Stoneskin Dragon (Stone Shifters Book 1) Read online

  Oh no you don't. Now that he knew how this guy worked, Reive wasn't about to give him a chance to get his magic ready.

  Reive barreled into him at full speed.

  —or tried to. Instead he skidded sideways as if he'd hit a greased plastic bubble, and crashed into a row of bookshelves.

  Reive staggered to his feet, shaking his head to clear it. The guy had some kind of shield.

  But even through the shield, the impact had still knocked Black Robe down. The robe billowed out, the magician hit the ground hard, and the book went skidding across the floor.

  Reive lunged for it. Black Robe got there first. Reive whapped him with a paw, knocking him backward, and slapped his paw down on the book, covering it with his giant claws.

  Now he could do what he should have done before: shift human, and then shift back to dragon form, taking the book with him into wherever dragon shifters' clothes went when they transformed. It would be safe there as long as he was a dragon.

  But he hadn't accounted for the devastating weakness of his body.

  Shifting had been a struggle the first time, and it was even more of a fight to get himself back to human form. He came through on his knees, his hand shrinking down to normal human proportions, spread out on the scuffed cover of the book. His stone arm dangled uselessly at his side.

  From the stiff, aching feeling of his rib cage, the stone patches on his side had spread measurably. He was starting to have trouble breathing. A wave of dizziness washed over him.

  This is bad.

  He wasn't sure if he could shift back. And even if he could, he didn't know if he could do it without passing out.

  "Give me that," the magician said.

  Reive looked up. Black Robe had gotten to his feet and pushed down the robe, leaving him bare to the waist—Show-off, Reive thought. For the first time he got to see the guy without the cowl covering half his face. The magician was surprisingly young, perhaps Reive's age, with spiky blond hair. He looked both panicked and determined.

  What Reive had taken for tattoos were actually scars in the shape of runes. They were beginning to to glow dully, shedding orange light like a fire's glow coming from inside the magician's body. He held one hand low at his waist and the other raised, the fingers curled into positions that were probably significant.

  He was preparing some kind of magic.

  "You can't stop me from shifting," Reive said. His mouth tasted metallic, and he kept having to stop to take deep breaths. "And as soon as I shift, I'll have the book, tucked away just like our clothes are when we're shifted. There's nothing you can do about it."

  "You're right," the magician said, his voice strained. "But what about ... her?"

  He turned and swept out his hands, then drew them back toward his body as if pulling on invisible ropes. Several small cuts burst open on his body in runic patterns, bleeding.

  From deeper in the book stacks, Jess gave a yelp. There was a crash.

  "Leave her alone!" Reive snarled.

  The magician's face was twisted in concentration and what looked like pain. "Damn it," he muttered. "She's so—slippery."

  A moment later, Jess came stumbling out of the depths of the book stacks. Rather than tying her up with invisible ropes, he had sandwiched her between two smallish bookcases. She was trapped between them as if in a vice. The lines of force were faintly visible, glowing soft orange like overheated wires.

  It was the same spell from before. This guy didn't seem to have very many tricks. As the magician fought to hold onto Jess, Reive could smell a faint scorching smell. The glowing patterns on his skin burned more than fabric.

  Those runes, or whatever they are ... they hurt him when he does magic. It's like his own magic is burning him. Cutting through his skin. He can't keep it up for very long.

  But it was enough.

  "Give me the book, and I'll release her," the magician commanded hoarsely.

  "Don't!" Jess gasped. "I'm all right, Reive, really. Just shift like you said you were going to_—ow!"

  The magician made a clenching movement with his hands. The bookcases squeezed her, and Jess gave a strangled cry.

  "Jess!" It didn't matter if the magician got the book, not anymore. Reive drew back, taking his hand off its cover.

  "No," Jess gasped out. There were tears in her eyes. "No, Reive, don't—not for me—oh, there's no other way, damn it!"

  She began to twist and writhe.

  In the first horrified instant, Reive thought she was being manipulated with magic somehow, transformed against her will. Her body writhed and expanded. Her blouse tore down the back, and a pair of wings erupted. Her hands thickened and grew claws.

  She was turning into a gargoyle right before his eyes. The magician was doing it to her.

  But then Reive became aware of the shocked look on the magician's face. Black Robe didn't know what was happening either.

  This was all Jess.

  The transformation finished. The rags of her skirt dangled around new, muscular thighs. Stone claws curved from her bigger hands. Her skin had turned gray and rocky.

  But her face was still Jess's face, even with fangs. It suited her, somehow. And she didn't look like she was being controlled by anyone. She only looked sad. There were tears on her rocky cheeks. She gave Reive a look of pure agony.

  "I'm sorry," she said, and then she turned on the magician, and her lips drew back from her stony fangs. "You!"

  She lunged.

  The magician yelped and flung up a visibly glowing net that wrapped around her. Jess was held for a brief instant, stopped in mid-leap, and then ripped free. She sprang at the shocked magician with her claws slashing downward.

  She hit the invisible shield. Red sparks erupted in runic patterns, and there was a sudden bright flash around the magician's body, like a soap bubble suddenly appearing and then popping as the shield died under her onslaught. Black Robe flung himself wildly out of the way, and Jess buried her claws in a bookcase instead, splintering the wood.

  "Get the book!" Jess yelled. Her voice was rougher like this, and slightly slurred from the fangs, but still recognizably Jess's voice.

  She was right. Reive curled the fingers of his good hand around the book and threw everything he had into his shift.

  "No!" the magician yelled. He whirled around and flung out his hands.

  Reive was already shifting. It was much harder than it had ever been, especially like this, trying to take an object with him. Pain spiked through his temples.

  But it was working.

  The magician had no way to stop him. Instead, the invisible ropes wrenched at a bookcase behind Reive, pulling it forward as Reive managed to fling himself into the shift.

  The book vanished as he went into the shift. His dragon's coils sprawled into the real world, just in time to connect solidly with the edge of the bookcase. It drove into his side with a crash that broke ribs and tore muscles. The taste of blood flooded his mouth, and Reive collapsed into darkness.

  Jess

  "Reive!"

  The scream tore out of her throat, coming out as a hoarse bellow. There was nothing delicate about her in this form.

  It looked from here like the magician had forced the bookcase through Reive's chest.

  Jess attacked in a grief-filled rage. She snarled wordlessly and slashed out. The magician hastily flung up another shield to try to deflect her—she could see it faintly through her gargoyle eyes, where she hadn't been able to in her human form. Her claws ripped through the shield like paper.

  "Look, let's talk about this," the magician said, backing hastily away.

  "You killed him!" she roared.

  The magician slid a bookcase into her way. She ripped through it, leaving splinters and pieces of books in her wake. Some tiny librarian part of her brain shrieked at the books' destruction and was ruthlessly silenced. Nailing this asshole's butt to the wall was the only important thing.

  "He's not dead!" the magician yelped, flinging himself behin
d another bookcase. Jess grabbed it, her arm muscles bulging, and wrenched it to the side. "Listen, you want the book, I want the book—we just need to get him to shift back and retrieve it—"

  "We! There is no we! You used me for a human shield and tried to kill Reive! I'm going to rip you apart!"

  He had retreated deeper into the stacks of Gio's astonishingly huge subterranean library. She dug in her claws and scrambled to the top of the nearest bookcase, crouching to clear the ceiling with her wings, just as she had done in a very different library half a world away in Indiana. Aha, there he was. She leaped from bookcase to bookcase, and dropped in front of him.

  "Gotcha," the magician said smugly, and the carpet rose up to wrap around her, binding her in coarse jute weave from the neck down. The gently glowing lines of force wound around the top of the rug, holding it in place.

  Those magic ropes didn't work on her. They just slid off. But he had figured out quickly how to make them work instead. He couldn't hold her, but he could hold something on her.

  Or at least he thought he could.

  She shifted, collapsing down to her smaller, weaker human form. The magician smiled in triumph, but the smile dropped off his face an instant later when Jess shifted back, erupting out of the bindings, shredding them around her as her body expanded.

  "You're not really a gargoyle, are you?" she demanded. "You're just someone who figured out how to make those fake gargoyles, the ones you've been attacking us with. But you don't know how the whole thing works. That's why you want the book. Well, let me tell you something." Jess stalked toward him. Her gargoyle feet were more like a wolf's hind legs; they weren't hinged like human legs, and they were kind of difficult to walk on, but they did produce a nicely eerie effect when she wanted to intimidate someone. She leaned close, and through her fangs, she snarled, "I'm the real deal, asshole."

  The magician paled. He reached behind him and drew a sigil in the air. It glowed faintly, and abruptly the air seemed to tear behind him, lined with fire along the edges. There was a sudden sharp smell of blood in the air, a flash of pain across his face—there and gone, like he was used to it—as cuts sprang open all over his arms. A chilly breeze blew through the hole in the air, and Jess glimpsed someplace high and lonely, with boulders and fallen stone columns. It was dusk there.

  "Wait—!" she began, but the magician threw himself backward through the rift in midair. Her claws closed on empty air. She lost the tips of two claws when the portal snapped shut. She was left standing alone in the library, breathing hard, with the scent of mountain heather hanging in the air.

  "Reive," she murmured, and she turned and ran back. She shifted human-shaped as she ran, to move more effectively through the aisles between the bookcases. Her gargoyle form was really too big for this, and also not well suited to running; it was meant for climbing and flying. Her fingertips were bleeding where the door in the air had closed on them. She hardly noticed.

  Reive was still a dragon when she got there, and Mace and Gio were working to get the bookcase off him. Mace was still in his gargoyle form, and despite her worry for Reive, Jess panted to a stop and stepped back for a moment and watched him.

  She had never seen one of her own kind from the outside before. She had never even dared look closely at herself in a mirror. And what truly shocked her was that Mace, as a gargoyle, wasn't ugly. Not in the slightest. And he was still recognizably Mace. Some things had changed; his face was wider and heavier, his muscles considerably more defined. In human form he had been appealing in a rugged kind of way; now he was best described as craggy. But he was still good looking, just different. Even the fangs didn't really look bad. They seemed to fit the rest of him.

  Of course, it's easier for a guy, she thought. Craggy is a good look on a guy. Women aren't so lucky.

  But still ... she didn't look at Mace and see a monster, any more than she did when Reive turned into a dragon.

  "Ah, there you are," Mace said. His deep voice was even deeper in his gargoyle form, rumbling like rocks grinding together deep in the earth, and like her own voice as a gargoyle, it was slightly slurred because of the fangs jutting from his lower jaw. "Shift and give us a hand, would you?"

  He said it so matter-of-factly, like it was a perfectly normal thing. Jess swallowed and shifted into her gargoyle body. Mace was still wearing his clothes; they'd gone to stone along with the rest of his body. She wondered if it was possible to learn how to do the same. It would certainly save wear and tear on her wardrobe.

  Between the two of them, she and Mace easily moved the bookcase. Reive lay unconscious, breathing shallowly. His side, under the bookcase, was bloody and visibly deformed. He'd broken some ribs at the very least.

  And the discoloration of the stone transformation was far worse than it had been before. Jess shifted back to human—she was still far more comfortable that way—and crouched next to him. His right foreleg was stone all the way past the shoulder; it continued on to consume part of his wing. There were great patches of it all along his uninjured side. She laid a hand on his leg. It was chilly to the touch, and completely unyielding.

  "Can you help him?" she asked, looking up at Mace.

  "Not here," Mace said, in his deep, rumbling voice. "Perhaps back at Stonegarden—my family estate. We will have to take him there."

  "Is it nearby?" she asked hopefully.

  "It's in Canada," Gio said behind her.

  Jess choked out a half-hysterical laugh, even though it wasn't really funny. "How can you get a dragon from Italy to Canada? Do we take him as cargo?"

  "There is a much faster way." Mace knelt beside her, gracefully folding his backward-hinged legs; she couldn't help staring at seeing, once again, her own physical differences in someone else. "I apologize, my friend," he said to Gio, "for leaving you with a mess to clean up. I need to get these two away from here. I doubt if anyone will bother you again, if the book is what they want, but you can always leave for a while if you feel safer that way."

  "Oh, I'll be fine, don't worry about me," Gio said. "Your visits are always interesting, I will certainly grant you that."

  "What are you going to do?" Jess asked. Right now she wouldn't have been surprised if Mace turned around and drew a sigil in the air that opened up a portal to somewhere else just like the wizard had done. Her entire mental model for what was possible and impossible had been thoroughly recalibrated in the last couple of days.

  "Do you know how to phase through stone?"

  Okay, maybe she hadn't understood the level of weirdness she was dealing with here.

  "Do I what?" Jess asked, staring at him.

  "Ah. Apparently not. This will only a take a moment. Don't be afraid."

  He put his arm around her, and laid a hand on Reive. Jess tried to pull away.

  "Wait, what—"

  She had no chance to say anything else. The ground swallowed them whole.

  There was darkness and cold, seemingly without end. The only real things were the hard, cool pressure of Mace's arm and the warmth of Reive's scales under her hands.

  And yet, she had no trouble breathing, and she wasn't cold enough to be uncomfortable. It was almost like dreaming, the way that you could do things that would be impossibly dangerous in the real world, and yet you knew in the dream that they couldn't hurt you.

  Maybe I am asleep.

  But it didn't feel like it.

  She tried to turn to ask Mace what was happening, but her body responded sluggishly—and that was like a dream too, the floating feeling and inability to fully control her own movements. That did make her start to panic, and Mace, feeling her stiffen, tightened his arm around her.

  And then the darkness was washed away by clear golden light.

  Jess staggered and almost fell. She was on solid ground, somewhere outdoors.

  A cool breeze blew over her, raising goosebumps through the rags of her torn clothes. The air smelled of salt and the sea. It was late afternoon, the sun low in a cloud-flecked sky.
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br />   Astonished, she looked around.

  She was on a hill, surrounded by boulders and the sprawling coils of Reive's injured dragon. The rugged gray wall of a large stone house towered nearby. It was a rambling structure, split-level and complex, looking like it had been built piecemeal, addition by addition, over many years.

  Below the house, a rugged hillside dotted with trees and blazing with autumn colors sloped down to a narrow strip of rocky beach and some cliffs. She could glimpse the tops of houses in a small village, and there was a lighthouse on a headland, looking like something out of a postcard of Maine.

  "Where are we?" she asked.

  Mace smiled slightly. Even in gargoyle form, he looked exhausted. "Newfoundland."

  "Newfoundland?"

  "This is where I live. Welcome to Stonegarden, my home."

  "It ... I ..." Words deserted her. She rested a hand on Reive's scales. "Newfoundland?" she said again, faintly. "It ... it was night just a minute ago ..."

  "It's four and a half hours earlier here. Well, somewhat later than that now. Stonewalking takes a little time." Mace rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache, and grimaced. "See if you can get your friend to shift back. It would be much easier to move him as a man."

  Jess tried to shake off the dazed feeling of dislocation—Newfoundland?!—and hugged Reive's massive head with her human arms. "Come back," she whispered. "Shift back. Reive, can you hear me?"

  He didn't respond at first, or even twitch, but it seemed that on some level he did hear her. After a moment, his entire body rippled, and then abruptly she had Reive's very human head in her lap. He was deeply unconscious, his skin pale under its tan tones.

  The book thumped to the ground, but Jess hardly paid it any attention. Reive was more important.

  Mace, still gargoyle-shaped, went down to one knee beside them. Jess tried not to stare too openly as Mace's big, capable hands, with their pebbly gray skin and claws, opened Reive's jacket. Then she was distracted by the blood all over Reive's side and T-shirt.