she knew everything else that mattered. She knew that she had been right to believe her own inner sense of herself. She knew that when the pressure was on, the choices that she would make were choices that she could stand by. She knew that when she messed up, she could deal with her mistakes.
And she knew how much she could trust the people around her. If this was the end of the line for them, she didn’t have to worry that Cooper would always be remembered as a criminal. Martin would carry on the quest to clear Cooper’s name. Theo and Colby would help him. Keith would grow into being a good Marshal, even if he never unwound enough to listen to the radio.
She wasn’t scared because all of that filled her with a sense of tremendous peace.
And, she realized slowly, a sense of burning rage. Because everything would be fine—and how dare this asshole interfere with that? How dare he try to keep Cooper facedown in the mud?
Her life was beautiful and whole now, and fuck Phil Locke for trying to keep her from having enough time to enjoy that.
It was like her feelings were pushing their way through her skin.
No, the old, familiar voice said from deep inside her. It had never been so loud before.
It would have scared her, if she’d still been capable of being scared.
No what?
No, your feelings aren’t pushing their way out. I’M pushing my way out. YOU’RE pushing your way out.
“Gretchen.” There was a crazy grin on Cooper’s face and a spark of wild, uncontrollable joy in his eyes. “You’re amazing.”
Was she?
She looked down at herself.
She was.
She was shifting.
Her body was flickering out of its familiar shape and into a new one, and—in what was maybe the most bizarre part—her eyes were changing too, with more colors leaping into blazing life as her vision opened up to let in ultraviolet shades her human eyes had never known.
She dropped to all fours, and the sound of her hitting the ground was weirdly... uneven. It took her a second to realize why.
Her back half had the paws she’d always subconsciously expected, but uncannily large, lion-sized even though she felt inexplicably sure that they were otherwise lynx-like. She could feel the knob of her tail and the sensitive pads of her back paws.
Her front half had talons.
They were a bright crayon-yellow, black-tipped at the points, which weren’t as wicked and curved as Cooper’s.
“You’re a falcon,” Cooper said. He was looking at her with a kind of awe. “You’re a griffin, but you’re part peregrine falcon and part lynx—supersized. I didn’t even know that kind of shift form could exist, Gretch.”
I didn’t either, Gretchen wanted to say.
But maybe she had. She’d always felt like there was some locked puzzle-box inside her that she couldn’t quite pick open. Then Cooper had come along and broken the lock for her, broken it by getting to embrace the woman she really was instead of just the girl she’d once been, and this crisis had made the box burst open for good. And everything that was inside might have been impossible and unheard-of, but it made sense to her all the same.
She’d always dreamed of flying.
She looked at the dark blot of Phil Locke. He was still hovering there outside the crevasse, high up like the sky was still the same refuge it had been two minutes ago.
He couldn’t see her well, not back in the shadows like this. If he could pick out the shape of a griffin, he probably just thought it was Cooper, who was still out of commission.
Not, in other words, a healthy, barely hurt, newly fledged lynx-falcon griffin eager to stretch her wings and flex her talons.
Cooper saw the direction of her gaze. He didn’t hesitate. All he did was grin, as if he knew exactly what she was feeling.
“Go get him.”
Gretchen launched herself into the air, her wings slicing furiously through the sky. Phil could have bested her on sheer size and muscle, and he had more experience on his side, but he was no match for the exhilaration and passionate anger coursing through her blood. He couldn’t be. He hadn’t expected this moment before today, and one way or the other, she’d been waiting for it her whole life.
She collided with him in midair, raking her talons across his scaly hide.
He let out a shrill shriek and puffed a little more weak flame at her—it was a pale yellow that almost seemed to