Chapter 9 #2
It sure looked like one to Ben. His studies in cryptozoology had led him to research all sorts of mythological creatures, so of course he knew what a griffin was.
However, looking at a medieval tapestry or a simple line drawing definitely hadn’t been enough to prepare him for what one of those legendary beasts would look like in the flesh.
The griffin stumbled into the clearing and glanced around, clearly disoriented. Well, that wasn’t too strange; crossing over into a different world had to be just a little confounding.
A shimmer approached through the woods, one Ben didn’t think had anything to do with the glow of the portal or the magical plants that surrounded it.
No, that white gleam was the unicorn, coming into the clearing from the opposite direction from the spot where the griffin had appeared.
Annoyingly, the trail camera footage didn’t have any sound, but he saw how the unicorn lifted its head and reared, and he guessed it had probably let out a commanding neigh.
Was it trying to warn the griffin away?
The lion-eagle turned immediately, and its enormous wings beat at the air, making all the glowing plants and flowers bend in the breeze those wings generated. In response, the unicorn reared again — and then charged.
Even though this encounter had happened several minutes earlier and Ben knew there was nothing he could do to change the outcome, his breath still caught.
Who would come out on top in this clash of the titans?
The unicorn was nimbler and faster, but the griffin had sheer bulk on its side — and those wings.
It rose into the air, breaking a few branches in the process.
The unicorn stopped directly under it, horn pointed toward the griffin’s belly, and reared and neighed once more.
Immediately afterward, the creature’s mouth opened…
Ben wondered if it roared like a lion or keened like an eagle…
and then flew off deeper into the woods.
Was it truly afraid of the unicorn, or did it just want to get away before one of them did something they regretted?
Hard to say, since he had no idea how those creatures’ minds even worked.
The one thing he did know was that a griffin and a unicorn were loose in the woods.
Slowly, he got out his phone. Yes, it was now after ten o’clock, and he normally would never reach out to anyone at that hour unless it was an emergency…but if this latest sighting didn’t constitute an emergency, then he didn’t know what did.
“I saw it last month,” Sidney said. Luckily, Ben had caught her before she’d started getting ready for bed, so she’d hurried over to his cottage as soon as she got the call. “Or at least, I saw a griffin, although I can’t say for sure whether it was this one.”
He swiveled in his chair to stare at her. She’d sat in the spare seat while he’d navigated on the laptop to show her the footage of the griffin and the unicorn, and their knees were almost brushing. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything terribly intimate about this meeting.
“And you didn’t think to say anything?”
She crossed her arms. Sometime before she’d left her house, she’d pulled on a UC Davis sweatshirt as a shield against the chilly, damp night, and right then, she looked as if she could have been back in high school, with even the faint cosmetics she usually wore now gone.
Ben wondered if his call had caught her right after she’d washed her face.
“Strange creatures have come and gone in these woods for more than a hundred years,” she said, her tone reasonable, even though the slightest edge to it told Ben he probably shouldn’t push her too hard.
“And I saw the griffin right at the dark of the moon, which is when we thought the portal would appear. There wasn’t anything that strange about it. ”
Looking at the situation that way, he supposed she had a point.
Even a month ago, it had seemed as if the portal had settled back into its usual patterns.
Now they knew better, of course, but to Sidney, her griffin sighting wouldn’t have meant anything except that the creatures appeared to be coming and going as they always had.
“Did your power go out at 9:47 tonight?” he asked abruptly, and she nodded.
“Yes. I remember it clearly because I’d just reset the clock again, and then boom!
The lights went out. Luckily, they didn’t stay off for too long.
” A pause, and her eyes narrowed slightly as she seemed to put the various puzzle pieces together.
“You think the outage was caused by the griffin coming through the portal?”
“It must have been,” Ben replied, even as he wondered if he was trying to force a connection here.
But no…it all made sense. Marjorie had already told him that the pulses seemed to coincide with the power outages in Silver Hollow, and he had to believe that the griffin coming through must have caused an enormous fluctuation in the electromagnetic field in the forest. “Do you know why the unicorn would have tried to fight it?”
“I have no idea.” Sidney uncrossed her arms and drummed her fingers against her jeans-clad knees.
Now she looked more worried than ever, face pale and brows pulled together in a frown.
“It’s not common that two different types of mythical creatures might be in the forest at the same time, but it’s not unheard of, either.
I know my grandmother wrote in her journals that she’d spied the animals together once or twice.
From what I remember, though, it seemed as if they got along pretty well.
So why would the unicorn go on the attack like that? ”
“Well, it’s not as if he’s a stranger to violence,” Ben responded, and her frown only deepened.
“He attacked Victor Maplehurst because he was hurting the forest.”
On one level, that made sense. But….
“If the unicorn’s intention is to protect the woods, then why wouldn’t he have gone after the person who’s carving up the trees? He’s causing a different kind of destruction, true, but it’s still not exactly minor.”
Since Sidney went quiet then, brow still creased with worry, Ben guessed she didn’t have a good answer to that question.
However, her expression cleared after a moment, and she said, “Maybe the unicorn wasn’t trying to actually hurt the griffin. Maybe he was trying to warn him off, trying to get him to go back through the portal.”
On the surface, that theory made some sense. Except….
“Why would the unicorn want to drive the griffin away? From what you’ve said, it’s not as if this is the first time it’s been here.”
“Maybe it was,” Sidney returned. “I know the unicorns aren’t always the same one, because I’ve seen the differences between them.
This is only the third time I’ve seen a griffin, and that trail cam footage” — she inclined her head toward his laptop’s screen — “is just muddy enough that it’s hard to pick out any real details.
This could be a new one, a different animal that doesn’t understand what it’s coming into.
Also,” she went on, clear gray eyes lighting up as a new idea occurred to her, “it could be that the unicorn understands what’s going wrong with the portal and was trying to get the griffin to go back before it gets stuck here or something.
After all, it sure sounds like the rules of the game have changed, and the creatures who are coming through the portal now probably don’t realize that it’s not appearing at the dark of the moon the way it’s supposed to.
If it only appears long enough for them to come here and not go back to wherever home is, then we could all be in a world of hurt. ”
Ben hadn’t even thought of that angle to the problem, but he could see that she had a point. Having mythical creatures come and go from the forest was one thing. Having them stuck here for an indefinite period…well, that could cause so many problems, he didn’t even know where to start.
“If that’s what the unicorn was trying to do, it doesn’t look as if he was successful,” he said. “So…now what?”
“Did you see any other creatures come through the portal?” Sidney asked, and Ben shook his head.
“No, just the griffin,” he replied, and allowed himself an inner grin. Only in the world of Silver Hollow would he have ever slapped the modifier “just” in front of the word “griffin.”
Some of the tension in her shoulders seemed to ease. “Well, I suppose that’s one piece of good news. Let’s hope nothing else got through…and that the portal will reappear sometime tonight and the griffin will go back whence it came. No harm, no foul.”
This was an overly optimistic view of the situation, one Ben wasn’t sure he could buy into. “And if it doesn’t?”
The corners of her mouth turned up ever so slightly. “Well, I guess you can put that footage on your YouTube channel and watch the clicks and views pile up.”
Ben knew she was joking. Or at least, he thought she was.
Still, he could see her point. Once there was a griffin trapped in the woods along with a unicorn, it was only a matter of time before the public learned the truth of their existence.
All the work the women of Sidney’s family had done for generations to keep the truth of the forest a secret would be destroyed.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” he said, then closed the laptop’s lid and stood. She rose as well and put her arms around his waist, snuggling in close, telling him that while she might be worried and frustrated by the situation, she was still very glad to have him there with her.
Just as he was glad to be there with her. He couldn’t think of anyone else he’d rather have at his side while they tried to find a solution to the mess they’d found themselves in.
Even if such a solution felt utterly elusive at the moment.