CELA
The other griffinsleft Cela on a wooded headland, looking out over the lashing gray waves. It was forbidding and lonely, even compared to the rocky island where she had spent her entire life. Nothing grew here except scrubby trees and mosses. On this chilly night, spitting rain swept over the barren landscape, making it even less hospitable than usual.
To add to her humiliation, she had been forced to fly to the mainland not in her griffin form, but as a human, riding on the back of another griffin. She could not transform and fly because there was no safe way to carry the twins. They were too young to ride on her back or fly with her, and their shifting was too unpredictable for them to be safe in a harness carried against her body when she had no hands to manage them.
Most griffin mothers would be home during these early months, safe in the covert, surrounded by their own kind.
Instead she climbed down off Kav’s back, forcing back tears of grief and shame. The two griffins who had escorted them stood proudly on the headland like a pair of guardian statues. Both were huge, one a tiger/owl hybrid, the other aleopard/osprey. The clan’s enforcers were never weaklings. Kav was the most classic of griffin shift forms, a lion/eagle, with a tawny mane cascading regally down his back.
Cela felt nothing like them. She didn’t feel grand and proud; she felt small and weak. She had to force herself to keep her spine straight, even with the weight of the babies in their front carrier, safely and warmly bundled underneath her poncho.
She could tell by their squirming that both were awake, and one of them had shifted. It was Ayra, the female twin; she felt the pinch of a tiny beak, the fluffy flapping of unfledged, stubby wings. Had it been Aven, her brother, the carrier would have dipped beneath the weight of a lion cub.
The two griffin enforcers abruptly shifted into a man and a woman. They were just as forbidding in their human forms, both tall and statuesque, wearing flowing cloaks. It seemed that the woman might be looking at her with pity. Cela turned her face away.
Unfortunately the only place that left her to look was at Kav. He shifted as well and gazed down at her. No pity there: his face was cold and distant as the icy northern sea beating against the headland.
Kav. Her mate. Once she had believed that he cared for her. Loved her, even. Now she knew better.
“How can you do this?” she asked him. “To me—to your children?”
It seemed that his eyes held a flicker of—something, she wasn’t sure what. But before he could say anything, the male of the enforcer pair spoke up.
“You have one last chance, Cela of Covert Silvershell,” the male griffin said formally. “You do not have to go into exile along with the ...” He glanced with disdain at the squirming bundle under Cela’s poncho.
And that, paired with her mate’s coldness, put steel inCela’s spine and a raw edge of anger in her voice. “Children?” she spat at him. “My children? My babies?”
She would never have dared to talk this way to a clan enforcer a year ago. But this was for herchildren.
“We’ll find good homes for them,” the woman said, speaking up abruptly. Her voice was musical and bell-like.
“No,” Cela said. “I will not give them up.”
Underneath the poncho, as if to prove that she’d made a mistake, little Aven kicked her in the ribs, and then abruptly shifted; Cela felt tiny claws sticking in her blouse. This seemed to trigger Ayra into shifting back to a human baby; the carrier’s weight shifted yet again, and Cela staggered.
“Very well. Let me see your tattoo.”
Cela swallowed hard. Pushing back the poncho, she held out her right arm and pulled up her sleeve, while the children continued to try to wriggle their way out of the carrier.
The tattoo swirled up her arm from wrist to shoulder, a complex writhing tangle of dark blue and pale silver. All griffins got them as children. Cela still remembered her pride to see Covert Silvershell’s colors and symbols twining up and down her arm, marking her forevermore as one of them.
Now the male enforcer shifted his hand—just his hand, tiger’s claws erupting from his human fingers. Cela knew what was coming. She kept her eyes open, refusing to look away.
The claw pierced her skin above the elbow. She clenched her jaw, refusing to make a sound, as he drew his claw down her arm, spoiling her beautiful tattoo.
The mark would forever identify her as an exile. Without the griffin elders to reapply the magical tattoo, there was no way to fix it, and the scar would remain anyway. No griffin on the outside would speak to her.
The enforcer pulled his hand back, shifting his fingers tohuman ones again, and shook them as if he found her blood distasteful.
Cela clenched her hand, trying not to show the pain. Mingled blood and rainwater trickled down her arm. She could already feel her shifter healing starting to itch as the wound knit back together.
She turned to Kav—one last appeal for help, succor, comfort. But if any sympathy for her had shown on his face when she received the exile mark, she had missed it. He regarded her with the same coldness he’d had for her since the discovery of the twins’ warped shifting—as if from that point on, his mate and children had been dead to him.
“You can’t just leave us here,” Cela said. “Please.”
Kav reached under his cloak and took out a bundle the size of a loaf of bread, wrapped in plastic to protect it from the damp. He held it out to her. “There are some things here to help you start a new life. Money?—”
Cela smacked his hand, flinging the package into the wet grass. “I don’t want money. I want yourhelp!”
