"Your bakery. What are the revenue figures?"
"I'm not giving you my financials."
"Monthly overhead?"
"No."
"Profit margins on custom cakes versus daily retail?"
Her head swivels toward me. "How do you even know to ask that?"
"I ran a mercenary company for eleven years. Forty-six contracted fighters. Overhead will kill you faster than any enemy blade." I shift my weight and the seat groans again. "Custom work has higher margins but unpredictable volume. Daily retail provides steady income but thin margins. You're likely undercapitalized and overextended on ingredient costs because you refuse to compromise on quality."
Silence. The van hums along the dark road. Pine trees blur past.
"That is... disturbingly accurate."
"You use New Valencian vanilla. I can smell it in the upholstery. That alone is?—"
The roof buckles inward.
Metal screams. The van lurches sideways, tires shrieking against asphalt. Four massive puncture points appear in the ceiling above my head, curved talons the length of hunting knives punching clean through steel and upholstery and stopping three inches from my skull. Wind howls through the shattered windshield, glass spraying across the dashboard in a glittering curtain, and through the jagged opening I see feathers and fur and a hooked old bone-colored beak.
Griffin.
Displaced. Wild-eyed. Talons sunk deep into the roof and wings beating hard enough to rock the entire van onto two wheels.
Magnolia screams and yanks the steering wheel left. The van fishtails. The griffin shrieks, a sound like tearing steel, and slams its weight down again.
The roof caves another six inches.
CHAPTER 5
MAGNOLIA
The world is talons and wind and the shriek of metal being peeled apart like a sardine can.
I slam both feet on the brake.
The van bucks. Tires lock. The smell of burning rubber floods through the shattered windshield along with a blast of pine-scented night air and feathers, so many feathers, tawny and barbed and whipping across my face as the creature on the roof slides forward from the momentum. Its talons carve four parallel trenches through the ceiling, showering me in curls of shredded steel and bits of insulation that look like dirty snow.
The van screams to a halt sideways across both lanes.
I am gripping the steering wheel so hard my knuckles turn white. The engine sputters. Stalls. The headlights cast crooked beams into the trees at the road's edge, illuminating nothing useful, and above me the griffin shifts its weight and the entire frame groans like a dying animal.
Then Dash moves.
He doesn't open the door. He kicks it. One massive leg pistoning outward with the kind of force that belongs in demolition work, not vehicle egress. The door launches off its hinges, spinning into the dark like a rectangular frisbee, andcrashes into the tree line with a sound of splintering wood and startled birds.
Cool.
That was my only passenger door.
Dash rolls out of the gap, shoulder-first, hitting the asphalt in a tight combat tuck that carries him five feet before he's already on his boots and rising. The van rocks from the sudden loss of his weight. The griffin's massive head swings toward the movement, that bone-pale beak catching the glow of my one surviving headlight. Its eyes are gold and wild and rolling with panic. Not hunting eyes. Cornered-animal eyes.
Oh no.
"Dash, I think it's scared?—"
