“Benoit,” Teresa said under her breath. “Riell. I remember that.”
Isabelle met her gaze squarely. “Then you understand why I can’t allow our people to be part of something like that ever again. If anyone has come to you in the last year looking for shelter, he could be this man, and we need to know.”
Teresa turned around, looking back at the dragons gathered behind her.
“You’ve heard all this,” she said, raising her voice. “What do you say to their request?”
One by one, each dragon bent forward and laid their left wing flat against the snowy brick courtyard.
It was a hypnotically beautiful image. They were perfectly coordinated, as if they were all in some enormous synchronized dance that Gretchen had never seen before, and it brought actual tears to her eyes.
This, she thought, this was what these all-dragon cities were supposed to be like. This was why someone would want to live in one. You were isolated, but you could live so openly as dragons that you could develop rituals that had their own beauty.
Teresa turned back to them.
“He isn’t here,” she said. “But we believe we know who you mean. He lives in the mountains outside of Ambergris’s boundaries, but he comes down sometimes for supplies. He flew away a few days ago—I saw him go—and he hasn’t been back since.”
“Have you seen him in his human form at all?” Cooper said urgently.
“Only once. I made him transform when he first arrived—we don’t let anyone past our magical wards unless we can tell who they are.”
“What did he look like?”
Everything was riding on this, or at least it felt like it was. And they were working at a disadvantage. Gretchen knew she must have seen Phil’s photo during the trial, but couldn’t remember much about what he looked like. And if he was still alive, he could have easily dyed his hair or even had plastic surgery to change his face; he could have grown a beard or acquired new scars. It was possible that Cooper wouldn’t recognize a description of him, and it wouldn’t necessarily mean anything. But if he did recognize it—
“Five-nine or five-ten,” Teresa said, her eyes half-closed as
she tried to remember. “He was white, with dark blond hair—a little curly. I don’t remember the exact color of his eyes, but they were light—green or blue. He was stocky, and he had big hands.”
Cooper turned away, walking a few paces away from them. His shoulders were shaking.
It wasn’t Phil. It wasn’t Phil, and he must have heard some detail that had been enough to convince him that it couldn’t be Phil: there wasn’t too much a person could do to disguise their height or their general build.
The man they were dealing with must have just been a general recluse.
“I’m sorry,” Gretchen said to Teresa and Isabelle. “Just give me a second.”
She walked to Cooper and put her arms around him. She wasn’t surprised when he turned around and hugged her back, resting his face against her hair. She could feel a little dampness where he’d been crying.
“We’ll find him,” she said. “There’s more than one dragon village out there, and he could easily be hiding somewhere else. We’ll—”
“No.”
“Coop, you can’t give up—”
“I’m not.” He pulled back, and she could see a fire burning in his eyes, as bright as Isabelle’s dragonmarks. Griffin-gold seemed to dance around his pupils. “I’m not giving up. That’s Phil. He’s alive.”
17
Phil was alive.
Cooper’s first reaction had been a flash of delight and disbelief—all this time, it had torn him up inside to think about Phil being gone and his murder being unavenged. Phil was alive? That was great.
But it only took another second for everything else to sink in. Gretchen was right. There was no way for Phil to be alive and uninvolved in everything that had happened. If he was living in the mountains above Ambergris, then he had cooperated with every step in Cooper’s doom. He had helped the team fake his death, probably offering Monroe tips on how to create the best illusion of his corpse, with all the right birthmarks in all the right places. He had used his access to their files to sell away the info about their witnesses’ new lives.
And while Cooper had sat behind bars, his griffin locked away inside him, his reputation ruined, his life destroyed—Phil had retired to the mountains.
And if he’d left them a few days ago, it had almost certainly been to wipe Cooper off the board once and for all.