Cooper lifted Gretchen up, tucking the blanket snugly around her so it wouldn’t fall. He followed along after the old man.
“What’s your name?”
“Clifford Meeks. You can call me Ford.”
“I’m—”
“I don’t want to know who you are, son,” Ford said, cutting him off. “If your girl doesn’t wake up by the time the phones come back, then I’ll call for an ambulance for you. If she does, and she’s doing all right, then I don’t see any reason to get anyone else involved. What I don’t know, I can’t tell the police.”
Cooper stared at the man’s hunched back. “Sir, if I actually were on the run, you could be arrested for harboring—”
“But you’re not on the run. You’re saving a lady’s life when you could have just left her out in the cold. And I’m eighty-three years old; anybody who wants to put me in prison is a damn fool. I’d almost welcome the change of scenery.”
“It’s not that great,” Cooper said. “Everything’s either beige or green, and the food’s terrible.”
“I like beige,” Ford said. “It’s soothing.” He unlocked one of the pale wooden doors. “This is one of just two that opens up from the actual inside. Everything else, you have to go out into the court to get to it. So it’s kind of like giving you the Presidential suite, only that’d be something worth caring about, and this isn’t.”
The doors, Cooper noticed, were so old that they still used actual keys that hung on little plastic tags. As ancient as its setup might have been, the room looked clean and well-kept, without even a trace of lint on its dark green carpeting. The bed had a thick, fluffy white comforter and a plush gray blanket, and Cooper wasted no time in wrapping them both around Gretchen.
If she woke up in this, she’d feel like a burrito. Tough. Right now, it was more important for her to get warm than be comfortable.
“I’ll leave the door open,” Ford said, putting the soup bowls down on the dresser. “You want something, just yell.”
“Thank you, sir,” Cooper said quietly. “You’re a good man.”
“Son, this is the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in twenty years. I just hope your girl’s okay.”
“Me too,” Cooper said. He put his arms around her once again.
He didn’t want to think about what he would have to do if this didn’t work.
If she didn’t wake up soon, he’d have to make a hard decision. Should he risk trying to turn her?
An infusion of shifter strength and hardiness would be enough to save her from almost anything. If, that was, she survived the transformation in the first place. Sometimes human bodies couldn’t handle the enormous late-in-life change, and he’d heard rumors that mythic transformations were especially dangerous.
But he couldn’t just let her die.
Luckily, there were at least a few ordinary, human things he hadn’t tried yet, and one of them was the snuggling-up they’d done in the car. Skin-to-skin contact might do the trick.
“I’m sorry to do this when you’re so out of it, Gretch,” he said as he maneuvered her sweater over her head. “I’m just trying everything I can think of.”
He had barely caught a glimpse of her in her underwear before, and he didn’t want to catch more of one now. He shed his own clothes and wrapped her in his arms, cocooning them both in the blankets that would hold in their heat.
He tucked his chin over her shoulder, resting his head against hers, and that was when he saw it.
He could scratch trying to change her into a shifter off his list. By the looks of the scar between her neck and her shoulder, someone had already tried that, and it hadn’t gone well.
It wasn’t a huge scar, but it was obviously a bite-mark, and one that looked like it had healed badly. Cooper only had to brush a fingertip against it before Gretchen flinched away.
What had happened to her that, even mostly unconscious, she would still viscerally recoil like that? Who had hurt her?
And if a shifter’s bite hadn’t killed her, how was it that she was still human? The only person Cooper knew who had survived that kind of a bite without gaining a new shape had been Roger, and, of course, Roger was already a shifter.
Shifters can’t turn other shifters, his griffin confirmed. Then it sounded uncertain: But Gretchen said she was human.
Cooper couldn’t understand what had happened, but he could still understand the pain on her face. He kissed her hair.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’ll stay away from it, I promise.”