Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 69711 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69711 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
“We—” His voice is drowned out by an eldritch shriek which raises every last tiny hair on my body. I instinctively press myself up against Krav who, after a second, puts his arm around me. His scent is like hot cocoa by a bonfire on a cold evening. With marshmallows. And whisky.
Together, we watch the sky.
“Don’t make eye contact with him until I tell you to,” Krav murmurs. “Otherwise he’ll take it as a sign of aggression.”
“And then what would happen?” I squeak. It didn’t occur to me to be afraid of Plutus… until now.
“Then he’d—here, Plutus, come to me!” There’s another ear-splitting screech, like from a barn owl the size of a T-rex, and I’m so anxious about accidentally making eye-contact that I bury my face in Krav’s chest as Plutus approaches.
A great gust of wind and a frantic rustling of wings later, Krav turns around, moving me with him. “I’m just shutting him in,” he tells me. “You can open your eyes but don’t look directly at Plutus’s face until I say.”
I keep my gaze trained firmly on the ground as we approach. The obsidian rock beneath our feet is soon interrupted by an industrial metal frame—the door to the cage.
“Stop here,” Krav orders. His arm slides off my shoulders, the weight lifting, leaving me oddly bereft—and colder. There are grating noises, like bolts being driven home, then he tugs me back against him. Weird how his arm around me feels so right. “Plutus, meet Renee,” Krav announces. “My other pet.” I roll my eyes. “Sweetheart, now you can look all you like.”
“Holy shit,” I breathe. Plutus is magnificent. Around ten feet tall, he stands on huge green talons tipped with razor-sharp claws. He has the feet, head and wings of a predatory bird, and the body and tail of a great cat. “A real, live griffin!”
“Griffin?”
“A mythical creature back home.” Plutus tosses his head and prances back and forth as I admire his striking turquoise and gold plumage.
“Mythical?”
“Yeah. One that doesn’t exist. Like unicorns, dragons…” Men who keep their vows.
“They don’t exist… and yet they have names, and you know what they look like?”
Now that I think about it, I can see how that statement would baffle Krav. “Doesn’t matter,” I say. “I can always explain it later.” Right now I’m too busy gawking at the animal in front of me with a mixture of awe and intimidation. I don’t know what I expected when Krav first mentioned Plutus to me, but it certainly wasn’t this. “What did you say he is?”
“A styxian,” Krav says, a note of pride in his voice. “Very rare.”
As if to prove that point, Plutus rears up and snorts, twin lilac flames spiraling out of the holes in his beak. “Jesus!” Even though there’s a barrier between us, I take a step back. Krav’s arm tightens around me. “He spits fire?”
“He’s posturing. Those little flames are as much as he can do. More a threatening gesture than an attack mechanism.”
Plutus cocks his head. His piercing honey stare is intense. Unblinking as a snake’s. “Wow.” Not sure I want to know the answer, I ask anyway. “How does he attack then, if not with fire?”
“His talons.” Krav indicates the creature’s huge feet. “They can disembowel a fully grown Ulfarri Alpha before he can blink. Styxian have lightning-quick reflexes.”
I’m reminded of the velociraptor claw scene from Jurassic Park, where the little boy makes the mistake of telling Dr. Grant the dinosaur skeleton looks like an overgrown turkey. Only this isn’t a movie.
“Want to feed him?” Krav asks.
“Depends… what with?”
Krav lets go of me and makes for a chest I didn’t notice before. Tugging open the lid, he removes a dark blue, scaly thing about the size of a mouse.
Plutus snorts again and rustles his wings.
“Crius,” Krav says, holding it out. I approach cautiously.
“Ew! It’s a critter!”
Krav chuckles as I recoil. “Ulf only knows why Plutus likes them so much, but he’s crazy for them,” he says, tossing the dead thing through the bars.
Plutus snatches it out of the air and swallows it whole, chittering with excitement.
“That’s all he eats?” I raise an eyebrow. “When he’s that big?”
“Oh no. He hunts and feeds himself whenever he goes out. Don’t you?” Krav tosses several more blue critter-corpses into the cage before closing and locking the chest.
“What does he hunt?” Do I want to know? What if this animal was responsible for some of the kids going missing?
Krav shrugs. “Whatever he can find.”
“Does that include people? Ulfarri?” It’s still so surreal that people are called that here.
“If he feels threatened. He doesn’t eat them.”
“That’s good.” I glance sideways at Krav. My demon lover. The previous tension between us has faded, leaving only a comfortable warmth. He’s not even cranky about my questions—although that’s probably because none of his answers about Plutus require any kind of internal reflection. “How did you get him?”