Ever since the arrest, he’d been trying like hell to not seem angry, because anger only made him look scary to other people. Scary and probably guilty. But now, knowing that Gretchen knew him even better than he knew himself, he could let those feelings have free rein. He could finally feel the enormity of how Phil and Roger and Monroe had screwed him over, and he could be pissed about it.
“Coop?”
“You’re right,” he said. He still couldn’t get over what it felt like to finally be able to breathe freely.
She’d given that back to him. She hadn’t just given him the sky; she’d given him the air.
“You’re right,” Cooper said again. “There wasn’t a lot I could have done differently. They lied to me, they used me, and they framed me.” He took a huge breath, relishing the feeling it gave him. “And now we’re going to find them and drag them into the light of day, and they’re going to have to tell everyone what happened. And you know what matters to me most about all that?”
He was half-expecting her to make some joke about how it was probably the part where he’d get out of prison, but instead she just said softly, “What?”
“The fact that I started all that just saying ‘I’ and I get to end it saying ‘we.’”
A wide smile spread across Gretchen’s face. “My favorite part is getting you free so that we can be us all the time.”
“We make a good us,” Cooper agreed. “And then we can start figuring out what you—”
—might be able to turn into. That was what he’d been ready to say.
He was interrupted by an inferno.
Flames streaked down from the sky, tracing a circle that surrounded their car. Cooper’s heightened senses let him hear the paint blistering on the hood, boiling and popping: that was how close the fire was. It was lapping up against them like the tide against the beach.
Gretchen slammed on the brakes, throwing them to a halt so quickly that they snapped forward against their seatbelts. Her face had gone dead-white. “We have to get out.”
He knew what she was thinking. If the gas tank blew, they were dead. But if they got out, they’d roast anyway.
They couldn’t stay in a burning car. And they couldn’t get out in the middle of a fire.
They couldn’t go forward, they couldn’t go backwards, and they couldn’t stay where they were.
Cooper could only think of one thing to do.
He unbuckled his seatbelt.
“Hold onto me,” he said. “We’re going up.”
18
First, they had to get out of the car, and they had to do it in the middle of a vortex of flames. Unfortunately, Gretchen couldn’t help with that. She just had to sit there while Cooper shifted and tore through the mental frame of the car like it was nothing more than soft cheese.
Even in the midst of all her terror and panic, even with the temperature in the car climbing so high that sweat was starting to break out all over her, some part of Gretchen could still admire the sheer majesty of Cooper’s transformation.
He really was magnificent. The glossy white feathers on his head smoothed out almost imperceptibly into the mahogany brown wings and golden fur. She’d never seen a griffin before him, and she had always more or less imagined that they would look awkward, like two entirely different animals smashed together. She could almost have pictured a visible seam between the lion half and the eagle half.
But the real Cooper was nothing like that. He wasn’t half-lion and half-eagle. He was a griffin, a complete whole in and of himself.
And it was incredible to watch him in action. The same talons that had carefully cradled her and carried her to safety at Ford’s motel now sheared through the car roof, tearing their way to freedom. His enormous wings ruffled slightly, brushing against her, and then he turned his immense head to look at her with his liquid golden eyes.
Somehow, they were still recognizably his eyes. She would have known him anywhere.
And she knew what he was asking her. Ready?
She nodded. When it came to getting out of a burning car, she’d been born ready.
There was no room to climb on his back while they were still in the car, so she had to settle for locking her arms around his neck and holding on as tightly as she could. She squeezed him hard.