Stoneskin Dragon (Stone Shifters Book 1)

  Stoneskin Dragon

  Stone Shifters #1

  Zoe Chant

  Contents

  A note for my readers

  1. Reive

  2. Jess

  3. Reive

  4. Jess

  5. Reive

  6. Jess

  7. Reive

  8. Jess

  9. Reive

  10. Jess

  11. Reive

  12. Jess

  13. Reive

  14. Reive

  15. Jess

  16. Jess

  17. Reive

  18. Jess

  19. Reive

  20. Jess

  21. Reive

  22. Jess

  23. Jess

  24. Reive

  Epilogue

  A note from Zoe Chant

  Also by Zoe Chant

  Preview: Shifter Agents

  A note for my readers

  This book is a standalone with an HEA, but Reive, the hero of this book, was introduced in the previous series, Bodyguard Shifters. Here are those books in order if you'd like to read them:

  1. Bearista

  2. Pet Rescue Panther

  3. Bear in a Bookshop

  4. Day Care Dragon

  5. Bull in a Tea Shop

  6. Dancer Dragon

  There is a convenient boxed set of the first four books.

  Babysitter Bear, Bodyguard Shifters #7, is coming soon!

  Reive appears mainly in Pet Rescue Panther and Dancer Dragon.

  Reive

  If not for phone maps, Reive Corcoran would never have found it. The Ossowa Public Library was on a tree-lined residential street, surrounded by white frame houses with neatly kept yards. The library building was only one story high, most of it hidden behind shrubs bright with early touches of autumn color. The front parking lot was just big enough for a handful of cars.

  He walked to it from the bus station. It was a lovely day, warm and a bit muggy, with just enough early autumn coolness to cut the heat. His leather motorcycle jacket would ordinarily have been too warm for the sunshine, but he was cold inside it, almost shivering.

  His right arm hung numb at his side.

  He felt out of place in this small town, scruffy and leather-jacketed with his hair—long enough to fall in his face—tied back with a leather cord. He carried a small backpack slung over his left shoulder with a change of clothes and some toiletries.

  He was used to traveling light, but he wasn't used to traveling without his motorcycle. He'd had to leave it behind weeks ago. To his infinite frustration, his right hand could no longer handle the controls.

  Reive reached absently to rub his aching arm under the leather jacket. A black leather glove covered his hand, and he had to resist the urge to pull it off and examine it again to see if the gray, stony patches had visibly spread. When he rubbed at his arm, he could feel the hard places underneath his sleeve. The rocky patches themselves were numb, but when he pressed at them, pain sparked bright and hot on the burning edges where rock met flesh.

  He almost welcomed it. The pain steeled him, gave him purpose. Reminded him why he was here.

  He was running out of chances, running out of time.

  He'd slept on the bus, but it had been interrupted and restless, as all his sleep was lately, plagued by strange dreams. Not nightmares exactly, but eerie and unsettling—dreams of being buried alive in stone or trapped in an unresponsive body.

  If this library didn't have what he needed, he wasn't sure where to go next.

  Who would have guessed that the biggest collection of books and manuscripts on gargoyles on the entire continent, possibly in the world, was in a small-town library in Indiana?

  There was a pleasant little path, edged with flowerbeds, leading to the library's glass door. Small-town library hours, he noticed: 11-4, Monday-Friday. It was Friday afternoon. He had barely made it before they closed.

  His dragon uncoiled inside him, stirring wordlessly. It had been sluggish and quiet as his disease progressed, almost unresponsive; even his shifts were coming with greater difficulty. This was the most interest it had shown in anything in weeks. Reive couldn't help feeling a weary thrill of something that might be reluctant hope.

  When he opened the door, the chill of air conditioning hit him sharply, an abrupt change from the end-of-summer mugginess outside. The contrast brought a prickle of chill sweat to the back of his neck, turning into a shiver that ran through him from the inside out. He swayed a little, catching himself on the doorframe.

  "Are you all right, young man?"

  He looked up, through sudden double vision, and blinked to clear it. The speaker was an elderly woman with a canvas tote of books, looking at him with worry.

  So this was what he'd come to. Humans pitying him. He straightened his spine and put on a smile.

  "I'm fine, ma'am. Can you tell me where the reference desk is?"

  "Over there, but there's only one desk, circulation and reference combined." She smiled. "We've a fine little library here, but it's not a big one."

  "Thank you," Reive said politely, and added, "Would you like a hand with those books?" He was a dragon and she was a human, but he'd been brought up to respect his elders.

  "Oh, what a nice young man—no, I'm only walking to the car, but thank you."

  He held the door for her and then went on into the library. There was the usual library smell of books and carpet-cleaning chemicals. Though not a big library, as she'd said, it seemed to be larger than it had looked from out front—the shelves went on and on. Up front, near the single staff desk, there were a number of displays arranged around various themes. STAFF PICKS was pretty obvious; so was IT HAD A BLUE COVER! One set of books had a tongue-in-cheek collection with punny titles, and another featured books that all had bunnies on the cover.

  Reive decided that he liked whoever had put those displays together.

  "Can I help you?" inquired another little-old-lady voice. The woman behind the counter was tiny, five feet if she was an inch, with her hair done up in a perfectly neat little bun. Her name tag said MARION.

  Reive turned on the charm again, or at least he tried to. He was tired to the bone; just the walk from the bus station had exhausted him.

  "I hope so, ma'am. I understand you have a collection of books on gargoyles here."

  "We do, but we're closing soon," she said, checking her watch. "We're only open for a few more minutes."

  He hadn't realized how much hope he'd pinned on this until panic clutched at his chest and tightened its claws around his throat. Every day mattered. He couldn't wait until Monday. "Couldn't I just take a look at it? A quick look?"

  "Well ..." She looked around, tapping the end of a ballpoint pen against her chin. There was no one else in the library except an old man one-finger-typing on one of the library computers. "All right. Just for a few minutes. Are you looking for something in particular?"

  "I—uh—it's complicated," he said awkwardly, following her as she left the desk. "I'm doing some research. I think I just need to look and see what you have."

  "You know, you're the second person in two days who's come here wanting to see these," the librarian remarked brightly. "But you're so much nicer than the other one."

  "Who was the other one?" Reive asked, a thread of ice crawling down his back. No one else knew about his personal mission. No one had a reason to know. Was someone from his clan checking up on him? No, that made no sense.

  "A young man writing a book. He wouldn't talk much about it. Very rude young man, if you want my opinion. Always in such a hurry, people that age. No one has any time to stop and talk anymore."

  For a p
erson Marion's age, "young" could mean anywhere from a teenager to someone in their 60s.

  "Did he tell you his name?" Reive asked. Could it be the gargoyles themselves? He couldn't see how; they didn't know what he was looking for, so they had no reason to interfere.

  "I don't believe so. Neither have you," she added, giving him a sharp glance.

  "I'm Reive," he said. "When did you say he was here?"

  "Yesterday." She was wary now. "Are you with him?"

  "No, no, not at all," Reive said quickly. "I just thought it might be an, um, a professional rival."

  "Are you writing a book too?"

  Reive couldn't help smiling. "No, just interested. It's a hobby of mine."

  "Well, I hope you'll find what you're looking for here." She turned a corner and gestured eloquently. "Ta-da!"

  The shelves were stuffed with various-sized books, papers, folders, and periodicals. Reive reached for a book at random, only to fumble it with the clumsy fingers of his right hand. He pulled it out with the left instead. It was a large, recently published book of photographs of gargoyles on churches in Europe. The book fell open to a page of a grotesque stone monster, and Reive felt a physical reaction, a twinge that went all the way down his aching right arm to his fingertips.

  It's only a photo. And not even a real gargoyle at that. Just a statue.

  "Is this the kind of thing you need?" Marion asked. She checked her watch again. "You know, I need to start closing—"

  "I know," he said, desperation tinging the words. "Couldn't I just stay for a few minutes? I won't be any trouble."

  "Well ... maybe Jessamy could stay with you. She's our assistant librarian. This collection is her project. I can't say I was that pleased in the beginning," Marion rambled on, time pressure apparently forgotten now that she had an ear to bend, "to have her taking up shelves with this. We're a small library, you know, without much room and not that much of a budget. But she's done a good job with it. She even bought most of the collection out of her own pocket. The kids love it, and it really brings in more than it costs us, between book sales and sometimes even tourists coming in to look at it ..."

  While she talked, Reive took the opportunity to quickly scan the shelves, trying to get a feel for what kind of books were here. He'd come in the hopes of finding antique and rare items, the old books of myth and lore that he'd only found passing references to in his other research. For the most part, this collection was nothing but books and periodicals about gargoyles that he could have gotten anywhere—true, many were out of print, but probably still available on Amazon.

  But there were a handful of older things, rarer things. He carefully handled a turn-of-the-century picture book, its clothbound cover crinkly with age.

  "Is everything you have out on the shelves?" he asked.

  "You know, our other visitor asked about that too," Marion said. "I believe there are a number of uncategorized and rare items in the back, but Jess is the only one who knows for certain. She was off yesterday, so she couldn't give our other visitor a tour. He seemed disappointed about that. Jessamy—Jess, dear? Someone's here to look at the weird collection again!"

  "I really wish you'd stop calling it that, Marion," a voice said from the other side of the shelves, and then the most gorgeous woman he'd ever seen came around the corner, a few feet away from Reive.

  She stopped and stared at him.

  She was the absolute epitome of everything he would imagine of a sexy librarian. She had brown hair pulled back in a braid, a spray of freckles across her nose, and the hottest white cardigan he'd ever seen, paired with a long brown skirt that reached almost to her feet. She was taller than most women, not more than a couple of inches shorter than he was.

  And his dragon reacted to her, rising up inside him in a surge of—something. An emotion he'd never felt from it before.

  Mate? was his first, startled thought.

  I don't think so? But his dragon seemed oddly unsure.

  He had always thought you would know for certain. Everyone he knew who had found their mate seemed sure of it from the start. He had assumed you would recognize them instantly; that was how it was supposed to work.

  But he found himself captivated by her, and he had no idea why.

  Jess

  The hottest man Jess O'Dell had ever seen was standing in the G-J stacks. He'd just turned around from talking to Marion. And so of course Jess did the worst (but most characteristic) thing she could possibly have done, and froze in her tracks, clutching a book in one hand.

  Guys who looked like that didn't wander into small-town libraries. They were too busy riding horses in slow motion and rescuing sexy young women (not frumpy librarians) from burning buildings and that sort of thing.

  He was dressed in black leather, with a small backpack slung over one shoulder. He had black hair, pulled back in a short ponytail, and eyes of a striking color that she could only describe as amber. His tan face was all clean lines, with high cheekbones and a chiseled nose and a jaw you could cut yourself on. And yet there was also something gentle about it, like a deeply hidden softness that only a select few ever saw and managed to draw out ...

  She became aware that first of all, she was just standing there, and second, he hadn't said anything either, and third, Marion was snickering.

  Jess, in desperation, fell back on the only script she had for situations like this. "Can I help you?" By putting my hands all over you, maybe? her brain helpfully supplied, but she managed not to say it out loud. "You wanted to see my special collection, right?"

  Marion snickered more. Jess glared at her.

  Really Sexy Leather Guy looked like his train of thought had been interrupted mid-track as well, though Jess couldn't imagine why, since all he was seeing was Perfectly Ordinary Jess: tall, awkward, broad-shouldered enough to make buying sweaters a pain, with all the natural grace and coordination of a pile of Jenga sticks.

  And that wasn't even mentioning her other secret, the far worse secret, the one that had made dating a minefield for her entire life.

  "Uh—yes. The ... books? The ones on gargoyles?" He seemed to get himself together, and Jess noticed something she hadn't before, that he looked tired. Really tired. A little bit gray, almost. "Marion said you had more that aren't out on the shelves. I know it's almost closing time, so I won't keep you for long."

  "Yes, of course," she said, trying to shake herself out of the spell that seemed to have come over her as soon as she saw him. "Right this way, please. It's in the back."

  "I'll close up for you, dear," Marion said with far too much cheer. "No need to hurry." She started to duck around the end of the shelves, then popped back to say, "His name is Reive, by the way!"

  Jess was very aware of her cheeks flaming. "I'm sorry about that," she said as soon as Marion was out of earshot. (Which didn't have to be very far, as Marion was hard of hearing.) "It's little old ladies who run the library and, honestly, the entire town. Marion and her friends are the book sale committee and the Friends of the Library and the volunteer coordinators at all our literacy events. They're very nice, but I'm the youngest person at every meeting and I think they've all taken a proprietary interest in my love life." Was she babbling? Oh no. She was definitely babbling.

  "Don't worry about it," Reive said, smiling a little. "I have a bunch of older relatives in my family too. They all think they know what's best for me, too."

  So he came from a big family. Jess felt a twinge of old pain. She'd always yearned for that sense of belonging, of history—"You're so lucky," she said without thinking.

  "Lucky?" he asked, looking surprised.

  "You know. To have that. I grew up in foster homes. I don't know if I have any relatives at all."

  She clamped her lips shut on the words, but they'd already escaped. What was it about him that made her want to pour out her life story? She couldn't even imagine what he thought of her now.

  But his smile was gentle. "Maybe," he said. "I never really thought of it
that way. My family's gone through a lot of ... upheaval, lately. I'm a little bit estranged from them right now."

  "Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring up anything painful."

  "You didn't." He smiled again, all too briefly. It was a smile she could get lost in. She had to wrench her gaze away.

  "Anyway, you're here to see the—"

  "Yeah, lead on."

  They spoke at the same time, and Jess couldn't help laughing, bringing out Reive's warm smile again. The moment of tension dissipated, and his gold-tinted eyes sparkled.

  "It's back here, past the restrooms," she said. "I swear I'm not always this scattered."

  It's just that I'm more used to helping 90-year-olds with their taxes than giving book tours to guys who look like you.

  This, at least, she managed not to say out loud.

  She dug in her skirt pocket for the storeroom keys and unlocked the door. "This is everything that's not currently in circulation," she explained, flicking on the light. "New books that haven't been entered in our computer system yet, damaged books, donations—it's kind of a mess, sorry." The room was crowded with plastic totes and boxes of books, books scattered on the sorting table, shelves packed with books. "And the rest of the gargoyle books are back here. Most of these are items that might not be able to stand up to being regularly handled by patrons. And some are ... well ..."

  She pulled out a plastic sleeve with a newspaper inside. It was from the late 1800s, the newspaper so brittle she had to handle the plastic very carefully by the corners to avoid causing any more of it to flake off. HOAX OR MONSTER? TERROR IN PICCADILLY CIRCUS! the headline read.