Chapter 129

It could just be a really lucky coincidence, but the optimism spurred by my sudden change of events leads me to call this plot armor.

Wisened by years of experience, I don’t sit around basking in the glory of it as Amir and his men fight to restrain the beast. My one hand immediately goes to work on the belt buckle, and although it takes me a bit longer than it would’ve taken Jack, I’m able to remove the blasted belt that had tied my legs together like a rotisserie chicken.

“Freedom,” I sing under my breath as I scramble to my feet. Circulation resumes in my appendages as I hear some whoops and cries in the distance, men approaching to aid in curtailing the griffin.

Turning towards the bushes where Julia and her men still hide despite hearing every word that Amir just said, I smile rather wickedly.

I did give her a fair shot, didn’t I? Now it’s my turn.

My bottom lip begins to tremble and I clutch my chest as if my heart will give out at any moment.

“My... my own sister... to me... she- she could...” I deliberately keep my words relatively unintelligible, but with what was just seen, anyone could fill in the blanks with ease.

.....

As the damn breaks and tears flood down my face, some of them are real. There are tears of relief along with the residual anger that had come when I felt most useless.

But the unnecessary loud sobbing coupled with the pitiful hitching in my breath? That’s all me.

A young man wearing a dark-colored livery adorned with a family insignia I vaguely recognize as belonging to one of the eastern provinces bursts onto the scene first, his sword clutched in hand. It is almost comical to see the way his confident brashness crumbles quicker than the tree the griffin headbutted earlier.

His shiny, new weapon nearly tumbles from his hand just as a loud horn sounds throughout the forest and frightens the birds of the forest out of the trees. It is the warning sound meant to warn of extremely dangerous beasts, which means that word of the rampaging griffin has made its way back to the front of the forest where many anxious parents await.

However, there is one parent here I have not given enough thought to.

“Prince!” I yell.

“Just call me Amir,” he says, flashing me a friendly grin as he wrangles to hold the beast in place. If he had a blade in hand, which he isn’t allowed to carry as a foreign dignitary, I do not doubt that this stand-off between man and beast would be over in mere seconds.

I roll my eyes. “Amir,” I say, inching closer so that those who are slowly arriving at the scene do not hear.

“That griffin, can you let it go?”

He chuckles a little, never looking away from the whip tightly coiled around the griffin’s front right leg. “I’m sorry, I fear I may have misheard you. Did you ask for me to let this creature go free?”

“Yes, I did,” I sigh.

A perplexed green gaze meets mine.

“Why?”

“Because it wouldn’t be fair for this mother griffin to die all because my... sister wanted to use her to kill me,” I lie, looking away first.

“I agree but I cannot think of a way to make this griffin return. It is rather keen on killing us,” Amir states.

To emphasize his point, the griffin shrieks and claws at the ground, sending Amir surging forward a few steps until he readjusts his grip again.

“Let me handle that,” I tell him, already turning heel to search for my dropped vial. “Release your whip when I say so, alright?”

The foreign prince purses his lips. “I don’t know if I can agree to your request in good conscience.”

“Amir,” I say, my tone a bit softer due to his show of chivalry. “Just trust me.”

And then I’m back at the base of the tree as if the past several minutes hadn’t just occurred. The shallow cut on the back of my hand is still dripping blood, albeit much slower than it was earlier.

“The vial, the vial, the vial. Shit, where did it go?” I mutter under my breath as I abandon all decorum and search for it on my hands and knees.

Whatever pristine appearance I’d had before I entered the woods has long fallen apart. Tendrils of hair have fallen from my hairdo and my matching hat has long gone MIA. Dirt smears onto my hands as I check everywhere for the vial I dropped and curse every second I can’t.

“Looking for this?” someone croons from my side with a perfectly timed interruption.

I sigh as I fall prey to another cliche as old as time. My fingers curl into the soft earth. I’d rather they wrap around my half-sister’s tiny neck.

“Julia. Have I ever told you how much I love you?” I inquire sarcastically as I stand up.

My sister has finally emerged from the bushes and is flanked by her three bodyguards. She twirls between her fingers, a precious glass vial that looks as if it could slip free any second.

“No, I don’t think you have dear sister,” Julia titters behind her hand. Twigs and dirt have maligned her appearance just as much as mine, but unusually my vain sister doesn’t take notice.

I don’t need to look to see that Amir and his men’s hold on the griffin is weakening. Simply the terrified expressions of the useless small fries who’ve gathered tell me all I need to know.

“What if I told you that the vial you’re holding has the potential to save everyone gathered here?” I ask, cutting straight to the chase. A tremble goes through my weak hand. I am weary to the bone.

Julia brings it close to her face, the blood sloshing inside it. “Oh really?” she curiously intonates, not giving an inch.

“Yes. Really.” My patience has long dried out.

“That’s such good news!” she yells, jumping with excitement. “But um, there’s one thing I don’t quite understand. Can you explain it to me?”

“If it’s within my knowledge, I’d be happy to.”

“Alright. Tell me this.” Julia bites her lips to keep her smile from spreading across her face. “Why should I care?”

I’ve been manhandled, had a knife to my throat, and nearly been eaten by a griffin today. But this moment takes the cake for me as the most infuriating of all.

I suck in a deep breath, attempting to steady my heartbeat and calm down my violent urge to slap Julia across the face. If I even took a step closer to her, I know that the guards by her side would without a doubt intervene.

“You, bitch,” I murmur in between breaths of air. “You fucking bitch.”

“I beg your pardon?” she scoffs.

A whooping cry louder than the rest comes from the forest. I look over my shoulder to see freckled Robbie charge past the rest of the cowardly lot towards the griffin. He lunges into the air, landing upon the beast’s neck with ease. It understandably riles the griffin up, her head swinging so vigorously Robbie loses his grip and slips off. But her rapid motion has another effect as well as a leathery snap sounds through the surrounding forest.

The remaining whips around the griffin’s legs grow taut without warning, relaying to all observers that the whip that had been holding one of the back legs just snapped. Mayhem unfolds. I realize that there is no better time for me to act than now.

I look just over Julia’s shoulders right as screams ring behind me and the earth shakes once again.

“A-Augustus?” I yell as convincingly as possible, putting a quivering hand over my mouth as if Prince Charming has just swooped in to save me.

It has the desired effect, as I knew it would.

All the conniving, sociopathic malevolence that had twisted up Julia’s smile disappears in a puff of smoke, her glassy gaze succumbing to a softer and more childlike appearance.

But the important thing is that her eyes aren’t on me and her guards are too focused on the griffin that has predictably begun to stampede near us where I had originally poured out the vial of a single male griffin’s blood. It’s a small, precious window of opportunity that I, or better yet, my foot takes advantage of.

I never played soccer, although I watched a fair bit growing up in a Hispanic household. Regardless, I lift my skirts in an indecent way that would scandalize society if any proper ladies had witnessed it and scissor up a leg towards the hand holding the vial.

Part of my rage quells as Julia squeals like a pig and grabs her hand. The vial goes spinning through the air. The royal guards are too busy grabbing Julia to whisk her out of the line of fire to punish me. But then out of the sheer habit of being a right-handed person in my last life, and technically this one too, the vial of baby griffin’s blood falls into my right hand.

It all happens both in slow motion and in the span of a second. The euphoria soccer players feel when they score a goal in the last second of the game floods my heart, only for the referee to blow their whistle and invalidate the shot by calling it ‘offsides’.

The vial tumbles from my useless hand onto the ground.

I naturally bend down to pick it up, but an awareness runs through my veins just as my hand makes contact with the vial. I do not have enough time.

The mother griffin is the size of a house and is eating up ground faster than a race car down an F1 track. Her time to the finish line? If I’m lucky, by the time my fingers even touch the vial on the ground.

Julia is yelling obscenities and instructing the royal guards who are carrying her to safety to search for Augustus instead. Prince Amir yells my name, “Winter!”. He sounds surprisingly close by as well, but not close enough. A blade of grass tickles my fingers as they reach for the vial. The countdown is like a bomb that is about to detonate on an unsuspecting city below.

Unlike when I had been trussed up and waiting to die, I do not even have the mental capacity or the time to feel any fear within this sliver of a moment that has been stretched to the span of several lifetimes. As I come to these many conclusions and notice all these tiny nuances, my body is still reaching towards that fateful vial, trapped within my own version of Icarus reaching for the sun and failing.

Perhaps I have been too ambitious.

Perhaps I was asking for too much.

No, I think to myself, just as my fingers are millimeters away from touching the vial and I can all but feel the breath of the griffin on my neck.

I wasn’t ruthless enough.

My fingers curl around the slender tube, the cool glass feeling like ice against my sweaty, slick flesh. And then a force collides with me from the back, one that makes me tense up until I realize that this cannot possibly be a griffin. I can smell linen and a heart beats beneath the chest I’m cradled against. The person’s arms that hold me are tighter than steel, but the hand holding the vial is free, free enough for me to uncork it and roll it towards where I’d seen the griffin last.

But when that is done, I look up into a face I had least expected to see at a time like this.

“Father.” I somehow sound incredibly calm.

Above the emperor’s head, the innocent griffin I had lured over calms instantly and to my immense pleasure takes to the skies, leaving behind a bigger mess than it had found.