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  Stonewing Guardian

  Stone Shifters #2

  Zoe Chant

  Stonewing Guardian

  (Stone Shifters #2)

  © 2021 Zoe Chant, All Rights Reserved

  Author's Note:

  This book is a standalone with an HEA and can easily be read on its own. However, Mace and his family were introduced in the previous book:

  1. Stoneskin Dragon

  This series, Stone Shifters, is a spinoff from my currently running 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

  7. Babysitter Bear

  Bodyguard Shifters Collection 1 (collects #1-4)

  Contents

  1. Thea

  2. Mace

  3. Thea

  4. Mace

  5. Thea

  6. Mace

  7. Thea

  8. Mace

  9. Thea

  10. Thea

  11. Mace

  12. Thea

  13. Mace

  14. Thea

  15. Mace

  16. Thea

  17. Thea

  18. Mace

  19. Thea

  Epilogue

  A note from Zoe Chant

  Also by Zoe Chant

  Preview: Shifter Agents

  Thea

  She could do this.

  It was only an elevator.

  No problem.

  Thea Lanning stood in front of the steel doors like a woman confronting her own doom. The cup of coffee she had picked up from the coffee cart in the lobby was cooling in her hand.

  The doors dinged and opened abruptly to release a cluster of chatting, animated grad students. Thea stepped quickly out of the way.

  "Hi, Dr. Lanning!" one of them called, recognizing her.

  "Hi, Lakshmi," Thea said, summoning a smile.

  The students hurried off, and Thea stood there, nerving herself to move forward, staring into that little metal box. But she was still rooted to the spot when the doors slid slowly shut again. It almost felt as if the elevator itself was judging her.

  This was ridiculous. She was sweating and shaking as if she was about to confront some sort of horrendous monster, not trying to make herself do something that for most of the forty-two years of her life, she had done every day, thinking nothing of it.

  Outwardly, Thea knew, she was a solid, sensible-looking person. She wore her brown hair chopped off just below the ears, and the only time she wore footwear fancier than sturdy, all-weather boots was when she had to dress up for faculty events. Archaeology fieldwork tended to strip a person of both vanity and squeamishness. She had picked through semi-fossilized feces with tweezers, chased wild dogs away from a work site with a shovel, and tried to talk her way past hostile locals when she didn't speak a word of the language.

  She was not going to lose to a damn elevator.

  She forced herself to push her foot forward. All she had to do was press that button and—

  "Is this going up?" a voice asked in her ear.

  Thea flinched, nearly spilling her coffee. She was so intensely on edge that it took her a minute to recognize the older man standing next to her, and she still couldn't remember his name. One of the linguistic anthropologists on the floor above hers.

  He was all but jittering with impatience, briefcase in one hand and a fat file folder shoved under his arm.

  "You are waiting for the elevator, right?" he said.

  "Uh ..." Swallowing, Thea leaned forward and pushed the button.

  The elevator dinged and the doors immediately opened. The linguistic anthropologist got on and reached to hold the door for her with his elbow, wearing a look that said clearly, Come on, don't take all day.

  Thea shook her head. "I'm ... waiting for someone," she lied, and hoped that the flaming blush she could feel wasn't as visible under her freckles as she was afraid it had to be.

  She could still feel his eyes on her as the door closed, even though she knew it was almost certainly her imagination. He wasn't judging her. He didn't even know. He had probably forgotten about her the instant the doors closed, turning his mind to whatever class he was late to teach or the student he needed to meet with.

  The numbers above the elevator door went up, paused, and then started coming back down again. Here it came, her nemesis, her date with destiny, her—

  "I can't do this," Thea said out loud. She tried to take a drink of coffee, but her hand was shaking too hard for it. She turned fiercely on her heel, and strode toward the door adjacent to the elevators.

  And she did what she had done every day, for the two years since the cave-in, to get to her office and classes: she took the stairs.

  Mace

  Mace MacKay hadn't been to Toronto in a long time, but he still remembered his old reference point.

  He emerged from a jumble of concrete fill underneath an overpass in the Rosedale Valley, an odd little patch of isolated-feeling woods in the middle of one of Toronto's most affluent neighborhoods.

  Stonewalking through concrete was always a deeply strange experience. Every kind of rock had its own feeling. Granite was crunchy; limestone was a bit chalky. Heavily folded metamorphic rocks could be as crinkly as tissue paper.

  But concrete was just weird. It didn't even have the fuzziness of soil, which he could slog through on a stonewalk if he had to, though it tired him. Concrete pushed back. It was as if the unnatural, man-made nature of it was trying to push him out.

  He struggled through it, and emerged in a tangle of brush above a pedestrian walkway and bike path. For a few moments he stood in the morning sun, breathing deeply of the warm, still air. An hour earlier, he had been a time zone and a half to the east, in Newfoundland. It was much crisper and cooler there, still dragging itself out of the grip of winter even in early June. Here in southern Ontario the air was mild and humid, promising a hot day.

  No one had seen him come out, as far as he could tell. He heard voices, and a moment later, a couple of rollerbladers skated past, chatting with each other. A jogger with a dog went by from the other direction.

  He had once asked his friend Gio what it looked like when he stonewalked, from the outside. He habitually used that method to go back and forth between his home on the island of Newfoundland and Gio's villa in Italy.

  Gio had laughed.

  "It is as if you are coming up from beneath a wet sheet, my friend. As if the stone is transforming itself into you. Your face pushes out from the rock, and then the rest of you follows. You will be the same color as the stone at first, whatever stone you emerged from, the white of marble or the brown of my cellar wall. Then slowly you begin to look like yourself."

  Definitely not something he wanted random humans passing by to see.

  Mace waited until the path was clear, and then adjusted the strap on the leather satchel he was carrying, and walked casually down the steep bank onto the bike path.

  He was dressed for cooler weather in a sweater and hiking boots, but he doubted if anyone would notice or care. Canada's generally casual culture made it easy to avoid being noticed unless he really did something to draw attention to himself.

  He looked around; it had been decades since he had last been here. He didn't necessarily need a reference point to stonewalk, but it made the process a great deal faster, easier, and less risky; there was always the slight, but present, risk of misplacing himself underground. The trouble was that reference points and landmarks did change. He made a careful study of the surrounding landscape, and then started walking.

  A
few minutes later, he reached a set of stairs leading out of the quiet green depths of the ravine. It grew noticeably warmer, smellier, and noisier as he climbed to street level.

  He had spend most of his life in the cool, windswept silence of rural Newfoundland, where his family had lived for generations in their family home of Stonegarden, far from cities and the prying eyes of humans. But he also enjoyed the transition to the city. It was busy, interesting ... different. Decades ago—a long time for humans, a relatively short time in the long life of a gargoyle shifter—he and his sister had talked their parents into letting them take classes at the University of Toronto. It was the 1970s then, and he and Margery used to come out under the bridge in this very ravine, then climb up to Bloor Street and walk to campus.

  Their parents hadn't liked it much, but Margery was a person who always got what she wanted. The agreement was that they could do what they liked during the day as long as they stonewalked back to the island at night.

  In retrospect, those trips had taught him a lot, including about humans—he'd had a few human girlfriends back in those days—but also about stonewalking, the practice making him efficient enough that he could travel around the world at will. Not all gargoyles could stonewalk, and fewer still were this good at it. He was teaching the skill to his niece Jess, daughter of long-dead Margery, but she had a long way to go to match his abilities. Mace knew, and had told her, that he wasn't naturally talented at it. He simply practiced a lot.

  Another legacy of those long-ago classes was that he knew the walk from the ravine to the campus by heart. From the top of the stairs, he turned and started walking toward the university, past high-end fashion shops and hurrying, busy professionals out for the lunch hour.

  The fashions were different, the streets busier, but he could almost have been walking this way with Margery, hand in hand, both of them thrilled to be off the island. He breathed deeply of the warm air, inhaling the scents so different from his island home.

  The buzz of his phone in his pocket was an unwelcome interruption to his nostalgic thoughts.

  "Yes?" he said shortly.

  "Hello to you too." It was Gio's voice, light and laughing, with the slight lilt of an Italian accent. "Where are you? Is that traffic in the background?"

  "Toronto." Mace left the busy street behind, turning down a quiet side street.

  "Why are you in Toronto?"

  "I'm here to see a Dr. Lanning at the university. The professor is an expert in Viking archeology and can perhaps help me with my search."

  "Is that wise, leaving Stonegarden?" Gio asked. "The cult of evil magicians is still after you and the other gargoyles." He made a faint scoffing noise. "I cannot believe I just said that."

  "If they staked out the U of T on the off chance I might show up here, then their resources are far beyond what we have any ability to deal with, so why worry about it?" Still, he found himself looking around, casting a sharp eye across the serene grounds and Gothic facades of the campus buildings. "Did you call to give me information or question my life choices?"

  "I can do both." There was the sound of shuffling papers in the background.

  Gio was a collector of rare books and amateur historian in Italy. The two had been friends for a long time—since boyhood, in fact, though as their relative human and gargoyle lifespans diverged, Gio was now an old man, while Mace still looked like a powerfully built man in his early 40s. His dark hair was barely streaked with the first strands of gray, while Gio's thick mane was already pure silver.

  "From what I've found in my research, I think you're right," Gio said. "The medallion you're looking for was taken to Newfoundland by the early Vikings. It may still be on the island somewhere."

  Mace felt his heart quicken. He was right. "That could even be why my ancestors moved there, back in those very early days. Perhaps they sensed the proximity to the medallion, and felt safer there, when we were being so harshly pursued in Europe. Stonegarden has always been a place of refuge for my kind. And I will feel safest when I can take the medallion there to protect it."

  "You know, there's a word for this," Gio said. "What's that word I'm looking for ... something Greek ... right on the tip of my tongue ..."

  "It's hubris, but that is not what this is."

  "Oh really? Safer with you, only you can protect it, et cetera? You know I value your wisdom, old friend—"

  Mace burst into a short laugh, causing several students to glance at him sideways and part around him as he pushed his way into the anthropology building. "You haven't valued my wisdom a single day in your life."

  "I do," Gio said, laughing too. "But you can also be proud, and stubborn. Traits of your people, from what I understand, though in you they run particularly strong. Don't let them lead you astray."

  "As much fun as it is to dissect my personality flaws in detail, I'm going to have to end this charming conversation. I have an archaeologist to talk to."

  "Be careful." Gio's voice was serious now, with no hint of his usual warm humor. "You've grown used to being secure behind the walls of Stonegarden. But walls that keep enemies out can also make you insular and careless. You've spent little time in the human world, but it's a human enemy you face now. And the world may have changed more than you realize in the last fifty years, while you were locked up with your books."

  "Are you done? Because—"

  Gio snorted. "Listen to your elders, boy."

  "I'm six months older than you," Mace said, smiling despite himself, and hung up.

  He tucked the phone into his pocket and looked at the directory on the wall. It was Dr. T. Lanning's office that he needed, and it looked like that was on the fourth floor.

  He opted to take the stairs, because the walk had energized him and he needed the time to get his thoughts together and decide how to bring the problem to Dr. Lanning without admitting to the existence of actual-for-real, living gargoyles.

  He was two flights of stairs up when the third-floor door into the stairwell burst open and someone charged in, moving so fast he could only catch a glimpse of brown hair before the person smacked into him, and their armful of books and papers went flying.

  There was also a loud splash as coffee drenched Mace's sweater and splashed onto the floor, followed by its cardboard cup.

  "Oh, no," the person said. "I'm sorry."

  She pushed her short hair back behind her ears. She was tall and angular, tanned in the way of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. There was a spray of fine freckles across the high bridge of her nose. She had capable square hands with short-cut fingernails, and Mace found himself suddenly, strangely captivated by all of it. He had never just wanted to stare at a human before, but he caught himself doing it now.

  "Sorry, sorry," she chanted, and crouched down to collect the books. "Can you—um—darn it, I have an appointment with a grad student and I'm already late for it."

  "Here, let me get these," Mace said. He descended a few steps to collect scattered papers. But he kept glancing up the stairs at her. She wore jeans and hiking boots—mud-crusted and clearly well used—and a men's denim shirt, open at the collar, with the sleeves rolled up to reveal lean forearms that were so densely freckled that they connected together to blend with her tan.

  "I swear that I'm not usually this much of a menace," she called down the stairs to him. "It's just that I'm used to having the stairwell mostly to myself at this time of day. I wasn't looking. Did I get coffee on you?"

  "Only a little," Mace said, glancing down at the huge brown stain on his gray sweater.

  "Oh my goodness," the woman said when she got a look at it, too, as he climbed up the stairs to give her the papers back. "At least let me get you a towel or something. Good grief. I'm a menace."

  She straightened up and tried to push her hair back with her elbow—it had slipped from its tucked place behind her ears and fallen into her eyes—and nearly sent the entire stack cascading down the stairs again. Mace hastily steadied it with a hand on top o
f the pile.

  "See? Menace." She looked up at him with a small frown. He couldn't help noticing that her eyes were gray, like the sea around his island home, with just a hint of blue. "Can I help you? If you're looking for a faculty office, I can direct you."

  "I'm here to talk to a Dr. Lanning."

  "Oh! That's me. I'm Dr. Lanning. Thea Lanning." She tried to shove out a hand at him, and nearly upset the pile of books. "Oh no. Look, I need to get up to my office before my student gives up and leaves. Just put those on top." She nodded with her chin to the papers in his hands.

  "Tell you what, I'll carry these upstairs for you, and then I'll go get you another coffee since I spilled yours."

  "You don't have to," Thea protested as they began climbing the stairs together. She went at a trot, two stairs at a time, and Mace matched his pace to hers. "I spilled it all on my own."

  "No, but I'd like to talk to you when you're free, and the least I can do is bring a peace offering, since I can see you're busy."

  "Well—okay—I'm not going to pass up a free coffee."

  She blasted through the fourth-floor stairwell door with the same casual disregard for who or what might be on the other side, and Mace couldn't help wondering exactly how many collisions she'd caused during her time here. However, the source of her urgency was clear: a girl was standing in the hallway in front of one of the office doors, fidgeting with the strap of the backpack slung over one shoulder.

  "Sophie! Hi!" Thea called. "Sorry, sorry! The department meeting ran long!"

  She tried to transfer the books to her opposite arm to fumble out her keys. The pile teetered alarmingly. Mace offered a stabilizing hand once again.