Cooper stared at her.
He didn’t know what he’d expected to follow that lingering kiss to his cheek, but it hadn’t been that.
Gretchen lined up the evidence before he could even answer her. “You heal fast. Eerily fast. You’re strong. You—”
“You’re right,” Cooper said, his brain finally kicking back into gear. “I’m a griffin shifter.”
There had been about a thousand emotions flickering through her face, like a carousel of feelings going around and around, and Cooper had only been able to parse a fraction of them. But now they resolved into something singular and incredibly clear: delight.
“A griffin!” Gretchen said. Her eyes looked positively starry. “I’ve never met a griffin before.”
“We put our pants on one leg at a time like everyone else.”
All he wanted to do was luxuriate in the bizarre, totally unfamiliar experience of someone just being enthusiastic about him, but the joy he was feeling at her reaction faded away when he remembered what had become the one hard, inescapable fact about his griffin.
It was missing. And it might be forever out of his reach.
Gretchen’s hand found his, and their fingers intertwined. She didn’t say anything, but he knew that she’d seen the look on his face. He’d been hiding this fear for a long time now, but he was completely unguarded around her. What she’d seen was him remembering that a part of his soul was dying on him.
“I can’t hear it anymore,” Cooper said. “I can’t feel it. All that time in prison, it was like it just... wasted away. I felt a flash of it during the fight, but nothing since then, no matter what I do.” He swallowed. His eyes felt hot, but he didn’t want to cry around her. If going to prison had meant losing his griffin but gaining Gretchen, well, it was worth it, and he didn’t want her to think otherwise.
But she looked more confused than pitying. There was a crease in her forehead as her face scrunched up a little. “I don’t think you can lose your animal. That doesn’t sound right.”
“That’s what it feels like.”
“But it’s part of you. Experiences change you, sure, but... your soul’s not something that can get pushed to the back of a shelf and get dusty because you’re not using it. It’s who you are. Even if you can’t express it, it’s still there.”
Maybe. He wanted to believe that, but it was impossible to be sure, especially when his griffin stayed incommunicado. He could have sworn that he’d sensed its presence at least a little today, but apparently it took more than a conversation to attract its interest.
He didn’t want to get his hopes up and have them come crashing down. He wanted to believe she was right, but he couldn’t handle the idea that he might just be disappointed again.
It would be better to just change the subject.
He said, “Are you a shifter too?”
Gretchen’s eyes had been bright, blazing with intensity, but now some of the light in them dimmed. It wasn’t that noticeable, not since she was still radiating interest, not since her actual expression didn’t change, but Cooper saw it all the same.
“No,” she said. “My family are all lynx shifters, but I’m a genetic quirk, I guess. Born human. But I’ve lived around shifters all my life, first with my family and now with my team.”
As nice as it sounded to have a family and a team that would surround you, people that you could claim and be claimed by in return, Cooper couldn’t help thinking that Gretchen’s position sounded kind of lonely all the same. She, too, had been the stray Monopoly piece in the Scrabble box.
Then something she said clicked with him. “Your team? All of them?”
Gretchen nodded. “Martin’s a pegasus, Theo’s a dragon, and Colby’s a wolf. Keith’s a unicorn.”
“Keith,” Cooper repeated, “is a unicorn. You’re sure.”
“I promise. I’ve seen him shift.”
“I just can’t picture that at all.” Prissy, stuck-up Keith, who hadn’t unbent until a car crash had almost split his head in two? He was secretly a majestic white horse with a flowing rainbow-colored mane?
Admittedly, Cooper had never actually seen a unicorn up close and in person. He wa
s mostly going off a mental image cobbled together from kid’s toys and the covers of fantasy novels. Maybe the real-life version was more dignified, and maybe it suited stuffy Keith as well as any animal could have.
He decided not to ask for clarification, though: he was getting too much of a kick out of picturing Keith as something straight out of a little girl’s toybox. And since Keith was recovering just fine, he didn’t think he had to feel too bad about laughing at the guy in his head.
Besides, that wasn’t what they needed to talk about. That was a more professional reason for staying on topic.