of Roger’s showboating. And in that fight, Monroe had concentrated all his fire on Cooper, trying hard to avoid hitting Gretchen.
Monroe wasn’t up for all of this. He touched his tongue to his lips and then said, “She’s a woman, Rog.”
Gretchen burst out laughing. “Seriously, that’s your objection? You’re fine with selling out witnesses and framing Cooper for murder, but it wouldn’t be chivalrous to kill me? Go to hell.”
Cooper agreed with her in principle, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to encourage people to try to kill her just on the grounds of gender equality.
It was bizarre for Gretchen and Roger to be on the same side of the argument, because Roger was also looking at Monroe incredulously. “You’re such an infant. Don’t you know that she’s just as dangerous—”
Gretchen’s gaze flashed over to Cooper’s. The second he saw the anticipation in her eyes, he knew at once what she was going to do.
Oh, she was just as dangerous as he was, all right.
That’s my girl.
While Roger was focused on chewing out Monroe for not being sufficiently willing to murder women as well as men, Gretchen was melting into her griffin form and lunging at him, the coiled muscles of her lynx half creating a pounce that her falcon half carried forward in flight.
She crashed into Roger like a guided missile and fought him with the fury and energy of a whole life spent pent up in only half of herself. Her beak snapped at him, taking out mouthfuls of his own needle-like feathers, and her talons and claws raked over his tough hide.
Before Cooper could even shift to join in the fight, Roger flung Gretchen away from him with a high-pitched shriek of rage.
She hit the rocks hard. That would have been bad enough, but what was worse was the white smoke writhing up from her body.
He’d hit her with another venomous, acidic blast.
Everything in Cooper’s body wanted to run towards her and make sure that she was okay, but if he did that, all he’d be doing is letting Roger have free time to target them both. The best chance of keeping Gretchen safe was to keep fighting.
Then that was what he was going to do. He would save her life—or die trying.
You can’t just be horrified by him now, he told his griffin. We have to fight.
For Gretchen, his griffin agreed. He trusted its love for her as completely as he trusted his own—his griffin’s love for her was his own.
Cooper shifted as quickly as he could, dodging a claw-swipe from Roger in the process. He rushed forward. The pain in his hind legs and back was nothing more than a distant memory now that Gretchen’s life was at stake. All he could feel was pulse-pounding adrenaline.
If she dies—
We’re not going to let that happen, his griffin growled.
He found himself in a tussle with Roger, rolling around on the ground. They were a hurricane of feathers, fur, scales, and claws, and he wasn’t sure which one of them was winning. At least Roger, who only cared about himself, was probably still feeling every bite and scratch. Cooper was beyond all that now.
Though he did feel the terrifying pull of gravity as they tumbled down the mountainside, caught in a brief freefall before they both remembered their wings.
They just hung there in the sky and stared each other down, each of them trying to decide what move to make next. They were both hurt, but neither one of them was badly injured enough yet to even think about giving up. Roger might only have had his own life at stake, but Roger liked his life a lot. He’d worked hard to have it, as poisonous and awful as it was.
Cooper wanted to ask him so many questions.
Why had he done it? Why had he done any of it? Had he ever cared about the job at all, or had it been a sick moneymaking opportunity from the start?
And the chimera creature that he was now, this warped blend of a dozen different animals—did it even have a voice inside his head, or had he traded away his true soul for an aching, crowded silence?
Cooper knew what that silence could feel like—but even when he hadn’t known if his griffin was buried beneath it or not, he’d still known he was there. At least he had always known who he was.
A cool, almost serene steadiness came over him. It was the kind of steely calm that had been