A nice lady came by offering them drinks. Peyton got coffee; Cela got juice and then Peyton showed her how to fold her seat tray down.
“Thank you for coming with me,” Cela told her. The smile came more naturally this time. “This would have been much harder if I had to figure it out on my own.” She poked at her tray. “Oh, this little dent is for the cup, isn’t it? So it doesn’t slide around. How clever.”
The flight took hours, but Cela thought of how much longer it would have taken to fly herself. Let alone that nightmarish bus trip, which had gone by in a haze of misery.
Now she looked out the window eagerly, impatient to be there but also terribly torn with her longing for Autumn Grove, the twins, and the house and orchard. She hadn’t realized how settled she had become there.
No matter what happens when I get there, I’m not staying on Griffin Island.Even if they welcomed her back with open arms, she thought. Her life was elsewhere now. She just wanted to get Tyr and go back to the house, the beautiful trees, the diner. She wondered how Gaby was getting on with the twins.
As the flight went on, Peyton asked questions about shifters and especially the idea of fated mates once Cela admitted exactly why she needed to find Tyr so badly.
“So you justknowthat there’s someone out there for you somewhere? For every single one of you?”
“Mostly,” Cela said. She was a little embarrassed that she had never really thought through most of the things Peyton wanted to know. “Griffins are, um, different. We don’t normally have mates. In fact, I thought we didn’t at all, but then I met Tyr.”
“You were with a guy before Terry—that is, Tyr, right? The kids’ dad?”
“Yes. Kav. It was arranged for us by the clan elders.” There was still some pain of betrayal there, but her primary feeling was a protective anger over Tyr. If Kav had hurt him?—
She found herself leaning forward in her seat, as if the physical motion could get her there faster.
“You mean like an arranged marriage? That sounds awful.”
“It was all right. Kav was the head of the clan in which I lived. It was a great honor. He was distant, but until we found out about the twins, he was kind to me.”
Until she had met Tyr, she just thought that was what a relationship was supposed to be like. She and Kav weren’ttoo close, but it hadn’t been bad. It was just that she hadn’t yet realized that it could be sogood.
“Oh wow, distant but kind, that’s definitely what I want from a husband,” Peyton said, making a face. Then she frowned. “What do you mean, found out about the twins? Like, that they're not his kids?”
“No, no. I was never with anyone else. They’re not ...” She glanced around, lowering her voice. “They're not griffins. Sometimes our children come out like that. They shift into their split forms. Ayra is an owl, and Aven is a lion. A few shifter children don’t shift at all, but even if mine were like that, I would have loved them just the same.”
She swallowed heavily. Until meeting the shifters in Autumn Grove, she had never known that there could be happy shifter families with some members who shifted and others who didn’t. It was still strange to her. But all she had to do was take one look at Gaby’s family, with shifting and non-shifting children, all of whom were loved and treated equally.
“So the others made youleave? Even your husband?”
“They were going to cast out my children. They would have been taken to a family on the mainland to raise. I—I couldn’t let that happen.”
“Gosh, no kidding!” Peyton burst out. This got her startled looks from some of the passengers in nearby seats. “Sorry,” she muttered, sinking down in her seat. “Just, wow. I’m not the mom type, but I know that no parent in their right mind would stand for something like that. Your husband sounds like an absolute jerk.”
“As the head of the clan, he had to enforce the rules, no matter what he wanted. But ... yes.” Cela blinked her stinging eyes, but with the support of Peyton’s righteous anger, she found herself smiling. “Hewasan—absolute jerk, you’re right.”
“Are you going to have to see him again?”
“I hope not,” Cela said. “I just want to get Tyr and leave, if we can.”
It finally occurred to her that she had come all this way out of fear for Tyr—but she ought to have more faith in him. No one had ever really done anything like this for her before. He had gone there to fix things for her, for both of them, and it was entirely possible that he had actually managed to do so. She knew he wouldn’t stop trying until he found something that would help.
But she still needed to be there.
Whatever you’re dealing with on Griffin Island, we will face it together. As true mates should.
In Portland, Peyton picked up a rental car to drive them up the coast to the small town where she had grown up.
“You can stay with us tonight if you want, but from the look of things, you’ll be wanting to head out directly.”
“Yes,” Cela sighed.
She was distracted by the sea. The scent of it caught her off guard, a straight wallop to her visceral memory. For her entire life, she had been surrounded by it; she had played in it, flown over it, fished and hunted in the shallow waters along the shore. She hadn’t even realized that she had missed it so much until suddenly it ambushed her with its sunstruck waves and mud-and-metal smell.
