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 in Gretchen’s voice when she’d been taking aim at Roger, and feeling it seemed to connect him to her even more.
He could feel a kind of ribbon of light stretching out between the two of them, like their love was tying them together.
No matter what happened today, they had, and would always have, an unbreakable bond; they would always have a kind of happiness that Roger never could. And while he was still scared of what could be happening to her back where she had fallen, he knew she was alive.
He could feel her soul in the same way he could feel his own.
Maybe he couldn’t ask Roger any of the thousand questions he had. But in Gretchen, and in his own heart, Cooper already had all the answers he really needed.
He’d spent months behind bars, unable to act. Now he was free.
And if Roger thought he could stand in the way of all that, Coop was happy to prove him wrong.
He spiraled up into the sky, making Roger chase after him, only to dive bomb down, his claws brandished.
You hurt my mate.
All of his other grievances against Roger had left his mind. This one had more power than all the rest, and it would be enough to make him win this fight.
He lashed out at Roger, clawing into him and dodging a burst of weak dragonfire. Roger might have had plenty of powers Cooper didn’t, but he was way less agile. His shifter forms had never been meant to be stitched together into this crazy patchwork quilt, and it was like the different parts of his body were pulling against each other. And each bite from Cooper made him look even stranger, as he took on griffin traits too, sprouting additional feathers and a lion’s tail. So this monstrous form, never especially nimble, was now constantly becoming less familiar to him. He was spitting acid and flames because he didn’t have the coordination for anything else.
But Cooper did. He knocked into Roger and the two of them rolled through the air. He got burned and blistered in the process, but he barely even felt it.
Roger snapped at him, trying to tear Cooper with his teeth. Cooper rolled to dodge him—and the two of them hit the sheer side of the cliff.
Roger spat a final puff of flame at him. The angry, insane light in his red-and-black eyes was dying out, as if that last collision had been too much for him.