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

  “Nightmare serpents?”

  “Right,” Martin said. “They could figure out what you were afraid of... and they could make you see it. Or whatever else they wanted you to see.”

  The fear gas.

  The visual distortions that had only happened when they were looking at the men they were trying to identify.

  The chameleon car.

  Her vague memory that its driver had had unusual, captivating, almost hypnotic eyes.

  “Monroe,” Cooper said. His face looked chalky.

  “Monroe?” Martin repeated, confused.

  She told Martin about Monroe, and he eventually agreed with them: as reluctant as he was to point the finger at another Marshal, he had to admit that it sounded suspicious.

  “His whole team was suspicious,” Gretchen said. It was like Monroe’s untrustworthiness had broken some kind of dam inside her, and now all her frustrations were pouring out. “Everything Cooper’s told me about these guys rubs me the wrong way. Even outside of Monroe! We’ve got Phil, a guy who hates that his partner wants to look after a witness. We’ve got a Deputy Chief who wants to trade being a jaguar shifter—a perfectly good kind of shifter, rah-rah big cats—for being a basilisk—”

  She cut herself off.

  “Monroe and Roger must have been pretty close,” she said to Cooper. “If Roger wanted to get Monroe to turn him somehow, and if Monroe agreed to it.”

  Cooper still looked almost gray with shock, but that was changing: he was getting angrier now, which was better. “I don’t know that either of them could get close to anyone, but I guess if they were close to anyone, they were close to each other. And yeah, there were two men in the car. If you’re asking me if I think Roger’s in on it too... I do.”

  That meant they were going up against respectable, high-ranking US Marshals—one of whom could play with their minds. And take the form of a giant snake.

  Gretchen would have preferred taking on the mob.

  *

  After their phone call, breakfast was understandably quiet.

  They ate with Ford, who showed them into a little kitchen in the suite of rooms tacked onto the back of the motel’s front office. The walls were yellowed with years of cigarette smoke, but the kitchen was neatly kept, with scrubbed plastic placemats and a faded blue gingham tablecloth. Cooper thought that Ford was lonely, and the kitchen showed it, but he also thought that Ford was mostly happy, and the kitchen showed that too. The calendar on the fridge was up-to-date, with a few birthdays marked down there in red ink.

  And the food was good, even if he had trouble concentrating on enjoying it.

  Eggs, cornflakes, orange juice, coffee, bacon. It was certainly the best real meal he’d had in months, and as a matter of fact, it was actually better than any free continental breakfast he’d snagged in all the days he used to spend on the road.

  All the days I used to spend on the road with the team who murdered my partner.

  “You two are awfully quiet,” Ford said, and for once, he didn’t seem to be on the verge of making a suggestive, eyebrow-waggling remark about it.

  “We figured out some bad news,” Gretchen said, glancing over at Cooper. She chewed, and the expression on her face said she wasn’t tasting the food any more than he was.

  “Well, you don’t have to tell me,” Ford said comfortably. “I don’t need to know more than I already do. That’s a good rule to live by, if you own a motel.”

  He pushed back from the table, studying them. His left eye, Cooper noticed, was a little clouded with cataracts, but his gaze was as sharp as any Cooper had ever encountered. Yesterday, Ford had looked old and a little scruffy, but today, even though he was still rumpled and in a bathrobe, his face was smooth and he smelled of soap and aftershave. He looked years younger than he had last night.

  “We’ll pay for the room and the inconvenience, obviously,” Gretchen said.

  Ford shook his head. “Don’t bother, dear. That just makes a paper trail proving you and your young man came through here, and I don’t figure any of us need that.”

  It clearly went against Gretchen’s grain to deliberately put herself off-the-grid—to imagine herself being on the wrong side of the law—but she knew as well as he did that they had to accept that that might be the case, at least for now.

  “Well, I can still pay you in cash.”

  “Save it,” Ford advised. “You should always keep some cash on you anyways. People today don’t value cash the way they should. And I don’t need your money—it doesn’t take more than a bird’s worth of feed to keep me alive these days. And you two are the most interesting thing to happen here in years.”

  That got Gretchen to break into her first real smile since their call with Martin had ended, and Cooper was grateful for that.

  He decided to return the favor and give Ford a kick, too. Everyone liked hearing good, exciting gossip.

  He leaned forward.

  In for a penny, in for a pound, right? If Ford wants to screw us over, he already has more than enough material.

  Don’t turn into a griffin, though. The last thing you want is to give the guy a heart attack—that doesn’t make for a good thank-you at all.

  He said, “I was framed for murder. We think we just figured out who did it.”

  Ford looked like all his Christmases had come at once. “Just like in The Fugitive.”

  “You do kind of look like a young Harrison Ford,” Gretchen said to Cooper. “Mostly your jawline. You’ve got prettier eyes, though.”

  Cooper touched his jaw, trying to figure out if she was right about that.

  Ford didn’t seem interested in the respective merits of Cooper’s eyes vs. Harrison Ford’s. He said, “Now that you’ve found this fellow, you think it’ll clear your name?”

  “I hope so. But even if it doesn’t, we have to try. Whoever framed me hurt other people, too, not just me.”

  “We can’t just sit back and let them get away with it,” Gretchen said. “And I’m going to clear Cooper’s name if it kills me.”

  “I like a good love story,” Ford said. He looked a little shamefaced about it. “My wife used to get those pirate romances with Fabio on the cover, and I always read them after she did. Some of them were damn good yarns.” He cleared his throat and looked down at his gnarled hands, twisting the wedding ring that Cooper was guessing he hadn’t taken off since he’d first put it on. “Those always had a happy ending. I hope you two get one too.”

  “And you, sir,” Cooper said quietly. “Thank you for everything.”

  Ford cleared his throat again. “Well, you two had better be hitting the road. Innocence won’t prove itself, you know.”

  Tell me about it.

  16

  Hitting the road was a lot more easily said than done. Sitting in a nice, central-heated motel room, it was easy to forget that they’d left their only transportation stranded miles back in a snowbank off the shoulder of the road.

  But Ford had offered them his car. Gretchen hadn’t wanted to take it—the absolute last thing she wanted was to drag this kind, gruff old man into trouble with the law—but Ford had insisted, and Cooper had finally pointed out that they could always claim they’d stolen it. Then Ford had objected on the grounds that he didn’t want to have to tell any cop that he was such a damn fool he’d left his keys in his car. Luckily, he’d caved on that point before Gretchen had needed to figure out if hotwiring a car was as easy in real life as it always looked in the movies.

  So she and Cooper were on the road again, this time in Ford’s Ford, which was an old beast that still had a tape-deck. Ford had left a Patsy Cline tape in it that they were enjoying.

  Cooper was wearing some of Ford’s freshly-laundered clothes, so at least he wouldn’t look like a prisoner—just a young man with an old man’s fashion sense. (Although Gretchen kind of liked that baggy forest-green cardigan on him.)

  They had clean clothes, a car, and a good breakfast, and they knew more or less what they w
ere doing and who they were after.

  But they didn’t know where they were going, which made the road trip part a little complicated. And Coop had been quiet ever since they’d worked out the truth about Monroe and (probably) Roger. Gretchen could feel him simmering over there in the driver’s seat; he was like a bundle of tension and anger and self-reproach.

  “How could I not have seen it,” he said under his breath.

  “No one thinks to suspect something like that. You walked into the middle of a conspiracy. You couldn’t have anticipated that.”

  He sighed. “I wonder if they were vetting me. I was enough of a loner that they could have figured just being on a team could help bend me in their direction.”

  “Sooner or later, they still would have figured out that you were never going to be a bad guy.”

  “I could have been,” Cooper said. He was staring out at the road, but she didn’t know if he was really seeing it. “If Monroe had bothered to use his basilisk tricks to figure out how to play me...”

  “No,” she said firmly, taking hold of his arm and squeezing it. “If it worked like that, they would have just gotten me to kill you, when I met them in the parking lot. It must be like hypnosis. They can’t make you do anything you really, really wouldn’t do. They have to work with what they have. And no matter what buttons they could have pushed, Coop, you wouldn’t have been like them.”

  “How do you know?”

  His voice sounded just the littlest bit lost, like after everything he’d been through, he couldn’t even hope for her answer to convince him.

  Well, Gretchen was going to convince him anyway. Because even if he wasn’t sure, she was.

  “I know,” she said firmly, “because when I met you, you’d gone through hell. You’d been disgraced, locked up, shot, and dragged out of a hospital bed before you could even heal up. You couldn’t find your griffin. Keith was hassling you and wouldn’t cut you a break. You had every reason to hate the world, Coop, but you didn’t. You were polite and funny, and when I was in trouble, when I wasn’t acting like myself, you were the one who noticed and tried to help. You wanted to escape, but you wouldn’t do it at the cost of hurting me or Keith, and you wouldn’t do it at the cost of abandoning us, either. You’re good, Coop.”

  There was a hitch in his voice when he was finally able to thank her. He said, “You know something, I think I’m starting to believe you.”

  “Good. I’m right.”

  He laughed, and the laugh gradually turned into a long exhalation, like he was clearing out all the old lies and clutter inside his chest. A deep breath replaced them with something new: fresh air. Her.

  “All right,” Cooper said. He sounded like a whole new person. Her Cooper, the real Cooper, the way she had become the real Gretchen.

  Which was good, because she had to ask him a question she really didn’t want to ask, and unfortunately, she had to ask it now.

  “You said Phil had worked with Roger and Monroe for a long time. That they were all really tight-knit.”

  Cooper didn’t even need her to ask the question, apparently. He turned to her. “You’re wondering if Phil was in on it. Then Monroe and Roger wouldn’t have needed to figure out how to hack our files—Phil could have just told them everything.”

  Gretchen nodded. “It even works with what you were saying about them testing you to see if they could bring you in on whatever scam they had going selling the witness info. Phil liked you, at least a little, and he wanted to bring you into their creepy little fold—but when you chose helping a witness over grabbing a beer with him, he finally saw that you were never, ever going to be that guy. Maybe that’s why he got so mad.”

  “But if he was in on it, why would Roger and Monroe ever kill him? He wouldn’t have turned them in if he had just as much to lose.”

  “Maybe they fought over money,” she suggested. “He wanted more than his share, so they killed him. And since they knew the heat was on, they decided to seal the deal by making you their scapegoat. Or—” This thought hadn’t occurred to her until just now, and it made her grow cold.

  It was impossible, right? It had to be impossible.

  But then, a lot of people would say that giant snakes that made you hallucinate were impossible. A lot of people would say that shifting at all was impossible.

  She had to say it, no matter how ridiculous it sounded. “Or maybe they didn’t kill him at all. Maybe he’s still alive.”

  “That can’t be,” Cooper said slowly. “People saw his body. Plenty of people.”

  “How many people saw it without Monroe there to help them along? How many of those people knew him well enough to tell the difference between Phil and a guy who just looked a lot like him? If we could find Phil alive, you’d instantly have to be exonerated, at least on the murder charge, and it would call everything else into question.”

  “I sat around for months hating that there hadn’t been justice for him,” Cooper said. He sounded stunned. “One of the reasons I wanted to get out was so I could figure out who’d really killed my partner.”

  Even thinking about it hurt him, Gretchen could tell. She couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to find out that even the man he’d been mourning had been part of the trap that had closed around him.

  But Cooper was strong, and he took a deep, shaky breath and came through to the other side of whatever it was he’d been feeling.

  “But I think you could be right,” Cooper finished, and he even managed to smile. “Which makes you two-for-two in this conversation.”

  “I’ll try for three out of three. No one’s seen Phil in the last few months, but no one’s been looking for him, since they all thought he was dead. He could breathe easy, even if he couldn’t go back to his normal life. But your case got national attention. Unless Monroe was stuck at his side twenty-four-seven, Phil would be taking the chance of being recognized, and even one mistake would blow up their whole plan.”

  “It’d be stupid to risk it,” Cooper agreed.

  “Unless,” Gretchen said, “he could hide out someplace where they didn’t really get the news.”

  Cooper blinked. “Like—Amish country?”

  For a second, Gretchen considered it just because it was weirdly charming to think that they could vindicate Cooper by taking a long tour of horse-and-buggy country, eating shoofly pie at little cafes, and questioning men and women in starched, old-fashioned clothes. But unfortunately, that wasn’t what she was thinking, and they couldn’t exactly afford a vacation detour. She boxed up the thoughts of everything they could do after this was over—if it was ever over—and stayed on track.

  “Like dragon country,” she said. “I know some mythic shifters form their own little communities, even more separatist than the Amish. Keith grew up in this tiny all-unicorn village, and Theo came from this snooty dragon one. Riell.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Cooper said cautiously. “Phil mentioned it. He wasn’t from there, but he used to say it might be a good place to retire. He made a joke about it having the best tax rates.”

  Gretchen snorted. Considering it was a town made up solely of dragons, she was willing to bet that Phil was right: Riell would let a guy hold onto his gold coins.

  “It’s not the only place a dragon on the run could go undercover, but it’s one of them. And Riell has housed fugitives before—for a price.” She frowned. “I don’t know that they’d do it again, though. Theo read them the riot act for it last time. And if I were Phil, I wouldn’t stay camped out in one of the only dragon towns that boasts a US Marshal as a hometown boy. But there are probably other counterparts to Riell scattered across the country. Phil could have gone to one of those.”

  “Do we know how to find one of those?” Cooper asked reasonably enough.

  “No,” Gretchen admitted, “but I know who to ask.”

  *

  Theo had directed them to his cousin Izzie—“Isabelle, technically,” he’d added as an afterthought, “but I keep
forgetting that”—who was attending college within an hour of Gretchen and Cooper’s current position. Isabelle would be their passage into dragon territory, which was usually guarded from the human world with a series of complex wards and spells that even Theo couldn’t explain.

  They picked Isabelle up at the stone gate of her college. She was a tall girl with white-blonde hair and unusually timeless fashion sense: in a sea of students in bulky parkas and tattered jeans, Isabelle stood out in her cranberry wool trenchcoat and sophisticated trouser-suit.

  Gretchen didn’t remember having herself put together that well in college—or even now, for that matter. Clothes seemed to wrinkle the second they touched her body, but with Isabelle, they looked like they wouldn’t dare.

  “Hello,” Isabelle said, climbing into the car. She had an arch draconian accent, more noticeable than Theo’s, and Gretchen wondered where her classmates thought she was from. “I’m pleased to meet any colleagues of Cousin Theo’s, and obviously it’s very exciting to participate in ethical criminal activity for a change.”

  “Glad we could help,” Cooper said. “Do you, ah, participate in a lot of unethical criminal activity?”

  “Not knowingly,” Isabelle said severely, “but my father is a disreputable man.”

  Gretchen remembered that Theo had told her that: Isabelle’s father had been the one to offer sanctuary to corrupt businessmen. He’d been found out partly because of Isabelle’s inability to stand idly by once she knew his schemes were getting people hurt. Once he knew that, he’d turned on his daughter and cowed wife with a snakelike quickness, lashing out bitterly. Gretchen knew how much even well-intentioned families could sometimes wind up hurting their kids; she couldn’t imagine having Isabelle’s background. It was another reason to admire how well the dragon girl carried herself.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” Gretchen said.

  Isabelle lifted her chin. “I wouldn’t be much use if I didn’t, would I?” She pointed out their next turn and then sat back imperiously in her seat, wrinkling her aristocratic nose. “Where did you get this car?” She said “car” like she was tempted to put it in air-quotes.