She’d never been in more danger than right now—but at the same time, there was something wonderful about the clarity of it. She knew exactly why she was risking her life, and she wouldn’t do a single thing differently.
She was riding a griffin, being chased by a dragon, and they were fighting their way up a mountaintop for a confrontation that would set Cooper free.
The clear air and the heat of the fire had burned off the last of her insecurities and uncertainties. She didn’t know that any basilisk would be able to prey on her right now. All her feelings of being muddled were gone.
No one was going to manipulate her now. Not even her.
She could tell that Cooper was steering them towards a crevice in the mountainside. It was too narrow for a dragon to enter it and too deep for the dragonfire to follow them all the way to the rear. It could help them force a one-on-one confrontation.
Correction: a two-on-one confrontation. She was going to have Coop’s back whether he liked it or not.
She didn’t want to risk taking one of her hands away from his shoulders, but she rolled her hip just enough to feel that the comfortable weight of her sidearm was still there. She thought she would probably need it just as much as she would need her handcuffs.
They were almost to the opening of the crevice when the dragon behind them must have put on one last desperate burst of speed.
In another few seconds, they would have been safe. In another few minutes, the dragon wouldn’t even have been able to breathe fire—the flames had become so weak and sputtering that Gretchen could tell it was running on fumes. They were so close to safety and the fair fight Cooper deserved. Close enough that it hurt.
But this last breath of flame fell against Cooper’s hindquarters like a lash, making the whole back half of his body sag down. It threw his center of gravity off, making his wings falter and his flight turn choppy. That single instant of delay was all the dragon needed to dart in and claw at him savagely, opening up his griffin’s broad lion back, just an inch from where Gretchen was seated.
Cooper let out a harsh, cawing cry, and tumbled out of the sky.
If his talons hadn’t hooked deep into the rock, splintering it just to make a foothold, the two of them would have fallen down the side of the mountain.
Gretchen was shaking, but she managed to dig her fingers into his sides, stroking him, urging him up. She couldn’t even imagine the strength it was taking for him to cling to the mountainside—couldn’t even imagine how he was staying conscious—and she hated to ask him for more than that, but she had to.
“Come on,” she said, her mouth close to his ear. “Come on, Coop, just get us level again. Please.”
His body lurched, the muscles rippling under his tawny fur, and for a second, Gretchen could picture them sliding back into thin air. It was sickeningly easy to imagine falling instead of flying. In the battle between gravity and injured Cooper, it was all too possible for gravity to win, for one person’s struggle not to make any difference.
But not today. Cooper fought his way upright again, propelling their way up the sheer rock face of the mountain with a combination of wing beats and brute strength.
The dragon lunged at them, and Gretchen’s mind almost whited out with rage. It thought Cooper was completely vulnerable right now, since he was wounded and fighting for their lives? Well, Cooper had a partner, and his partner had a gun.
The angle was horrible, but Gretchen managed to draw her sidearm and keep her shaking fingers locked on it so that it didn’t fall immediately out of her hand and down into the valley below. As she took aim, a familiar coolness fell over her, steadying her hand. This was part of the job, and she knew how to do the job.
She fired twice, sending the dragon spinning backwards through the air. Gretchen wasn’t sure if she’d hit him or not, given all the jostling of Cooper getting them to safety, but she’d at least driven him back.
And that had given Cooper enough time to finish hauling them up the mountain. Even with all his injuries and all his exhaustion, he didn’t collapse until they were on solid ground again.
Gretchen dismounted and stroked his sides, feeling him tremble beneath her touch. His fur was soaked through with sweat, and his chest was heaving unevenly as he fought the pain. Tears welled up in her eyes as she looked at the marks left by the dragonfire and the claw-slashes, and she was almost glad that her vision was blurred. Seeing his wounds in more detail wouldn’t make them look any better. He needed help, and he needed it as soon as possible. It wasn’t something that it would be easy to get when they were in the middle of nowhere.
The dragon’s shadow fell over her now. It breathed out little puffs of ineffective, weak flame. Its strength was mostly spent, at least for now. And it didn’t seem willing to risk another head-on, close-up charge while she still had a gun trained on it.
They still had a chance. Maybe.
Unless it decided to just hover there until its fire returned. If this was Phil, and if he could work out that facing them in human form was too much of a risk—and he probably could—then maybe they had no chance at all.
She leaned against the broad, darkly feathered expanse of Cooper’s shoulders and felt his wings ruffle around her, wrapping her in a kind of embrace.
“Can you still heal if you change back?”
He looked at her with his gold-bronze eyes and nodded so solemnly that she had to swallow down another lump of unshed tears.
“Good. Because not that this look doesn’t work for you, but on the off-chance that we’re going to die here—I want to be looking at your other face.”
He melted against her, the solid, wounded strength of his griffin’s body dissolving into the tense, wounded strength of his body. Gretchen herded him back into the crack in the mountainside before the dragon could make a move on them. It was only a temporary shelter, but it was better than nothing, and it gave her at least a minute or two to look over Coop.
She loved his griffin, but she loved his human shape even more. All else aside, it was only like this that he could really and truly hold her back.