Christmas Griffin - Zoe Chant Page 0,4

peer out into the world.

“See?” He looked around the room slowly, then out the window, letting his griffin take in the beautiful serenity. “There’s no one here but us. You can relax.”

He took a sip of coffee and grimaced.

“No one here but us and worse coffee than we get in the station,” he grumbled. His griffin clacked its beak in agreement and Hardwick relaxed.

They were going to be fine. Work. Retreat. Get well enough to work again and put his gift to good use. He had a system, and it hadn’t failed him yet. These last few months had been harder than usual, but—this was going to work. It always did.

Without warning, pain shot through his skull.

“What the hell?” He jumped to his feet. Coffee spilled across the floor as his mug fell to the ground. Inside his head, his griffin was all fur and rustling feathers, defensively puffing itself up.

The pain was gone as quickly as it had arrived, but he didn’t let that fool him. Someone else was here.

Hardwick swore to himself and barged over to the door. Icy wind whipped against his face as he slammed it open. Snow, too. The flakes were the size of his fingernails, deceptively soft as they flurried through the open door.

There was no sign of anyone outside.

He narrowed his eyes, drawing on his griffin’s enhanced senses to see through the darkness more clearly. It strained inside him, its lie-sensing powers reaching out despite itself. Like scratching an insect bite even though you know it’ll make it hurt worse, Hardwick thought, his stomach clenching.

Nothing. No sight, or sound, of anything in the darkness surrounding the cabin. No sign of whoever it was that threatened his much-needed solitude.

On a winter’s night.

With snow deepening on the ground, and the air so cold it was biting the inside of his mouth.

Crap.

Hardwick ground his teeth. “Is someone out there?” he called. Then, using telepathic speech because given what Jackson had told him about this area, it was as good a bet that a shifter had gotten themselves into trouble on the mountain roads as a human: *Is someone out there?*

Chapter Three

Delphine

Was that a voice?

Delphine stopped moving. She willed her teeth to stop chattering and strained her ears until she couldn’t hear anything over the blood pumping through them, but it didn’t help. Compared to the rest of her family she might as well have been locked in a sound-insulated bubble.

She stumped back towards the car. The snow was coming down so fast it was settling in small drifts on her shoulders—she’d never seen anything like it.

She knew she should be worried that it was too cold, that the chill was slipping in the gaps between her hat and scarf, sticking icy fingers up her sleeves past where her gloves reached. But it wasn’t the thought of what might happen to her that scared her. It was the thought of how her family would react when—

“You’re being silly,” she scolded herself, and repeated the words she’d been trying to reassure herself with ever since she crashed. “That’s not going to happen. I’m going to get this car free—” Somehow, she added silently. “—and get back into town, and everything is going to be fine.”

Somehow.

She wrapped her arms around herself and looked over the car. It hadn’t moved since the crash, unfortunately. Its back wheels were still deep in the snowy ditch and its front wheels just touching the edge of the road. If she got the chains out of the trunk and put something under the front wheels for them to grip on, maybe she’d be able to get enough purchase for the four-wheel-drive to pull out of the ditch.

She repeated the plan out loud to herself, pretending she was explaining it to her boss. There weren’t any holes in it that she could see—at least none that her boss would have been able to see through.

Delphine bit her lip. A plan that her boss could not see any holes in was not necessarily a plan that had no holes in it. And now was not a great time for her to realize that she’d put so much effort into creating a Mr. Petrakis Worldview to guide her actions that she might have slightly lost track of how the real world worked.

In her defense, the plans she tested against the Mr. Petrakis Worldview were usually somewhat less potentially fatal than this one.

But driving in snowy or icy conditions were what chains were for, surely. She should have