Once, when he was thirteen, when puberty made him accidentally transform every other day, he’d gotten so scared he’d tried to cut off his wings. But Justice had wrestled him and fought him over the knife until they were both bloody. Then they’d sat together. Griff was back in his human form, and Justice put an arm around his shoulder. He was a year and a half older than Griff and the only big brother he’d ever have.
“You can’t cut out parts of yourself you don’t like,” Justice had said, his voice low and vehement. He’d recently become a mine, and that was the first time in weeks he’d shown any emotion. He’d wiped at the blood dripping down his lip. “It won’t work. What do you think’ll happen? You cut it out, but it’ll still be there. You might hate it, but it’s not going away. It’s inside you. You’ll just have hurt yourself.”
Justice was speaking from experience. For a long while, he’d hated that he was part-conjurer.
“So? What if I want to hurt myself?” Griff had thrown back.
“Then do it, I guess.” Justice had shrugged. “Make yourself weak. What do I care? You die, your wings’ll come back anyway. They always will, one way or another. If it were me, instead of trying to cut out what I hate, I’d just accept it.”
But Griff wouldn’t. The Jersey Devil had raped his human mother and then she’d died in childbirth. Then Griff’s father had sold him to Jagger for a half-bottle of Furtig. To him, there was nothing good there. Nothing.
“No. I won’t ever accept it.”
Justice had shrugged again. “Then I guess you’re gonna have a hard life.”
Griff did end up cutting off his wings, his tail, and his horns. Then, weeks later, he’d slipped on a patch of ice and died. When he came back in his new body, I asked him if he was going to cut them off again.
“No,” he’d said. “Justice was right. I’m my father’s son, whether I admit it or not. It’s stupid—when I realized I still felt the same, that I was the Jersey Devil’s son even without my wings . . . it felt worse than before. I cut them off, and nothing changed except I realized I hated a part of me so much I’d hurt myself to make it disappear. What’s worse is, when it didn’t work, I was almost glad I slipped on that ice. Stupid.”
“Not stupid.” I’d shaken my head. “Human.”
He’d grinned at that. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Human.” He’d nodded. “Right. Human.”
After that, he didn’t change into his father’s form very often, but he didn’t avoid it either. And he didn’t hate it, because he’d stopped hating that part of himself.
He’d accepted it. Which meant he’d been able to save our lives.
If he’d stayed human, we both would’ve burned up in the Smith’s fire. But since he’d transformed into his father’s form, we were saved.
A Jersey Devil is fireproof. How else would it flit in and out of hell?
So Griff had covered my body and wrapped his wings around me, shielding me from the volcanic flames swallowing our home. He was strong, and so even though he grunted and winced as Hell Gate collapsed on top of him, I don’t think he was hurt.
Then there was only darkness, heat, and silence.
“Can you lockpick us out?” Griff asked. It took me awhile to decipher the low growl of his words.
When I did, I shook my head. “No. We’re buried so deep I can’t see any illusion.” I sent my senses outward, searching for knots to untie. There was nothing.
“Can you break us free?” I asked.
Griff made a noise that was halfway between “no” and “I wish.”
The air was stuffy, and each breath scraped my lungs and left my eyes and my throat itchy and pained. There was something caustic in the air. Worse, though, the air was thin and growing thinner. I couldn’t see anything outside the cocoon of Griff’s wings, but I wondered if we were sealed in an airtight pocket.
My back was pressed against Griff’s front, and my knees were wrapped to my chest in a fetal position. It made me think of the pictures I’d seen of Pompeii. The people there had been covered in ash, their bodies preserved. All of them were in the fetal position too.
“Are we running out of air?” I asked, my voice surprisingly steady.
Griff nodded. “No air flow.”
So we had minutes. Maybe.
Griff would die and come back as a mine.
