Page 12 of Griffin Undone
Good thing I had another option.
When I crouched beside Richard again, the man’s flinch banged his head against the brick wall behind him. Letting the distraction do its job, I gripped the human’s clothes at the neck and pulled, grasping my knife in the opposite hand. When the muscle running from Richard’s shoulder to his thin neck was bare, I cut a shallow furrow about three inches long just above his collarbone, watching dispassionately as blood spilled onto the frizzled hair coating Richard’s chest. When the human tried to touch the wound, a single glance froze him in place.
“What—”
“Shh.” The sound was more croon than rebuke. “I need you to take a message.”
Richard nodded, dread obvious. It should be. Where he was going, there was no guarantee he’d come out alive. He was going anyway; I would make sure of that.
I murmured the instructions straight into the human’s mind. Then I tossed his money into his lap and walked away.
ChapterSix
Sun
Isquinted down at the human quaking on his knees before Solomon, the Archai king. The man’s anxiety rolled off him in waves, but I had to hand it to him—he didn’t flee. What incentive had Arik given him to give the human that much backbone?
I didn’t blame him for his fear. Humans rarely came in contact with the Archai king—not that this man knew whom he was actually kneeling before—but Basile, my second, had felt the human’s message was too important to shrug off as nothing.
Basile had been right, as usual.
“When?” Solomon barked.
The human—Basile had called him Richard—startled, falling onto one hand on the marble floor. “The Parthenon at dusk,” he replied, the words trembling harder than he was.
Solomon flicked a glance at me, then barked, “Go!” in the human’s general direction.
The man shifted onto his feet. Still bent in half, he started to turn.
A snarl rumbled from deep in Solomon’s chest, the sound echoing through the throne room and liquefying the man’s knees. The king had no sympathy for his humanity—ignorance was ignorance, even if you had a good excuse for it. The rituals would be observed.
Sympathy wisped through my chest before disappearing. I’d lived a thousand years with that unrelenting rigidity. At least Richard would only be forced to endure a few more moments. If he lived that long, that is. With Solomon, the chances were fifty-fifty, even with complete compliance.
Getting the idea, the man scooted backward carefully until his ass met the massive door that signaled the possibility of escape. Then he vanished without so much as a squeak.
Solomon gestured to the guard stationed by the door. The male gave an almost imperceptible nod and followed the human out. He would take Richard to Lyris and have his memories removed. The human would find himself on some empty Nashville street, still bloody and wondering what the hell had happened to him. He would never find out.
Solomon waited for the door to close behind the guard before he stirred on the throne. “What say you, Sun?”
Does it matter?I held in the sigh hovering in my chest. Like Richard, I understood the thin ice I was on around the king. Even if he was my father.
Closing my eyes, I let the moments of my childhood, so long ago now, play out across the screen of my eyelids. So many of those moments and beyond had featured one face. One friend. Arik. Until the day that friendship had been destroyed by the evil that crouched in Arik’s soul, an evil I should’ve seen and stopped before it cost Rivalen and Anna and Maddox their lives. That was certainly how Solomon saw it. Who better than me, Arik’s closest friend, to ferret out his duplicity? But then, I hadn’t managed to kill Arik after the fact, either. My father had never forgiven me either failure.
With a silent draw of breath, I met the king’s demanding gaze. “It’s him.”
“How do you know?” Solomon stood, his footsteps echoing through the vast chamber as he descended from the dais. Though slight in build, the weight of centuries of rule made him seem bigger, heavier. Certainly more solemn. My father had ruled through the Great War long before my birth, through the years of chaos following, finally bringing the Archai into a semblance of order, then prosperity. Some of the younger shifters, those born when the war was just a memory residing in our collective consciousness, joked that the Biblical Solomon was named for our king.
I didn’t disabuse them of the notion.
Unease filled my chest. The Archai were strong again, happy. Would Arik’s reappearance change that? Something told me the answer was yes, at least for me. I would stand between the griffin and any harm he sought to do to my people.
How did you find us here, brother, after all this time? Why did you come now, after the centuries I searched for you, for vengeance for your parents? Is it to finally kill me, or are you ready for justice?
I opened my eyes as my father’s footsteps stopped before me. Ever-changing irises glinted back at me, twins to my own. Phoenix shifters reflected our power, our royal heritage in our rainbow-hued eyes, eyes I sometimes hated but couldn’t refuse, no matter how much I wanted to, how much the memories stabbed at me.
“I know it’s Arik.” If my gut hadn’t told me so, the wound on the human’s shoulder would’ve quelled any doubt. The same place my sword had driven into Arik’s flesh that day long ago, when everything had begun.
No, there was no doubt.
