Chaos

by Taylor Longford

  Books in the Greystone Series:

  Valor

  Dare

  Reason

  Defiance

  Chaos

  Chaos

  A Greystone Novel

  Book Five

  ISBN 9780989278546

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Chaos Copyright 2013 © Taylor Longford

  www.taylorlongford.com

  Electronic Book Publication October 2013

  This book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the publisher, Taylor Longford.

  Warning: Any unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the publisher's permission.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination and used fictitiously.

  CHAOS

  A GREYSTONE NOVEL

  Book Five

  by

  Taylor Longford

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Prologue

  I'd seen thirteen summers when my father marked me with my rune, in a coming-of-age ceremony that involved our entire community of gargoyles. Our families worked all day to prepare a fabulous feast spread out on long trestle tables in the courtyard. And that night, I tasted ale the first time but was careful not to drink too much. No one wants to look like an idiot on the night they become a man.

  Along with the rest of our friends who'd reached the age of marking, Valor, Force and I showed off the new runes freshly emblazoned on our necks, swaggering between the tables and feeling certain that our futures shone as brightly as the many candles that lit the yard in a golden wash of light. Soon I'd be working full-time beside my father and brothers, trimming stone blocks for the great bridges that spanned the rivers of York.

  I guess you could safely say that I worshipped my father. He was a champion of the harpy wars and a hugely heroic figure in our community. But it wasn't his bravery, his strength or even his skill that made him a hero to me. It was his patience. Even though I was always screwing up, he never got mad at me. And whenever I made a mistake, he'd laugh it off like it was no big deal.

  "Why am I such a fool?" I asked him once, feeling sorry for myself when some of the other lads had made fun of me for getting lost on the moors.

  "You're not a fool," he said, smiling across the table while he polished his sword with an oily rag. There was a good fire on the hearth and the orange light flickered along the length of the gleaming blade, making it jump to life in my father's hands.

  "You know what I mean," I sulked, crossing my arms over my chest and leaning back against the wall. "I'm not like Victor and Reason."

  "Your brothers are older," he answered after a while. "You'll be older, too, one day."

  That was true, assuming I lived that long. But I was fairly certain I'd never be like my brothers.

  "You take chances," he pointed out when he could see I wasn't satisfied with his response. "That's not necessarily a bad thing."

  "What do you mean?"

  He rolled his broad shoulders. "You could stick to the beaten track instead of going off exploring for old hill forts. But that wouldn't be much fun."

  "Nay," I answered moodily.

  "And you take risks when you choose your friends," he added. "But I was the same when I was young."

  "You were?" I questioned him, surprised.

  "Aye," he answered, dropping his rag on the table and tugging on his thick blond braid. "And I took a risk when I marked your mother. My family was against it. But they were wrong."

  I nodded and straightened my shoulders. Of course his family was wrong. Because my father was always right.

  "Don't worry," he said, grinning. "You'll turn out well enough in the end."

  And as long as my father was there to tell me I'd turn out well enough, I was alright. But there were dark days in my future. A month later, we lost our father as well as both of our uncles after a harpy attack. And at the age of sixteen, Victor took over leadership of the pack with Reason acting as his second-in-command. In spite of their youth, they were an effective team.

  It was hardly a surprise. Victor's golden. He's always been golden. He's even-tempered and quick to smile, hard working and knowledgeable, decisive and wise beyond his years. So much so, that even the adult men in our community looked up to him, seeking out his advice on various issues.

  On top of that, he's quite possibly the best looking male that has ever walked the earth. Gargoyles are generally blessed with the handsome gene, meaning that most of us are better looking than human men. But Victor took good looking to another level. The girls could never resist him and he was always surrounded by a small crowd of hopefuls. But Victor was a player when it came to the lasses and never took any of his relationships seriously.

  Reason was ideal as his second-in-command. Almost religious in his dedication to the pack. Always the first to step forward and risk his safety in dangerous situations. But you'd be wrong if you thought that made him all brute-force. Because my brother is also this amazing artist. I don't mean to sound jealous but I guess I am. Because I could never even draw a stick man.

  In a way, my father's death shaped our lives. It gave my brothers a chance to shine while I fell back into the shadows. It wasn't intentional. My brothers did their best to include me. But their first responsibility was to the pack and their duties kept them busy. I knew I could never be as good as them, so I never tried. That might have been a mistake but I was just a kid who was afraid of failing before I even got started. With my dark hair, I was definitely the black sheep in the family and over time I drifted away from the pack lads, spending most of my spare time with some of the other young gargoyles in our community. Malarkey and his brothers were a wild bunch and suited me fine.

  Not that I had all that much spare time. My family and I were stoneworkers and built bridges for a living. So I was working beside them four years later when Dare ran into a little harpy trouble. It wasn't his first encounter with the monsters. He'd been captured by one earlier and had spent two years trapped in her hidden aerie. Unlike my overly-responsible brothers, my cousin was daring by nature. Hence his name. But he'd been badly damaged during his earlier captivity and we were quick to respond when we realized he was in danger, dropping our tools and racing across town to help.

  When we reached him we found ourselves outnumbered, and the pack decided to go stone rather than fight it out. All I can say is that it wasn't my idea. I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Defiance and his brothers, ready to take my chances against the big uglies. But as usual, my opinion didn't carry much weight. Victor made the decision with Reason backing him up. Even Havoc bought in which surprised me because he's not the sort to go out of his way to avoid danger; he's always up for a brawl. But not this time. In fact, I think it was his idea to go stone. But we didn't have much time to ponder the decision.

  Breaking away from the harpies, we made for a small hut and fused our feet to the red slate floor. Locked
to the ground in our stone forms, the monsters couldn't harm us or carry us off, so we thought we'd be walking free the next morning. But the wicked creatures decided if they couldn't have us, nobody would. And they walled us in at the back of the small building.

  Eight hundred years went by before we got out of there. Fortunately, gargoyles have exceptional hearing so we were able to keep up with the times during our confinement, and were able follow the gradual changes in language that took place over the centuries. But by the time we were set free, the gargoyle race seemed to have died out. And while we hoped the same was true for harpies, we weren't that lucky.

  By that time, a large house had been built up around us, the original hut serving as a cold storage room that had been used during the last century to store canned goods and keep the butter cool. Americans would probably call it a root cellar. But none of the inhabitants who came and went over the years ever discovered the secret space hidden at the back of the room, behind the shelves of jams and pickles. It took an American treasure hunter to unearth us.

  He moved into the house, planning to strip it of its old fixtures and sell off anything of value. Even he probably wasn't expecting to find the enclosure that had been our prison for the last eight hundred years. But one day he tapped on the stones that separated us from the rest of the world and realized there was a hollow space behind the wall.

  He went to work and pulled down the ancient stone barrier. And as each rough piece of rock fell to the ground, we felt our freedom edge closer. But the square windows that had allowed the sun into the hut eight hundred years ago were now blocked by the newer construction. Not a single ray of sunlight found its way to us, although the electric light rained down on us just as brilliantly. And while we found the modern light amazing, it didn't have the power of sunlight and we couldn't use it to change back to our living forms. We were just as trapped as we'd ever been.

  I was the last gargoyle to be removed from the narrow space between the walls. But I was able to follow what was happening to the rest of my family, watching through the thick veil of dust that covered my eyes before my new owner eventually swept my face clean.

  So I saw Valor, Havoc and Reason stuffed into crates and wheeled from the room. And a few days later, I watched as Dare, Victor and Defiance met the same fate. Force, Courage and I were left behind as if forgotten, and as the days passed, I began to worry that we might never be reunited with the rest of the pack. Funny how that was a concern all of a sudden when I'd always taken my family for granted. Now I was afraid I might end up separated from even Courage and Force. And I didn't want to be stranded alone in a world where gargoyles had been relegated to myth.

  The days dragged on, feeling longer than the centuries we'd spent behind the wall, while I hoped to learn what had happened to the missing members of our pack. Then one evening, I heard the quiet man having a one-sided conversation and assumed he was talking to someone on the telephone. The news I pieced together from his call wasn't good. But it wasn't all bad, either. He was telling someone that he'd sold one of his sculptures and planned to use the money to ship the rest of us to the same location…which was in America! The New World. Somewhere in Colorado, which I knew, was one of the western states. So there was some hope of getting back together with the others. And eventually the day came when it was our turn to be packed into wooden crates.

  Inside the box, I couldn't see my cousins but I assumed from the amount of scraping and banging going on around me that that I was traveling in the company of two other crates. Then at some point in the journey, while we were being shifted around, Courage's crate was damaged, and he took on his living form. Once we were alone again, he told us his crate had been cracked and some light had penetrated the transparent stuff we were wrapped in. He'd soaked up enough sun to make the change, although he was still stuck in his wooden packing crate and couldn't bust out because of the other heavy items packed around him. And for a while, he kept up a quiet monologue when he wasn't sleeping, telling us what direction we were traveling. But I could tell we were traveling west and hoped that was where the rest of the pack was.

  Then the vehicle carrying us crashed without warning. There was no squealing of brakes like you hear in movies. One minute we were moving west and the next minute there was a huge sound like an explosion as were thrown forward. The jarring impact was no big deal for Force or me since we're almost indestructible in our stone forms. But I was worried about Courage. A fire had started, the smoke filtering into our crates while my cousin coughed and shouted for help.

  I think perhaps a gargoyle's greatest fear is to be trapped in his stone form while those around him suffer. And I was living my worst nightmare as the flames got closer, licking at the wooden slats that surrounded us. The roar of the fire increased but I could still hear Courage hammering his fists against his wooden cage and screaming for help.

  Desperate to answer my cousin's call, I drew everything inside me and tried to force the change. But without a trace of sunlight, there was nothing I could do. I thought I'd go mad. And I was sure Courage would die without help from some outside force. So when help finally arrived, I was thankful. But it wasn't exactly the help any of us had been hoping for.

  It was harpies.

  It turned out that the flying uglies had been following us after escaping from a museum in one of the bigger eastern cities. And when the vehicle carrying us crashed, they broke into the crumpled container and tore open our burning crates, dragging us into the cold night air. Courage was alive—thank God—his head hanging, his arm locked in the grip of one of the monsters. His face was turned away from me, so I couldn't see much but what I could see didn't look good. Most of the hair on the right side of his head was gone. Just burned away. I had no sense of smell in my stone form, which might have been a blessing. The stench of burned hair and scorched flesh would probably have turned my stomach.

  There was some fighting and squabbling among the three ladies who turned out to be sisters—Vilschka Nitschka and Motschka. But harpies aren't exactly known for their ability to get along, even when they're family. The one named Nitschka was somehow crippled. So naturally, she ended up with the damaged goods—Courage. Only, somehow he gave her the slip. And lifting into the air, she went after him, the sound of her hoarse caws fading into the distance as she headed west.

  That left Force and me. And two of the ugliest harpies I've ever had the bad luck of setting eyes on. The biggest one was named Vilschka and she swept me into the air while Motschka followed, carrying Force. But Vilschka's sister was having trouble managing her prize. To begin with, Force is more heavily muscled than the rest of us, so he weighs more. On top of that, he'd been plucked from the heart of the fire and the harpy's taloned fingers were getting burnt. It wasn't long before she dropped him. And while Motschka searched for Force on the ground below, Vilschka flew on without her.

  She headed west toward a high range of mountains then turned north when we approached a large area that glowed like a carpet of lights. I remember being surprised by all the lights. It must have been a city laid out beneath us but I wasn't expecting it to be lit up like that and wondered how people managed to sleep at night.

  At any rate, we turned north. And as I hung in the air, I saw that the harpy was skirting a line of foothills that rose sharply from the plains. Eventually, we approached more lights—another city, though not as big. But by this time, we were over the foothills, the harpy looking for a place to make her lair.

  Down in the high valleys, I picked out the occasional building—a dark rectangle against the snow—but there weren't many lights on the ground below and the small dwellings seemed to be empty. Vilschka circled the area and picked out a cabin, setting me down in front of it and kicking open the door. Inside, she positioned me against a rough wall between two small windows so that the sun couldn't reach me when it rose the next morning.

  It was a pretty bleak little space, with a rock fireplace on one end and a few ugly cupboards hanging abo
ve a stained counter on the other end. Ragged bits of paper flaked from the walls while the floor was paved with strange red and black squares that were too thin to be stone. I don't know what they were made of, but they looked like they'd been there for a long time, and the thick layer of dust blanketing them seemed to confirm that idea.

  Vilschka spent the next several moments gloating over me, pawing me and cackling. "Mine," she kept croaking. "Pretty boy all mine."

  It was disgusting. She was actually drooling, a long string of saliva slithering down over her chin. I couldn't help but wonder what she'd do if she saw Victor. She'd probably get so excited, she'd wet herself.

  "Going to get boy's lovely poison," she banged on brainlessly. "Then Vilschka be as beautiful as the boy."

  Ugh. Like that was going to happen. There wasn't enough poison in the world to fix her bad case of uglies.

  Anyhow, Motschka turned up before long and interrupted her gloating. Having lost her own prize, she thought Vilschka should share her gargoyle. Yeah, good luck with that, sweetheart. And the two harpies ended up having this huge fight. As they crashed around the small cabin, kicking and scratching and trading punches, I thought the rickety old building was going to fall in around us. At one point, they plowed into me and I fell over on top of them. Too bad my wingtip didn't go through one of their eyes.

  When the two inches of dust they'd kicked up had settled back into place on the floor, Motschka left in a tattered huff and that was the last we saw of her. Vilschka spent the next few weeks hunting for food in the evenings and collecting stuff like chains and leather straps—things she could use to tie me down before she exposed me to sunlight. She also brought back some modern tools that I didn't recognize and a rusted hand axe. And occasionally, she brought home a glittery bauble to add to her collection that was growing on the ramshackle counter like flowers sprouting in a shepherd's rough croft.