Stoneskin Dragon (Stone Shifters Book 1) Read online

  "Come on, Reive," she said desperately. "Please wake up."

  She laid her hands on his chest. Maybe she could do something for him. It was stone, wasn't it? One of the advantages to being a gargoyle was that stone was supposed to do what she wanted.

  "Come on, come on," she muttered through her teeth. As she had done with the statue back at Mace's place, she tried to focus on the rocky surface of Reive's chest, pushing at it with her mind.

  Come on, Reive. Come on.

  In her gargoyle form, her own body was living, animate stone. Was it really impossible that she could somehow infuse some of that life into Reive? All he had to do was move his chest like living flesh instead of stone. Surely that ought to be possible.

  She concentrated, spreading her fingers on his chest and trying to push at the stone with her mind. She reached desperately for the sense of kinship that she felt whenever she touched normal rock. But she couldn't quite grasp hold of that feeling with Reive's stone body. It didn't want to give up its secrets to her.

  "Jess!"

  Mace, in his shifted form, thumped down to the path beside her, and the feeling she had been grasping for slipped away. Even so, it seemed to her that Reive might be breathing a little more easily. It was hard to tell.

  "He just collapsed," she said tearfully as Mace leaned over them. "Can you do anything for him? Help him?"

  Mace laid his big, pebbly-gray hand on Reive's chest, as she had done earlier, and then he shook his head. "He's beyond my ability to help," he said, and Jess had a moment of sweeping horror so intense that she nearly fainted. "Oh, no, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to frighten you. He's still alive, my dear. He's holding on."

  "But he's made out of stone. I tried to help him move his chest. Can't you do that?"

  Mace shook his head. "My power, and yours, only extends over inanimate stone. We have no control over the living stone flesh of another gargoyle. And right now, he's in between. Neither one nor the other. The stone he's made of is beyond our reach, and currently beyond his as well."

  "Then we have to move ahead with the ritual," Jess said firmly. Reive had agreed to it, she told herself. She wasn't pushing him into anything he didn't want. She stroked his hair back from his face, and her thumb touched a cool, hard patch on his cheekbone. The stone was even spreading to his face now.

  "I know. I had meant to come find you anyway. I think we're ready, at least as ready as we're going to be, and everything I've read suggests that the ritual is meant to be done at sunset." He glanced up at the sun touching the top of the hills, painting the clouds in shades of red and gold. "We mustn't miss our chance today. Hold onto him."

  Jess wrapped her arms around Reive and buried her face in his hair. Mace laid a hand on her shoulder and wrapped his wings around all three of them.

  This time she was a little more prepared for the darkness that swallowed her. She tried to keep her eyes open, but there was nothing to see, only the dark. Still, it didn't feel harmful or dangerous. There was something almost comfortable about it, the feeling of having rock wrapped around her on all sides. She could almost imagine herself going to sleep like this, if she wasn't so frantically worried about Reive.

  The darkness swept away, and they were crouched in a jumble of boulders.

  Jess patted Reive's shoulder and straightened up to look around. She had never seen this place before. The air was sharply cool and smelled intensely of salt and iron and mud: the smell of the sea, but much stronger than on the sun-warmed hill.

  They were in some kind of stony grotto, standing on rocks and loose sand. Sea stacks towered above them, and the sun was already hidden. A tidal pool lapped at the bottom of the scree slope they were standing on. The waves pounded at the rocks, but the pool was calm as glass, protected by the rocks from the driving force of the ocean.

  "Where are we?" Jess asked.

  "A rock pool I know of. The ceremony must be performed in the water, and it's the closest suitable place." Mace glanced around. There was a feral anxiety to his body language, at odds with his usual calm. "We should get moving. Away from the protection of Stonegarden, they may be able to find us. Help me get him to the water."

  Jess helped him pick up Reive. "Couldn't we just do it in a bathtub?" A particularly fierce wave hit the sea stacks, and spray dashed her, shockingly cold.

  "It must be wild water, not water that's been calmed and tamed." Mace started down the scree slope, while Jess scrambled alongside.

  "Don't the villagers notice you flying around as a gargoyle?" she asked to distract herself.

  Mace smiled. "They're used to it. They don't know that I am the gargoyle, but they do know that their village is protected by a lucky gargoyle. Did you see the statues in the village?"

  "I did. They told me that they're supposed to keep the village safe from harm. Nobody said anything about statues coming to life and flying around."

  "If you'd seen a statue come to life and fly around, would you talk about it with strangers?"

  "Yes, okay, you have a point," she admitted.

  They stopped at the tidal pool's edge. The glassy water reflected the blazing sky above.

  "If this has to be done at sunset," Jess said, "we're running out of time."

  "Sunset lasts a long time this far north. But you aren't wrong." Standing at the pool's edge, Mace turned to her. Reive's head rolled limply against his shoulder. "Shift."

  "Why?" she asked, alarmed. "I mean, I want to help, but ..."

  "You are the one who must take him into the pool. The mate bond will help. But you can't carry him like that."

  "Oh," Jess murmured. She concentrated and shifted.

  Ever since she had met Reive, the transformation was starting to feel less like losing herself and more like embracing her true self. There was no shame at all this time; instead it felt satisfying, like scratching a long-denied itch. It wasn't until she had finished shifting that she realized she had taken her clothes with her this time without even trying to. The one thing that hadn't come along was her shoes. She shook off the pieces of her borrowed shoes—there went another pair—and curled her clawed toes in the sand.

  "Here." Mace held out his arms, and Jess carefully took Reive's limp form. It was a reminder of how much stronger she was in this body. She knew that she couldn't have picked up a full-grown man under normal circumstances, but he hardly even felt heavy to her now.

  When his body came into contact with hers, it seemed that he relaxed slightly. His head lolled against her shoulder. There was something trusting in it that made her chest tighten with the need to repay that trust.

  "So I just take him into the water?"

  Mace nodded.

  She began to wade in. The water that had been so cold to her as a human now felt merely cool, pleasantly refreshing on her gargoyle skin. She walked in up to her knees and turned to see what Mace was doing.

  For the first time she noticed a few other items at the edge of the pool. There was a large bowl, a few bottles and jars, an incense burner, and a briefcase.

  "Where did this come from?"

  "I brought it here before I went for you. It's everything we need for the ritual ... I hope," Mace muttered under his breath. "But the most important ingredient is you."

  "Me?"

  "A living gargoyle. His mate." Mace tipped his head at the deepest part of the pool. "Go on, take him all the way in."

  Taking a deep breath, she waded deeper. The cool water climbed her legs. She kept thinking her clothes should be getting soaked, then remembered she was no longer wearing clothes, at least not in the normal sense. Her clothes were part of her body now. Beneath her stony feet, the pebble bottom of the tidal pool felt slippery and nice.

  Granite, limestone, sandstone, flint ...

  Reive's feet dipped into the water. He jerked in her arms.

  "Shhh," she murmured, and he relaxed again. She wished now, irrelevantly, that she'd thought to take off at least some of his clothes before wading in. Or at least his shoes.
>
  Like it matters. Priorities, Jess.

  She waded deeper. Sandstone, sandstone, mudstone, shale, her rock sense told her as the smooth pebbles slipped under her feet. Except it wasn't in words, not really. It was like Reive had said earlier about an inner animal voice. She just knew.

  Maybe she had always been hearing her gargoyle's voice, as long as she had been alive, and had just never recognized it.

  The water came up around her crotch and then rose to the level of her hips. Reive's legs floated, wavering under the surface. He jerked again when the cold water started climbing up over his hips and back.

  Jess glanced over at Mace. He lit the incense burner—the spicy smell drifted to her over the water—and opened the briefcase. The book was inside, now open to a page that was weighed down with a rock. Her soul cringed.

  "At least cover the pages with plastic! The salt in the air will destroy the paper."

  Mace laughed under his breath. "You're definitely a librarian."

  "I'll take that as a compliment. Can I do anything to help?"

  "Just what you're doing," Mace said over his shoulder. "It's the most important part."

  "It doesn't feel like it," she muttered, but she kept moving, wading deeper and deeper.

  Looking down at Reive's slack face, where the stone patches seemed to have spread visibly since she'd first noticed them, was making her anxious. She looked up at the sky instead. The last pink-gold rays of the setting sun still touched the top of the grotto, though chill blue shadows cloaked the bottom where they were.

  She might not have seen what she saw, except for the steep angle of the sun, casting long shadows from every protruding knob and cleft in the rock. There was more than just rock up there.

  In the cliff, there were faces.

  "Mace!" she gasped out.

  "What?" He spun around at the alarm in her voice, half-spreading his wings. "Oh." He followed her gaze to the clifftops. "Those are mine. Don't worry about it. This place isn't warded as well as Stonegarden, but it has its defenders."

  Jess stared up anxiously at the cliffs. The gargoyle statues seemed to be frozen in the act of emerging from the cliffside. The statues at the house and in the village hadn't unnerved her like this, but there was something creepy about these. She found them more frightening than comforting.

  Looking at the cliffs also made her aware that there was no visible way to get down into the grotto. There were no steps cut into the rock, no paths, not even so much as a ladder. With the sheer cliffs along the sea and the rough surf, no one could possibly get here if they didn't have wings or Mace's ability to travel underground.

  It should have made her feel safer, but instead she felt trapped.

  You have wings, Jess. You can fly out of here.

  It wasn't quite the voice of something entirely apart from herself, but it was a voice she had been hearing in the back of her mind for her whole life. It was her common sense and sanity; it was the reasonable part of herself, the part with its feet planted firmly on the ground.

  "Jess?" Reive's voice murmured.

  She wrenched her gaze from the clifftops to look into his face. His eyes cracked half open, staring up dazedly at the sky. When he managed to focus on her face, his gaze sharpened, as if he was pulling himself back to consciousness by sheer force of will. He smiled weakly.

  "Hi," she said, smiling back. Remembering her task, she took a step deeper into the pool. Reive flinched and tried to sit up, then seemed to realize that he wasn't being supported by anything except the water and her arms, and thrashed in an abrupt spasm that almost made her drop him.

  "It's okay. Settle down. I've got you."

  Reive calmed down, but raised his head enough to look around. "Where are we?" he asked weakly.

  He was still gasping for breath between each word, and she could feel his heart beating rapidly where his body was pressed against hers.

  "We're in a place Mace took us to. We're going to do the ceremony here."

  She was braced for argument, and not entirely sure what she was going to do if he objected. But instead he just nodded, and then he said, "Are we ... wet?"

  "Yes. Sorry. It's part of the ceremony."

  Reive nodded again. He laid his head back against her shoulder, but smiled up at her. "Never gonna mind getting you naked and wet."

  "Reive!" she said, casting a quick glance at Mace, who had his back to them. And then she remembered abruptly and shockingly that she was in her gargoyle form. And ... he hadn't reacted badly to her at all. She hadn't seen any shock or alarm in his face at all, not even surprise or a moment's lack of recognition. He had only looked glad to see her.

  It's true. He really does see me and not the gargoyle.

  But that wasn't entirely it.

  No. I am the gargoyle. That's what he sees, no matter what shape I'm wearing. He just sees me.

  There was a time when she would have reacted with vehement resistance to the idea that her gargoyle form and her human form had anything at all in common.

  But they weren't actually that different, were they? She looked down at her hands, curled around Reive's shoulder and thigh. Those were her fingers, bigger and stronger, but—except for the claws at their tips—still basically the same shape as the hands she was used to seeing wrapped around a cup of coffee or turning the pages of a book.

  Even her face as a gargoyle was broader and thicker, but discounting the fangs, it was her face. Not someone else's, not even that different.

  It really is me.

  Told you, some other part of her brain seemed to say.

  They would have been floating now, but for her gargoyle weight holding them down, keeping them stable. The water was up to her chest. Reive's head was out of the water for now, but then it lolled again, his brief moment of consciousness flagging. The back of his head dipped into the water, his black hair floating before he gasped awake and jerked himself a little higher in her arms, throwing an arm around her neck.

  "That's cold!"

  "Good," she said. "It'll help keep you awake."

  She felt her way across the bottom of the tidal pool with her toes, letting the pebbles guide her. This seemed to be about as deep as it got. They were submerged except for their heads and her shoulders. She could feel the water tugging at her, trying to lift her, while her weight held her down. Water versus stone.

  "How do you feel?" she asked Reive.

  "Cold," he said. He drew a labored breath. "Wet. I—ah!"

  His head snapped back, dipping so low in the water that she had to throw her shoulders back and lift him to keep his face from going under. The spasm of pain contorted his whole body.

  "Reive, no! What's wrong? Mace! It's getting worse!"

  "He has to change," Mace called back from the shore. He was hunched over the little altar he had set up with the bowl and incense burner on a slab of rock. From here, Jess could see the flickering light of fire in the bowl; it lit his face from below. "We don't have a choice."

  Jess clung to Reive as he writhed in pain, as if her arms could hold him here in the world. She couldn't help thinking back on Reive's distrust of Mace. Maybe he was right. Maybe Mace was tricking them, tricking her.

  "He's hurting so much! There has to be another way."

  "Just keep holding him," Mace called. "You're helping, you really are. Don't let him go."

  "Not ever," she whispered.

  Unable to watch Reive writhing in pain, she tilted her head back, looking up at the bright salmon-colored sky on fire with the brilliant colors of sunset. The cliffs were outlined sharp and dark against it.

  And at the top of the cliff above them: a human figure, cowled and cloaked, with the skirts of the robe flapping in the wind.

  Jess sucked in a breath of shock and alarm.

  "Mace!" she shouted. "He's here!"

  Reive

  Jess's cry of alarm snapped Reive back to reality just as his grip on consciousness began to fade again.

  Our mate needs us.
r />   His dragon's voice once again sounded stronger than it had in days, surging back with the need to protect Jess.

  Reive tried to struggle upright in her arms just as there was a sound like a thunderclap. A great crack appeared in the cliffside above Mace and the altar.

  "Oh no you don't," Mace snarled. He slapped a hand against the rock. His claws sank into the stone, and the entire cliffside shuddered. The crack stopped expanding.

  The magician, framed against the sky, crouched to do something to the rock at his feet.

  Stoneskins began tearing free of the cliff in showers of pebbles. Most of them had wings that they beat ponderously, somehow staying aloft despite looking too heavy to fly. In moments the sky was full of them.

  "Mace!" Jess shouted.

  "Keep going!" Mace called back, his voice sounding strained. "We have to continue the ritual."

  Reive, staring up in dazed shock, realized there were different factions among the stoneskins. Some of them were lumpy and ill-formed, others more detailed, lifelike sculptures. And they were fighting with each other. With some controlled by Mace, others by the magician, they clashed overhead. Cascades of gravel rained down into the pool.

  A piece of stone underneath the magician's feet cracked away—Mace again, presumably, because the magician gave a yell of surprise. Then fire flared from his fingertips. Rather than falling, the stone began to glide down the cliffside like a child's toboggan. It landed with a thump against a cleft in the rock above them.

  "I'm sorry, Reive," Jess said. "Stay here! I have to go help."

  "No!" Mace shouted over his shoulder. His great muscles bunched as he pressed both hands against the wall. "Stay in the water! We can't interrupt the ceremony halfway through."

  The magician's robe smoked and his hands moved in a complex dance as he guided the stoneskins. Lumpy and crude, they were more suited to this kind of brute-force fighting than Mace's more carefully sculpted creations. One of them broke through the line of defensive stoneskins and splashed into the water near them.