by Zoe Chant
"Oh?"
She ran her finger past the tip of the island and up the Labrador coast. "Most of what we know about Norse exploration of North America is from the old sagas, and they speak of three different lands they found past Greenland. From north to south, they were called Helluland, Markland, and Vinland by the Norse. Vinland is probably Newfoundland."
"So they also explored the coast of Labrador."
"Yes," she said. "We think they harvested timber there for the settlements back in Greenland. They could have gone as far south as Nova Scotia, even all the way down to Hudson Bay, though that's pretty unlikely."
Excitement flared in him. She was right, he had been searching in too narrow an area.
"And now you see why I don't mind telling you all of this," she added, resting her elbow on the map and one fingertip on her chin. It was almost unbearably cute, especially with the newsboy cap. "The Atlantic coast is unbelievably vast. Well-funded teams of archaeologists with ground-penetrating radar have found nothing in any of these places, but that's because there's just so much ground to cover. You could look for your entire lifetime, and it's pure chance whether you hit on anything at all. You certainly aren't just going to turn around and trip over your medallion. So don't go and sue me when all you find is cobble beaches, pine trees, and bears."
Mace made a cross-my-heart motion. "I appreciate the information, and the disclaimer. No suing necessary."
But what he couldn't tell her was that he had an advantage that no archaeologist could match. He has his innate gargoyle powers to work with, including his stone sense.
And gargoyle stone was quite different from regular stone. If the medallion was anywhere nearby, he should be able to feel it out like a dog hunting by scent.
Still, she was right that it was a vast area to cover, and his stone sensing range was limited. He had to get himself to the right general area in order for it to work.
"Any way to narrow this down?" he asked. "What sort of places might they have landed?"
Thea sighed. "Just take an introductory archaeology course, would you? It'd give you a much more comprehensive overview of the ways we search for places like that."
Mace offered the most charming smile that he had. "But if you were just going to give me a capsule overview ...? I mean, the food's not even here yet. We have to pass the time while we wait."
Thea rolled her eyes, but in a reluctantly charmed kind of way. She reached into her bag for a pencil. "Tell you what," she said. "For each piece of archaeological information I give you, in return you have to tell me something about yourself."
"That sounds like a somewhat one-sided deal, but I'll take it."
Thea raised a brow and, reaching into the bag again, perched a pair of square reading glasses on the end of her nose. She traced the pencil down the Labrador coast. "Okay, so you have to think like an ancient Norse sailor. You've been at sea for weeks in what we would consider an absolutely tiny boat. You're looking for sheltered harbors. Fjords, basically—small bays where your longboat will be protected from storms. You'd want fresh water, and timber, and pasture for your cattle. It's true that the climate has changed quite a bit over the last millennium, so places that had timber and grass back in the Vinland days might be tundra now. But the landscape hasn't changed. You wouldn't bother looking at rugged cliffs. Sheltered bays where you can easily get down to the water, that's what you want."
"That's very useful," Mace said, bending over the map. Their heads were close together. She had a clean, fresh scent.
"My turn." Thea drummed the pencil thoughtfully on the edge of the map. "Why do you want this thing so badly? And don't give me that bullcrap about how it's a family heirloom. No one hunts all over the remote Atlantic coast for a memento from a thousand years ago."
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," Mace said.
"Try me. I can believe a lot of things."
Her sea-gray eyes were earnest. He could easily get lost in those eyes. For a wild instant, he was tempted to do it. Tell her the truth: that he needed the medallion to save gargoyle-kind from a cult of evil magicians. She might not believe him, in fact she probably wouldn't, but she might still get caught up in the romance and excitement of it all.
Or, more likely, she'd decide that he was a madman and walk out of this pub, never to return. And he couldn't bear the thought of that happening.
"Try an easier question," he offered. "My childhood. My parents. Favorite color."
"What is your favorite color? No wait," she said. "Let me guess. It's gray."
He was shocked, because it was. Especially now that he had encountered her storm-gray eyes.
But even before that, he'd had an inexplicable love for it. Gray was the color of the rugged stone of the house where he had grown up. It was the color of the cliffsides he loved, and the wild and changeable sea.
Mace had studied art at the university, among other things, and he had learned that when you mixed together the primary paint colors, you ended up with various shades of gray. Gray was the color that hid all other colors within it.
Thea laughed at the expression on his face.
"No one's ever guessed that before," he said.
"Is having people guess your favorite color something you normally do?"
"No, it's just that it's not the first one that anyone thinks of when they're naming off favorite colors."
"But it's just so ... you." She spread her hands. "And I don't mean you're boring. Far from it. You remind me of ..." She frowned. "Stone, I guess. Does that sound as terribly uncomplimentary to you as it does to me? Because I don't mean it the way it came out. You aren't cold or unapproachable. You're rugged. Solid. I feel as if I could anchor a boat on you."
Mace laughed; he couldn't help it. "You were doing great up until that last sentence."
Thea groaned and took off her reading glasses, tucking them absently into the breast pocket of her denim shirt. "Don't think I haven't noticed that the sole piece of information about you I've gotten so far was the one I figured out."
"So ask something I can answer."
"If only I could figure out what that is," she said, gazing at him. "I swear, you are the most mysterious person I've ever met. But mysterious about the strangest things! You won't tell me why you're trying so hard to find a long-lost artifact that might be entirely fictional, and yet you don't mind in the slightest talking about your life in the back of beyond. So tell me about your parents, then. Were they weird and secretive too?"
"Definitely," Mace said. "They were also a lot older than me. Strange old scholars. They had a lot in common with each other, not so much with my sister and me."
He hadn't entirely realized it was true until he said it. Both of his parents had been quite old, even for gargoyles, when he and Margery were born, which was why they were gone now while he was still relatively young.
He had always thought of himself as being very much like them, but he now realized that it was considerably more true now that he was a mature adult and had grown into a scholarly lifestyle of his own. But it had been much less true when he and Margery were young and wild, in the way of all young things. It had been a peculiar, very lonely way to grow up. The villagers viewed his family in a distantly friendly sort of way, tempered by an awareness of the differences between them. He was not like the fisherman's sons who were his only nearby agemates, even if he had been able to talk to them openly about his gargoyle heritage.
No wonder he had gravitated toward Gio, the only child of a human couple, professors at the Sapienza University of Rome, who had been friends of his parents and had known their secret.
But the look that Thea was giving him was strangely wistful.
"I know what that's like," she said, and for an instant, his thoughts having drifted, he thought she meant being a gargoyle. "My parents were older, too. Pretty much exactly like that. I was a late-in-life baby when my mom was in her forties and my dad was in his sixties. They were incredibly smart people, both very
dedicated to their lifestyle in academia, but not so much to parenthood. Can you guess what Thea is short for?"
"I didn't realize it was short for anything."
"It is just a name on its own, you're right. And sometimes it's short for Dorothea. But in my case, it's short for Eidothea, a sea nymph in the Odyssey in classic Greek myth, and also a genus of tree in Australia. My mom was a professor of the classics, my dad a botanist. Eidothea Grevillea Lanning was a hell of a name to have to spell out on official paperwork."
"And Grevillea is—"
"A genus of plants in Australia. They compromised on Eidothea, and apparently my dad won Grevillea over my mom's choice, Clytemnestra, through a series of games of chess during her third trimester."
"You're kidding."
"I wish. To be fair, I guess he was going to let her put her choice on my birth certificate too, but both middle names wouldn't both fit, so they went with Grevillea."
"I have to admit," Mace said after a suitably impressed moment, "that I guess I got lucky with Mason Rogers MacKay."
"Well, Thea isn't so bad. And it really wasn't a bad way to grow up, either. My parents didn't really know how to handle a child, so they treated me like a miniature adult. Not many people have in-depth conversations about Homer with their six-year-old over the dinner table. I was home-schooled for the most part, until I was old enough to insist on being enrolled in regular school because I wanted to get to know my peers and act like a normal child for a change. That was—"
She grimaced. The sharp, sudden pain in her eyes pierced him.
"—not so great. I didn't know how to be around other children. They didn't like me, and—I can't pretend perfect innocence here—I didn't like them either. My parents wouldn't have forced me to stay if they had known how unhappy I was. But I toughed it out. I had fought my parents for it and I won, maybe the first argument I ever won against them, because they never believed in going easy on me just because I was a child. I wasn't going to back down even though I was wrong and I turned out to hate it."
Mace gazed at her in a kind of growing wonder. She had spoken of the stone she saw in him, but she had a core of pure diamond. "How old were you?" he asked.
"Eleven."
"You know," he said, "you don't have to tell me all of this. I mean, I admire you for it, that's amazing. But I'm a near stranger, and I'm—"
And I'm keeping the better part of myself from you.
"You don't have to tell me all your secrets," he went on.
"I started it, though," she said, forcing a smile. "So I'll follow through. I believe in finishing what I start, and in being honest, with myself and with other people. That can be an uncomfortable combination, sometimes."
"I can see why," Mace said, gazing at her.
He had never been so close to telling a human the truth about himself. The only thing that interrupted him was their food arriving just then, a beef pottage for him and a shepherd's pie for her. Thea rolled up the map to make room on the table and stuck it back into her bag.
"They do the best English pub food here," she said, digging a fork in, as if she hadn't just been talking about something that was clearly painful for her a minute ago. "What do you think?"
"Amazing," Mace said.
He wasn't just talking about the food.
"So is it true what they say about Newfoundland food?" she asked, scooping up a large forkful.
"Do I want to know what they say?"
"I've heard you have something with the worrying name of flipper pie."
"Oh. That."
"Oh that, he says. Are there actual flippers in it?"
Mace opened his mouth to reply, and just then, the window beside their booth exploded inward in a shower of glass.
He reacted on pure instinct, flinging himself across the table to curl an arm around Thea and pull her down to the floor. They ended up in a heap on the floor while other patrons screamed around them.
"What was that?" Thea gasped under him. He could feel her heart going like a jackrabbit's. "A bomb?"
We should be so lucky, Mace thought.
He raised himself up to his knees, keeping a secure hand on Thea's shoulder, to risk a glance out the shattered window.
He saw exactly what he was afraid he'd see.
Framed in the window, there was a figure in a black robe. The hood was draped around the figure's face, hiding it, but the figure had its arms flung out to the sides, the robes shoved up to mid-forearm. The hands and arms were muscular and pale, with a complex tracery of runic tattoos, glowing faintly as if lit from within by ruddy firelight. The black robes were smoking faintly.
"What the hell?" Thea said, and Mace looked around hastily to find that she had sat up too. Her newsboy cap had been knocked off, her short hair was flying everywhere, and even in the moment he couldn't help noticing how beautiful she was.
"Cultists," Mace said succinctly.
"These are the guys who are after the—"
Mace clapped a hand over her mouth. There was little to no chance that Voldemort and company didn't already know about the medallion, but on the off chance that they were actually looking for something else, he would rather not be the one who gave it away.
The magician was now fumbling in his robes. His voice carried to them through the shattered window and the rising howl of sirens. "Where is—damn it—oh, here we go."
From his robes, he pulled out a miniature crossbow. It looked like barely more than a toy, but even from here Mace could see that it was loaded not with a bolt, but with some kind of syringe. Who even thought of putting a tranquilizer dart on a crossbow?! Or was it poison?
Mace didn't plan to stick around and find out. He started to scrabble backward across the floor, pulling Thea with him. "Is there a back way out of here?"
"I don't exactly live a life where I go around looking for back exits out of places!"
The magician pulled the trigger. The bolt, propelled by a surprisingly strong force given the size of the crossbow, smacked into a chair next to Mace's ear. He wasn't wrong; it was a tranq dart, a giant syringe like the kind a vet might use to take down a raging bull, with a tuft of fletching on the back to make it fly straight.
I need to turn to stone. Those can't penetrate if I shift.
But he'd have to give himself away to Thea.
He was caught in an agony of indecision. Meanwhile, the magician was cursing to himself and hastily cranking the crossbow.
Mace looked across the endless stretch of floor to the back, where most of the employees and customers had fled. There were only a couple of ways out of here, and both of them were bad, but there was only one that would get Thea out of danger in the minimum amount of time.
"Thea," he said, "I'm so sorry about this."
"What—"
Everything happened at once.
The crossbow bolt went twung, and at the same time, he wrapped both arms around Thea, shielding her, and sank into the tile floor.
He felt something very sharp sting him in the shoulder just before the embrace of the earth closed around him.
It was all rammed earth and city utility piping underneath the restaurant. He had to fight his way through it, like struggling through a thicket, trying to find his way to the comfortable solidity of bedrock.
In his arms, he felt Thea jerking as if trying to escape, and held onto her. Stonewalking was bad for a human who was unprepared for it, he knew that, but if she lost contact with him underground, she would revert immediately from her phased state back to normal human solidity, and die.
A worrying numbness was starting to spread through his shoulder. It was getting hard to think, and in fact, extremely difficult to travel through stone. Much more than he would have expected even with the dizziness.
I think this drug is supposed to stop me from stonewalking.
If so, it didn't seem to be working, at least not well. But he had the sluggish, horrible realization that the dart was affecting him faster than it should. Gargoyles,
like all shifters, had a fast metabolism and a strong resistance to poisons. Whatever this was, it had been specifically created to take down gargoyles.
And he was still underground. With Thea.
He had to go somewhere safe. He could feel his consciousness flagging, and he pushed himself, driven by terror—especially for Thea, who had never asked for this, who had been drawn into his world against her will.
He needed a safe place, a reference point.
He found himself reaching for one—unbidden, desperate, even as his control of his stonewalking began to slip away from him.
Thea
There was air around her, and the first thing she did with her breath was scream.
That was all she had at first. Screaming, and then panic crushed her chest and she couldn't even do that. Slowly she became aware of Mace holding onto her.
"—Thea? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to frighten you that badly. Are you all right?"
No, she thought, as crushing panic threatened to strangle her. She would never be all right again.
"I—I can't—" she gasped out. "Help me, help me, please. I ... I have to—"
She had to ground herself. She fought her way far enough back to remember that. Focus, she thought, squeezing her eyes shut. Focus on where you are. Not where you were.
Grounding, she had to ground herself. Literally ground herself. There was soil underneath her knees, damp and dank. There was also the perfume of flowers in the air, and the tinkle of flowing water in her ears. They were outside somewhere. Mace's hands gripped her upper arms, holding her steady despite a slight tremor in the strong fingers.
It was that faint trembling that gave her the strength to draw in a small, hitching breath. There was something wrong with Mace. He was being strong for her right now, but she had to be strong enough to claw her way back out of the darkness. She had to understand what was wrong so she could help.
She opened her eyes.
For a terrible instant she thought it was still dark, the crushing, smothering darkness of wherever he had taken her. But then she realized that there was actually some light. And there was the wind in her hair, damp and cool. They were outside, not underground.