“What do you mean, she saved my life?” I ask. “Where did the griffin go?”
“She killed it. She sliced its wing and sent it toppling over the side of the mountain,” Lief explains.
I shuffle to the edge of the cliff, and sure enough, way down at the base of the mountain, there’s a griffin’s corpse. The sight of it sends a chill down my spine. I quickly return to Alessia’s side, examining her injuries.
“How on earth did she get up here? Don’t tell me she…climbed all the way up here?”
“She sure as hells did,” Lief says, his grin broadening. “The way she looked, she was ready to burn the world just to get to you. Even I was a bit intimidated, if I’m being honest.”
I cradle Alessia’s hands in my own, kissing the tops of them gently. My heart aches to see her injured, but it’s also warming, like I’m standing beside a small campfire. She put her life on the line to save mine. She was ready to sacrifice it all just to get to me, even though there was no guarantee I’d be alive, or that she’d survive. I truly am the luckiest man alive to be married to such an incredible woman.
And to think, when we were first married, I was planning to skive off and read my years away, ignoring our marriage entirely, I think to myself, snorting. How fickle fate can be.
“She’s going to take a while to wake up,” Lief says. “She overextended herself greatly, using all her magic to get up here and defend you. There was no other way to scale this cliff face.”
My chest tightens. “Didn’t she overextend herself less than a week ago, too?”
“Yes, she did.”
“Then that means…she came pretty close to dying, didn’t she?”
Lief nods grimly. “She did, but she pulled through. You wouldn’t have appreciated the sight of her about twenty minutes ago.”
I shudder. “I’m glad I didn’t see that. I’d never get that image out of my head.”
Lief hugs onto my shoulder, burying his face in my neck. “You scared the hells out of me too, Aurelio. Don’t do that to me ever again, you hear me? I kind of like having you around. The world was a lot more boring before you came into it.”
“I promise I’ll be more careful, Lief.”
“You better!”
The smile returns to my face. “You helped Alessia save my life, too, didn’t you?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ll take that as a yes, then. I’d like to thank you too, Lief. It can’t be easy for a fairy to go up against a griffin.”
“It wasn’t, but Alessia did most of the hard work. I just gave her the opportunities she needed to defeat it.”
“You’re one special fairy, you know that?”
Lief climbs down my arm and onto my hand, where he sits and dangles his legs off the side of my palm. He looks away from me, pretending to grumble to himself while his cheeks turn pink.
“You’re my friend, okay? I can’t let my friends get hurt. That would ruin my reputation as a guardian fairy.”
I’m about to tease him, but just then, there’s a sound to my right that distracts me. It sounds like a cross between a hammer whacking wood and ice shattering. When I look over, my eyes fly wide.
“Lief, why didn’t you say something?” I demand.
“It’s pretty obvious. I thought you’d see it. Did that griffin knock you blind or something?”
I rub my eyes, but they aren’t deceiving me. I have no idea how I missed this. Right across the cliff face, nestled between the side of the mountain and a rocky outcrop, is an enormous nest. There’s a single egg in the very center of it, and that egg is starting to crack. It wiggles back and forth as the creature inside struggles for freedom. My heart rate spikes to a very unsafe level as the first makings of a beak and a few talons peak out of the top of the egg.
“Lief, is that what I think it is?” I question.
“Of course it is what you think it is. Griffins aren’t normally that desperate for food that they’d snatch up a human. It was probably a mother hoping to keep some leftovers for her baby.”
I know I should feel guilty for murdering the mother of a baby griffin, but after seeing the size of its talons, I’m okay with an aggressive, human-eating monster dying. If its mom is anything to go by, however, this baby will be just as aggressive, and griffin chicks are still the size of human children. It could do some serious damage, even as a newborn.
