MAGNOLIA #2
The griffin chirps. A small, confused sound. Almost sweet.
Dash stands over it, breathing hard, hands on his knees. The necktie holds. He watches the creature for a long moment, then reaches down and scratches behind its ear. Just once. Brief. The griffin's trembling slows.
He turns back toward the van.
Toward me.
The remains of his tuxedo hang from his frame like battle flags, and there is a single tawny feather caught behind his tusk. He stops at my open windshield and looks at me with those steady gold eyes.
"Your van is toast."
"Yeah, I noticed when the ceiling became a skylight."
He grunts. The sound carries what might be approval or might be indigestion from being body-slammed by a griffin.
Hard to tell with Orcs. He rounds the van, steps over the spot where his passenger door used to be, and folds himself back into the seat.
The van dips hard to the right. Something underneath the chassis pops with a sound like a knuckle cracking.
Wind pours through the windshield frame.
Not a gentle breeze. Full highway wind, cold and sharp and carrying the smell of pine sap and roadkill from whatever's decomposing in the ditch three miles back.
My vintage dress, a blue gingham number with little pearl buttons that I'd pressed this morning with actual starch, is now dusted in glass fragments, road grit, and griffin down.
There's a feather in my bra. I leave it.
Dash reaches for me.
No warning. No preamble. His hands grasp my left arm and turn it over, fingers pressing along the inside of my wrist, my forearm, my elbow.
Checking for breaks. His palms are rough and hot and span my entire forearm from wrist to elbow crease.
Each finger applies individual pressure points in a methodical sequence that speaks to field medic training or a lot of experience putting people back together after breaking them apart.
"I'm fine—"
"Quiet."
His hands move to my other arm. Same sequence.
Wrist. Forearm. Elbow. Then up. His fingers curve over my shoulders, thumbs pressing into the muscle along my collarbone, testing for swelling or dislocation with the clinical efficiency of a combat triage checklist. The pads of his thumbs find the hollow above my clavicle and hold there. My pulse hammers against his touch.
"You hit the steering wheel."
"I didn't—"
"Your sternum." He presses two fingers flat against my breastbone through the gingham.
Gentle. Testing. The adrenaline is still screaming through my bloodstream, turning everything sharp and bright and oversaturated.
His face is six inches from mine. The cut on his forehead has started to clot, a dark line bisecting his brow.
The feather behind his tusk trembles in the wind from the absent windshield.
His fingers find a tender spot below my left collarbone. I hiss.
"Bruised." His jaw works. "Not broken."
"How can you tell?"
"Broken sounds different." He pulls back. His hands leave my shoulders and the cold rushes into the spaces where his palms had been. "Your pupils are even. No concussion. Elevated heart rate is adrenaline, not shock. You'll have bruising tomorrow across the chest where the seatbelt caught."
"You got all that in ten seconds?"
"Seven." He reaches past me, one arm crossing my body, and wrenches the seatbelt back across my lap. The buckle clicks. His arm retracts. "Drive."
I drive.
The van protests every mile. Without a windshield, the highway air hits us at fifty-five miles per hour like a wall of frozen needles.
My eyes water. My hair whips free of its careful low bun and lashes across my face in every direction.
Dash sits in the roofless passenger side with his arms crossed over his shredded tuxedo, completely unbothered, like he's riding in a parade float instead of a mobile disaster.
The heater doesn't work anymore. Something severed in the griffin's initial landing, probably. My fingers go numb on the steering wheel first, then my nose, then my ears. I clench my jaw to stop my teeth from chattering. Fail.
Dash unbuttons what's left of his tuxedo jacket, peels it off his shoulders, and drops it across my lap without looking at me.
The silk is warm from his body and smells like ozone and something deeper, woodsmoke and iron.
The armor-silk panels glow faintly in the dark, residual enchantment still pulsing through the weave.
I don't say thank you. He doesn't want me to. I tuck the jacket around my thighs and keep driving.
The Silverleaf Country Club announces itself two miles before the actual entrance.
First the stone walls, twelve feet high, covered in crawling luminescent ivy that the Elves imported from some pocket dimension.
Then the wrought-iron lampposts lining the private road, each one topped with a captured wisp-light that casts everything in a soft, expensive blue glow.
Then the gates. Bronze. Thirty feet. Carved with interlocking leaf patterns so detailed they seem to breathe.
The gates stand open. Beyond them, a sweeping drive of crushed white quartz winds through manicured gardens toward a clubhouse that resembles a cathedral crossed with a greenhouse. Crystal spires. Living wood columns. Windows that shimmer with internal starlight.
And at the entrance, a valet stand staffed by three Elves in matching silver livery.
I drive the van up the quartz drive. Glass fragments rattle off the dashboard.
Wind whistles through the windshield frame.
The muffler, which has been dragging for the last six miles, chooses this exact moment to detach fully and clatter onto the pristine white quartz with a metallic shriek that echoes off the crystal spires.
The head valet steps forward. Tall. Cheekbones that could cut glass. Ears pointed enough to pick up satellite radio. His silver-gloved hand rises, palm out, in a gesture so elegant it belongs in a ballet.
"Absolutely not."
"I have a reservation."
"You have a biohazard." His nostril flares.
One single nostril. "This vehicle will not park within two hundred meters of the main entrance.
Club policy prohibits any conveyance lacking a primary windshield, a functional exhaust system, and"—his gaze slides to the passenger side where the door should be—"a complete set of doors. "
Dash unfolds from the doorless passenger gap. All six feet nine inches. He keeps unfolding. The valet's chin tilts up. And up. Dash's undershirt, stretched across a torso that the griffin's claws had failed to breach, is stained with road grime and blood.
The valet's composure holds, but barely. A muscle twitches beneath his left eye.
"Sir, the overflow lot is behind the service building. Past the compost facility."