by Zoe Chant
We’re not going to let that happen, his griffin growled.
He found himself in a tussle with Roger, rolling around on the ground. They were a hurricane of feathers, fur, scales, and claws, and he wasn’t sure which one of them was winning. At least Roger, who only cared about himself, was probably still feeling every bite and scratch. Cooper was beyond all that now.
Though he did feel the terrifying pull of gravity as they tumbled down the mountainside, caught in a brief freefall before they both remembered their wings.
They just hung there in the sky and stared each other down, each of them trying to decide what move to make next. They were both hurt, but neither one of them was badly injured enough yet to even think about giving up. Roger might only have had his own life at stake, but Roger liked his life a lot. He’d worked hard to have it, as poisonous and awful as it was.
Cooper wanted to ask him so many questions.
Why had he done it? Why had he done any of it? Had he ever cared about the job at all, or had it been a sick moneymaking opportunity from the start?
And the chimera creature that he was now, this warped blend of a dozen different animals—did it even have a voice inside his head, or had he traded away his true soul for an aching, crowded silence?
Cooper knew what that silence could feel like—but even when he hadn’t known if his griffin was buried beneath it or not, he’d still known he was there. At least he had always known who he was.
A cool, almost serene steadiness came over him. It was the kind of steely calm that had been in Gretchen’s voice when she’d been taking aim at Roger, and feeling it seemed to connect him to her even more.
He could feel a kind of ribbon of light stretching out between the two of them, like their love was tying them together.
No matter what happened today, they had, and would always have, an unbreakable bond; they would always have a kind of happiness that Roger never could. And while he was still scared of what could be happening to her back where she had fallen, he knew she was alive.
He could feel her soul in the same way he could feel his own.
Maybe he couldn’t ask Roger any of the thousand questions he had. But in Gretchen, and in his own heart, Cooper already had all the answers he really needed.
He’d spent months behind bars, unable to act. Now he was free.
And if Roger thought he could stand in the way of all that, Coop was happy to prove him wrong.
He spiraled up into the sky, making Roger chase after him, only to dive bomb down, his claws brandished.
You hurt my mate.
All of his other grievances against Roger had left his mind. This one had more power than all the rest, and it would be enough to make him win this fight.
He lashed out at Roger, clawing into him and dodging a burst of weak dragonfire. Roger might have had plenty of powers Cooper didn’t, but he was way less agile. His shifter forms had never been meant to be stitched together into this crazy patchwork quilt, and it was like the different parts of his body were pulling against each other. And each bite from Cooper made him look even stranger, as he took on griffin traits too, sprouting additional feathers and a lion’s tail. So this monstrous form, never especially nimble, was now constantly becoming less familiar to him. He was spitting acid and flames because he didn’t have the coordination for anything else.
But Cooper did. He knocked into Roger and the two of them rolled through the air. He got burned and blistered in the process, but he barely even felt it.
Roger snapped at him, trying to tear Cooper with his teeth. Cooper rolled to dodge him—and the two of them hit the sheer side of the cliff.
Roger spat a final puff of flame at him. The angry, insane light in his red-and-black eyes was dying out, as if that last collision had been too much for him.
Change back, Cooper thought. Don’t die like this. Part of you was human once.
But Roger had never put much stock in humanity, especially not compared to the shift form he’d worked so hard to mutilate to his desires. He became dead weight, his wings failing him.
Just like that, he dropped out of the sky, falling hundreds of feet down to the rocks below.
Roger was done.
And from as high up as Cooper was now, he looked very small and insignificant. Eventually, the wilderness surrounding the mountain would close over him, turning him once again into something natural.
And for all he’d tried to ruin Cooper’s life, eventually Cooper would stop even thinking about him.
In fact, he had already stopped: there was only one person he was thinking of right now.
Gretchen.
Cooper raced back to the mountaintop, and his heart stopped in his chest.
Gretchen wasn’t there. He could still see the place where she had fallen, with the spots of blood and the disarrayed grass to let him know that he wasn’t going crazy. She had been there. But now she was gone. The place was deserted.
Monroe? Had he gotten over his scruples and dragged her off after all? His car was gone.
Then, thank God, he noticed a few stray drops of blood leading away, down the road. He followed the trail they made, his keen griffin eyes fixed so tightly on them that the whole rest of the world had become a blur of green and brown.
“Coop!”
Her voice, even as weak as it was, was the sweetest sound in the world. He saw her up ahead of him, struggling down the road alone, one hand braced against the rock to hold herself up. He landed and shifted back to human, taking her in his arms before he’d even lost all of his feathers.
She hugged him back just as fiercely.
“You were gone,” Cooper said, unable to put into words exactly how terrifying it had been to find her missing.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to worry you. But—Phil.” She pointed down the trail, and her jaw was now grimly set. “The cuffs are slowing him down, but he’s getting away.” She cleared her throat. “Roger?”
“Dead,” Cooper said shortly. “Monroe?”
“He ran off too, and since he had the car, he did it a lot faster than Phil could. I tried to shoot his tires out, but he messed with my sight again: all I did was shoot up some rocks. And getting to Phil is more important than anything with Monroe.” She touched his cheek gently, wiping off what he suspected was a streak of blood. “I need Phil so we can save you. You have to go get him, Coop. I can’t catch up, not like this.”
He knew she was right—but he knew with an equal certainty that he couldn’t make himself leave her again, not when he had just gotten her back, not after thinking that he’d lost her.
Luckily, he knew just what to do.
He leaned in and kissed her. Everything else faded away, and all he could feel was the soft heat of her mouth. She still tasted like peppermint from the toothpaste back at Ford’s motel, even though that morning felt like it had been a hundred years ago. He wanted to make love to her in that bed again. He wanted to make love to her everywhere he could think of, for the rest of their lives.
“I’ll shift,” he said against her lips. “Can you hold onto me? We’ll go down together.”
“Are you sure? You’re still hurt—it can’t be good for you to carry me. And I’m not sure I’ll make the best backup right now.”
“I don’t need you to be backup.” He pushed his fingers through her hair, loving how silky the sleek dark strands felt against his skin. “I just need you to be you. I just spent enough time away from you. I’m done with it. I’m always better with you than without.”
He could feel her smile against his mouth, letting him know her answer before she actually gave it.
He shifted and lowered himself to the ground, making it as easy as possible for Gretchen to climb on top of him. His griffin’s back was easy for her to straddle, and she held him with her knees as well as her arms around his shoulders. She might have been feeling weak, but her hold still felt strong and unshakeable.
Maybe it was just always easy for them to hold onto
each other.
Cooper lit up into the air again, racing down the mountain. Unlike Phil, he wasn’t stuck with the treacherous, twisty road. As the griffin flew, the route was a lot shorter.
It was one hell of a mountain, and Phil had a long way down. They were still hundreds of feet from the ground when Cooper caught up with him.
Phil turned to look over his shoulder. When he saw the griffin barreling down towards him, a hundred different emotions seemed to cross his face. One of them, definitely, was relief that it at least wasn’t Roger’s horrible chimera. But another was rage, plain and simple. Somehow, during his stumbling trip down the road, Phil had already started thinking he was going to get away with everything yet again.
And now he knew, once and for all, that he wouldn’t.
Then Phil flung himself over the side.
Time seemed to freeze.
I overestimated him, Cooper thought, stunned. I thought he’d know when it was over, but he didn’t.
Phil had forgotten about the shiftsilver handcuffs. Even though they were the whole reason he’d been struggling to jog down the mountain in the first place, when his instincts had taken over, his arrogance had taken over along with them. Of course he could escape. He’d always escaped before. His reflexes had overruled his brain.
All of that passed through Cooper’s mind in a fraction of a second. He didn’t have time to really think about what he was going to do—he had no more time than Phil had.
He dove down, trusting Gretchen to keep her tight hold on him. He was racing a falling body that had had a head start, and there wasn’t much time—or much distance to the ground.
He snagged Phil with his talons, plucking him out of the air when he was maybe six feet above the rocky ground that would have killed him as surely as it had Roger.
For a moment, he couldn’t believe what he’d done. He could barely breathe.
He was going to look down and find that he had missed Phil after all. He was going to see Phil lying at the foot of the mountain, all Cooper’s hopes shattered along with him.
Gretchen stroked Cooper’s feathers. She leaned forward, lying against his neck, touching him as much as possible.
“It’s all right,” she said. Her voice was the only thing that could have broken through the icy panic that had frozen him in place. “You caught him. Everything’s okay.”
He came back to himself at the sound of her. He knew he always would.
21
“It’s good to be home,” Gretchen said.
Cooper looked around the bustling, chaotic office. “It’s good to be anywhere, really. But is it always like this?”
The two of them were currently serving as the still center to all the hubbub. Theo was submitting a glowering Phil to the kind of thorough, creative tongue-lashing only a dragon could give another dragon. Martin was in the middle of bulldozing straight through any attempts to take Cooper back into Stridmont’s custody, even for the night: it seemed to involve a lot of yelling. Colby had decided that the one thing everybody needed right now was comfort food, so he’d set up shop in the office kitchen and was now making grilled cheese sandwiches, intermittently calling out to ask if anyone wanted tomato or bacon on theirs. Keith was blissfully quiet, zonked out on the office sofa and oblivious to all the noise. He still had a bandage on his head.
“There’s usually less shouting,” Gretchen amended. “And normally you couldn’t pay Theo to dress somebody down like this. But it’s pretty spot on for Colby.”
“Then I like Colby,” Cooper said, just as Colby came around the corner bearing two grilled cheeses. They were displayed with a kind of deli-style neatness, each surrounded by chips and a pickle spear.
“Thanks,” Colby said, handing their sandwiches over. “I like you too. Any mate of Gretchen’s is a friend of mine.” He leaned over and kissed the top of Gretchen’s head.
She swallowed down the lump in her throat. Seeing the team rally around her and Cooper had already made her cry three times in the last hour. She didn’t want to make it four.
“Wait until you find out what my new shift form is,” she said.
“Wait, what?” Pure delight lit up his face, making him immediately look like one of her kid brothers. “You can shift now?”
“I’m a lynx-falcon griffin.”
There was a pause where she could see Colby mentally drawing a picture of this in his imagination, and his grin only got wider—right up until it comically deflated. “Wait, now I’m the only person in this office who can’t fly?”
Gretchen reached up to pat him on the shoulder, but she couldn’t get much higher than his arm. She patted there instead. “Lots of people can’t fly, Colby, and they still live perfectly fulfilling lives.”
“Sure. That’s what all you flying people want me to think.”
“You’re not going to take our grilled cheeses back, are you?” Cooper said tentatively.
He sounded so cautious, and it made Gretchen’s heart ache a little. He had relaxed with her, of course, but she was his mate. She could see how hard it was for him to joke around with a relative stranger, and she knew how risky it must feel for him to open up his life again. His last group of friends had kicked his heart around like a soccer ball.
Gretchen had been so much luckier than he had been. She could look back on her life now and see that her childhood had left her with more scars than the one on her shoulder—she had spent a long time feeling small and defensive. But she’d never doubted her family’s love for her, and she’d spent her whole adult life surrounded by people who thought the world of her.
And she thought the world of them, too—something that was particularly vindicated as Colby handled Cooper’s joke lightly and deftly.
“I would never deprive someone of the opportunity to experience my world-class grilled cheese. But I’ll expect to be heaped with a lot of praise. It’s the only way I’m going to console myself for being stuck on the ground.” He tipped them a little salute and returned to the kitchen, slinging a dish towel over his shoulder as he went.
Cooper now wore the shyest, most beautiful grin Gretchen had ever seen.
See? You’ll do just fine now that you’re with the right people. You’re one of us now.
He took a bite of his grilled cheese and instantly made a face she hadn’t seen since their all-too-brief roll around Ford’s bed.
“Oh my God.”
Yeah. Colby really did make a good grilled cheese.
“Now might not be a good time to tell you I can’t really cook,” Gretchen said.
Cooper swallowed. The orgasmic ecstasy of the perfect sandwich still lingered on his face, but he put his arm around her. “Neither can I. When we’re alone, we’ll live off cereal, and then we’ll just try to eat at Colby’s house whenever we can.” He lowered his voice. “He’s not the one with the mate who makes the rock-hard cookies, right?”
She stifled a laugh. “No, that’s Martin’s mate, Tiffani. She has a lot of other good characteristics. And Martin can cook, so I promise the food will be safe if we’re invited to any dinners there.”
She leaned her head against his shoulder. She was familiar enough with the glory of a Colby Acton Grilled Cheese Special to be able to eat one now without actively swooning, and that let her just take the moment to unwind.
It was eleven o’clock at night, and she was in her home office in the Sterling courthouse, wrapped in a blanket, snuggled up against her mate, and eating a grilled cheese while her boss woke up every governmental official he could find to tell them that there was no way in hell Cooper Dawes was spending another night in prison. She’d been through a round of first aid, a bumpy trip back home, and a visit from a shifter doctor. She was bandaged, sore, and exhausted. It had been a long, long day.
And somehow, this felt like exactly the right ending to it. This was where she wanted to be. She liked her house just fine, but this was her home—and these people were just as much her family as the ones she was related to by bl
ood.
She liked thinking of Cooper being welcomed into that big, lovable mess. But he wasn’t just another part of her life. He had helped her define herself in a way no one else ever had or ever could. She didn’t just want to share her home with him, she wanted to share her life with him. She wanted to share herself.
Before she could think of exactly how to do that, however, Martin came out of his office with an enormous smile on his face.
“Oh, I like that look,” Gretchen said, straightening up.
“You should.” Martin turned to Cooper. “You don’t have to go back.”
Until she saw his face just then, Gretchen hadn’t realized that Cooper hadn’t even been letting himself hope for that. Now it was like pure light was shining out of him.
“Really?”
“Really,” Martin said firmly.
Gretchen’s face hurt from how much she was smiling. “So for right now, what are we doing?”
“For right now, Cooper’s officially in our custody.” Martin looked a little sheepish. “I might have implied to some higher-ups that there’s some complicated shifter-related reason why he can’t be anywhere else. There almost is. I hate the idea of separating the two of you.”
“We hate the idea of being separated.”
“I can imagine,” Martin said softly, and Gretchen knew that he was thinking of how impossible it would have been for him to have to spend so many nights without Tiffani. “Having Phil alive makes things much, much easier, as you can imagine, and Theo already got him to agree to make a full confession in exchange for an eventual transfer to a draconian prison—he’ll be moved as soon as the scrutiny dies down.” His mouth hardened. “I’m fine with that not being any time too soon. He deserves some discomfort.”
Gretchen couldn’t agree more, and she didn’t think even a long, cold flight nestled in Cooper’s talons had come close to filling the bill.
“And Monroe?” she said.
Martin’s expression shifted to one of supreme satisfaction. “I had roadblocks set up all around the mountains near Ambergris, and traffic cops stopped him about an hour ago.”