Stonewing Guardian Read online

  He scooped out a handful and dropped them in the suitcase, trying not to think of her small, high breasts filling out the cups. Okay, so far so good. He opened the other drawer.

  There was a sporfling sound on the other end of the line.

  "You're enjoying this," Mace accused.

  "Of course I'm enjoying this. It's just clothes, Mace. They're even clean. Just put something in, for heaven's sake."

  Like the bras, her panties were plain colors, solid and practical. However, there were a couple dashes of color in the mix, bright purples and reds mixed in with the black and beige and gray. He could imagine her wearing those under the jeans and tweed, like the hidden bright spark of her sense of humor and sparkling imagination under the serious exterior.

  ... which was now giving him a slight hard-on.

  Right. Get on with it.

  He dropped a handful of panties into the suitcase, making sure to include some of the jewel-colored ones.

  "You got awfully quiet there," Thea said.

  "Excuse me if it's hard to concentrate on a phone conversation and on your underwear drawer at the same time."

  "You mean it's true that men can only think of one thing at a time?" Laughter bubbled through her voice.

  "Slander! I'll have you know I can think of at least two or three things."

  Gio tapped on the bedroom door. "Done in here? I got her passport and charger and some toiletries."

  "Thanks." Mace slid the passport into his pocket—it was too important to take a chance on losing—and packed the handful of other items Gio had picked up: toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo. "Thea? We'll be on our way back in a few minutes. I need to get somewhere I can stonewalk through."

  "See you when you get here."

  "Everything good there?"

  "So far," she said. "Tell Gio his place is really nice. Not that I'm poking around or anything."

  "We're in your place, so it's only fair." Mace glanced up at Gio, opening his mouth to share the joke—and then saw something behind Gio in the air of the doorway to the living room. "Sorry, gotta go, bye! Gio, get down!"

  "What?" Gio said blankly, and then he whirled around and saw the glowing slice through the air opening wider, expanding into a human-sized portal.

  It was night on the other side, somewhere mountainous and remote. There were stars glittering above, and several black-robed magicians standing in front of the portal. One of them had his sleeves pushed up from fiery, glowing hands, held before him with the fingers locked together. He was chanting softly. Beside him was another robed figure holding one of those small crossbows, which he was already raising.

  As Mace triggered his shift, feeling his claws extend and stone flush across his arms and face, Gio pulled out his gun and shot the guy with the crossbow.

  Crossbow Guy staggered backward, and Fiery Hands completely lost control of his magic in surprise. Mace glimpsed fiery contrails shooting off in all directions, cultists ducking frantically, before the portal snapped shut.

  "Wow," Mace said. He fought his shift back, human skin replacing stone. "That's useful."

  "Also illegal, here as at home," Gio said brightly. "Shall we go?"

  Mace grabbed the suitcase, and they sprinted out of Thea's apartment. He paused for the seconds it took to reach inside, lock the doorknob and shut the door. It was Thea's place; he wasn't going to leave her door standing open for anyone to wander in.

  "Mace!" Gio yelled.

  There was a portal opening in the hallway. Mace seized Gio's shoulder and hauled him at faster than human speed into the stairwell. "Take that," he ordered, shoving the suitcase into Gio's arms, and he turned around while shifting only his hands. Great stone paws replaced ordinary human hands.

  The stairwell door was the kind with a locking bar across the middle. Mace grasped the door frame and pulled it inward. Plaster on the surrounding wall twisted and cracked. That door wasn't moving without cutting tools.

  "Hurry up!" Gio yelled up the stairs.

  Mace looked over the railing to check for obstacles, then swung himself over it and jumped. There was no room to spread his wings, or time to properly grow them; instead he used his transformed, ultra-strong hands to grab the railing in several places on his way down, bending the railing but also slowing himself down. He passed Gio on the way, and thumped to the floor on ground level.

  "What was that about hurrying up!" Mace called up the stairs to Gio, who was still only halfway down.

  "I'm loaded down and also old!" Gio retorted breathlessly.

  "Throw me the suitcase!" Mace called. "I can catch it. I'll stonewalk as soon as you get down here—oh, come on!"

  A portal was opening on the stairs between them. There was a glimpse of the same mountainous backdrop, and then two more black-robes stumbled out onto the stairs. One was Fire Hands, who was already weaving something between his hands, while his sleeves crisped with heat. The other was smaller and slighter—female, Mace suspected, though it was hard to tell with the hood shielding her face—and she was carrying a crossbow.

  The portal collapsed, and the two of them seemed to realize that they were confronting enemies from both directions. Fire Hands whirled toward Gio, while Crossbow turned toward Mace and fired.

  He instinctively finished his shift, and the dart bounced harmlessly off his stone shoulder.

  There was a thump and a yell from up the stairs. Mace looked up to see that Gio had thrown the suitcase at them, knocking the woman down and freeing his hands to draw the gun.

  "Javic, he's got a gun!" the woman yelled, on her hands and knees on the stairs. She had lost her crossbow in the melee.

  Mace shifted from the knees down and leaped, the kind of powerful bound that gargoyles used to climb buildings. Javic—the magician, presumably—was knocked off the stairwell, and whatever magic he had been creating was released early. It struck the wall of the stairwell and rippled across it in a web of fiery lines.

  "Gotcha," Mace said, wrapping an arm around Gio. "I just need to get us both to the floor and we can—"

  "Look out!" Gio snapped, pushing him.

  Startled, Mace went to one knee on the stairs. The dart that had been speeding toward his vulnerable, still-human back instead went over his shoulder and plunked into Gio's chest.

  Mace snarled. The shift came over him without warning, triggered by his rage and distress. Stone flushed through his body, and he bulked out, completely blocking the stairs. Another dart bounced off his arm.

  He tore the dart out of Gio's chest and dropped it, just as Gio convulsed and began screaming.

  Mace got a grip on him and jumped over the railing.

  It wasn't far down, but he was a lot heavier this time. He hit hard enough to crack the concrete underfoot. In his grasp, Gio had gone alarmingly limp.

  "You idiots!" the woman was yelling from the stairs. "Javic! Stop them!"

  Mace didn't hear any more. He pressed his will into the concrete as if it was stone, fighting to overcome its resistance, and with both arms wrapped around Gio, he sank into the willing embrace of the earth.

  Thea

  Thea had just made herself a sandwich for stress-eating in Gio's enormous kitchen when there was a loud thump from somewhere else in the house.

  She almost dropped a jar of pickles, set it down quietly instead, and snatched up the knife that she'd been using to cut bread.

  She had tried to call Mace back after the abrupt end of their call, then tried texting, and got no response. She sincerely hoped this meant he was traveling somewhere underground and not, for example, being kidnapped and taken to another dimensions by evil magicians.

  Not that she knew if there were other dimensions, but at this point she wouldn't be surprised.

  The thump had come from somewhere out back of the house. As she headed toward the sound, bread knife in hand, the saferoom crossed her mind briefly, but she was nowhere near that desperate yet. At the very least she needed to know who or what she was dealing with.

 
The noise had come from a terrace out back. Thea peeked out. The sky was lightening into the pink and gold of dawn, and by that soft pink light, she saw a monster on the terrace.

  It was roughly human-shaped and bulky, with claw-edged wings arching over its muscular shoulders. The morning light glinted off rugged stony skin. It was crouched on the terrace, having knocked over some of the furniture, and it was holding something—no, someone. From the white hair Thea guessed the victim was Gio.

  "Get away from him!" she yelled, charging toward it with her bread knife.

  She realized about halfway there what a terrible mistake she had made, as she got closer and realized how big the thing was. It was proportioned like a human man, but everything was slightly outsized, from the incredibly broad shoulders to its height.

  "Thea?" it said in a voice that was slightly slurred by the fangs jutting out of its mouth, sounding genuinely baffled. And then it said, "Oh," and it seemed to—

  —dwindle, collapse, fold in on itself. Color flushed back into the gray rock, a burgundy sweater and dark hair and medium-light skin.

  Thea skidded to a stop. The hand with the bread knife dropped limply.

  "Mace?" she said in shock.

  "Uh. Hi."

  Mace was now crouched on the terrace with Gio in his lap. Gio seemed to be seizing weakly.

  "You were—what is—" She gestured helplessly with the bread knife.

  Had they done something to him? To them?

  "What happened?" she asked, settling on that as a relatively neutral question.

  Mace seemed to take it as a question about Gio. "He was hit with a weapon meant for me. I don't know what it's doing to him, but I'm pretty sure it's killing him. Humans are much less durable."

  Less durable than WHAT? she thought. Her brain was spinning around and around, rebounding off each new revelation. But with Gio clearly suffering, she didn't think now was the time to ask for in-depth explanations.

  Instead she said, "Can I help?"

  Mace looked massively grateful. "Help me find some things." He let Gio's head down to the terrace and scrambled to his feet. "I need a bowl, and something to make a fire, and a few other things."

  "I—I saw bowls in the kitchen. And there's a gas stove and some lamps, so maybe there's some kind of lighter or something."

  "Yes. Good." He was looking around, the green eyes intent. "Please get those."

  Thea ran to the kitchen. He hadn't said what size of bowl, so she grabbed a whole stack of mixing bowls in different bright colors. There was a barbecue-style lighter on the shelf above the stove, so she dropped that into the top bowl and ran back out to the terrace.

  "Yes, good," Mace said, taking them from her. He thrust a piece of paper at her. "Do you think you can find your way back to the spring where we first emerged?" He pointed down the hill. "It's a short walk that way."

  "I think so." She glanced at the paper. It looked like a shopping list. "What is this?"

  "It's a list of items I need for the ritual. Please get them and bring them down to the spring."

  "Ritual?" she asked blankly, but Mace was crouching beside Gio again. He put one hand on the stack of bowls and the other on Gio's chest, and they sank into the flagstones as if into a still pond. A slight ripple passed over the flagged surface, and then it was as before.

  Thea swallowed. Her throat felt very dry. Cautiously, she took a few tentative steps forward, and leaned over to prod at the place where they'd been. She was tensed to leap backward if it felt at all strange, but it was just ordinary flat rock, cool to the touch and slightly gritty.

  "What are you?" she whispered.

  Recovering somewhat, she looked down at the list in her hand. Mace's handwriting was neat and even, although the items on the list looked like they belonged to a kid's game of make-believe magic.

  Chalk (any color)

  Candles (same)

  Compass (if possible)

  Twine or cord

  It went on like this. The only thing missing, she thought, was a ouija board.

  But magic was real, she reminded herself. And apparently Gio was dying from it.

  Which meant there was no time to lose.

  She started hurrying around the house, gathering things into a canvas shopping bag she found in the kitchen. Some things she had to improvise. There was a role of butcher's string in the pantry, which she guessed would work for twine, and some grease pencils would have to do for chalk. There wasn't anything even remotely similar to a compass, but her phone had an app for that, so maybe it would be good enough.

  She carried the lumpy bag of supplies out onto the terrace. The dawn light was pinky gold, the sun just starting to wink across the hills. Looking down the slope, through neat ranks of olive trees, she glimpsed the tops of the stone lions' heads poking up above the shrubbery. She didn't bother trying to take the road or look for a path, but went straight down the hill, slipping and scrambling on the uneven, sandy soil. The hill was steeper than it looked, and it turned into a sudden sharp drop at the spring. She skidded down the last few feet and landed with a thunk beside the water's edge.

  By daylight, the spring was a peaceful, pretty place. The water bubbled up in a deep, stone-edged pool flanked by the two enormous stone lion statues, each one the size of a real lion. Heavy banks of ornamental bushes, loaded with flowers, overhung the water and sprawled around the stone lions' legs.

  Mace had set up an improvised altar on top of a low stone wall near the pool. Two of the mixing bowls had fire smoldering in them. Mace was stirring something else in a third bowl.

  It took her a moment to notice Gio, because he wasn't at all where she was expecting. He was actually in the pool, on his back with his head on the edge. He seemed to be deeply unconscious, although occasionally he jerked or writhed as if caught in the grip of an involuntary minor seizure.

  Steam was curling up around his body where the water touched him. Thea stopped to stare.

  "Over here!" Mace said, and she hurried to him with the bag of ingredients.

  He took it from her gratefully. "Go to Gio," he told her, as he dumped the bag on the grass beside the altar. "Keep his head out of the water. The deeper that he is, the better it will work, but I can't do both."

  Thea nodded and ran to the pool's edge. When she touched Gio, however, she jerked her hand away in shock.

  The steam wasn't merely cosmetic. It was exactly what it looked like. The water was vaporizing on contact with his body. He was so hot she couldn't touch him, far beyond any fever that a normal human body could withstand. When she stared at him, she thought she could see tiny, bright flickers showing through his skin, as if there was fire licking at his bones.

  "Mace, what on Earth is happening to him?"

  "I don't know," Mace said, his voice tight with a locked-down panic. "He took a dose of a drug meant to take down a—to take down me, but it's clearly more than just an ordinary drug. It would have to be, I guess, since I'm impervious to poisons." He said this matter-of-factly. "I've never seen anything like it. Whatever it is, it's killing him."

  Thea quietly stuffed a few more questions into the for later bin. "And you're fixing it?" she asked.

  "I hope so," Mace said, and added in an undertone she could barely hear, "And I hope he doesn't hate me for what I'm about to do to him."

  Taking the grease pencil, he began drawing symbols on the nearest of the stone lions.

  This is magic, Thea thought, fascinated. He's doing actual magic, a real-life magic spell.

  She would have loved to watch more closely—actually, what she wanted to do was whip out a notebook and start documenting the entire process—but just then Gio began seizing again, and slipped off the pool's edge into the water. Modesty be damned, Thea thought, and tore off her denim shirt. Under it she was wearing nothing but a bra, and not even a nice bra, but a sturdy cotton beige one. Steadfastly refusing to look toward Mace, she dipped her shirt into the water and used the sodden shirt to take hold of Gio and pull his he
ad and shoulders out of the water again.

  "Can you explain what you're doing?" she asked Mace, who had finished marking with the grease pencil and was doing something with the burning contents of the bowls.

  "I'm turning him into a form that can withstand the drug. At least I hope so."

  "Turning him into ... what?" she asked. A vision of the creature on the terrace flashed through her mind. It was still hard to believe that the stone creature and Mace were the same—though admittedly getting easier to believe by the minute.

  "It's not working out as I'd hoped," Mace said. He carried a smoking bowl to the statue and began smudging soot onto the lion's stone forehead. "I need a vessel to anchor him to."

  "A vessel?"

  "The one time that I did this before, the process was already started. I just had to finish it." Mace pressed his hand to the lion's stone flank. He appeared to be concentrating, although he went on speaking in a slow, distracted voice. "This time I'm doing it from scratch, and—ah, there we are."

  Under his hand, the stone lion statue shuddered all over. It tore one of its paws free of the earth, scattering flowers. Slowly, ponderously, it began to walk toward the pool.

  Thea knew her eyes must be as round as a pair of marbles. She sat very still as the lion waded into the water, one slow step at a time, with flagstones creaking under its weight.

  She knew that it wasn't dangerous; Mace seemed to be controlling it somehow. But there was still some part of her that felt like a mouse in the presence of a cat, as if she didn't want to attract its attention.

  Mace climbed in after it. This gave her a whole new thing to be distracted by. The sweater clung in a very compelling way.

  "Did you get the compass I asked for?"

  "Uh ... phone," she managed. "My phone."

  "Look up which way is due magnetic north, would you?"

  He took Gio off her hands, towing him out into the water, where the lion was now submerged until only its back and head were visible. Thea sat back on her heels and wiped her hands on her thighs. She tried not to feel too exposed in just her bra as she pulled up the app.

  "That way," she said, pointing up the hill.