Christmas Griffin - Zoe Chant Page 0,16

the smell of baked dough and hot cheese.

Whatever strange urge was making him drag his feet couldn’t compete with that.

Hardwick muttered his thanks for the meal as he sat down opposite her.

Delphine had set the table—something he wouldn’t have thought possible, given the cabin’s thin provisions. A stack of hot, butter-yellow biscuits steamed gently on a plate in the middle of the table. There was a stick of butter on another plate to one side, and two mugs of what smelled like the same deathly coffee he’d made the night before.

He didn’t know where she’d found the butter. By the condensation dripping from the stick laid out on the kitchen table, and the way it fought the knife he tried to cut through it, he suspected it had been frozen. How long had she been up before he woke, to work this sort of magic?

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she murmured when he asked how she’d found it all. The lie scratched, though there was no sign of it on her face. “I like to get up early and make myself useful. Well, I always do, anyway.”

Another lie. But—her final sentence was closer to the truth. Hardwick frowned. Had she forgotten he could sense untruths?

“How did you sleep?” he asked, tempting fate.

“Poorly.” Her mouth quirked at his surprise. “I’m sorry. I know I should be a better guest, but there’s no point lying, is there?”

“No.”

“No.” She echoed him, her voice making the word more musical than his had done.

He cleared his throat. “Were you too cold? I only arrived yesterday afternoon. I don’t know if the heat gets through well enough to the other room.”

“Mmm. No. I think my restless sleep had more to do with being in a strange bed, snowed in miles from anywhere, than it did room temperature.”

Pain shot through Hardwick’s forehead. He jerked one hand up to rub it, and when he lowered it again, Delphine was watching him. Her eyebrows were drawn together.

“You—” she began, and stopped herself. “You said last night that you’re a detective?” she said after a brief hesitation. “That must be interesting, with your, um, particular skills.”

“It’s a living.” Hardwick eased himself into the familiar conversation. It was the same one he had with other shifters who knew about his shifter type. Usually those conversations ended with the other person sloping off before the small talk got too close to the bone. “I have a gift. It’s my duty to use it.”

“Any good stories?”

He thought about the sting that had gone wrong and left Jackson with the scar from a bullet wound across his forehead. How a job that had been simple when he was a new recruit had turned into such a tangled mess.

But this was his duty. What was his gift for, except to help people?

Anyway, he had a story. Something from early in his career, featuring a lost kitten, two neighbor kids communicating with tin-can phones like something from the 1950s, and the sort of convoluted scheme that only a pair of eight-year-olds caught in their own lies would come up with. Bland and inoffensive. Cute.

“…and it turned out there were two kittens, after all, which explained the collar changing color. Every time their parents got suspicious and they handed off what they thought was the only kitten to what they thought was the other kid, one of the kittens got picked up by the old lady who was living downstairs.”

“It’s like that puzzle with the wolf, the sheep, and the cabbage,” Delphine said. “What happened to the kittens afterwards?”

“I don’t know.” Hardwick searched his memory, but his griffin was sure that his automatic response had been the truth.

“Back to the pound, I suppose, if they weren’t allowed in the apartments.” Delphine’s voice had an undertone of pessimism that made his attention jerk towards her.

“It’s a happier ending than most,” he said.

“Even with your gift?”

“People don’t need my gift because they were already having a good day.”

Delphine made a face and gestured with her butter knife. “Point. Sugar for your coffee?”

He shook his head and she spooned sugar into her own mug, which she then looked at as though it was going to jump up and bite her. Which wasn’t far wrong. Even his griffin agreed with that.

Hardwick wanted to be confused about why she was asking about his powers when it was so obvious she knew he’d seen through her attempts to lie about who—what—she was. But he wasn’t. Even though it made his heart ache and his griffin