Except sometimes it wasn’t, Bob. Sometimes things got so fucked up all you could do was send them home in a body bag.
Rune’s temper grew short. Normally he was an easygoing kind of Wyr, but he had started snapping off people’s heads for no reason. Metaphorically, anyway. At least he hadn’t started snapping off people’s heads for real. Still, people had started to avoid him.
“What’s up your ass, anyway?” Aryal had asked after Niniane’s coronation, when they crossed over from Adriyel to Chicago and were en route back to New York.
They took their preferred method of travel, which was flying in their Wyr forms. Aryal was his fellow sentinel and a harpy, which meant she was a right royal bitch ninety percent of the time. Usually her snarky attitude cracked him up. At the moment it almost had him drop-kicking her into the side of a skyscraper.
“I’m being haunted by Marley’s ghost,” he told her.
Aryal slanted a dark eyebrow at him. When she was in her harpy form, the angles of her face were pronounced, upswept. Her gray-fade-to-black wings beat strongly in the hot summer wind that blew wildly around them. “Which ghost?” the harpy asked. “The past, present or future?”
Huh? It took him a second to click to it. Then the Dickens connection happened in his head. He thought of Jacob Marley’s ghost, not Bob. Aryal had gotten the Jacob Marley character all muddled up with the three spirits of Christmas past, present and future.
Time and time and time. What happened, what is and what is to come. He barked out a laugh. The sound was filled with ground glass. “All of them,” he said. “I’m being haunted by all of them.”
“Dude, give it up,” said Aryal in a mild tone that he recognized as a conciliatory one, coming as it was from her. “Believe in Christmas already.”
His Wyr form was that of a gryphon. He made the harpy look almost delicate as he flew by her side. He had the body of a lion and the bronze-colored head and wings of a golden eagle. His paws were the size of hubcaps and tipped with long, wicked eagle talons, while his eagle’s head had lion-colored eyes. His feline body had breadth and power across the chest, had sleek, strong haunches and was the dun color of hot desert places. In his Wyr form he was immense, easily the size of an SUV, with a correspondingly huge wingspan.
In his human form, Rune stood six-foot-four, and he had the broad shoulders and lean, hard muscles of a swordsman. He had sun-bronzed, fine-grained skin with laugh lines at the corners of lion’s eyes that were the color of the sun shining through amber. He knew how to use his even features and rakish white smile to his best advantage, especially with those of the female persuasion, and his tawny mane of sun-streaked hair that fell to his broad shoulders held glints of pale gold, chestnut and burnished copper.
He was one of the four gryphons of the earth, an ancient Wyr who came into being at the birth of the world. Time and space had buckled when the Earth was formed. The buckling created dimensional pockets of Other land where magic pooled, time moved differently, modern technologies didn’t work and the sun shone with a different light. What came to be known as the Elder Races—the Wyrkind and the Elves, the Light and Dark Fae, the Demonkind, the Goblins and the Djinn and all other manner of monstrous creatures—tended to cluster in or around the Other lands.
Most of the Elder creatures came into being either in the dimensional pockets of Other land or on the Earth itself. A few, a very few, came into existence in those crossover points between the places, where time and space were fluid and changeable, and at the time of creation, Power was an unformed, immense force.
Revered in ancient India and Persia, Rune and his fellow gryphons were the quintessential liminal beings. They were born at the cusp between two creatures, on the threshold of changing time and space. Lion and eagle, they learned, as the other ancient Wyr had learned, to shapeshift and walk amongst humankind, and so they also became Wyr form and man. There would be no others like them. Creation’s inchoate time had passed, and all things, even the crossover points between places, had become fixed in their definitions.
The past, behind him. The future, the unknown thing that waited ahead of him and smiled its Mona Lisa smile. And the ever-fleeting now that was continually born and continually died, but was never, ever anything you could get your hands on and hold on to, as it always pushed you on to some other place.
Yeah, he knew a thing or two about liminality.