Stoneskin Dragon (Stone Shifters Book 1) Read online

  "Is he going to die?" she asked in a small voice.

  "From wounds such as these? Not at all." Mace shook his head. "Shifters are swift healers—as you probably know firsthand," he added. "He'll just need rest."

  "But the stone," Jess said. It had expanded further when he'd shifted; she could see some patches on his neck now. His breathing was labored and shallow.

  "I know," Mace said, his voice gentle. "Let me take him inside, and we'll see what we can do. Bring the book."

  Unsure what else to do, she relinquished him to Mace, who lifted him gently. Jess picked up the book and tucked it under her arm.

  They crossed a patio of flagged stones toward the house. It was astonishingly quiet here. The distant cries of seagulls and an engine, perhaps a boat or a car, were the only sounds to break the silence.

  She hesitated at the door, looking up the hillside. She couldn't tell if they were on an island or the mainland—oh wait, Newfoundland was an island, wasn't it? She still couldn't believe they had crossed an entire ocean in that timeless darkness. The stone had swallowed them in Italy and spit them back out at the eastern tip of North America.

  How had he done that? Could the magician do it too, and follow them here?

  She tapped a flagstone with her bare toe; her gargoyle feet had ripped apart her hiking shoes. It seemed perfectly solid.

  "Jess?" Mace said through the open door.

  "Coming! Sorry!" She hurried to follow him inside.

  The house was echoing and vast, with high ceilings and wide corridors. To accommodate gargoyles, she thought in amazement, watching Mace carry Reive without his horns or wings brushing the ceiling or walls. This house was built by and for gargoyles. It felt old, though she knew it couldn't possibly have been that old. New World settlers in Canada went back, what, a few hundred years at most? But the house felt like it had been transported from somewhere medieval. The walls were buttressed with heavy wooden beams and draped in tapestries, something she had read about in books, but had never seen in real life before. They might have stepped through into an earlier century, except for the electric lights that came on automatically as Mace proceeded onward with his burden in his arms.

  "Why is this place called Stonegarden?" Jess asked, hurrying to catch up; she kept getting distracted by interesting tapestries or doors opening onto more corridors and stairs.

  "I'll show you later. Ah, this room will do. Most of the house is unused, but I keep a couple of bedrooms made up for guests."

  He opened a door onto a room that was washed in the gold of the setting sun. Tall windows looked down the hillside onto the sea. Jess's legs nearly buckled with exhaustion at the sight of the king-sized bed, made up with pillows and a thick, warm coverlet.

  Mace laid out Reive carefully on the bed. "If you want to clean up, there's a bathroom through there," he said, nodding toward a second door. The room also had a small table, a chair and a desk in front of the windows, and a low, comfortable-looking couch, as well as a densely stocked bookshelf that covered nearly an entire wall.

  It was a measure of how tired and stressed Jess was that she didn't even feel the urge to check out the bookshelf, beyond a vague interest. She laid the leatherbound book from Gio's library on the desk.

  "Reive—" she began.

  "I'll take care of him. There's a robe in the bathroom you can change into."

  Jess hesitated a moment longer, but she felt itchy and awful. She needed to get cleaned up, and also to make sure that she'd changed all the way back. Every time she shifted into her monster shape, she had a deep-rooted fear that her face would stay that way. She went quickly into the bathroom and closed the door.

  To her relief, the bathroom wasn't an exhibit of lush excess like the one at Gio's. It was just a nice, normal bathroom with a tub and shower and soft, thick towels.

  Jess looked at herself in the mirror. Good news: her face was normal and human again. She touched the bony sockets around her eyes and pulled back her lip to make sure that her teeth were blunt human teeth instead of fangs.

  But her hair had come completely unpinned, and her clothes were an absolute wreck. At least her bra had stayed on, though it was stretched all out of shape.

  She washed her face and hands with a large, soft cloth and a generous dollop of citrus-smelling hand soap from a ceramic dispenser. She found the bathrobe, actually bathrobes plural, hanging on a set of hooks on the inside of the door, and found one in her size. What she really wanted was a bath and about a year's nap, but she was too worried about Reive to indulge.

  She was also feeling an increasing urgency to look at the book. What if this was their only chance? Now that she had seen the black-robed magician open a portal, she didn't dare trust that anywhere was safe, no matter how seemingly secure.

  The bedroom was bathed in salmon-pink sunset light when she stepped out of the bathroom. Mace had stripped off Reive's jacket and T-shirt while she was in the bathroom, and Reive looked impossibly vulnerable, unmoving and bloody, with the gray patchwork of stone mottling his ribs and chest fully exposed. It was even worse than she had realized. Most of his torso was now stone.

  Mace—still in his gargoyle form—was just sitting there, immobile as a statue, with one hand on Reive's shoulder and the other on Reive's chest. For one shocking, horrible moment she thought Reive must have died.

  Her gasp made Mace turn his head. He smiled at her reassuringly. "It's all right. Don't panic. I'm only examining him."

  "Can I help?" she asked quietly.

  "Not at the moment." He nodded to the table, where there was a tray with a gently steaming coffeepot and a scattering of other things around it: buttery bread, muffins, a dish of jam. "Transforming takes energy, and so does healing. I'll have something more substantial brought up later, but this is what the kitchen had on hand."

  Brought up. He said it casually, as if having people bring you things was perfectly normal. "Do you have ... servants?" she asked, breaking off a corner of a muffin. She could feel faint stirrings of hunger, but she was too worried to really feel like eating.

  "I have employees. There aren't many jobs around the village, especially since the fishing industry has been struggling. I have things that need doing around the house, so some of the villagers work for me, yes."

  "Oh." She ate a bite of the muffin, and, discovering that she actually was hungry, crammed the rest of it into her mouth. "Can you help Reive?" she asked as soon as her mouth was clear again.

  "I don't know yet." Mace's voice was distant and distracted.

  She was full of questions: about Mace, about gargoyles, about this place. But he was clearly deep in concentration and she didn't want to disturb him. She was full of a mix of jittery energy and exhaustion. What time did her body think it was right now, anyway? Early afternoon? The middle of the night? She was just starting to adjust to Italian time, and now here she was in yet another time zone.

  She needed something to distract her. She licked the crumbs off her fingers, then got up and went into the bathroom to wash her hands again before handling the book. She poured herself a cup of coffee while she was at it, glanced at Mace one more time (eyes closed, looking like a statue again) and then opened the book that they had come so far and risked so much to retrieve.

  She could see immediately that it had been re-bound relatively recently, which made sense if it was made up of loose pages like the other book. The leather cover was much newer than the fragile, yellowed pages within. This was good; it had helped protect the book from the abuse it had suffered while they were fighting over it.

  Otherwise, the contents of the remaining part of the book were not too different from the rest. Jess flipped through the pages in growing frustration. She hadn't realized how much she had been pinning her hopes on being able to find a cure, for Reive and for herself.

  But instead, it was the same semi-incoherent mix of legend and theory and whackadoodle nonsense on the origins of gargoyles as the other half of the book. For every bit of pote
ntially useful information, there was page after page of stuff the writer had clearly made up on the spot, or collected from utterly batshit sources, much of it contradictory.

  "I am going to assume that gargoyles were not created by dipping a statue in the baptismal font of a desecrated church after a black Mass," she muttered.

  Mace laughed quietly, and opened his eyes. "No. But we were made."

  "What do you mean?"

  Mace took his hand off Reive's arm. He got up, swayed slightly, and then shifted human again. It was fascinating to be able to watch the process from the outside, a slow melting as his body contracted down to human proportions and colors bled back into his stone-gray clothing and skin. When the transformation was complete, he stretched and went over to pour himself a cup of coffee.

  "Gargoyles are not like other shifters," he said quietly, buttering a piece of bread. "We were made, not born—the original ones, I mean, the first gargoyles. My parents were gargoyles like me. But at the start of it all, we were created. Some say from human stock, some say from stone statues given life."

  "The book says both."

  "I know. I've read it." Mace smiled. He had an oddly playful smile, unexpected on his slab-jawed, serious face. "This part of it, anyway. I should warn you that half the book is missing."

  "Not exactly," Jess said. "I have the other half." She grimaced. "Had, I mean."

  Mace leaned forward in surprise, tea and toast forgotten. "You do?"

  "I did. That dude with all the scars took it. That's why I was trying to get a look at Gio's part of it." She touched the edge of a page. "I wrote down everything I could remember from the other book. But I don't have most of it here. It's at Gio's, in my suitcase." She looked at him hopefully. "Could you go get it, with that stone thing?"

  "I could. But I'm too exhausted now. I'll just have Gio fax the pages to me instead. In your suitcase, you said?"

  "It's in the back of our rental car."

  Mace gave her a brief nod, a tight jerk of his chin. "From memory, you said." He examined her with his curious green eyes. "What was in it?"

  Helplessly, Jess shook her head as she flipped the pages. "The same thing that's in this. Alchemy. Magic. Metaphysical insanity."

  She snatched up the book and flung it across the room.

  Mace lunged with inhuman reflexes and caught it. For an instant Jess glimpsed the blurring of his arm extending, his feet and legs briefly turning to gargoyle feet before blurring back to human again. He took a stumbling recovery step, and carefully set it down on the couch.

  "Careful. Gio's not gonna be happy with you if you destroy his book."

  "But that's all there is, then?" She was nearly in tears. "We are monsters. Creatures made in a lab, like Frankenstein's monster. And there's no cure in this, no fix for Reive ... no cure for me."

  "Is that what you wanted the book for?" Mace's voice was gentle. When she didn't answer, he patted the couch. "Come sit with me."

  Jess wiped her eyes. After a moment she got up and came over to sit on the far end of the couch.

  "I just wanted to be normal," she said quietly. "My entire life, I've had to hide. I just didn't want to hide anymore."

  "What about Reive?" Mace asked, turning to look toward the bed. "He's a dragon. He has to hide, too."

  "Yes, but ..." She thought of that beautiful, powerful copper creature, all strength and grace. "That's ..."

  "Different?"

  "He wasn't made," she said.

  "Ah," Mace said softly. "But ... what the book doesn't tell you is what we were made for. We're guardians, child. Protectors."

  Jess shook her head wordlessly.

  "No? Why not?"

  "Because ..." She wiped her eyes again. She hadn't realized how much hope she had pinned on the other half of the book containing the cure she needed. "Because the gargoyles, your people ... our people, have been attacking his for generations. He's dying now because he was poisoned by one of us."

  "There are reasons for that," Mace said. "Reasons that aren't your fault. Or his fault either. Do you know what happened to the rest of the books of true gargoyle lore, the books this version was made from?" He touched the book's cover. "They were destroyed. To stop any more of us from being created."

  Jess frowned. "But why?"

  "Remember what I told you about us being guardians? We were made for noble purposes, to guard and protect. But there were those who twisted us away from our true purpose, manipulated and used us—and the dragons too."

  "Who?" she asked quietly.

  "A great evil, child." He stood up. "It's a long story, and I'll tell you all of it when Reive is awake, so I don't have to explain it twice."

  "But that magician guy—is he working for this evil? What if he attacks us again?"

  "We are safe here. He cannot enter this place." Mace laid a hand on each of her shoulders, and kissed her on the forehead. It was gentle and paternal. She couldn't ever remember anyone doing something like that for her before. "No evil can come here. Now you should get some rest."

  "Reive—"

  "Needs sleep as well. I'll have some clean clothes and a proper meal brought up to you, and get Gio to fax the pages to me so I can look at them. Does that sound all right?"

  "Uh ... yes. It'll be fine. More than fine."

  Mace gave her another of those strangely sweet smiles, and left. She could still feel the brush of his lips on her forehead.

  It wasn't sexual, not at all. But it made her feel ... cared about. Taken care of.

  She got up after a minute. Her body was stiffening up, and if she was going to lie down, she wanted to do it next to Reive.

  He was still on the bed, with a soft, fluffy coverlet drawn over him. His face was very pale, and even in sleep, it was drawn with lines of what looked like pain. Jess lightly kissed the corner of his mouth, but he didn't stir. She pulled back the covers to take a look.

  His bruised side had been cleaned up and then left as it was. The bruising was horrible, but it was also fading to browns and yellows like a healing bruise instead of a new one. She could no longer see the deformation of his ribs she'd noticed earlier, and there was no sign of anywhere that he might have been bleeding from.

  He heals like I do, she thought, touching her fingertips to his skin gently. The claws snipped off in the magician's gateway had left sore, bloody places on the tips of her fingers, but they had already healed to shiny pink skin.

  When she was a child, it had taken her a long time to realize that humans didn't heal little playground scrapes and bruises in a matter of hours, and broken bones in a few days.

  But the stone wasn't healing. In fact, with his shirt off and all the time in the world to examine him, she could see the full extent of it at last.

  His right arm was stone all the way up to his shoulder and collarbone. It spread down his side in a mottled patchwork, spots and blotches ranging from quarter-sized to big enough that Jess's spread fingers could barely cover them. They were all over his side and the right side of his chest, vanishing under the waistband of his jeans.

  How far does it go down? she wondered, horrified.

  Reive stirred slightly. "Shhhh," Jess soothed. He needed sleep to heal—at least from those wounds which could be healed. The other, perhaps, could not.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, she shed the bathrobe and the rags of her clothes. It wasn't like there was any point in being coy with him now. He had seen her deepest secret. And she could only think that the more skin she could expose to him, the more she could offer him the relief that he seemed, for some reason, to get from her touch.

  She had her choice of his injured side or his stone side to snuggle up with. Her main thought was to do it without hurting him, so she decided the stone side would be better for that; it did seem to bother him, as when he'd been jostled on the plane, but at least she wasn't likely to re-injure him just by touching him.

  Hopefully.

  He didn't seem to mind at all. When Jess shed the bathrobe a
nd snuggled under the covers with him, he seemed almost soothed by her presence. He leaned into her, pressing himself against her.

  She turned her face into his neck. The stone was smooth and cool against her mostly-naked body, but not unpleasant, especially as it warmed with her body heat.

  She pressed a kiss to his neck, against the odd-feeling edge where stone met flesh. Reive sighed slightly. Some of the pain lines in his face smoothed out, and he sank into deeper sleep.

  Jess lay against him, feeling him breathe, feeling the tension easing out of her.

  Outside the windows, darkness rolled in over the sea.

  After a while she slept.

  Reive

  Reive woke with a dim awareness of pain in his side, or the memory of pain, but the rest of him was blessedly pain-free. The relief was so great that he seemed to be floating. It was a surprise to find himself anchored down—weighed down, in fact, by a heavy bedcovering and a warm, soft body pressed against his own.

  Jess.

  He turned his head, barely daring to move. Her hair tickled his nose. Early morning sunlight fell through high windows above the bed, striping her face and hair with liquid gold.

  Reive had no idea where they were. A bedroom at Gio's, perhaps? He had no sense of danger. His dragon was calm and relaxed.

  And Jess was in his bed.

  From the amount of warm flesh he could feel pressed against him, she must be nearly naked under the covers. He seemed to still have pants on ... regrettably, especially as his body responded to Jess's nearness with unmistakeable urges.

  But the lack of pain was a kind of bliss all its own. He would almost have thought the petrification had reversed itself, except for the numb deadness of his right arm and a tugging sensation whenever he tried to breathe deeply, as if his lungs or ribs were resisting. But this was such a vast relief after the constant pain that he could have stayed here forever, drifting in comfort with Jess's warm body pressed against his.

  Unfortunately, he was starving, and thirsty, and he needed to pee.