Cooper started to turn him down gently, cautiously—he didn’t want to get the guy even more stirred up than he was already—but his loneliness got the better of him. If the game got tense, or if more of the guys were high, it could be trouble... but maybe trouble was better than nothing. He just wanted to be around people for a change, since it wasn’t like keeping to himself had made these months more bearable.
His griffin was still dying. His hope was still dying. Maybe a little game of pickup basketball was exactly what he needed.
“Sure.” He slid the book into his coat, in a hole in the lining that worked as an improvised pocket, and then he started following the guy out onto the blacktop. There wasn’t much yard time left, but maybe he could still shoot a few baskets.
But something was wrong. It was just a twinge of his instinct for danger, but it was more than he’d felt from his shifter side in a long time.
Stay calm.
“Looks like you’ve already got an even number,” Cooper said. “Someone dropping out?”
“Oh, yeah,” the ferret-faced guy said, wheeling around to give him an enormous, panicked-looking grin. The high, late morning sunlight flashed off his eyes, making him look more jittery than ever. “Someone’s dropping out, oh yeah, you’d better believe it.”
This was trouble.
Cooper took a half-step back. “I don’t want to be a problem,” he said easily, trying to make it sound like no big deal at all. “I’ll just go sit back down. I can play next time.”
“No, no, no. Nope, nope, nope.”
The ferret was crowding him suddenly, and the other prisoners were coming over too, closing in around them in a tight knot of bodies.
From the guard tower, it could have looked like the start of a game or an argument over who was going to play on what team. Only no one was talking.
Cooper had that feeling he’d gotten sometimes back on the job, when everything just slid slowly, sickly sideways, like a car skidding out.
He knew this was wrong, but it was too late to do anything but steer into the skid.
The ferret smacked him on the shoulder like they were best buds. That was with his left hand. His right held a shiv, a sharpened toothbrush handle.
He slipped it in between Cooper’s ribs in a single, practiced movement.
“Sorry.” The ferret twisted the blade around, spreading the damage. “Nothing personal, you know. Had to do it. The deal was too good to pass up, you know, too good to pass up.”
The other men tightened in around them, screening them from the guards and holding Cooper in place.
The shiv stabbed forward again, into Cooper’s side this time. He felt hot blood immediately soak through his jumpsuit.
The third stab was right to his heart—except it hit the paperback western in his coat lining. The ferret cursed, pulling at the shiv where it had gotten stuck in the pages.
He’d just been saved by a story of bold US Marshals and dastardly outlaws.
And suddenly all Cooper’s months of turmoil and desperation cleared away. It was like he was getting to fly again after all, and he had just lifted up through the last of the clouds. Light and color exploded around him.
For the first time since his cell door had closed behind him, Cooper knew beyond a doubt that he wanted to live.
He refused to die like this. He refused to die without knowing why.
Shifting or going invisible would have saved his life, but only at the cost of revealing his kind to the world, and it was a chance he couldn’t take—if he could even have done it at all. But even with the most obvious shifter tricks off the table, and even with his griffin mostly AWOL, he still had a few cards up his sleeve. He was strong and well-trained.
And that, at least, he didn’t need to hide.
He slammed one elbow back into the solar plexus of one of the men holding him, then slipped neatly out of the second one’s grasp. He was still surrounded, but he wasn’t letting anyone grab him again. He lashed out hard at anyone who tried, and he heard the crunch of someone’s nose breaking under the heel of his hand. He knew he was grinning—the adrenaline junkie reunited with his drug of choice—and he kept it up, hoping it would scare them off. Nobody wanted to mess with crazy.
And he had one more surefire way of scaring them off, even though he didn’t realize it until it had happened. He only felt it: for a second, his eyes had flashed griffin gold.
Later, they could all tell themselves it was just a trick of the light, but in that second, every man in the circle knew he’d just seen something impossible. They backed way off him. The ferret dropped his shiv, and Cooper heard it clatter against the asphalt.
He was bleeding from multiple stab wounds, but he’d taken out six other guys, and he was the only one to come out of it smiling. Not too bad. Not too bad at all.
Thank God for books.
He made it halfway to the guards’ station before he collapsed.
2
Gretchen had a lot of nieces and nephews, and that meant her weekends were usually whirlwinds of birthday parties, recitals, and paintball games; anything to make the kids happy and give their harried parents a night off. But she had completely blocked off this Saturday night, and she didn’t feel even a trace of guilt about it.
Theo and Jillian were going to have a baby, and she was going to help them celebrate.
They were going to be spectacular parents. Jillian worked with troubled teens at the community center, and she already
