But she was breathing. When he held his hand in front of her mouth and nose, he could feel her breath stir against his fingers.
“I’m sorry,” Cooper said, gathering her up in his arms. He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I have to put you down in the snow for a second so I can pick you up as a griffin. I got it back, Gretch. We’re going to fly away somewhere warm.”
He laid her down on the snowbank and transformed again.
He grasped her as delicately as he possibly could and held her close to the warmth of his body. Flying would cut down on the amount of time they had to spend outside, but they’d still be out in unprotected weather that would feel even colder as they whipped through the air. The ticking clock was still ticking. This was either kill or cure.
And he was mostly flying blind. It was almost a pure whiteout, obscuring everything around him in a constantly whirling blend of sleet and snow, and he was going off memories he’d had of a road trip he’d only made once or twice. But he was almost sure, dammit. He could see the low-slung motel, an old-fashioned motor court, in his mind’s eye. It had looked drab but clean, the kind of place that could sometimes cling to a half-life forever, as long as it got a few customers every year. It had had a sign that was boasting about the rooms having cable TV, not free wi-fi or even HBO. He could almost see the color of the curtains.
His wingbeats sounded like they were counting down the time, marking the minutes and seconds as they slipped away.
His talons didn’t have enough sensation to feel Gretchen. He didn’t know whether she’d woken up enough to grasp onto him or whether—
He couldn’t think about it.
Just a few miles to the exit, and then it’s right there. Just a few miles and then it’s right there.
And then, magically, there it was, materializing out of the flurry of snow—a solid, dark shape in all the white. It was almost like the optical illusions that pilots were prone to seeing after going snow blind, but Cooper trusted his griffin’s eyes and, even more than that, its sense of overwhelming relief.
He banked in towards the motel and came down softly and carefully, laying Gretchen down against a snowbank before he shimmered back into his human form. For the first time in his life, he relished landing more than flying. He lifted Gretchen up in his arms.
She was even colder than before. Her cheek was icy to his touch. But once again, he could feel her breath, warm and gentle against his neck, and even though it wasn’t as strong as he would have liked, he’d take it. He’d take any sign of her being alive.
He tried the door, but it was locked. Shifting Gretchen in his arms, he hammered his fist against the glass hard enough to make the whole door rattle in its frame.
He was waiting two seconds, and if no one answered, he was breaking in.
But someone came into view. It was an elderly, white-haired man with a close-trimmed beard, using a walker with cut-up tennis balls on the floor posts.
Cooper suddenly remembered exactly what he looked like right now.
A big guy in a maximum security prison jumpsuit, cradling an unconscious woman who, on the other side of the glass, could easily have been mistaken for dead. The old man wasn’t going to let him in. He was going to call the cops, and the cops wouldn’t come for hours, and if Cooper tried to break in now, all that would happen was he’d make this poor old guy have a heart attack—
But then the old man unlocked the door.
“Well, come in,” he said in a creaky voice. “You’ll suck all the heat out of the place. You picked a bad time to escape from prison, son.”
Cooper got in quickly, before the man could change his mind, and he laid Gretchen down on the couch in the lobby. He knew you weren’t supposed to chafe someone’s hands if they could be suffering from frostbite, but aside from that, his mind felt horribly blank.
Finally, something clicked: get the snow off her. All it was doing was keeping her cold and wet. He brushed the snow off her jeans and onto the floor, undoing her coat so that the warmth could reach her.