have normally been able to access the leaked files were me and Phil, and I know it wasn’t me—”
“I know that too,” Gretchen said.
Cooper couldn’t keep himself from smiling. He’d never get tired of hearing that she believed him. “And I don’t see how it could have been Phil. People who want to commit crimes and want to cover them up do a lot of things, but they don’t kill themselves and then hide the gun in someone else’s house. It’s a bridge too far.”
Thinking about Phil’s death definitely wiped the smile off his face.
“I’m sorry,” Gretchen said, glancing over at him. “I hadn’t really gotten to the part in my head where since you didn’t kill your friend, you lost him, instead. It must have been pretty hard to try to grieve him with everything else going on.”
“It was, but...”
He had never told anybody the full story of his last few days with Phil. He’d started to tell his lawyer, but the guy had cut him off and warned him not to say anything that could make him look worse than he already did. Stories about arguing with the murder victim definitely qualified.
If he told Gretchen, there was a chance he would look over at her and see her trust in him, which he valued more than anything else, vanish right before his eyes.
For a second the words stuck in his throat.
He couldn’t stand the thought of her turning away from him.
But if he didn’t tell her the truth, he wouldn’t deserve her trust, and he knew it. He had to be worthy of her even if it killed him.
“I don’t know if this makes sense or not, but I didn’t grieve him as much as I would have wanted to. I wish we’d been closer. We didn’t always see eye-to-eye. Phil wasn’t even really talking to me when...”
Gretchen was right. What grief he’d had was still unresolved and messy. He had to choke down a lot of tangled feelings to keep going.
“When he died,” he finished.
She didn’t stiffen up or lean away from him. Her voice was still warm when she said, “What happened?”
“We were getting a new witness settled in. I’ll never see her again, I know that—they must have moved her all the way across the country after I got arrested, and that’s for the best. She was a good person, and she deserved to be far, far away from whoever was selling off my witnesses like cattle. I hope she’s okay. She was a single mom with two kids, one a colicky baby and the other just old enough to understand what was going on and hate that he’d never see his friends again. She was exhausted and frazzled, so I figured it would be good if she didn’t have to worry about anything for a few days except getting her family settled in. I asked her what groceries I could pick up for her—pantry staples, you know, and what the kids might like as a special treat. She was so relieved, she almost started crying.”
Gretchen squeezed his arm. There was a little bit of dampness on her eyelashes, Cooper noticed, like she was ready to cry too. “I knew it,” she said, almost to herself. “I knew that’s the kind of guy you were. What could Phil possibly object to about that?”
“I messed up our schedule. We were supposed to go out for drinks to wind down. He said I was a bleeding heart, that I didn’t care enough about the team, that I didn’t want to fit in. He said he’d just about had it with trying to help me. I’d never seen him so angry.”
She was quiet for a second and then said, “I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead...”
“No, I know,” Cooper said. “I feel bad saying it now, because of everything that happened. And even with all of that, he was the closest thing I had to a friend back then. But he could be kind of a dick sometimes. He was impatient, and if things weren’t going the way he wanted them to, he’d get pretty angry about it. Like, literally hot under the collar—you could see his neck turn bright red.”
Cooper had sometimes even been able to see Phil’s bright crimson dragonmarks flare up. For some reason, the sight had always made his griffin uneasy.
“I hope he kept that under control around civilians,” Gretchen said.
“He did. Always. But when he got you alone, he’d let you have it—just like he let me have it that night.” He exhaled. “I just assumed there’d be time to patch things up with him, so I didn’t worry about it too much. I was wrong, though. That was one of the last times we saw each other.”
“None of that’s on you,” Gretchen said quietly. “He shouldn’t have gotten upset about you trying to do the right thing. You were just trying to look out for your witness. I wouldn’t have cared about patching things up with him at all, not after that.”
Cooper didn’t know what to say. He could see why she wouldn’t have cared... but she had Martin, an upstanding, laidback, funny, and fundamentally good chief who’d handpicked her as his successor. She had a team that she knew would worry about her.
He’d had Phil, and that was it. No one else on the team had ever even really tried to get to know him. Monroe had just ignored him, and Roger had just given him platitudes about how he should go along to get along and how there was no I in team.
“It wasn’t all bad.” He needed to avoid too much self-pity. “Phil was... self-centered, but he was funny, too, and he poured a lot of energy into trying to get me to fit in with the rest of the team. They’d all worked together for years, and I was the first new face they’d seen in a while. Phil was the only one who was really enthusiastic about me. I think that’s why he got so mad when he thought I didn’t appreciate it—he was making an effort to bring me into their little circle, and I wasn’t going along.”
His memories of Phil had, for so long, been painful, and it was nice to finally have the chance to talk them out with someone who understood. Gretchen wouldn’t judge him, no matter what he said.
Finally, it felt like he’d exorcised the last of Phil’s ghost. He’d let him go now. Everything that their partnership had been—good, bad, and otherwise—was behind him, and he could close the book on it.
“What about everyone else?” Gretchen said. “They didn’t reach out to you at all?”
“Not much. There was Roger, our chief, and a guy named Monroe. If Phil ran hot, Monroe ran—runs, I guess, he’s still there as far as I know—cold. And Roger’s a hard person to understand once you get past the surface. He...” He didn’t know how to explain what was up with Roger without getting into the truth about shifters, and Gretchen had already dealt with enough today without finding out about all of that. “He’s a little weird,” he finished weakly.
He couldn’t think of a human equivalent for Roger. Those people who wanted to have surgeries to give themselves cat ears or make themselves look like Barbie or Ken dolls?
Gretchen didn’t push him on it, thankfully. “And Monroe?”
“Hard to read. He kept to himself a lot.”
The most he’d ever heard Monroe say at once, probably, was Monroe tearing into the legend that basilisk shifters could kill people by looking at them. That’s just a kid’s story, Monroe had said irritably. Our powers work like a scalpel, not like a sledgehammer. But he’d never elaborated more than that, which meant that the most Cooper had heard him say at once still
wasn’t very much.
His old team had been a strange bunch, that much was true, and it was nice to think that he hadn’t been the problem. There was something kind of liberating in knowing that Gretchen thought that he’d deserved more friendship there than he’d gotten.
He had always felt inherently broken, like he hadn’t found a family or a circle of close friends because there’d been something wrong with him all along. But... maybe he’d just had bad luck.
If that was true, he could hope for something better someday.
Gretchen was thinking about something else, though. Her voice was cautious as she said, “And Roger and Monroe... would they have had access to the leaked files?”
Cooper started. In all the time he’d had to think, he’d never thought of that. They were all Marshals, and they were all shifters, and those common bonds had to mean some kind of loyalty, right?
Luckily, he didn’t have to think about it for more than a second.
“No. Not even Roger had access to our files—not that I know of, anyway. And Roger and Monroe couldn’t have hacked their way through wet paper bags. They’re both old-fashioned—without me or Phil or around, I don’t even know how they’re managing to check their email.”
“Then it has to be the mob.”
She sounded as relieved as he felt. No Marshal wanted to investigate other Marshals.
Though his old team had investigated him awfully quickly.
“They hacked the files, stole the info, and killed their witnesses. Once the heat was on, Phil must have noticed something, so they killed him and framed me for everything. That way...” Cooper grimaced. “It’s like we’re sitting on a ticking time bomb. If all this is true, then they probably still have a way to see all the witness information. They can pluck witnesses out of our system like getting an apple off a tree, anytime they want, because nobody would have overhauled the system when they thought that it was just one corrupt Marshal. All of this could happen again.”
And when it did, someone like Gretchen could be the scapegoat. He couldn’t let that happen.