Page 1 of Griffin Undone
Prologue
“Arik!”
The scream reverberating inside my head drove my knees to the ground. I let out a scream of my own as the telepathic message my father had thrust inside my brain snuffed out, the loss howling through me, leaving behind an emptiness deeper than anything I had experienced in the hundred years I had been alive.
And then a single image flashed behind my eyes: Maddox, his face a mask of hatred, his sword arcing toward my father’s neck.
The image made no sense. My parents, Rivalen and Anna, had practically raised Maddox. He was closer to me than a blood brother could ever be. Across the decades it had been Maddox, Sun, and me. The three of us had shared everything, all our lives. Everything. Maddox would not hurt my family.
But the blankness was there, along the line that had tied me to my father for a century. Gone. But where…
Mother!
I lunged to my feet, already running, even as I sent the cry, the question to my mother. The searing pain that echoed back threatened to overwhelm me, the image of Anna struggling with my best friend, Maddox’s hands on her, the gluttony in the shifter’s eyes as he forced her—
“No!”
I choked against the rush of acid rising up the back of my throat and ran faster, following the link to my mother with a desperation that turned to violent despair mere steps from the front door of the home I had been raised in. The moment my mother’s life ended. I slammed inside anyway, unable to stop, unable to turn away from all that remained of my parents.
Scattered ashes.
They were gone.
The next minutes were black, blank. I remembered nothing, not even kneeling amid the mess of broken furniture and fixtures. Nothing until the door burst open behind me.
“Maddox,” I choked out, only then realizing tears drenched my face. I did not turn to see who had entered. It did not matter. I placed my palm on the floor, right in the ashes of my betrayed father.
“It was Maddox.”
* * *
Hours later
I ignoredthe whisper of movement at my back, my focus centered on the pyre I had struggled for hours to build. No help. I had not wanted it. While my clan reeled, shocked and grieving, my own pain had coalesced into a hard, deadly force inside me—the need for vengeance. The need to feel Maddox’s blood dripping through my fingertips.
I would honor the two people who had given me life, who had loved me with everything inside themselves. Then I would bring their murderer to justice.
I had stacked each piece of wood on the memorial to my parents with careful precision, but as I touched a lit torch to one corner, watched the flames begin their dance along one edge, I knew the gesture was as empty as the pyre. The burning of the fire was merely symbolic of the flash of energy that had burned my parents’ headless bodies at the moment of their deaths, the same flash that delivered every Archai to whatever lay beyond when they were taken from this life.
Somehow the ritual no longer comforted me, not with the memories of the final horrific moments that my parents had drawn breath circling inside my head. My father’s blood coating the ground. The elegant finery of my father’s clothes a macabre contrast to the grisly detachment of his head from his neck. Anna reaching for her mate in desperation. In terror. My mother’s pain— I couldn’t bear to think of what she had gone through, what I had shared in those too-brief moments of connection. Choking, suffocating grief welled, tearing into my mind, my very sanity as I struggled to make sense of what had happened, to say good-bye to the two people who had nurtured me, protected me for a hundred years.
The two people I had failed.
I knelt, silent and alone, in the dirt, keeping vigil as the fire grew to a roar, the heated air a foul kiss along my naked scalp. My coloring had always drawn attention—the silver-blue of my eyes that shone in the night, the blond, almost white hair, a trait shared by the males of my long and honorable family line. All had worn their unusual hair far down their backs, a vanity of sorts, identifying them on sight as the purest and most ancient of griffin shifters. As had I. Until now. Now my head was bare, shorn in grief for the parents I loved.
The parents my closest friend had murdered.
I glanced down at the short blade on the ground before me, the knife I would use to carve the mourning cuts in deep diagonal grooves across my cheeks. But first…
“You will be avenged,” I whispered, swearing it as I rammed my knuckles into the ground, relishing the sharp pain echoing through them. Rage mounted with every throb, every breath, my heart a bottomless pit of boiling emotion in my heaving chest.
“Yes, they will,” a familiar voice said behind me. The slide of a sword from its sheath accompanied the threat inherent in the softly spoken words.
Shock sizzled through me. My head shot up, my incredulous gaze locking onto the point of Sun’s sword mere inches from my neck. The weapon’s unwavering position matched the lack of give in its owner’s expression. This male who had grown up alongside me, shared my triumphs and tribulations over the last one hundred years, my boyish mistakes and adult disappointments, now threatened me before my parents’ grave. What I could not understand was why.
“What is happening?” I asked, hating the thick coat of grief and confusion that weakened my words.
Sun held his weapon steady. I met his rainbow-hued eyes, an inherent trait of his phoenix form, and the emptiness I found there immobilized my limbs. The birdlike tilt of his head was at once familiar and utterly alien as he dissected the figure huddled before him.
