Christmas Griffin - Zoe Chant Page 0,47
think I should answer that.”
A shadow passed across Hardwick’s face and for a moment she was worried her smile would slip. She squeezed his hand and turned back to the crowd.
Goodness. Three full-grown dragons, and half a dozen winged lions. Her relatives must be hating this. Winged lions were around the size of regular lions; full-grown dragons were, frankly, massive.
Which gave her just the in she needed.
“Opal! Hank! Jasper!” she cried out, greeting the three dragons.
Opal and Hank were Cole’s parents. Opal’s scales were pale and luminescent, like her namesake, while Hank was a shade of forest green that would almost have counted as camouflage if it wasn’t the middle of winter and he wasn’t unmistakably dragon-shaped. Jasper, Opal’s younger brother, was a thousand brilliant shades of red, orange and brown.
They all bent their heads to her in greeting, and the itch in her mind intensified. She waited for it to fade, then shaded her eyes against the light and added: “I don’t think there’s enough room out here for all of us in our animal forms! Shall I do introductions in human form, and then we can all head back somewhere warm?”
For another group of shifters, it might not have worked, but because both the Heartwells and her own family knew how to do Mr. Petrakis’s trick with clothes, it did. Even cold-resistant shifters might not be too happy to hang out on a snowy mountainside stark naked, but the Belgraves leapt at the chance to show off their new skills—and to be, in human size, not completely physically outmatched by the dragon shifters.
Hardwick rubbed his thumb over the back of her hand, and she realized she was holding onto him with a death grip. She took a deep breath while the others were distracted by shifting and pulled herself together.
There were small rushes of air and sparks all around as the dragons and winged lions shifted back into human form.
The Heartwell siblings, Jasper and Opal, were both tall and broad-shouldered, with red hair and sparkling eyes the colors of the gems they were named after. Hank, who had married into the family and taken Opal’s name, was a giant of a man with brown hair and eyes the same color as his dragon’s scales. Jasper was dressed up as brightly as his dragon, in a hideous Christmas sweater and matching boots and hat that clashed incredibly with his red hair. Opal and Hank were slightly more normally dressed, though Delphine noticed a giveaway embroidered reindeer under the open collar of Opal’s long jacket.
Beside her, Cole sighed and transformed back into a lanky teenaged boy. His hair was darker than either of his parents’, and he’d shot up at least a foot since Delphine had last seen him. He was also, to his bad luck, wearing pajamas. Opal tsked and advanced on him threateningly, already pulling off her own coat to wrap around him. “Mom, no!” he cried, backing away.
She left them to it and turned to her own family.
Her heart did its usual complicated thing, because as terrified as she was at the idea of her family finding out the truth about her, she did love them. And this group weren’t the most terrifying. Her grandparents weren’t there, of course—she guessed that, if they’d all set out from the Heartwell lodge to find Cole, Grandmother would be waiting there, taking the opportunity to privately sneer at the dragon shifters’ base. Uncle Carrick wasn’t there, either. A little of the weight came off her chest.
Delphine’s brothers, Vance and Anders, were identical twins. Like all Belgrave men they were tall with golden hair, and at almost-eighteen they were just starting the transformation from teenaged weed to burly full-grown adult.
They went through phases of wanting to look exactly like each other or not like each other at all. This was their first year at university. Early, of course; they were Belgraves, after all. Vance had gone to university in England and Anders had taken a year in the Netherlands, and they’d returned home at midterm to discover that they’d both changed up their look in exactly the same way. Long hair in a ponytail, truly terrible little moustache. In a huff, they’d both immediately gone and shaved off said moustache and lopped off the ponytail—then come back and huffed again.
Ponytail and moustache were back now, of course. They’d gotten over their annoyance at discovering how similar they were, again, and had cultivated the horrible hair in preparation for the extended family