The wind whistled in her ears. As she fell, she was already making plans. She would swim back to San Francisco. Julian wouldn’t like her return. They had reached an understanding, she and the Nightkind King, when she had come to the island to die. But Julian would have to adjust, and Rhoswen was perfectly capable of making the crossing with the dog on her own.
Carling rolled in the air to dive headfirst and watched the foaming white-capped water rush toward her. She reached out to it with both arms, anticipating the cold shock of the plunge into water with grim satisfaction.
Hard claws jerked her upward with gut-wrenching force just before she hit. Son of a bitch. Her head snapped back. As the universe wheeled, she caught a glimpse of the gigantic lion paws that curled to grip her by the shoulder and thigh. The edge of tremendous bronze wings hammered down on either side of her.
She shouted at Rune, “You did not just do that!”
His deep voice sounded overhead. “How is that disbelief working out for you?”
The need to do violence caused her fists to shake. He swooped up with her to the top of the cliff and dumped her on the ground. With a twist of her hips, she flipped onto her back and drove her fist upward as hard as she could. Before she could get the blow to full extension, he knocked her hands aside and pinned her by driving his claws deep into the ground on either side of her arms.
He imprisoned the rest of her body by the simple expediency of lying down on top of her. It felt like she had a Hummer parked on her chest. While she might have the strength to shift a Hummer—she didn’t know, she’d never tried—she sure as hell didn’t have the strength to do it without any kind of leverage.
Outrage steam-whistled. Not in thousands of years had anyone dared to try to lay a hand (or paw, as it were) on her without her permission. She felt like she was about to blow a gasket. “YOU BASTARD! Let go of me!”
“Shut the fuck up.” His growl vibrated through her body to rumble in the earth beneath her.
Sunlight blinded her as she glared up at him, turning him into a towering blur overhead. She scrambled mentally for a spell and sucked in a breath—
—and the towering blur plummeted toward her. It resolved into an immense, sleek eagle’s head the length of her arm, with a long wicked hook of a beak that snapped at her. Rune tilted his head to stare at her with a blazing fierce eye the size of a headlamp. He roared, “DON’T YOU DARE!”
It was like having an F-16 bomber take off in her face. Her hair blew away from her face.
The spell died on her lips as she stared at the enraged gryphon. She had never seen him so close in his Wyr form before. His sheer magnificent size and regal barbarity were overwhelming.
She refused to get swept away by such bizarre perfection. She said in a cold, precise voice, “I would dare.”
His head lifted. She felt him struggling with his own anger. Then he said, “Will you at least calm down enough so we can talk about what happened? You are one righteous hellcat when you decide to get going, do you know that? Way to throw an all-over hissy fit, Carling.”
She ground her teeth. How dare he lecture her? “If you ever try to do anything to restrict my movements again, you’ll find out I know how to hold a grudge too,” she said between her teeth. “In fact, I have a real talent for it.”
“I’m sure you do,” he said. “Goddammit.”
In a startlingly humanlike gesture of exasperation, he shook his head and shifted his body off of her. He did not deign to glance down as he carefully pulled his claws out of the sod and shifted his paws to one side. She watched as he did it. Those retractable claws were curved like scimitars and sharp enough to pierce steel. He settled on the ground beside her and looked out over the water, a predatory leviathan wearing a ferocious frown.
She didn’t move. She looked up at him again, at that broad, strong feline chest to the long, graceful, strong column of his neck, and she lost whatever she had been about to say. Even though they were no longer touching, the great, heavy sprawling length of his body radiated warmth that began to sink into her bones.
Time passed and as she calmed, her perspective shifted. His severe, silent contemplation of the ocean and sky suddenly made her feel impetuous and oddly young. Or perhaps it was not so very odd. To him, she was young. What an amazing thought. When he wore his T-shirt and ragged jeans in his human form, and he made wisecracks in modern slang, he lived much more in the moment than she did. The weight of passing years did not press on him. He had no mortality.
In the process of scooping her out of a dead fall and pinning her down, Rune had not given her so much as the equivalent of a paper cut. She remembered how he had gently kissed her forehead before he had left her child-self, and burning tears filled her eyes again.
“I gave you permission to go back,” she whispered. “I didn’t give you permission to change me.”
The gryphon bowed his head, and somehow that giant fierce eagle managed to look humble and chagrined. “I heard the whip,” he confessed in a quiet, pained voice. “And I heard you cry out, and I couldn’t think. All I knew was I couldn’t let that lash fall on you again.”
The tears spilled over, sliding down her temples to soak into her hair. She glanced at his immense paws again. She hadn’t seen him kill the priest who had been whipping her, but she had seen the priest’s body afterward. The broken corpse had been in ribbons, its bones split apart. She reached out to touch one paw. “Okay,” she said unsteadily. “Okay. But I don’t remember what happened to me before you did that.”
He sighed and lifted up his mammoth wings to resettle them more comfortably into place along the sleek arch of his muscled back. Only then did he lift his head enough to look at her. “I don’t believe I have the Power to change you,” he said, still in that quiet, careful voice. “Not you, not your soul or spirit, or your ba, if you will. We don’t yet know what the rest of it means.”
She gave in to impulse and rolled over to sink her fingers into the fur at his breast. The fur was as thick and soft as it looked. Underneath, his hot skin was a tight cloak over muscles that were so massive they were as much of a shock to feel as they were to look at. She ran her hand upward through the fur, reaching the place where it gave way to a luxuriant burst of soft, small feathers. The feathers lengthened and darkened until they lay in a sleek bronze cap over his neck and head.
He began to purr as she petted him. The sound rumbled through her body. She raked her fingernails gently through the thick fur and soft profusion of feathers. He lay naturally in the position known in heraldry as the lion couchant, relaxed but alert as Carling studied him.
How could he not believe he had the Power to change her? What thrummed under her fingertips was indescribable. She realized how much of Rune’s personality came from his catlike sense of play. In his gryphon form, he revealed something much more ancient and unknowable.
How could he exist as two creatures melded into one? He said he had an affinity for crossovers and between places. She had nodded and thought she understood. Now as she stared at him, she didn’t think she had understood anything.
The Power of the between places roared in his body. By its very definition it was a transformative force filled with tension and dynamic movement. Yet instead of the tension tearing him apart, he contained it, the transformative force held steady as a rock by his immortal spirit, and the Power that required was unimaginable to her. It seemed the very definition of impossibility.