He imprisoned the rest of her body by the simple expediency of lying down on top of her. It felt like she had a Hummer parked on her chest. While she might have the strength to shift a Hummer—she didn’t know, she’d never tried—she sure as hell didn’t have the strength to do it without any kind of leverage.
Outrage steam-whistled. Not in thousands of years had anyone dared to try to lay a hand (or paw, as it were) on her without her permission. She felt like she was about to blow a gasket. “YOU BASTARD! Let go of me!”
“Shut the fuck up.” His growl vibrated through her body to rumble in the earth beneath her.
Sunlight blinded her as she glared up at him, turning him into a towering blur overhead. She scrambled mentally for a spell and sucked in a breath—
—and the towering blur plummeted toward her. It resolved into an immense, sleek eagle’s head the length of her arm, with a long wicked hook of a beak that snapped at her. Rune tilted his head to stare at her with a blazing fierce eye the size of a headlamp. He roared, “DON’T YOU DARE!”
It was like having an F-16 bomber take off in her face. Her hair blew away from her face.
The spell died on her lips as she stared at the enraged gryphon. She had never seen him so close in his Wyr form before. His sheer magnificent size and regal barbarity were overwhelming.
She refused to get swept away by such bizarre perfection. She said in a cold, precise voice, “I would dare.”
His head lifted. She felt him struggling with his own anger. Then he said, “Will you at least calm down enough so we can talk about what happened? You are one righteous hellcat when you decide to get going, do you know that? Way to throw an all-over hissy fit, Carling.”
She ground her teeth. How dare he lecture her? “If you ever try to do anything to restrict my movements again, you’ll find out I know how to hold a grudge too,” she said between her teeth. “In fact, I have a real talent for it.”
“I’m sure you do,” he said. “Goddammit.”
In a startlingly humanlike gesture of exasperation, he shook his head and shifted his body off of her. He did not deign to glance down as he carefully pulled his claws out of the sod and shifted his paws to one side. She watched as he did it. Those retractable claws were curved like scimitars and sharp enough to pierce steel. He settled on the ground beside her and looked out over the water, a predatory leviathan wearing a ferocious frown.
She didn’t move. She looked up at him again, at that broad, strong feline chest to the long, graceful, strong column of his neck, and she lost whatever she had been about to say. Even though they were no longer touching, the great, heavy sprawling length of his body radiated warmth that began to sink into her bones.
Time passed and as she calmed, her perspective shifted. His severe, silent contemplation of the ocean and sky suddenly made her feel impetuous and oddly young. Or perhaps it was not so very odd. To him, she was young. What an amazing thought. When he wore his T-shirt and ragged jeans in his human form, and he made wisecracks in modern slang, he lived much more in the moment than she did. The weight of passing years did not press on him. He had no mortality.
In the process of scooping her out of a dead fall and pinning her down, Rune had not given her so much as the equivalent of a paper cut. She remembered how he had gently kissed her forehead before he had left her child-self, and burning tears filled her eyes again.
“I gave you permission to go back,” she whispered. “I didn’t give you permission to change me.”
The gryphon bowed his head, and somehow that giant fierce eagle managed to look humble and chagrined. “I heard the whip,” he confessed in a quiet, pained voice. “And I heard you cry out, and I couldn’t think. All I knew was I couldn’t let that lash fall on you again.”
The tears spilled over, sliding down her temples to soak into her hair. She glanced at his immense paws again. She hadn’t seen him kill the priest who had been whipping her, but she had seen the priest’s body afterward. The broken corpse had been in ribbons, its bones split apart. She reached out to touch one paw. “Okay,” she said unsteadily. “Okay. But I don’t remember what happened to me before you did that.”
He sighed and lifted up his mammoth wings to resettle them more comfortably into place along the sleek arch of his muscled back. Only then did he lift his head enough to look at her. “I don’t believe I have the Power to change you,” he said, still in that quiet, careful voice. “Not you, not your soul or spirit, or your ba, if you will. We don’t yet know what the rest of it means.”