The Griffin Marshal's Heart (U.S. Marshal Shifters Book 4) Read online

  The Griffin Marshal's Heart

  Zoe Chant

  Published by Zoe Chant, 2020.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  THE GRIFFIN MARSHAL'S HEART

  First edition. June 15, 2020.

  Copyright © 2020 Zoe Chant.

  Written by Zoe Chant.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Prologue | Eighteen Years Ago

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Epilogue

  A note from Zoe Chant

  More Paranormal Romance by Zoe Chant

  Zoe Chant writing as Lia Silver

  Zoe Chant writing as Lauren Esker

  Prologue

  Eighteen Years Ago

  Gretchen Rose Miller came from a long line of shifters. Mostly, the people in her family turned into lynxes. There were a few bobcats on her dad’s side, and her great-great-grandmother on her mom’s side had been a falcon shifter. But mostly, it was lynxes all the way down. Her mom, her dad, her two sisters, and her brother: they all turned into long-eared, long-legged spotted cats with imperious stares.

  Gretchen didn’t. Gretchen was human.

  There was no genetic test for shifter parents to give their children. If your parents were shifters, you were a shifter: that was how it worked. If one of your parents was a shifter and the other one was human, you were still probably a shifter.

  No one had ever heard of a case where two shifter parents produced a fully human child.

  Not until Gretchen, anyway.

  For the first few years of her life, her parents had just expected that she would turn into a lynx kitten at some point.

  Then the whispers had started:

  She’s just a late bloomer.

  I think my second cousin was six or seven when he first shifted. I’ll ask around.

  She’s healthy! There’s no reason why she shouldn’t be able to do it. The doctor said there’s absolutely nothing wrong with her.

  Now, she was twelve years old, and they all knew the truth. There was nothing wrong with her—except she was different.

  She was average instead of extraordinary.

  She wasn’t super-strong. She didn’t have an inner animal, a manifestation of her subconscious that would keep her company inside her own head and keep her in touch with her instincts. She would never look at someone and instantly know that he was her mate, destined to click with her perfectly on every level. There was magic—or at least something like magic—out there in the world, out there in the rest of her house, even, and she couldn’t touch it. She couldn’t use it.

  She was just plain, ordinary Gretchen. The fluke. The dud. The mistake.

  And while she knew her family loved her, they had a million little ways of driving that fact home.

  “Don’t roughhouse with Gretchen! She’s not as strong as you are.”

  “Remember to look after your sister. She doesn’t have your instincts.”

  “Gretchen, I just don’t know if that’s safe for you.”

  Well, Gretchen had a plan to deal with all of that.

  It’s like a shot, she told herself firmly. It’ll hurt, but then it’s over with.

  It won’t work, a little voice in her mind whispered.

  She used to think that was her animal’s voice, but her parents had gently explained to her that that was impossible, that she was just imagining things. Gretchen had learned to stop mentioning it.

  The voice spoke up only rarely, but when it did, she usually listened. It sounded like an older version of herself, like a Gretchen she desperately wanted to be.

  But right now it was telling her that her plan was dumb, and she didn’t like that at all.

  Remember the water balloon fight? the voice said, prodding at her. You kept trying to fill up that water balloon, and you put so much water in it that it burst. You don’t want to burst.

  No, she didn’t. Yuck.

  But she couldn’t burst apart, because there wasn’t anything inside her, no matter what it felt like. The little voice was just her imagination. She was empty, like a balloon thirsty for any water at all.

  Her little sister Tricia’s bite would take care of that. After it was over, Gretchen would be just like the rest of her family. More importantly, she would be just like she felt she was. Her outsides would finally match her insides.

  Gretchen pulled the collar of her T-shirt off to the side, exposing her neck and shoulder. If a neck-bite was good enough for Dracula, it was good enough for her.

  “Are you sure about this?” Tricia said nervously.

  “Definitely.” Gretchen kept her voice perky even though she could feel goosebumps rising up on her arms. “It’s not like anything bad will happen. It’ll just make me like the rest of you.”

  “I don’t know. Mom and Dad always told us to be careful not to bite you because it could make you really, really sick.”

  It stung to know that her whole family had talked over how to protect her and she hadn’t even known about it. It was like they were the real people and she was just the baggage they lugged around. Well, not anymore. Not if she had anything to say about it.

  Her parents thought that she was weak and fragile, but she wasn’t. She knew she wasn’t.

  “Maybe I’m not as strong as you guys when I’m human,” Gretchen said, “but after you bite me, I won’t be human anymore, will I? It’s not going to matter. You know Mom and Dad always worry too much.”

  Tricia scrunched up her face, thinking it over.

  After what felt like an eternity, she nodded.

  “Okay. Deal.”

  Even as nervous as Gretchen was, she couldn’t stop herself from breaking into the widest smile of her life.

  This was it. Everything about her that had always been wrong was about to be fixed.

  Tricia slipped into her sleek lynx form and climbed up the arm Gretchen offered her.

  When she sank her teeth into Gretchen’s shoulder, it was like dozens of red-hot needles had suddenly slammed through her skin. The pain was beyond anything she ever could have imagined. It felt like her whole body was turning inside-out, like every fiber of her being and drop of her blood was trying to revolt against what she was doing to it.

  Gretchen screamed, and Tricia landed on the floor and shifted back immediately.

  “Gretchen! Gretchen, what’s wrong?”

  All Gretchen could do was hold her shoulder and sob as the pain only seemed to get worse.

  She’d never seen her little sister look so scared, and whatever tiny part of her brain could even still think started hating herself right then and there for having put poor, gullible Tricia in this position. She reached out and grabbed her sister’s hand.

  “It’s okay,” she managed to say. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I’m going to go get Mom and Dad,” Tricia said. Her wide eyes were filling up with tears. “Gretchen, you’re bleeding so much.”

  “No, please.” She felt her hand slipping on Tricia’s, but she fought to hold on. “Please. Just give it a chance. It hurts, but I know I can do it. I know it’ll work.”

&nbs
p; She was still repeating that five minutes later, when she finally passed out.

  *

  Tricia’s bite left a horrible scar.

  The whole experience had landed Gretchen in bed for two weeks, with a shifter doctor and nurse almost constantly at her side. She’d needed IVs and blood transfusions—human blood transfusions. She had lost so much weight that none of her clothes fit anymore.

  Her shoulder wouldn’t stop throbbing, and she still sometimes threw up unexpectedly, like her body was trying to reject the last of whatever poison she’d managed to force inside of it.

  Tricia couldn’t look at her without crying. Her parents had hugged her, grounded her, and then hugged her again, stroking her hair and telling her to never ever do anything like that ever again.

  And Gretchen had promised she wouldn’t. She knew better now.

  When she tried to be more than she was supposed to be, other people got hurt. She cost her family money and trouble, and she made everyone sad. It wasn’t worth it. She didn’t want to be the kind of selfish monster who would destroy everyone else around her to get what she wanted.

  Lying in her bed, with a thick wad of gauze still on her shoulder, Gretchen had reinvented herself.

  She wasn’t Gretchen the Dud. She wasn’t Gretchen the Mistake. She was going to be Gretchen the Babysitter, Gretchen the Responsible: the girl who took care of other people and never worried about herself. She was going to be Cool Gretchen, the girl who could shrug off all her worries instead of bothering other people with them. From now on, nothing was going to bother her ever again—or if it did, she was going to keep it to herself, bottled so far down inside her heart that even she would someday forget that it was there.

  But I’m still here, said the familiar voice. I promise, you’re not crazy. You really are feeling something—

  Gretchen ruthlessly turned her back on the voice. She imagined building up a wall in her head, cutting the voice off from the rest of her mind.

  No, she wasn’t crazy. Because she didn’t hear voices, nope, definitely not. She didn’t hear an inner animal that she now knew she definitely didn’t have.

  Her family was right: that was all just an overactive imagination and wishful thinking.

  She was as human as anyone could possibly be, and if any part of her felt differently, she would run away from it until it left her alone. Because she couldn’t keep doing this. She couldn’t keep hurting other people and breaking her own heart.

  She was human, and that was all she would ever be.

  And nobody needed to worry about her. Nobody at all.

  1

  Cooper had a view.

  Once upon a time, he would have taken that for granted. And by most people’s standards, this wasn’t much of a view. Just a distant line of trees: ungraceful-looking loblolly pines, their shapes crisscrossed by the wiring of the fence.

  But Cooper didn’t look at the trees. He looked at the sky.

  He could still remember what it felt like to fly.

  The chilly mist against his wings as they sliced through clouds. The bright morning sky and clear, glittering night. The sheer, heart-pounding exhilaration of rocketing downwards and pulling up only at the last possible second. He’d been an adrenaline junkie back then.

  He’d been a lot of things back then.

  Once, Cooper Dawes had been a sworn US Marshal. He had hunted down dangerous fugitives and kept federal witnesses safe from harm. His job had been his whole life., and he’d poured his heart, mind, and soul into it.

  And on the rare days when it had all felt like too much, he’d taken to the skies, and it had always cleared his head.

  Now he didn’t have the job.

  And all he had of the sky was this single window in Cellblock D.

  Prison meant he was a Marshal who would never work for justice again. Justice had spoken—loudly—against him.

  Prison meant he was a griffin shifter who would never fly again.

  And six months into his life sentence, it was painfully clear that prison also meant being bored out of his mind.

  Cooper was in Block D, protective custody. It was where the prison stashed inmates who were deemed to be in need of additional safeguards—mostly because half the men in the prison’s general population wanted to kill them.

  As a Marshal, Cooper had personally worked shifts doing prisoner transport for this exact penitentiary. On top of that, some of the most dangerous men inside it, high-level drug traffickers and mob kingpins, were there because he’d tracked them down. Being in protective custody was probably the only reason he was still alive.

  But he hated it. His yard time was strictly limited—not even an hour a day walking around in circles on a scrap of asphalt and dust—and it was still the only bright spot he had. He stared out the window every day until the time finally came around.

  And when it did come around, like today, all he could really do with it was burn away some excess energy and then retreat into himself, sitting on the bleachers with whatever book he’d gotten from the prison’s library that week. Even in the yard, with the other protective custody prisoners around, he really only had himself for company. Keeping his distance had been a defense mechanism at first, a way to deny where he was and what had happened to him. Now, when he would have befriended Jack the Ripper to have someone to talk to, it was just a habit he couldn’t break.

  Cooper had carried around a kind of solitude his whole life, always feeling like the odd one out, but he’d never known the kind of bone-deep loneliness prison had to offer. It was like a dark tide that sooner or later would sweep in and drown him for good.

  There was still hope inside him, burning like a candle, but he didn’t know how long it could last. The tide was coming to snuff it out.

  I’m innocent.

  He hadn’t said that out loud since the trial, when it had practically gotten him laughed out of court. And afterwards? He knew exactly how much weight claims of innocence carried after a guilty verdict had been handed down. No one looked innocent in a prison jumpsuit.

  Even his old boss, Roger, the only person from his old life who still sometimes visited him and took his phone calls—even Roger didn’t believe him.

  The only person who believed Cooper was Cooper himself. His clear conscience was all he had left to keep him sane. And each time he’d told the truth and the person listening to him—even his own lawyer—had rolled their eyes, he’d felt that clarity get a little more tarnished and that sanity a little less sure.

  Cooper had had his whole life stripped away from him. In the space of hours, he’d lost his job, his freedom, and the respect of everyone he’d ever known. Now he was shut up inside a box, one that sometimes felt so small and tight he could barely breathe. His griffin’s wings felt like they were atrophying from lack of use, and Cooper hadn’t been able to hear its voice for weeks. It was unreachable, no longer a partner in his body but a ghost.

  Last month, on visiting day, Roger had come to see him, and Cooper had tried—subtly—to ask him what happened to shifters who could no longer shift.

  Roger was a jaguar shifter from a long line of them, and he had spent years researching and testing the limits of shifter nature: if anyone was going to know the answer, it would be Roger.

  But it was a hard conversation to have when other people could overhear you, and it was an even harder conversation to have with a thick pane of security glass separating you. He’d been able to hear the squeak and creak of his hand tightening on the black plastic phone that connected the prisoner’s side with the visitor’s side.

  “People like us—people like our team—”

  Roger had nodded, cutting him off before he’d needed to bungle through that even further. Federal law enforcement was quietly, vaguely aware of shifters, and it sometimes grouped them together, creating scattered all-shifter units: Roger had recruited Cooper onto his team of shifter US Marshals just a year before Cooper’s arrest.

  Despite everything that had happ
ened, Cooper was grateful for that. If Roger hadn’t recruited him, maybe bad luck would have still reached down and tapped him on the shoulder, stranding him in this hell—and then he wouldn’t have had anyone he could ask this question.

  “I know what you mean,” Roger had said.

  “When we’re in situations like this, situations where we’re boxed in, do we ever... lose what makes us different?”

  Roger’s red-brown eyes had sharpened. “Do you feel like that’s happening to you?”

  “I haven’t been able to reach you-know-who in a while,” Cooper had said, knowing Roger would understand that he meant his griffin. “When I look, there’s just... nothing.”

  Roger had never claimed to believe in Cooper’s innocence; he just visited him out of a sense of lingering duty, looking glum and resigned like some disappointed father. But now his voice was so heavy with sympathy that it was hard for Cooper to hear it. It was bad news that Roger thought he deserved that.

  “That happens sometimes. It’s not like riding a bike: you can’t just take a break for years and expect to come back like nothing’s happened. If you don’t use it, you lose it.”

  Cooper’s throat had suddenly felt parched, like it was packed full of sawdust. He’d tried to swallow. “Then you mean... forever? It goes away forever?”

  But that felt so wrong. He had never felt like shifting was something he’d learned how to do: it wasn’t like he’d been born with a gift for music and then had learned how to play the piano. His griffin wasn’t a skill; it was part of who he was. It was like Roger was telling him that part of his soul would wither away and die inside these walls. Literally.

  Roger had nodded. “I’m so sorry, Cooper. Forever.”

  That word had been echoing around in Cooper’s head ever since.

  Forever. He could lose his griffin forever.

  He would lose his griffin forever.

  It was even possible that he already had.

  No wonder he couldn’t concentrate on the paperback western he was trying to read. It didn’t help that it was about the exact kind of brave US Marshal that he’d never be again.