“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 had a wealth of experience in dealing with every possible problem a kid could throw at her. And Theo? Theo not only had all the skills of a US Marshal and a dragon, he also had so much sweetness and genuine courtesy that his fugitives usually wound up apologizing to him for having ever run away in the first place. Any kid raised by Theo and Jillian was bound to grow up to be incredible: tough, kind, brilliant, and adorable.
She wondered if their child would be a dragon shifter.
Probably. Almost certainly. If not, though, she knew Theo would make sure the child still felt important and special.
It’ll help that the kid wouldn’t be growing up surrounded by dragons.
Theo had grown up in an all-dragon enclave, a secret, hidden village that few outsiders ever even knew existed. He had a few cousins he kept in touch with, but otherwise, he’d made it clear that he wanted his past to stay his past: a lot of his hometown consisted of snobby, arrogant people who thought that if you weren’t a dragon, you were nothing at all. Theo wouldn’t bring a non-shifter kid within a hundred miles of the village of Riell, not unless a lot of things changed.
Besides, either way, the kid would have a human mom—and a kickass one, at that.
There was no reason to think that this child would grow up feeling the way she had.
Once. A long time ago. I grew out of it, anyway.
She hugged Theo as he came up to her.
“People keep doing that,” Theo said, smiling.