The Care and Feeding of Griffins Read Online Free PDF

was no one she trusted enough—not her father, not her mom, not Rhiannon, not the Pope—to share this secret with.  He was her responsibility.  Hers alone.
    He lunged at her button again, peeping piteously when she pulled it away from his questing beak. 
    Hungry.  He was hungry.
    So okay, forget griffins (fear rose up , cold and slick and sour), what about eagles?  Eagles ate regurgitated roadkill.  Lions drank lion milk.
    Taryn sat and stared with unseeing eyes at Elfmagick ’s Mystical Creatures Guide shining out of her monitor.  After a long moment in this trance of thought, she started up her search engine and hunted down the nutritional facts for foods for various orphaned zoo animals.  Protein and fat.  That was what it boiled down to.  Protein and fat for newborn tummies.
    It was such a leap of faith.
    She could buy kitten formula.  Heck, they had that at the Wal-Mart.
    The thought of leaving the baby behind while she drove clear out to Sugartree and back was chilling.  She didn ’t even have a box deep enough to put him in.  And even if she did, what if it tipped over?  What if he got too cold or…or got his head caught in something?  Anything could happen while she was gone.  Anything.
    She ’d have to take him with her.
    Taryn got up and rummaged through her closet until she found her high-school backpack.  It still had her French textbook in it.  She shook it empty and cushioned it with a towel, then poured sleeping griffin into its open maw.  He peeped at her.
    “Hush now,” she said.  “Hush, baby.”
    He peeped again, louder this time.
    The completely illogical thought came to her that he’d listen better if he had a name she could call him by.  A good name.  A name to fit this priceless treasure.
    Taryn brought the backpack up to her lips and whispered, just as though ears were pressing in on all sides.   “Righ-allaidh,” she told him.  “Your name is Righ-allaidh.”  Fierce king, in the tongue of her grandmother’s people, a word she knew from a childhood spent listening to Irish fairy tales of the Tuatha de Dannon and Fomorians.  There was no other name for her young prince.
    The griffin raised its downy head and aimed its sightless eyes at her, seeming for just that briefest instant to hear her, to understand.  Then it peeped, a baby once more, and with any newborn ’s utter lack of comprehension.
    “ We’ll call you Aisling for short,” Taryn said, the affectionate baby-name that she and her sister and her mother, perhaps, had all been called in their youngest years.  And so named, Aisling tucked his beak up under his forefoot and chirred himself to sleep.
    Taryn zipped up the backpack, not quite completely, and carefully shrugged into its straps.  She felt him shift once, but that was all.   She got her keys and she headed out to the parking lot.
    It was getting colder every night.  Taryn could see her breath on every exhale and she walked to her car as quickly as she could without jostling her sleeping charge.  She set him on the passenger seat, then on the floor, then in the back on the floor, and finally up front in her lap.  She ’d get a car seat or something when she got the formula, but right now, she needed to know he wouldn’t roll around.
    All the lead-footed habits with which she had drive n from the age of sixteen on were erased in one night.  She drove in a state of painful clarity, ten miles or more below the speed limit, tensing up every time another car dared to share the same road.  The twenty minute drive took a whole year to travel.  Her arms were aching to her shoulders by the time she finally parked, the strain of driving so safely as good as any workout, and then it was another rapid stroll across another wet parking lot to the bright lights and welcoming warmth of the store.
    Wal-Mart was stocked with exactly the sort of person who had to shop at two in the morning.  There were red-eyed mothers with kids in pajamas hanging off