It was one hell of a mountain, and Phil had a long way down. They were still hundreds of feet from the ground when Cooper caught up with him.
Phil turned to look over his shoulder. When he saw the griffin barreling down towards him, a hundred different emotions seemed to cross his face. One of them, definitely, was relief that it at least wasn’t Roger’s horrible chimera. But another was rage, plain and simple. Somehow, during his stumbling trip down the road, Phil had already started thinking he was going to get away with everything yet again.
And now he knew, once and for all, that he wouldn’t.
Then Phil flung himself over the side.
Time seemed to freeze.
I overestimated him, Cooper thought, stunned. I thought he’d know when it was over, but he didn’t.
Phil had forgotten about the shiftsilver handcuffs. Even though they were the whole reason he’d been struggling to jog down the mountain in the first place, when his instincts had taken over, his arrogance had taken over along with them. Of course he could escape. He’d always escaped before. His reflexes had overruled his brain.
All of that passed through Cooper’s mind in a fraction of a second. He didn’t have time to really think about what he was going to do—he had no more time than Phil had.
He dove down, trusting Gretchen to keep her tight hold on him. He was racing a falling body that had had a head start, and there wasn’t much time—or much distance to the ground.
He snagged Phil with his talons, plucking him out of the air when he was maybe six feet above the rocky ground that would have killed him as surely as it had Roger.
For a moment, he couldn’t believe what he’d done. He could barely breathe.
He was going to look down and find that he had missed Phil after all. He was going to see Phil lying at the foot of the mountain, all Cooper’s hopes shattered along with him.
Gretchen stroked Cooper’s feathers. She leaned forward, lying against his neck, touching him as much as possible.
“It’s all right,” she said. Her voice was the only thing that could have broken through the icy panic that had frozen him in place. “You caught him. Everything’s okay.”
He came back to himself at the sound of her. He knew he always would.
21
“It’s good to be home,” Gretchen said.
Cooper looked around the bustling, chaotic office. “It’s good to be anywhere, really. But is it always like this?”
The two of them were currently serving as the still center to all the hubbub. Theo was submitting a glowering Phil to the kind of thorough, creative tongue-lashing only a dragon could give another dragon. Martin was in the middle of bulldozing straight through any attempts to take Cooper back into Stridmont’s custody, even for the night: it seemed to involve a lot of yelling. Colby had decided that the one thing everybody needed right now was comfort food, so he’d set up shop in the office kitchen and was now making grilled cheese sandwiches, intermittently calling out to ask if anyone wanted tomato or bacon on theirs. Keith was blissfully quiet, zonked out on the office sofa and oblivious to all the noise. He still had a bandage on his head.
“There’s usually less shouting,” Gretchen amended. “And normally you couldn’t pay Theo to dress somebody down like this. But it’s pretty spot on for Colby.”
“Then I like Colby,” Cooper said, just as Colby came around the corner bearing two grilled cheeses. They were displayed with a kind of deli-style neatness, each surrounded by chips and a pickle spear.
“Thanks,” Colby said, handing their sandwiches over. “I like you too. Any mate of Gretchen’s is a friend of mine.” He leaned over and kissed the top of Gretchen’s head.
She swallowed down the lump in her throat. Seeing the team rally around her and Cooper had already made her cry three times in the last hour. She didn’t want to make it four.
“Wait until you find out what my new shift form is,” she said.
“Wait, what?” Pure delight lit up his face, making him immediately look like one of her kid brothers. “You can shift now?”
“I’m a lynx-falcon griffin.”
There was a pause where she could see Colby mentally drawing a picture of this in his imagination, and his grin only got wider—right up until it comically deflated. “Wait, now I’m the only person in this office who can’t fly?”
Gretchen reached up to pat him on the shoulder, but she couldn’t get much higher than his arm. She patted there instead. “Lots of people can’t fly, Colby, and they still live perfectly fulfilling lives.”
“Sure. That’s what all you flying people want me to think.”
“You’re not going to take our grilled cheeses back, are you?” Cooper said tentatively.