He's already on the hood.
One second he's standing on the road. The next, three hundred and eighty pounds of formal-wear-clad Orc launches onto the crumpled hood of my delivery van, and the front suspension collapses with a gunshot bang. The griffin screams. Dash screams back. His is lower, guttural, a sound that vibrates in my sternum and makes every hair on my body stand at attention. He grabs a fistful of the beast's chest feathers with one hand and wraps his other arm around its thrashing neck.
The griffin's wings snap open. Full span. Twelve feet at least, each one, and they hammer the air with enough downdraft to blow the rearview mirror clean off the windshield frame. Papers from my glovebox cyclone through the cabin. Receipts, napkins, an old parking ticket, my insurance card, all swirling around my head like the world's most boring confetti.
The van lifts.
Two inches. Three. The griffin beats harder, talons ripping free of the roof one by one with sounds like tent stakes being yanked from frozen ground. Dash's weight keeps it from gaining real altitude, but the creature bucks and twists and slamshim sideways into what's left of my windshield frame. Glass fragments spray. His tuxedo jacket tears across the back with a sound like a sail giving way in a gale.
I fumble for the door handle. Shove my door open. Fall out onto the asphalt on my hands and knees. The road surface is still warm from the day's heat and bites into my palms with embedded gravel.
The griffin drags Dash off the hood.
They hit the road together. The impact cracks the asphalt. Literally cracks it, a spiderweb of fractures radiating from the point where Dash's back meets the ground with the full weight of a panicked mythological apex predator on him. His tusk catches the light. His arms are locked around the griffin's neck in a chokehold that would snap a telephone pole, and the beast's hind legs, lion legs, massive and clawed, scrabble against his torso. The armor-silk holds. Grimshaw's enchanted fabric takes the raking claws without tearing, though the friction sparks like a struck flint in the darkness.
"Stop!" I'm on my feet. "Dash, stop, it's not attacking, it's displaced!"
He doesn't hear me. Or he does and the information doesn't register through whatever combat protocol has seized his brain. The griffin's beak snaps at his face. He jerks sideways. The beak gouges a chunk from the asphalt where his cheek was a half second ago.
I grab a handful of roadside gravel.
Throw it at his head.
Small stones ping off his skull. He blinks. His gold eyes find me across fifteen feet of dark highway, and for one heartbeat he looks like something from a war painting. Pinned under a monster, suit shredded, scarred arms flexing, breathing hard, blood from a shallow cut on his forehead running into his left eye.
"It's scared! Look at its eyes. That's not a predator hunting. That's a juvenile. It probably got separated from its flight and panicked when it saw our headlights."
The griffin wails. Close up, away from the terror and the wind, the sound is pitiful. Young. Lost.
Dash's grip loosens one degree.
His gaze flicks from me to the creature's rolling golden eyes. Back to me.
"You want me to release a griffin. On a public highway. In my good suit."
"Your good suit has claw marks and road rash. I think we're past worrying about the dry cleaning bill."
The griffin bucks. Dash's head cracks against the asphalt and his jaw tightens but he doesn't flinch. The creature's wings beat twice more, weaker now, and a gust of displaced air rolls across the highway and hits me with the smell of ozone and wild animal musk. Feathers drift through my headlight beam like autumn leaves.
Then I hear it.
Engine. Behind me. Coming fast.
Headlights sweep around the curve a quarter mile back, high beams bouncing off the tree line. Then a second set right behind the first. Late-night highway traffic, barreling toward a sideways bakery van, a girl in a vintage dress standing in the road, and a full-grown griffin pinning an Orc in a destroyed tuxedo to the center lane.
I am already running.
My flats slap the pavement. I throw myself into the driver's seat, crank the key. The engine catches on the third try with a consumptive rattle that sounds terminal. I wrench the wheel hard left and stomp the gas. The van lurches forward, dragging something metallic underneath the chassis that screams againstthe road in a shower of orange sparks. Probably my muffler. Possibly my entire undercarriage.
The first car's horn blares.
I yank the wheel right. The van swerves across the oncoming lane and my remaining headlight sweeps over Dash and the griffin like a lighthouse beam. They're rolling now, a tangle of feathers and green skin and shredded silk, and I'm going to hit them, I am absolutely going to flatten my rented mercenary on a state highway three hours before my sister's rehearsal dinner?—
I cut the wheel again. Hard. The van tips onto two wheels. Cups, sugar, my emergency roadside kit, everything in the back cascades to the left side with a crash. For one impossible second I am balanced on the passenger-side tires, the driver's side floating, the steering wheel useless in my hands. The first car screams past on my left, horn dopplering into the night. Wind rocks the van. The tires slam back down. My teeth click together hard enough to taste copper.
The second car.
Its headlights fill my mirrors. I can see the driver's face, mouth open, hands white on the wheel. I gun the engine and drag the van forward ten feet, fifteen, giving them room to swerve around the carnage behind me. They do. Barely. Their side mirror clips my bumper and explodes into plastic shrapnel that patters against my broken windshield frame.
