eyesight, keen in the dark, both from experience at moving in the blackness of the underworld and from the inner lion’s nocturnal nature, could see the worry lines etched into her brow. He inched backward, ready to run.
A soft sensation brushed across his senses as if someone reassured him that it was okay. At the same time it gave him a gentle mental push, urging him to leave.
Headlights filled the street as an SUV turned the corner and came to a stop behind the motorcycle.
The redhead who’d helped Selene get him down the stairs climbed out of the driver’s seat and a man unfolded from the passenger side. A blonde and a brunette emerged from the back doors.
“Is he still here?” the redhead called out.
“About to find out,” said the black-haired woman with the key in her hand.
“I tell you, he wouldn’t hurt anyone,” Selene insisted.
“You saw what he did to that girl in the hospital. We all saw the bruises on your arms. He’s dangerous.”
“He didn’t kill her and he didn’t mean to hurt me.”
Guilt squeezed Gryph’s chest so hard he couldn’t breathe. He’d hurt her when all she’d tried to do was help him. Balthazar had been right all those years. The only place for him was below the surface. Up until the past five years, he’d lived his life in the underworld, where the misfits and freaks existed judgment-free, and where he wouldn’t be unleashed to hurt innocents. Amassing a fortune and building a business didn’t make him any more human.
“You say he didn’t hurt her, but the victim had the forensic artist draw a picture of her attacker, which happened to match your guest from what you say.” The redhead nodded to the woman at the bottom of the steps. “Sounds pretty damning to me. Let’s check out your monster.”
The woman at Selene’s door unlocked it and pushed it open, her gun held in front of her. A light went on inside the apartment. She disappeared inside. A few moments later, she called out, “He’s gone.”
It was time to go. Gryph turned to leave. His night vision temporarily compromised by the headlights, he didn’t see the soda can until he nudged it with his bare foot. The can skittered across concrete, making a metallic grating sound that echoed against the buildings in the alley.
“What was that?” the man who’d arrived in the SUV said from the top of the stairs.
“Probably the wind,” Selene said.
Gryph stood poised to run, out of sight of the group standing near Selene’s apartment.
“I’ll check it out,” the man said.
Gryph took off, aiming for the corner of the building at the end of the alley. If he could get there before the man rounded the side of Selene’s building, he could lose him in the maze of downtown structures.
Channeling his inner beast to give him speed and strength, he ran, reaching the corner as a shout rang out.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!”
He didn’t slow, didn’t stop, just ran as fast as his feet could carry him. At the end of another building, he flew around the corner, crossed the street and ducked around another structure.
Before long, he was several blocks away, the sound of pursuit long disappeared.
Careful to ensure he wasn’t being followed, he entered a back alley, swung wide around a large trash bin and a stack of decaying pallets, and stopped in front of a solid steel door. He dug his fingers into a chink in one of the bricks beside it and unearthed a key that fit the door.
With practiced efficiency, he twisted the key in the lock. The door opened inward, revealing stairs that led into a basement. Replacing the key in the chinked-out space, he entered, closing the door behind him. On quiet feet, he moved through the darkness, descending to the basement floor.
One of the oldest buildings in downtown Chicago, it had access to the tunnel system beneath the city. Built in the early nineteen hundreds, city planners had hoped the tunnels, with their narrow-gauge rail cars, would allow quick and efficient transportation of cargo to and from the buildings downtown, freeing some of the congestion of the streets above. The plan failed, but the tunnels remained, for the most part. Some had collapsed, others had been filled in when skyscrapers had been built on top of them. The labyrinth provided a warm, safe haven from weather and prying eyes to the inhabitants who called it home.
Having been abandoned as a small baby, unable to fend for himself, Gryph had known no other domicile. If not for the benevolence of Balthazar, he’d have perished in the harsh Chicago streets, unwanted, unloved and unprotected. When he’d discovered a good living in day trading five years ago, he’d accumulated enough wealth to own his own building downtown and he dared to move closer to the light.
Like many who had been forgotten, shunned or thrown away, like himself, he’d lived his life in the shadows of the city, rarely venturing out. Even in his own building, he rarely stepped outside, preferring to limit contact with humans to avoid any mishaps or triggering his inner beast to appear.
Balthazar warned him about the surface dwellers and their lack of compassion or understanding of anything strange or unusual. His adoptive father taught him to sense the rise of his inner beast and control the urge to morph into his animal form. As a child, spikes in emotion had thrown him into animal form.
At those times, for his own protection and the protection of the others in his care, Balthazar had confined Gryph to a cage, letting him out when he’d returned to human form. Those times had marked him deeply. He’d hated the cage and everything it stood for and vowed never to be caged again.
Kindhearted yet firm, Balthazar had taken him into the Lair, brought him up as his own son. The older man collected strays like him, bringing them into the fold, helping them to assimilate into a life in the shadows, finding useful work for them, from running street cleaners to servicing office buildings at night when everyone else slept.
Balthazar raised Gryph and another lost boy who’d been the child of a crack addict with no other family to call her own or to claim the child. Broke, homeless and strung out, his mother had holed up in the basement of a building. When the maintenance super had discovered her temporary lodgings, she’d tied her baby to her back and hidden beneath a trap door, clinging to a ladder to avoid being evicted. She’d descended the metal ladder until her feet touched the bottom of the well.
A light glowing at the end of a long tunnel led her to the center of the underworld city. Balthazar had taken her in, offering food and shelter for her and the baby as long a she resisted the lure of her addiction and promised to keep the community secret.
Not long afterward, her hunger for drugs drove her back to the surface. She never came back.
The baby named Lucas came to live with Balthazar and Gryph when Gryph was eight.
Balthazar, a college professor in his former life amongst the humans, had taught Gryph and Lucas to read and write, instilling in Gryph a love of classic literature and the arts. Determined to give them all the educational advantages of the surface dwellers, he’d set up a computer lab in the Lair, running ethernet cables from above to allow them to learn about the world in the light.
Though he’d never traveled outside the city limits of Chicago,
