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.
He hugged her close, his embrace so tight it made her breathless. She knew he was hurting, but he still gave her all his strength and held none of it back for himself. She didn’t know how anyone could have ever thought he could be selfish enough to trade his honor for money.
“We’re not going to die here,” Cooper said against her hair.
Maybe they would. Maybe they wouldn’t. Gretchen realized that, as little sense as it made, she wasn’t afraid.
She was sorry for the time together that they might lose, sorry that she might not get the chance to say a real goodbye to her family and her team, and even sorry that she’d never have another bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream again—but she wasn’t scared. Not of any of it.
Cooper had given her enough certainty to face down death—or any other future—without fear or regret. Because now that she had him, now that she really knew him, she knew everything else that mattered. She knew that she had been right to believe her own inner sense of herself. She knew that when the pressure was on, the choices that she would make were choices that she could stand by. She knew that when she messed up, she could deal with her mistakes.
And she knew how much she could trust the people around her. If this was the end of the line for them, she didn’t have to worry that Cooper would always be remembered as a criminal. Martin would carry on the quest to clear Cooper’s name. Theo and Colby would help him. Keith would grow into being a good Marshal, even if he never unwound enough to listen to the radio.
She wasn’t scared because all of that filled her with a sense of tremendous peace.
And, she realized slowly, a sense of burning rage. Because everything would be fine—and how dare this asshole interfere with that? How dare he try to keep Cooper facedown in the mud?
Her life was beautiful and whole now, and fuck Phil Locke for trying to keep her from having enough time to enjoy that.
It was like her feelings were pushing their way through her skin.
No, the old, familiar voice said from deep inside her. It had never been so loud before.
It would have scared her, if she’d still been capable of being scared.
No what?
No, your feelings aren’t pushing their way out. I’M pushing my way out. YOU’RE pushing your way out.
“Gretchen.” There was a crazy grin on Cooper’s face and a spark of wild, uncontrollable joy in his eyes. “You’re amazing.”
Was she?
She looked down at herself.
She was.
She was shifting.
Her body was flickering out of its familiar shape and into a new one, and—in what was maybe the most bizarre part—her eyes were changing too, with more colors leaping into blazing life as her vision opened up to let in ultraviolet shades her human eyes had never known.
She dropped to all fours, and the sound of her hitting the ground was weirdly... uneven. It took her a second to realize why.
Her back half had the paws she’d always subconsciously expected, but uncannily large, lion-sized even though she felt inexplicably sure that they were otherwise lynx-like. She could feel the knob of her tail and the sensitive pads of her back paws.
Her front half had talons.
They were a bright crayon-yellow, black-tipped at the points, which weren’t as wicked and curved as Cooper’s.
“You’re a falcon,” Cooper said. He was looking at her with a kind of awe. “You’re a griffin, but you’re part peregrine falcon and part
