His body was almost completely white now—a sickly, unnatural hue of white that made Jared think of bleached bones. Here and there, near the joints, there was still a tinge of red left that showed that he had once been a fire dragon, before his pact with the Darkness.
But all fire had been burned out of him. Zane looked as weak as a newborn kitten as he rested on the ground—abandoned by both Darkness and Fire.
Before Jared could start to wonder what they were going to do with him, the other griffins landed. In the heat of the moment, he hadn’t paid them much attention. All he’d been able to think about was that he had to get Chiara somehow out of here.
But now, with Zane defeated, he got his first real look at them. And he realized at last why the griffins had looked so strangely familiar.
They were both powerful griffins, proud eagle’s eyes staring at him as they folded strong wings against their body. Like all griffins, they combined the elegance and majesty of the eagle with the power and strength of the lion.
But there was more. There was something about the co
lor of their wings. Something about the pattern formed by the black and brown of their feathers.
It was a pattern Jared knew intimately well.
Those marks of black and brown were the exact same pattern formed by his own feathers.
As Jared stared at them, a strange emotion building in his chest, the two griffins shifted.
A man and a woman were standing in front of him. Both seemed to be in their forties. The woman had long, brown hair that she wore braided back to keep it out of her face. There were tears in her eyes as she looked at him.
The man had large, strong hands and a powerful body, a square jaw and blond hair. There was a dazed look on his face as he stared at Jared, almost as if he couldn’t believe what he saw.
He looked remarkably like Jared.
Jared swallowed.
The man looked exactly like Jared might have looked if he’d time-traveled back to the nineties, with a haircut that had been out of fashion for thirty years, and clothes that he’d last seen in a nineties movie.
Impossible.
Jared couldn’t move. He was too stunned.
Then the woman came forward. She gave him a shaky smile. One of her hands reached out, her fingers trembling as if she didn’t dare to believe that he was real. There were tears gleaming in her eyes, one after the other spilling over and trailing down her cheeks.
And then, at last, something broke inside Jared.
He’d always thought that he’d been too young to remember his parents. But all of a sudden, memories rose up inside him, too powerful to ignore.
A gentle voice humming a melody that soothed him to sleep. Arms holding him close, a beautiful face smiling down on him. A different voice, a different set of arms, strong and reassuring, protecting him from any danger.
“Mother,” he said, his voice breaking with emotions, and then he was in her arms.
She was crying. He could hear it through the storm of emotions and memory that had broken over him with the sudden force of a hurricane.
He didn’t know how or why, but he remembered this. He remembered being held.
And he remembered being loved. Being loved and protected.
They’d loved him so much.
“What happened?” he asked when he finally drew back.
His father had drawn close as well, wrapping one arm around his shoulder and one around his mother. He, too, was crying, and his eyes were full of both joy and pain as he looked at Jared.
“You’re our son,” he said, his voice shaking. “Jared... You survived. You returned to us.”
“You were the statues,” Chiara said in wonder.