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

  Gretchen and Cooper traded amused glances, silently conferring about whether or not to tell Isabelle the truth. Gretchen made the call: there was no point in getting the girl more deeply involved than she was already, and no point in mixing up their stories about Ford.

  “We stole it,” she said brightly.

  Isabelle perked up. “That was clever,” she said, “because no one would ever think anyone would deliberately steal this kind of... vehicle.”

  Cooper seemed to be biting down on his lower lip to keep himself from laughing, but his voice was perfectly controlled as he said, “What are you studying, Isabelle?”

  “Law enforcement.”

  “Really?” Gretchen said, turning around in her seat. She’d been ready to guess fashion, or maybe something like hotel management, that involved excellent manners.

  “Really,” Isabelle said firmly. “I want to follow in Cousin Theo’s footsteps and become a Marshal.”

  “You might want to get a little less fond of breaking the law, then.”

  “Why? You’re both Marshals, and you’re breaking the law.”

  “I’m not technically a Marshal right now,” Cooper pointed out.

  Isabelle waved her hand breezily, like the exact circumstances of Cooper’s conviction and imprisonment weren’t her problem, and Gretchen thought that he probably found it weirdly refreshing to have someone just flat-out confirm that he was the same person he’d always been, no matter what the rest of the world said. And since Isabelle wasn’t his mate, he didn’t even have to worry about whether or not she was biased.

  “I hope you have a plan if you intend to arrest a dragon,” Isabelle said.

  Gretchen jingled the handcuffs at her side. “These are custom-made. They have shiftsilver threaded through the steel.”

  Shiftsilver kept shifters locked in their human form. All they had to do was make sure they got them on Phil before he turned in the first place. Gretchen didn’t have cuffs wide enough to go around a dragon’s forelegs.

  Isabelle wrinkled her nose at the mention of shiftsilver: most shifters were squeamish about it, for obvious reasons. “I suppose it’s a necessary evil.”

  “We never used those,” Cooper said, fiddling with the cuff where it hung down from Gretchen’s belt. “I didn’t even know that was an option, but I bet Roger did. I guess that was just another way he didn’t care about doing the job properly. Well, this makes me feel better about not being able to shift at all when I was wearing them before.”

  Isabelle gave them directions, taking them far out of town. It was almost dusk when she called them to a halt outside a frosted-over orchard. She unbuckled her seatbelt.

  “Every town has its own ritual,” she said. The twilight had turned her hair a kind of soft lavender color that Gretchen admired. “But if you have to do one of these without me, just improvise. Sincerity counts as much as accuracy.” She put on a pair of elegant leather gloves and then stepped out of the car.

  Cooper looked after her. “She’s nothing like Phil,” he said softly.

  “She’s not too much like Theo, either.” Though Gretchen was willing to bet that at least half of Isabelle’s seeming arrogance was a teenaged affectation that would burn off as she got more comfortable with herself. “But she wants to be, and that counts for a lot. She’s got that sense of noblesse oblige, you know—where people feel like if they have a lot of good fortune, they should make sure to give some of it back. She might think she’s better than people, but at least she thinks that means she owes them something. She’s a good kid.”

  “Like Keith. They just both need a little seasoning. Some growing up.”

  They watched as Isabelle knelt down in the road and wrote her name in the snow with one glove-clad fingertip.

  + guests, she wrote afterwards, in the same elegant script. The words melted away instantly.

  Magically. Gretchen had to suppress a shiver. After the basilisk mind-fuck, she didn’t find magic magical as much as terrifying.

  Isabelle straightened up, unbuttoned her coat, and unwound her scarf. With a sigh so enormous that Gretchen could see it in her shoulders and chest, she also gently tugged the neck of her top aside, allowing the luminous glow of her dragon-marks to light up the chilly, darkening night.

  “She’s stretching the fabric for us,” Gretchen said. “She’s really a hero.”

  A pale arc of pink light scratched its way across the sky, and Isabelle beamed in bright satisfaction. She climbed back into the backseat, shivering with the cold and hastily pulling her gloves back on.

  “There. Drive forward slowly, and we’ll end up in Ambergris.”

  “Ambergris?” Gretchen said, as Cooper started inching the car forward. “Isn’t that something you get from whales?”

  “Something expensive and disgusting-looking that you get from whales,” Isabelle confirmed. “Though not anymore, obviously. I don’t even know what it was for, but it was valuable enough to be a good town name, apparently.”

  “Does Riell mean anything?”

  “Riell was a dragon matriarch, thousands of years ago. She was supposedly so wealthy that even her scales were made out of polished gemstones. Which is ridiculous. It would have been so tacky.”

  “Griffins probably have legends like that too, even if I haven’t heard them,” Cooper said, still creeping forward at what Gretchen suspected was maybe two miles an hour.

  He had even more reason to be skittish about magic than she did, after all. She could tell he was talking partly to keep himself distracted from what he was doing: driving a car through a temporary hole in reality.

  “Oh, you’re a griffin?” Isabelle scooted forward in the seat, her interest now sharp enough to cut through her teenage attempts at coolness. She looked like a little kid, maybe a Girl Scout about to get a merit badge for spotting rare shifter types. “I’ve never met a griffin.”

  Cooper nodded. “I was mostly raised by bears, on my mom’s side of the family, but I’m a griffin.”

  “He’s awesome,” Gretchen said to Isabelle, who gave her a cute little grin.

  “I like mated couples,” Isabelle said, sinking back into her seat. “You two and Cousin Theo and Jillian. I’d like to have something like that someday. I’d like to have someone think that I’m... ‘awesome.’” She said the word like it was so unfamiliar she had to handle it at arms-length, maybe with tongs.

  “You seem pretty awesome already,” Gretchen said sincerely. Then she added, “Fuck,” because the sky had just opened up in front of them.

  Cooper slammed on the brakes, jolting them forward.

  “Sorry,” he said immediately. “Sorry. I just—I think I really hate magic.”

  “You’re a mythic shifter,” Isabelle said.

  “I hate magic that I’m not familiar with, then.”

  “Seconded,” Gretchen said.

  But she had to admit that their sudden entry to Ambergris was as stunning as it was startling. All of a sudden, the battered car they’d borrowed from Ford stuck out like a sore thumb on a wide, brick-paved street surrounded by tall flowers with silky orange petals. The flowers were blooming straight out of the snow, their blossoms looking like flames you could warm your hands over. The brick street widened out about a quarter-mile ahead of them, forming a kind of town square that was already crowded with suspicious-looking dragons. Far off in the distance, Gretchen could see houses that looked like they were originally made to house English lords and ladies.

  “Is Riell like this?” she said to Isabelle in an undertone.

  Isabelle shrugged. “We have more varied architecture. Honestly, this strikes me as a little dull, but the gardening is nice. I don’t know how they do that.” She cleared her throat. “Should we get out and approach with our hands raised?”

  Gretchen raised her eyebrows. “That depends. Do you think they’re going to try to set us on fire?”

  “It just seems like it would be best to be cautious. I don’t think they’d kill us without a very goo
d reason.”

  She was willing to bet that Isabelle thought that was a lot more reassuring than it was.

  She looked at Cooper, who reached over and squeezed her hand. They pressed their palms together again.

  “Ready?” he said softly.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  They climbed out of the car and approached the assembled dragons warily.

  The lead dragon, an especially magnificent-looking creature with feathery golden spines running down her long crimson back, advanced towards them and then shimmered into human form: a tall Latina woman wearing a dress so glamorous it put even Isabelle’s fashion sense to shame.

  And Isabelle must have known it, because she immediately moaned, “Oh, I want that gown.”

  It was, as it turned out, the right thing to say, because it broke the tension completely. The representative of Ambergris laughed and said, “You’d look good in it, but you’ll have to get your own.” She came closer to them and curtseyed, sweeping out her long aquamarine skirts. “Welcome to Ambergris. I’m Teresa Sanchez—our mayor, I suppose, in human terms.” She scrutinized them. “You, I can tell, are a dragon,” she said to Isabelle, “but I’m not sure about your friends.”

  “I’m a griffin,” Cooper said.

  “And I’m—” For the first time in her life, she had to hesitate. But the simplest answer still seemed to be the best one. It wouldn’t be practical to drag them into her speculation about whether or not she was some unusually late-manifesting shifter of a type even she couldn’t identify. “Human. But my family are lynx shifters.”

  “You don’t sound sure,” Teresa said.

  “I’ve been experiencing some things lately that only shifters are supposed to experience,” Gretchen said. “It’s made me wonder. But that’s not why we’re here.”

  “And you haven’t introduced yourselves,” Teresa said pointedly.

  Gretchen didn’t want a bunch of literally fire-breathing dragons to think that she was rude, but she had to think about Cooper’s safety first. They couldn’t just go around announcing that he was a wanted criminal. She offered Teresa a curtsey of her own, even though her jeans made it feel awkward and silly.

  “It would be safer if we didn’t. We don’t want to get you into any trouble.”

  Teresa drew herself up to her intimidating full height, which had to be something close to six feet. “We are the dragons of Ambergris. We do not get into trouble.”

  “It’s your call,” Gretchen said to Cooper. He had the most to lose, and he’d been burned before by trusting people. She expected him to say no, even if that meant that they would have to turn around and leave Ambergris then and there.

  But they didn’t have to.

  “My name is Cooper Dawes,” Cooper said in a clear voice that was loud enough to carry. And after days of watching him having to make himself small and inoffensive around every stranger he met, it was remarkable to see him stand up straight and admit who he was without any shame. “I was framed for murder.”

  If he was going to face down the potential consequences of pursuing his innocence, she was going to do it too.

  “I’m Gretchen Miller. I’m a US Marshal. I was supposed to be taking Cooper to another prison, but we were attacked by two armed men. I think they were using magic—maybe some kind of basilisk shifter power—to make us see things. They could have made a dead body look like it was someone it wasn’t. The man everyone thinks Cooper killed—I think he’s still alive.”

  “That’s a lot of speculation,” Teresa said.

  “It is. But we’ve seen a lot of crazy things over the last few days. And Cooper is my mate. I don’t believe he could be a killer.”

  Teresa turned towards Isabelle, who was silent for a moment before realizing what was expected of her.

  “Oh! I’m Isabelle Benoit, from Riell. And Rocky Vale College criminal justice department. I just came along to give them directions.”

  “You could have us all arrested,” Gretchen said calmly. “I’m way out of my jurisdiction here, and I’d have no official justification for why I had my prisoner uncuffed and in civilian clothes. But I’m hoping you’ll help us instead.”

  Disconcertingly, Teresa looked like she could still go either way on that. “What makes you think we’d be of any help? Why come to us at all?”

  “The man I didn’t kill was—or is—a dragon,” Cooper said. “Phil Locke. He was a Marshal too; he was my partner. He used to say he wouldn’t mind retiring to some place like this. If he were going to hide out anywhere, an all-dragon village would seem like a good place, especially one where people didn’t keep up too much with the outside world.”

  There was the barest hint of a reaction on Teresa’s face, just the tiniest twitch of her jaw before she restrained herself. But it was enough.

  She knows something.

  “He’s dishonorable,” Isabelle said.

  Gretchen had to think about what would make a difference to Theo. Not the Theo she knew so well by now, but the one she had first met as a vulnerable rookie who still had huge gaps in his knowledge of human society.

  She said, “If Phil Locke is alive, then he not only let his partner be framed for his murder, he was also almost certainly involved in a conspiracy to sell protected federal witnesses to the people they were hiding from. People who agreed to testify against mobsters died because Phil Locke and his buddies wanted to make a little extra money. If Phil Locke is dead, he’s innocent. If he’s alive, then he’s guilty—and finding him could be the only way to prove that Cooper deserves to be free.”

  “And the only way to get justice for all the other people who have been hurt,” Cooper said.

  “Dragons protect other dragons,” Isabelle said. “Sometimes, we protect those who don’t need or deserve our protection. My father did that.”

  “Benoit,” Teresa said under her breath. “Riell. I remember that.”

  Isabelle met her gaze squarely. “Then you understand why I can’t allow our people to be part of something like that ever again. If anyone has come to you in the last year looking for shelter, he could be this man, and we need to know.”

  Teresa turned around, looking back at the dragons gathered behind her.

  “You’ve heard all this,” she said, raising her voice. “What do you say to their request?”

  One by one, each dragon bent forward and laid their left wing flat against the snowy brick courtyard.

  It was a hypnotically beautiful image. They were perfectly coordinated, as if they were all in some enormous synchronized dance that Gretchen had never seen before, and it brought actual tears to her eyes.

  This, she thought, this was what these all-dragon cities were supposed to be like. This was why someone would want to live in one. You were isolated, but you could live so openly as dragons that you could develop rituals that had their own beauty.

  Teresa turned back to them.

  “He isn’t here,” she said. “But we believe we know who you mean. He lives in the mountains outside of Ambergris’s boundaries, but he comes down sometimes for supplies. He flew away a few days ago—I saw him go—and he hasn’t been back since.”

  “Have you seen him in his human form at all?” Cooper said urgently.

  “Only once. I made him transform when he first arrived—we don’t let anyone past our magical wards unless we can tell who they are.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Everything was riding on this, or at least it felt like it was. And they were working at a disadvantage. Gretchen knew she must have seen Phil’s photo during the trial, but couldn’t remember much about what he looked like. And if he was still alive, he could have easily dyed his hair or even had plastic surgery to change his face; he could have grown a beard or acquired new scars. It was possible that Cooper wouldn’t recognize a description of him, and it wouldn’t necessarily mean anything. But if he did recognize it—

  “Five-nine or five-ten,” Teresa said, her eyes half-closed as
she tried to remember. “He was white, with dark blond hair—a little curly. I don’t remember the exact color of his eyes, but they were light—green or blue. He was stocky, and he had big hands.”

  Cooper turned away, walking a few paces away from them. His shoulders were shaking.

  It wasn’t Phil. It wasn’t Phil, and he must have heard some detail that had been enough to convince him that it couldn’t be Phil: there wasn’t too much a person could do to disguise their height or their general build.

  The man they were dealing with must have just been a general recluse.

  “I’m sorry,” Gretchen said to Teresa and Isabelle. “Just give me a second.”

  She walked to Cooper and put her arms around him. She wasn’t surprised when he turned around and hugged her back, resting his face against her hair. She could feel a little dampness where he’d been crying.

  “We’ll find him,” she said. “There’s more than one dragon village out there, and he could easily be hiding somewhere else. We’ll—”

  “No.”

  “Coop, you can’t give up—”

  “I’m not.” He pulled back, and she could see a fire burning in his eyes, as bright as Isabelle’s dragonmarks. Griffin-gold seemed to dance around his pupils. “I’m not giving up. That’s Phil. He’s alive.”

  17

  Phil was alive.

  Cooper’s first reaction had been a flash of delight and disbelief—all this time, it had torn him up inside to think about Phil being gone and his murder being unavenged. Phil was alive? That was great.

  But it only took another second for everything else to sink in. Gretchen was right. There was no way for Phil to be alive and uninvolved in everything that had happened. If he was living in the mountains above Ambergris, then he had cooperated with every step in Cooper’s doom. He had helped the team fake his death, probably offering Monroe tips on how to create the best illusion of his corpse, with all the right birthmarks in all the right places. He had used his access to their files to sell away the info about their witnesses’ new lives.