her jaw was now grimly set. “The cuffs are slowing him down, but he’s getting away.” She cleared her throat. “Roger?”
“Dead,” Cooper said shortly. “Monroe?”
“He ran off too, and since he had the car, he did it a lot faster than Phil could. I tried to shoot his tires out, but he messed with my sight again: all I did was shoot up some rocks. And getting to Phil is more important than anything with Monroe.” She touched his cheek gently, wiping off what he suspected was a streak of blood. “I need Phil so we can save you. You have to go get him, Coop. I can’t catch up, not like this.”
He knew she was right—but he knew with an equal certainty that he couldn’t make himself leave her again, not when he had just gotten her back, not after thinking that he’d lost her.
Luckily, he knew just what to do.
He leaned in and kissed her. Everything else faded away, and all he could feel was the soft heat of her mouth. She still tasted like peppermint from the toothpaste back at Ford’s motel, even though that morning felt like it had been a hundred years ago. He wanted to make love to her in that bed again. He wanted to make love to her everywhere he could think of, for the rest of their lives.
“I’ll shift,” he said against her lips. “Can you hold onto me? We’ll go down together.”
“Are you sure? You’re still hurt—it can’t be good for you to carry me. And I’m not sure I’ll make the best backup right now.”
“I don’t need you to be backup.” He pushed his fingers through her hair, loving how silky the sleek dark strands felt against his skin. “I just need you to be you. I just spent enough time away from you. I’m done with it. I’m always better with you than without.”
He could feel her smile against his mouth, letting him know her answer before she actually gave it.
He shifted and lowered himself to the ground, making it as easy as possible for Gretchen to climb on top of him. His griffin’s back was easy for her to straddle, and she held him with her knees as well as her arms around his shoulders. She might have been feeling weak, but her hold still felt strong and unshakeable.
Maybe it was just always easy for them to hold onto each other.
Cooper lit up into the air again, racing down the mountain. Unlike Phil, he wasn’t stuck with the treacherous, twisty road. As the griffin flew, the route was a lot shorter.
It was one hell of a mountain, and Phil had a long way down. They were still hundreds of feet from the ground when Cooper caught up with him.
Phil turned to look over his shoulder. When he saw the griffin barreling down towards him, a hundred different emotions seemed to cross his face. One of them, definitely, was relief that it at least wasn’t Roger’s horrible chimera. But another was rage, plain and simple. Somehow, during his stumbling trip down the road, Phil had already started thinking he was going to get away with everything yet again.
And now he knew, once and for all, that he wouldn’t.
Then Phil flung himself over the side.
Time seemed to freeze.
I overestimated him, Cooper thought, stunned. I thought he’d know when it was over, but he didn’t.
Phil had forgotten about the shiftsilver handcuffs. Even though they were the whole reason he’d been struggling to jog down the mountain in the first place, when his instincts had taken over, his arrogance had taken over along with them. Of course he could escape. He’d always escaped before. His reflexes had overruled his brain.
All of that passed through Cooper’s mind in a fraction of a second. He didn’t have time to really think about what he was going to do—he had no more time than Phil had.
He dove down, trusting Gretchen to keep her tight hold on him. He was racing a falling body that had had a head start, and there wasn’t much time—or much distance to the ground.
He snagged Phil with his talons, plucking him out of the air when he was maybe six feet above the rocky ground that would have killed him as surely as it had Roger.
For a moment, he couldn’t believe what he’d done. He could barely breathe.
He was going to look down and find that he had missed Phil after all. He was going to see Phil lying