The Care and Feeding of Griffins

“Smart, funny, scary and sexy as hell!...I was hooked from the first page!”

—T. Banks

“Nobody out there is writing erotica like this!...A solid plot, real characters, and sex that just sizzles off the page!”

—
Valerie Webster

“Here’s something I never thought I’d say: 

A masterpiece of erotic literature!”

—
Su Chen

“Send the kids to Grandma’s and the hubby straight to bed—as the title suggests, this book is HOT!”

—Marn S.

“…Extremely stimulating and imaginative…I could go on and on…”

—S. Belfiore

Also by  R. LEE SMITH:

Heat

The Lords of Arcadia Series
:

The Care and Feeding of Griffins

The Wizard in the Woods

The Roads of Taryn MacTavish

The Army of Mab

Olivia

The Scholomance

COMING SOON!

Cottonwood

Lords of Arcadia

Book
I

THE CARE AND FEEDING OF GRIFFINS

R. Lee Smith

This book is dedicated to the Redmond library.

The real one.

Copyright © 2006 by Robin Smith

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, photocopying or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

[email protected]

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted material:

“You Are My Sunshine” by Jimmie Davis.  Copyright 1940 by Peer International Corporation.  Copyright renewed.  Used by permission.

This book is a work of fiction.  Names, places, locales and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual persons, places or events are purely coincidental.

Cover designed by Sarah-Jane Lehoux

A BRIEF WORD ABOUT CHILDREN
…

C
hildren are strange and complicated creatures.  They are uniquely amazing in that they lack the capacity to be amazed.  Grown-ups, and parents in particular, simply cannot comprehend this quality and so they cling to the idea of ‘childlike wonder’, stubbornly oblivious to every child’s utter lack of same.  Grown-ups believe that imagination is a child’s way of world-building, a means of blurring a reality which strikes them at every corner with wonder and amazement.  It isn’t, and they don’t.  Children actually imagine very little.  What they do is every bit as strange, though. 

They accept.  Without reservation.  Without question.  Without limitation.

A child accepts the idea of Mom and Dad and Santa Claus and God and dinosaurs and dragons and electricity and the internet and Harry Potter and Captain Crunch and Kermit the Frog and electric cars and little biting dogs and butterflies and tadpoles that turn into frogs with legs and oceans and deserts and space and stars and, yes, even the octopus.  A child accepts
all
these things and what adults perceive as amazement and imagination is really just a child’s boundless ability to believe in everything.

This, incidentally, is the reason why a child can have just as much fun with a cardboard box as with the toy that came in it.  In a child
’s mind, there is no fundamental difference.  The reality of a walking robot dog is really, on that very basic level of pure belief, no more or less fantastic than the reality of the box itself.

This is, as previously stated, incomprehensible to the adult mind.  Incomprehensible
and vaguely offensive.  And so adults force amazement down in great, steaming double-handfuls on the heads of their offspring, bombarding them with Barney and Little Einstein and Mr. Wizard and all those other pastel-colored, singing and dancing idols that can be collectively summed up as “Whimsy, dammit!”  And children, who are very small and yet very wise, and who are also not a bit amazed, obediently pretend to be, because children are quite good in their own small way at guessing what adults want.

All of which is necessary for you to know in order to understand that although Taryn MacTavish was surprised and interested and delighted by the great events that set the wheels of her future life in motion, she was not amazed.  In her adult life, she would not understand that.  And, if you are reading this while you are a grown-up, you probably won
’t either.

But that
’s all right.  Read on.

1.  The Library

T
aryn was six the day she got her very own library card.  Specifically, she was six and sixteen days, but it was really a birthday present, and in Taryn’s opinion, it was the best one.  Not to knock the crayons (sixty-four different colors!  Plus metallics!) or her new stuffed stegosaurus, and certainly not to knock the ice cream sundaes at SugarPie’s, but come on, a library card!

There were so many cool things about a library trip, beginning with getting to go to the grocery store and the fabric store and the post-office first because Mom was congenitally incapable of going to
just one place a day.  (Taryn’s Dad had recently remarked that his new boss was congenitally incapable of using complete sentences and therefore went around sounding like an epileptic macaw most of the time, a phrase which had impressed the eavesdropping Taryn so much that she went out of her way to use it herself, although she wasn’t quite brave enough to say it out loud yet.)

And Mom was in a really good mood today, after about a week of being unexpectedly nervous and fidgety.  Not cross or snappy, just
…jittery.  Like she thought Christmas was coming or something.  But whatever had been making her excited, it appeared to be over now and happily resolved, so much so that Mom had even bought Taryn a Snickers bar at the grocery store and a bag of beads at the fabric store.  And now the library, the pointy tip of a perfect-day pyramid.

The library in Redmond was a huge
, grey building with great panes of black-tinted glass framed by massive slabs of concrete.  There were concrete stairs—two sets of them, in fact, forming a great L up to the dungeon-heavy doors—and a concrete wheelchair ramp running up the side.  There were concrete ledges and cubby holes and overhangs and grooves and just all
sorts
of places for a six-year-old Taryn-shaped body to slither in and out of.

But the outside was
for later.  When Mom finally came up from the car and opened the heavy doors (still too heavy for her to budge on her own, but just wait until she was seven!), Taryn was able to get in on the good stuff inside.  First, the little fountain.  It was just Taryn’s height, but with stairs (concrete, of course) for the even littler little kids to climb up if they wanted a drink.  Then a slow walk past the long glass case that the library-lady filled with the weirdest stuff.  This time, it was books on fish, together with some Indian paintings and carvings of salmon, a Billy Big-Mouth singing bass, a whole bunch of tiny fishy knick-knacks, and what Taryn determined after several minutes to be a real live fish in a real fishbowl.  After that, Taryn took a quick glance through the tinted glass window next to the ‘little room’, a place Mom called a ‘conference room’.  Sometimes there were puppet shows or Madeleine movies or mask-making in there, but not today.  There was still lots of stuff in there
,
half-glimpsed and shadowy things she could only sort of make out through the dark glass.  It was always fun to try
,
though, and it gave Taryn something to do while her mom looked at all the boring stuff on the library calendar.

Taryn had picked out the puppet theater and two stacks of kiddie chairs from all the other black shapes in the Little Room, and was trying to puzzle out
what looked like a giant box of French fries when her mom called her name.  She decided swiftly and with authority that she must be looking at a box of wrapping paper tubes or rolled-up posters, and with that mystery solved, Taryn ran over to join her mom.  They both went through the second set of hugely heavy wooden doors and into the ‘real’ library together.

This was the second-best part of going to the library: getting to look through all the different shelves and pick up all the books she wanted.  There were books she
’d never read or even heard of, books they didn’t even have in the dinky old school library.  There were books with pictures, books with photographs, and even some books with photographs
of
pictures, which Taryn privately thought was a little pointless.  There were books with nothing but words, books with enough words for chapters, and books with so many chapters that Taryn couldn’t even count all the way up to how many there were.  There were books about ghosts and dogs and what to be when you grew up, and if she walked just a few aisles
this
way, there were books with murders and naked people and brains and all sorts of bizarre and forbidden things.  Books books books books books.

Taryn did not limit herself when it came to books.  She got as many as she could carry and labored them to a plastic table where she sat and read.  She was determined to read as much as she could while she was here so that she could check out other books before she left, and she applied herself grimly, giving each illustration a stern looking-over before turning each page.  Anyone looking at her would have thought she was searching for the cure to some horrible disease she had just contracted, but despite her outward appearance, Taryn was in a state of sublime bliss.

By the time her mom came over to the kiddie section to get her, Taryn had read four books and was mostly through with a fifth.  Her mom let her finish and went to browse the kiddie shelves herself, a thing Taryn noticed, found inexplicable, and then dismissed from her mind. 

In the end, Taryn
selected five whole books to take home: a chapter book about two kids who discover they can talk to animals, another chapter book about a baby bear who saves his circus, a book about different kinds of dinosaurs and how people dig them up, and two Jenny Fletcher Girl-Genius mysteries.  Taryn wanted to be a girl-genius someday.  She’d get a business card and everything, and grown-ups would come from all over to give her a dollar to solve mysteries.  Taryn could guess almost all the Jenny Fletcher stories without having to look in the back of the book for the answer, and she figured that was pretty good practice.

Taryn carried her books over to the high checkout counter and laid them out one at a time, taking a deep sense of pride in the delivery of the chapter books, and topped the whole stack off with her brand new library card.

Her mom got books too, and Taryn looked them over idly while Mom and the library-lady talked.  There were two kiddie books about babies and a very big chapter book that had a picture of a skull and a church window on the cover, and that looked way cool, but her mom read books like that all time and Taryn already knew it wouldn’t have any pictures in it.  She’d tried to read her mom’s books before and they were too hard.  Someday, she’d be grown enough to try again.  Privately, Taryn had always been really impressed that her mom read books about skulls. 

But now, now came the very best part about trips to the library.

Taryn left her mom at the counter with the books and went outside to play (it was so much easier to push the heavy doors open than it was to pull them).  Concrete stairs and concrete flowerboxes, concrete corners and concrete pillars.  It was like a castle, dark and undiscovered, and Taryn explored it thoroughly for the hundredth time, returning to the stairs to discover she was no longer alone out here anymore.  There was a lady sitting on the library steps.