No, it was even more than that. He would give that up just to choose his future over his past. He could walk away from everything he’d been through if it meant that he was walking towards her.
She was going to take him up on it, for his sake. She had a bad feeling about whatever Phil had been talking about, and the sooner they had him safely and officially in Martin’s custody, the better.
Cooper said, “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.” He felt along his back, wincing as he brushed against his wounds, but he clenched his jaw into place. “I think I’m strong enough to fly again. I can carry him.”
He transformed into his sleek, glorious griffin, and took a struggling Phil up in his talons, holding him more securely and gently than Gretchen thought Phil probably deserved.
Gretchen had just started melting into her own griffin—already it felt comfortable and natural, like stepping into a pair of old shoes that had been perfectly broken in—when another one of Phil’s contemptuous laughs rang out, echoing around them so she had to hear it another dozen times.
She could see why he was laughing. This time, she couldn’t really blame him: the joke was definitely on them.
The advancing car had come to a standstill.
And what had burst out of it was a monster like nothing Gretchen had seen before.
Even in a nightmare.
20
Fuck.
It was the only word Cooper could think of.
There was a monstrosity stalking towards him, something so grotesque and unnatural that his griffin shied away from it. It was repulsed in an instinctive, animal way that was even more powerful than Cooper’s own revulsion. The thing in front of them wasn’t right, and his griffin knew it even better than he did.
Gretchen, human again, reached over and clutched at him, her hand digging into the scruff at his shoulders where the feathers stopped and the fur started. He could feel cold sweat on her palm.
This was as scared as he had ever seen her, and considering everything they’d faced together—that meant she was having the exact same response he was.
Even Phil’s laughter had taken on a vaguely nauseated sound. He didn’t want to be around this thing, either, and he knew it was on his side.
“Maybe it’s Monroe again,” Gretchen whispered. Her lips were barely moving, and her face had gone as pale as it had been when she’d been half-frozen. “Maybe it’s not real. He’s just making us see things.”
For a second, that gave him a fantastic hope. But then he knew better.
Monroe’s visions had been disorienting, like some kind of low-grade acid trip. The constantly shifting colors of the car his creepy powers had painted had been dizzying. Monroe could mess with them, but he couldn’t make them miss that they were being messed with.
He could still leave them confused and half-blinded, but he couldn’t fully trick them, not when they were prepared for him. The only reason he’d gotten away with confusing them before was because they hadn’t known what they were dealing with—since it seemed so wrong to doubt the evidence of their senses, they’d doubted themselves instead. Now they understood, and he wouldn’t catch them off-guard.
Cooper had no doubt that Monroe could still make them feel sick to their stomachs, but he couldn’t do it in the coldly real way this monster did.
Because part of what made this monster hideous was that it was so obviously real, down to the warped shadows it cast against the rocks. It was consistent, not warping itself to make room for his own fears. It was straight out of a nightmare—but it was right there, an unreal thing that had never been meant to be flesh-and-blood.
It was an enormous patchwork monster made of leathery dragon wings—shining with an iridescent slime—snake eyes and a cobra hood, a long purple tongue, a scorpion tail, and blood-red scales scattered all over with tufts of mangy looking fur.
Jaguar fur.
Cooper shifted back to human. His griffin was freaking out too much right now—he had to contain it somehow.
His mouth was as dry as dust.
What little skin the creature had was covered with grotesque, disfiguring scars. Dozens of bite-marks, maybe even hundreds of them.
“Roger,” he said, naming the monster for the man he knew it was—or the man it used to be. “God, Roger, what did you do?”
The monster screeched out a kind of hideous victory cry. Even Phil recoiled from it, his face twisted in unmistakable disgust.
Then, unbelievably, the creature talked.