Page 31 of My Guardian Gryphon

“I don’t hide,” I snarled, feeling my beast rear its head from within, making my voice reverberate through the dining hall. My Gryphon hated that I’d rejected Gretchen. Hated me. It’d done nothing but sulk and growl and whine inside me since the moment I’d pulled my lips from hers, but there was nothing to be done about it. I couldn’t be with her. This conversation was ridiculous, but if it would make Gretchen or Rose feel better, I would participate.

Nothing would close the black hole leaving Gretchen in the library that day had ripped open.

“Good.” Rose’s voice snapped like the crack of a whip. “Let us go talk to the little Sister who denies her destiny.” Her gaze fell on me next. Magick whipped around my body, frothing and churning like the waves of a stormy ocean.

The entire cafe had silenced, all eyes focused on us, but I didn’t care.

I glared back, angry. Burning on the inside because I’d done the right thing—or at least what I thought had been right—and now she was pissed. Rose only got pissed when something interfered with her grand design. And the Sisters were at the very center of that design.

She tilted her head just slightly to the side, waiting for me to speak. Waiting for me to hang myself on an emotionally reckless response. If she thought that tactic was going to work on someone more than four thousand years old, she was senile.

I wanted Gretchen, but if I was dead, it would make that dream null and void. Unbeknownst to many in Sanctuary, Rose had no issue removing obstacles from the path to her goals. Through the millennia, I’d seen more than one man she’d called soldier and friend banished or killed because he’d changed or botched her well-laid plans.

Lamassu weren’t just called the most powerful beings on Earth—they were. And more.

“Let’s go talk,” I said, keeping my tone flat. We left the cafe and strolled casually across the town circle as if the tension between the three of us wasn’t thicker than peanut butter in an arctic blizzard.

The closer we got to the castle, the more I could feel her presence. Her unhappiness. Her despair, and it struck me like a sucker punch to the gut.

I made a one-eighty. “Be right back.” I caught Miles glance. “Wait for me in the foyer.”

He nodded, and I took off back across the street and into the cafe.

“Hey, big guy. What’s up?” Raven asked, weaving between the tables to my side. “Forget something?” She held up a to-go coffee cup and gave me an encouraging smile.

I took the offering, relishing the scent of the nutty roasted hazelnut aroma. “Thanks, but could I trouble you for a cup of hot chocolate as well?”

“You’re so sweet to that girl. Gimme a sec.” She bounded off, returning shortly with another covered paper coffee cup. “If it wasn’t crazy, I’d totally think you were trying to win her over. You’re always bringing her treats.”

My throat cinched closed, her words much too close for comfort. “Crazy,” I said, barely able to keep my voice from cracking.

I’d faced thousands of enemies through the years. All types. Weapons of mass destructions. Crazy lunatics.

I always won.

Never believed different, but the upcoming conversation with Rose and Gretchen was the first time I’d ever felt…fear. Things would be easier if I could just fight it out, but Rose wouldn’t fight me with a sword. If she wanted me dead, she’d just snap my neck and stab me through the heart. There would be no words. No negotiation.

I knew her.

I knew what to expect.

“What are you and Gretchen reading right now?” Raven’s question jerked me out of the mire my mind was concocting.

“Antony and Cleopatra,” I said, my voice managing a robotic quality.

“Very good play.”

“It was and thanks for the drinks.” I lifted the cups in a salute and used my shoulder to push open the cafe door, escaping from Raven’s cheerful optimism and eye-opening realistic summation of how I spent my free time.

Did everyone in the town know I spent most afternoons tucked away in the Blackmoor library with one of the Sisters? How had I been utterly oblivious to my own infatuation? If someone had pointed it out sooner, perhaps I could’ve stopped it before it progressed to the point it was at now.

But I didn’t want to forget Gretchen, and I wouldn’t trade a single afternoon I’d spent in her company. She’d made my tired, bitter soul feel young and alive again.

I kicked the bottom of the large oak and iron door leading into the front space of the castle. Miles opened it, and I stepped inside beside him. Rose stood a few feet away, closer to the double grand staircases leading to the Blackmoor’s personal quarters.

He glanced at the coffee cups and grunted his approval.

The library was on the second level as well, but instead of keeping it to themselves after the library in town burned in a Djinn attack, they’d generously left it unlocked and available to anyone who wanted to use it.

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