Stoneskin Dragon (Stone Shifters Book 1) Read online

  Jess growled, low in her throat. The sound vibrated through Reive, echoed in an inner growl from his dragon. Despite the desperation of their situation, he couldn't help thinking, with an abrupt surge of inappropriate arousal, I wonder if I could get her to do that during sex?

  But there was nothing of play in Jess right now. She snarled, opening her stone jaws to reveal sturdy fangs, and pushed Reive behind her.

  Losing her support in the water, he floundered for a moment, half-wild with frustration; he couldn't just tread water here while his mate put herself in danger! He reached inwardly for his dragon, struggling to shift, and found the transformation elusively out of reach. His body felt leaden and half-dead. It was all he could do not to sink in the water and drown.

  "Stay away from us!" Jess roared. She tore into the stoneskin with her claws. Each stroke bit through the rock of the stoneskin's body as if she was tearing up a sofa cushion. Pebbles and small stones flew wildly, plopping into the water.

  Our mate—in danger—

  Well, it would help if you'd let me shift! Reive roared back at his dragon. He thrashed in the water, finally managing to flounder his way a little closer to shore, where his feet could touch bottom. In her shifted form, Jess was considerably taller than he was.

  Can't ... His dragon's mental voice was growing weak again. Everything feels wrong. Can't get hold of our body ...

  That was what he was afraid of. His entire body felt wrong—heavy and stiff, barely responding to his orders to move.

  Reive gave up on trying to transform. His right arm was fully petrified, even if the rest of him wasn't. If Jess could tear her way through the stoneskins with her stone claws, maybe he could too.

  Another stoneskin was wading into the water. This one didn't even have the glowing eyes; it was misshapen and horrific, a lumpy monstrosity with no head and one shoulder higher than the other. No wonder Jess had believed herself a monster, if these were the only other gargoyles she'd ever seen.

  It was no use, though. His flesh-and-blood fist bounced off, bruising his knuckles, and he couldn't even move his other arm. Just that small amount of effort made him gasp for air he couldn't get. His body was turning to a stone prison, trapping him inside.

  But Jess was magnificent. She tore her way through every stoneskin that came in reach, fierce and beautiful.

  "Just give me the damn book!" the magician yelled down from his perch on the cliffside.

  Jess grabbed a rocky chunk of what used to be a stoneskin, big enough that it took both her hands to lift it, and lobbed it at him. With her gargoyle strength, it arched through the air, much higher than any human could have thrown it. The magician had to dodge, and the stone crunched into the cliffside next to his head.

  Another stoneskin lurched toward Jess's back. Reive threw his good arm around its knob of a head, but there was no way to slow it down when he was unable to hurt it.

  "Jess, look out," he gasped, dropping off its back into the water. Jess spun around and tore into it with her claws.

  There had to be more he could do than just shout warnings to her. He floundered out of the water onto the beach near Mace. On land, he was even more acutely aware of his body's stiff heaviness. He hadn't realized how much the water had been doing to support him. He nearly fell over, barely able to keep his feet.

  Damn it! We can't do anything like this! We have to shift!

  "Mace!" he panted. "Why aren't you fighting?"

  "I am," the older gargoyle ground out. He still had one hand on the cliffside, and more stoneskins boiled out of it, popping out of the rock with cracking, tearing sounds to confront the magician's stoneskin army. "You need to get back in the water. All of this is for nothing if you die."

  "Just take Jess and get her out of here."

  "The hell I will!" Jess yelled, hearing him.

  "And do what, drag her off kicking and screaming?" Mace said dryly. "You need to get back in the pool. Stopping the transformation halfway through could kill you."

  "I'm already dying," Reive said bluntly. He lowered his voice so Jess couldn't hear him. "You and I both know it's true. Is there any way you could—I don't know, juice me up so I can take out that bastard once and for all?"

  Mace shook his head. He looked tired. "I have no control over the stone parts of your body. Neither does he, fortunately for you."

  Reive had a brief, awful mental flash of being attacked by his own arm. "Okay, fine, but is there anything else you can do? Like get me up there to where he is, say?"

  "That, I could do." Mace gave him a brief, intense look. "Is that really what you want?"

  "If I have to go out saving her, I'm willing to do it."

  Mace gave him a terse nod, and abruptly a pair of massive, cold stone arms closed around his body. Reive started to struggle before realizing this was exactly what he'd asked for. One of Mace's stoneskins lifted him off the ground.

  "Reive!" Jess shouted from below.

  The air was chaos, with Mace's stoneskins locked in pitched battle with the magicians' creations. It was like flying through the middle of an aerial dogfight where all of the shrapnel and flak was chunks of stone. Reive covered his face with his arm as stinging gravel and stone slivers pelted him.

  But in that chaos, the magician didn't see him coming until he was very close. One of the enemy stoneskins plowed into Reive's ride, with a sound like two boulders crashing together. Reive frantically kicked off and flew through the air. He made one last attempt to shift, but he was still human-shaped when he thumped into the cleft in the rocks where the magician had made his stand.

  Reive tackled him, because there was no way he could win if the magician had a chance to get those fiery-hot invisible chains around him. They slammed into the rock wall together.

  It felt like grabbing a live coal. Those scars in the magician's body, bleeding coal-red light, didn't just look hot, they were hot. But for once, the growing numbness in his body worked in Reive's favor. He pressed the other, slighter man into the wall, flattening the magician beneath his own half-stone body.

  The cowl had slipped off the magician's head, and Reive was struck once again by how young he looked. Not long ago, Reive thought, this might have been him. Some dumb kid, trapped by other people's choices.

  The magician struggled to free his arms, but Reive had him pinned, and it appeared that he couldn't do magic if he couldn't move; those hand gestures were a necessary part of it. The unnatural heat of the magician's body scorched Reive's wet clothes and what was left of his human skin.

  "Get off me," the magician grated out as Reive crushed him to the wall. "Help me, why don't you? We could work together. We want some of the same things, I bet.”

  Reive snarled. "You want to stop turning into stone too?"

  Shock crossed the magician's sharp-featured face. "I thought you wanted to use the book to turn into a gargoyle."

  Reive barked out a hard laugh. "Want to? It's happening to me whether I like it or not. What I want to do is turn back the clock and stop it. Change myself back to what I was before."

  "You can do that with the book too. I could help you."

  This made him hesitate enough to be pushed back a step. "Mace said it's impossible. It can't be stopped. All I can do is complete the transformation."

  "Of course he said that. He's a gargoyle. Why wouldn't he want you to be like him?"

  Reive's doubts flooded back. Somewhere deep in his mind his dragon was protesting, but it was so distant and weak that he could barely hear it. Darkness hovered around the edges of his vision. He was losing his fight to stay conscious. He couldn't win. Maybe the magician could help him; it seemed all other hope was gone.

  "You can't trust them," the magician went on, and that was his mistake. Reive's head filled with thoughts of Jess, beautiful and defiant. In flesh or stone, human or gargoyle, she was lovely and true.

  "The one I can't trust," Reive snarled, "is you!"

  He had nothing left to lose. He threw his good arm around th
e magician's neck and, with his last strength, dragged them both over the edge.

  They fell. Reive held on, even as his consciousness collapsed. He was dimly aware of hitting the water with a cold shock, and then nothing.

  Jess

  Water fountained over Jess. She blinked it out of her eyes, gasping, and dropped the pieces of stoneskin in her claws.

  "Reive?"

  She floundered toward him just as the magician scrambled to the edge of the pool, water hissing into steam as it streamed off him.

  "Mace—!"

  "I'm on him!" the gargoyle shouted. "Get Reive!"

  No one needed to tell her. Jess knew where she needed to be. She threw herself forward, diving beneath the surface. Even with her eyes open, she could barely see; it was nearly dark under the pool's surface. She felt her way toward where she had seen Reive fall, and her hand slipped across his clothes. For some reason she was having trouble getting a grip on him. When she finally did get her arms around him, he was horrendously heavy. She remembered how easily she had carried him before, but now she had to struggle. Was she weakening from fighting the stoneskins? She didn't feel weak. But his weight was like an anchor holding her to the bottom of the pool.

  No! I won't leave him here—I won't—

  Her head broke the surface at last, and she sucked in deep gulps of air. She was dimly aware of the fighting continuing around her, but she only had eyes for Reive's face. Eyes closed—unconscious—gray—

  He was made entirely of stone.

  "Reive," she gasped. His weight was already dragging her arms down again. It was like holding a man-sized statue. He was just as still, and just as hard. Unlike her living, yielding stone flesh, his gray pebbled skin was simply stone. There was no flesh left on him anywhere.

  "Reive!"

  He didn't answer. Frantic, desperate, she let his weight pull her under the surface and went to her knees on the bottom of the pool. He lay across her lap, rigid, holding her down. Despite being living stone, she did still need to breathe, and she felt her lungs cry out for air. But there were no bubbles rising from his mouth. She ran her fingers over his lips and felt nothing but cold, immobile stone. His mouth wouldn't open. He was like a carving of some strangely inert stone that her usual stone sense couldn't penetrate.

  Reive—no—Reive, you're supposed to live, you're supposed to change—

  Was it because the magician had interrupted the ceremony? Rage began to rise in her, fanning her flagging strength even as her lungs screamed for oxygen. She started scrabbling backward across the bottom of the pool, dragging the statue that had been Reive toward the edge. Maybe if they got him out into the air—maybe it just took time—

  Something hard and clumsy and rocky slammed into her from behind.

  Sandstone.

  What little breath remained in her body went out of her in a cloud of bubbles. She involuntarily started to suck in a breath, and choked as seawater flooded her mouth. Coughing and gasping, she was dragged out of the pool in the grip of several stoneskins.

  "No!" she roared.

  Her arms were immobilized, but her feet were still free. She lashed out, raking her hind claws through crudely formed stone flesh.

  "Reive—!"

  She couldn't believe he was dead. Wouldn't believe it. He couldn't be dead, so she couldn't just leave him on the bottom of the pool, where he had no air to breathe, even with some part of her telling her that he didn't need to breathe anymore. She kicked and raked at the stoneskins surrounding her.

  "Mace—Mace! Where are you? Help me!"

  "He's not coming to your aid," the magician's voice said, trembling slightly with strain.

  Dimly, she realized that the crunch and crash of battling stoneskins was no longer going on around her. There was only the thunder of the surf beyond the tidal pool. Twisting around in the grasp of the stoneskins holding her, she saw with a shocked start that Mace was pinned to the cliff face with several stone spires through his body, like a butterfly in a specimen jar. He didn't seem to be moving.

  "Take her there," the magician ordered, and the stoneskins dragged a resisting Jess to the cliff face. "Hold her."

  The magician limped to her. He was looking considerably the worse for wear; he had lost his cloak in the pool, leaving him naked to the waist. In the near-dark at the bottom of the grotto, he glowed brightly as if lit from within. Fire seemed to bleed out through every one of the many cracks and scars in his skin. There was blood too, in places where his skin had freshly split open, trickling down his arms and hands.

  "What are you?" Jess demanded. "Let me go!"

  She writhed, but the stoneskins now had both her hands and feet pinned securely. She couldn't seem to reach into the stone they were made of, any more than she had been able to use her stone-sense on the stone that was killing Reive.

  But she had the cliff at her back.

  Rock, she thought, take me inside. She had experienced Mace doing it twice; she had even felt the statue back at Stonegarden soften to receive her. For a moment, she thought that she felt the rock growing permeable underneath her.

  No, it wasn't just her imagination. It began close over her body.

  "Oh no you don't," the magician snapped, slapping his bloody hand on the cliff face. He quickly drew a sigil on the rock in his own blood.

  Jess had the bizarre feeling of the rock repelling her, bouncing her out like a trampoline. She was slammed into the stoneskins' implacable hands with a force that would have left bruises on her skin if she hadn't still been in her gargoyle form.

  "Now," the magician said, leaning into her space. "Where is the book?"

  "I—I don't have it!"

  The firelight shed by his body lit up the grotto. It was even in his eyes, as if something fiery burned inside him. By that strange campfire light, she could see that the altar had been knocked over in the fight, its contents scattered. She saw the briefcase, overturned and open.

  But no book.

  Where was it? Mace didn't seem to have it; she couldn't even tell if he was alive. Had he hidden it?

  The desperation to get back to Reive was starting to drain out of her, the longer he was under the water, replaced by misery and grief.

  If he still needed to breathe, his time might have run out already. And if he didn't ...

  "Look, this isn't a hard question," the magician said. He moved a hand—there was a faint, brighter afterimage for an instant—and the stoneskins' hands tightened on her wrists and ankles. "Just give me the damn book, all right?"

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” She had gone somewhere beyond fear and out the other side. “That night in Georgia, when they came for me.”

  “What?” he said, baffled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He really didn’t seem to. If not him, then who? She no longer believed the gargoyles were responsible, not if they were all like Mace. And she had no evidence that any gargoyle had ever tried to hurt her. All she had seen that night were the same crudely shaped stoneskins that were holding her now. Not like Mace’s comparatively graceful and well-made creations.

  “Are there others like you?” she asked. “Others who do what you do?”

  “I’m asking the questions here. Where’s the book?”

  “Why do you want it?” she countered.

  "Why do you want it?" the magician shot back. "You know what's in it, don't you?"

  "The secrets of gargoyles," she panted. Tears prickled at her eyes, but she swallowed them back, even as she found herself surprised that she could still cry in this body.

  “Oh, it’s so much more than that.” He seemed to pull himself together a little bit, straightening his shoulders. "Everything is so much more important than you know. All the power between those pages, and you wouldn’t even use the book for its most important purpose.”

  “What power?” Jess asked. “What purpose?”

  "Control of the elements, of course. Gargoyles for stone.” He held up a hand, curled his fingers
loosely. Fire flowed out of the cracks in his skin and coalesced into his palm. “And fire. And the others too, eventually.”

  She stared at him by the fire’s glow. As crazy as it sounded, he seemed serious.

  "Look, to be honest,” she said, “I’d give it to you if I could. I didn't even want to be this. I was hoping that if I found the book I could make myself human again. But it couldn't even do that for me, and it couldn't fix my boyfriend, so why shouldn't you have it?"

  “By fix yourself, do you mean make yourself human? Of course you can.”

  He sounded surprised, so much so that she blinked away her tears to look at him critically. He looked sincere.

  "I don't believe you,” she said.

  “It’s true. The spells in that book are so much more powerful than you seem to realize. Unmaking gargoyles should be simple.” He leaned forward, eager now. “I already offered this to your boyfriend, but he didn’t believe me. Now I’m offering it to you. If you give me the book, I can show you how to undo the spells that hold together every gargoyle in the world.”

  She stared at him in worry and confusion. "That sounds bad for the gargoyles," she said cautiously.

  "Why do you care? You don't even want to be one of them." He looked closely at her, frowning. It was almost completely dark now, except for the warm campfire light pouring out of him. It wasn't her imagination, she thought, and not a reflection; the irises of his eyes were little golden flames. Then they faded back to normal eyes—hazel shading sea-gray—and she jerked back in surprise.

  "You're not like other gargoyles,” he said slowly. "Are you half human?"

  "What if I am?" she asked defensively. But even as she said it, she felt a startled sense of things falling into place. That was it, the missing piece. That was why she didn't seem to be able to do all the things Mace could do, at least not as easily. It wasn't just growing up with humans. She was only half gargoyle.

  "Tell me, what do you owe them?" he asked. "Why shouldn't you help me? I swear I'm not lying to you. I can show you how to dissolve the gargoyle side of yourself. You'll get what you want. You'll be human."