“You know that’s what he does when he doesn’t like what a creature has to say. I still don’t understand why . . .” I trailed off at Griff’s sigh. “Thank you. No one else here would’ve done that. I’m going to miss the sound of your voice though. Your words.” I smiled. “Hang on. I’ll be right back.”
I returned five minutes later with a pencil and a notebook. Justice and I had both learned to read really young, but for Griff, it’d been a struggle. He hated it. He said the words looked like ravens flapping around the page. None of them stayed still. They were a big black flock darting across a white sky. He claimed if he ever caught a word, it jumped off the page and bit him on the nose. Jagger said it was because the Jersey Devil wasn’t made to read, and neither was his son. Rou said we shouldn’t try to change a being’s nature. But as a kid, I’d wanted to be able to leave Griff notes, so we’d devised our own language. Remember how much Griff loved codes? We’d created a code of our own with images. As long as it was a picture word, it didn’t fly on raven’s wings and refuse Griff its secrets.
It was a simple language—we’d been kids after all—but it’d work.
I handed him the pencil and the paper. “Why’d you do it?”
Griff looked at me as if he were disappointed in my denseness and then drew two hands clasped together.
Because you’re my friend.
My shoulders dropped. “As your friend, next time . . . don’t. Please.”
He looked away, refusing to agree.
I rubbed my eyes and smothered another yawn. It was close to dawn. Everyone had slunk to bed after an exhausting day. The asylum was quiet in the way a sleeping monster was quiet. I could feel its fetid breath on the back of my neck.
“Did you find a bedroom?”
He shook his head. So he’d come here right after Jagger let him loose.
The pencil scratched as Griff drew another hurried picture. It was a clown.
I laughed. “Yeah. It’s incredibly creepy here.”
I took the pencil and added fangs and blood to Griff’s drawing. He snorted.
“I should probably warn you, I think the Smiths are going to try to kill me.”
Griff spread his hands as if to sarcastically say, “You think?”
“Okay, yes. But I mean, really, really try. Hell Gate was just the beginning. If you see any of them, Finn especially . . . run. I mean it, Griff. Don’t trust them. Don’t talk to them. Just . . .”
He grabbed the pencil and scratched out another picture. I stared at it. It was two images: the sign for conjurers and the sign for evil.
“Not all of them,” I said.
Griff looked at me like I’d lost my mind. We were talking about conjurers, the boogeyman under his bed, the monster he was most afraid of.
Speaking of . . .
I grabbed my knife and crouched at the foot of the bed, slicing my skin and rubbing it over the stone. Then I rubbed blood at the threshold of the door.
“The locks here are garbage. They haven’t kept anyone out.”
Griff lifted an eyebrow as I clenched my hand.
I shrugged. “For now, we’re aligned with the Clarks and the Bards. We do what Jagger says. But the Smiths . . . Be really careful of them. They’re out for blood.”
Griff stared at my hand, blood leaking through my fingers. Then he drew another picture—one we’d never used before, but I knew exactly what it meant.
“Yeah.” I nodded and climbed onto the bed with him. We lay back on the narrow twin, barely fitting in the tight space. “It’s probably safest. It’s probably smart. It’s . . . Thank you. Thanks for saving me.”
I curled into Griff and felt his muscles ripple as he transformed. The bed shuddered beneath his weight and then stilled. The eerie, mad asylum feel shied away from his monstrous form, leaving only silence and weighted darkness. The sconce dimmed until we were covered in a blanket of black.
Perhaps Griff was afraid of the asylum, but it was afraid of him too.
I smothered a yawn. Griff rolled to his side and covered me with his leathery wings. Just in case . . .
