by Zoe Chant
"Meat is great. I'm all in favor of meat." What she wasn't used to was being around pregnant women. Jess seemed like a straightforward person, though, so Thea decided not to walk on eggshells around her. "How far along are you?"
"Six months, though I feel like a house already. I can't even imagine what it's going to be like three months from now." She laid the ham on a polished granite cutting board. "Bread's in the box on the counter there. Oh, sorry, let me move these."
There were a bunch of rocks in front of an old-fashioned wooden breadbox. As far as Jess could see, they were just normal rocks, not special in any way. They ranged in size from pebbles to about as big as her fist.
Jess scooped them up and dropped them in a large mixing bowl on the end of the counter, already partly full of other rocks. She looked like she did that a lot.
"Kids?" Thea asked, taking out the bread. It was a heavy, crusty loaf that looked freshly made.
"Husband," Jess sighed. "It's part of his hoar—er—collection. As someone who is slowly filling up every crevice of the bedroom with books, I can't complain too much if I have to move a few flints and piece of granite to brush my teeth in the morning."
"Your husband collects rocks?"
"My husband hoards rocks," Jess said, slicing ham. "He's a dragon, and rocks are what he hoards. No, I don't know how it works either, but then, I don't even understand the gargoyle thing all that well yet. He has a whole collection room for storing and displaying his favorite pieces."
"Your husband is a rock-hoarding dragon," Thea said slowly.
"I'm trying not to lay it all on you at once, but I don't know how much you already know. You've run into the cultists, I take it?"
"Those black-robed guys? Yeah. Are they really a cult?"
"Or something," Jess said, cracking eggs into the skillet beside the searing slices of ham. She passed Thea a bread knife. "We don't really know for sure who they are, and we're only guessing at what they want, but they tried to kill—no." She paused, looking a bit uncertain. "They attacked us, but mostly they just seem to want to capture or find out about us. Last year we had a fun little round-the-world chase over a book."
"The book that describes how to make gargoyles?" Thea asked. Jess gave her a look. "Sorry. I guess people aren't supposed to know about it."
"It was supposed to be destroyed, and the secret along with it. At least I thought it was," Jess added with a sharp glance at Gio.
He was lying in a sphinx-like pose in a sunbeam, head up and alert, looking like he was keeping an eye on things. Whether he actually understood any of their conversation, Thea couldn't tell.
"Mace said that he had only done it once before," Thea said.
"He's not supposed to be able to do it at all, without the book. At least that's what I thought. Apparently there are a few things Uncle Mace neglected to mention."
"He didn't have a choice," Thea said, feeling defensive of Mace. "Gio was dying. Mace saved his life."
"Oh, I know that part. He told me. What worries me—" Jess broke off and pinched her forehead, between her brows. "It's dangerous. And I'm about to bring a part-gargoyle baby into the world, with that secret, which I thought was gone for good, still floating around out there causing trouble. It's bad enough still having those cultists out there without Mace going around poking sticks into hornet's nests."
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"
"Not your fault." Jess huffed out a sigh and gave her a little smile. "Get down some plates, please? They're up in that cabinet. If we're going to eat outside, get the plastic ones."
The plastic plates were unexpectedly nice, thick and sturdy rather than the flimsy picnic plates Thea was expecting, and brightly splashed with painted flowers. Jess built them each a sandwich with ham and fried eggs and slabs of heavy bread loaded with grains and seeds. She refreshed Thea's coffee and poured herself half a cup, which she dosed liberally with creamer.
"I've already had my half cup, but I think I can treat myself today, since there's company," she said. "We don't get guests much. And I'm sorry to hit you with all this heavy stuff right away. Why don't you tell me about yourself? You're an archaeologist, right?"
They wandered out to the sun-soaked patio—actually yet another different patio, as it turned out, with a view not of the harbor, but of roses spilling over stone walls. Above them, a hillside covered with boulders and wildflowers sloped up toward a brilliant blue sky.
Thea talked about her work at the university while they ate, with Gio lying a little way distant in his guard-dog pose. She left out anything too intensely personal, skirting around the fact that she'd been teaching without doing field work for the last couple of years. But Jess was an attentive audience, and they skipped from discussing archaeology to talking about the library and bookstore that Jess was working on setting up in the village.
"I absolutely refuse to live in a town without a bookstore," Jess said. "And people in a place like this are big readers. We don't get regular TV reception, and while we do have the internet and cell service, which I gather is pretty recent, books are still a big deal. Mace has a huge library and didn't have a problem with me carting off some of his unused stash as starter stock for a small-town library and used book store. It's taken us a while to get off the ground, but we're on track to open later this summer." She touched her stomach. "If Booger in here doesn't come early and make us change our plans."
"Ah, there you are," said a familiar voice—Mace's voice—and Thea felt something in her chest clutch a little, a strobe of anticipation and eagerness.
He came not from the house, but out of the garden. He was dressed casually in jeans and a black T-shirt, and Thea's chest stuttered again, from a more visceral combination of feelings this time. She had been able to tell even in the sweaters that Mace was well built, but she hadn't fully realized how well built. He looked sculpted, as if the curves and planes of his body were designed with a master's chisel.
Even the fact that he was wearing a floppy-brimmed fisherman-style hat and carrying a watering can in one hand and a trowel in the other didn't dampen her libido. In fact, it made it worse. There were smudges of dirt on his knees. Thea had always been weak for people who didn't mind getting down in the dirt and getting a little mud on them.
"I like Thea, Uncle," Jess said. "I don't know what she did to deserve getting mixed up with you."
"Saucy girl." Mace set the watering can and trowel neatly on top of a low stone half-wall abutting the patio. "Hello, Gio."
Gio flicked an ear, but didn't otherwise acknowledge the greeting. Thea saw something in Mace's face crumple a little—there and hidden, almost too fast to see.
But he gave Thea and Jess a friendly smile as he pulled out a chair at the patio table. "How are you settling in? I hope you've made free with the hospitality of my house. You may help yourself to anything you like."
"I've definitely been doing that," Thea said with a glance at the plates, where nothing remained of the sandwiches but a few crumbs. "And Jess has been very welcoming."
"It's nice to have someone else to talk to," Jess said. "I love it here, but it can get a little lonely sometimes."
"I'm not staying for long." Thea felt that she had to point it out, because she could all too easily feel how she could stay here, in this peaceful, beautiful place. She had a life to get back to, she reminded herself.
Mace looked briefly sad, enough to make her regret saying it, but then his face firmed. "Yes. We should begin looking for the, er ..." He glanced at Jess.
"I know what you're looking for," she said with a sigh. "I don't approve, but I agree that at the very least we should get it before the cultists do."
"I don't know if either of you realize what an incredible long shot it is, though," Thea said. "I tried to explain to Mace, but I feel like no one is listening to me. Even if it's here, which we don't know for sure, there's a huge amount of coastline to search. You'd almost have to stumble across it by accident."
"There's more to
it than that, though. What he's leaving out is that gargoyles have an innate stone sense," Jess said. She leaned down and picked up a pebble from the patio, and concentrated for a moment. "This is siltstone with a trace of extra calcite."
Thea could feel her eyes going round. "Can you all do that?"
"As far as I know," Mace said. "It's not just a matter of finding good sites and then exploring them with normal tools, Thea. I think that once I'm there, I'll be able to sense the presence of the medallion. I just need to find places to look. I'm hoping you can help me."
"I'd love to," Thea said. It really was like a real-life treasure quest, for a good cause, even. She couldn't wait to get started.
Jess looked between them and let out a small sigh. "Well, I can see why you two like each other. I wish you'd reconsider, Uncle, but at the very least, please don't lie to me about this anymore. If you're going to do this, I want to know what's going on."
"I didn't lie," Mace said.
"A lie of omission is still a lie. This information was gone, Uncle. Destroyed. Now you're bringing it back. Promise me that you'll keep me informed from here on out."
Mace put a hand over hers, with sincere but awkward affection, and gave it a gentle squeeze. "I promise."
"I guess that's all I can ask for, since I know you're determined not to stop." Jess rose from the table and collected the plates. She offered Thea a smile. "I'm going down to town a bit later, and I'd be happy to show you around if you want a guided tour."
"I appreciate it, but I think I might be tied up for a while," Thea said. She managed not to look at Mace. "Rain check?"
"Absolutely." Jess nodded to both of them and went inside.
Mace huffed out a breath. He glanced over at Gio, who appeared oblivious to the argument, and was gazing down into the garden instead.
"The worst part," he said, almost to himself, "is that she's right." He ran a hand through his hair and gave Thea a smile that was sad and wistful. "In my hubris, I thought I could master the secret of turning flesh to stone before Javic's group got there. Now my friend is paying the price."
"But you're doing everything you can to fix it," Thea pointed out. "From what I've seen, you aren't wrong about those cultist guys."
"That may be. But pride is a dangerous thing."
"You don't have to tell me that," Thea said, thinking about a slippery bank in a rainstorm, and the sluicing of a collapsing dig site—
Although the day was warm, she shivered with an intense chill.
"Are you all right?" Mace asked her.
"I'm fine." She stood up and smoothed down her borrowed skirt. "Let's go find a Viking magic amulet."
Mace brightened. "Excellent. I suggest that we start in my library."
Mace's library wasn't the most amazing place Thea had ever seen, but only because she had been to the Palace of Knossos and the Colosseum. It was probably the most amazing other than that.
It was like a library out of a movie, complete with towering shelves of leatherbound books, a fireplace, tall pointed windows, and heavy leather furniture. The smell was heady, a mix of paper and leather and lingering traces of old woodsmoke.
Thea, spellbound, gazed around in amazement. She didn't even know where to begin looking, let alone doing any sort of research.
She trailed her fingers lightly over a shelf at random. This one was mostly books on local history and botany, some so old their spines were flaking, others new and freshly bound in colorful paperback covers.
Mace smiled at the look on her face and went over to a side of the room where, in between two reading stands, there was an old-fashioned map storage rack with deep cubbies. He pulled out a long tube of paper.
"I was thinking we'd start with a map," he said, and began unrolling it.
It turned out to be a nautical chart of the coast of Newfoundland, and it was huge. There was no room to properly spread it on any of the room's various surfaces, so Mace moved aside some of the solid, antique-looking furniture and spread it out on the floor. They weighed down the corners with paperweights and stacks of books to keep it from rolling back up.
"So you really think if you get close enough, you'll know this medallion is there?" Thea asked. She knelt beside the map and put her reading glasses on.
There was a thump from the doorway. Gio had followed them to the library, but seemed stymied by his inability to move around in a cluttered space without knocking into things. It appeared that he'd decided to leave. Thea noticed Mace's gaze following him unhappily and cleared her throat.
"So," she said. "Medallion."
"Right." Mace, on his knees, wrenched his gaze back to the map and tapped the coast near Westerly Cove with the back end of a capped marker. "To answer your question, yes, I think so, although I won't know for sure unless we actually find it."
"I honestly don't see how we can, even with your—what did Jess call it? Your stone sense." She looked down at the map again. Westerly Cove was a tiny dimple in the wrinkled coast, northwest of St. John's—and beyond that, the coast kept going, in and out, all the way up to the northern peninsula of the island where she knew the one confirmed Viking site in North America was located.
And Newfoundland was just one island along a vast, mostly deserted coast with tens of thousands of likely sites.
"I thought this was a wild goose chase when you brought it to me, but there didn't seem any harm in turning you loose on it. Now that there's actually something important riding on it, it's still a wild goose chase. Mace, archaeologists and treasure hunters, equipped with a lot more resources than we have, will spend decades, centuries searching for lost things the size of cities and pyramids and tombs. I don't know how we can find a single small artifact that might be buried anywhere on the North American coast. Or in Europe, or at the bottom of the sea. And that's even if it still exists, or ever existed."
"I know," Mace said quietly. "It's the longest of long shots. But one of the things that makes me think it's possible is that the cult believes it's here, and they may have access to information sources I don't. Why are they so sure about it? They may have their own version of my library, full of resources I don't have."
"Or maybe they're here because you're here, and they're hoping you'll lead them to it."
"True," Mace said, and Thea felt a bit like a cad.
"I'm sorry I keep shooting down your ideas."
He shook his head. "No. Thea, never apologize for that." He looked at her steadily across the map. In the shadows across his face, his green eyes seemed to glow. "I want you to point out the flaws in my plan. I'm glad I didn't walk into your office and have you tell me this was a great idea that would go off without a hitch. If you'd done that, I might have walked out again. I don't want someone to sugar-coat things or lie to me."
"Definitely none of that from this end," Thea said. "No sugar-coating."
It came out slightly breathless. The intensity of his gaze was just one part of an all-over intensity directed at her—that had been directed at her since the first time she met him. When he was talking to her, his whole being was focused on her. She hadn't noticed the same thing when he was with Gio or Jess, not in that particular way.
And he was still wearing that completely unfair black T-shirt.
Well, why not just enjoy it? she thought, heady with the possibilities. He was an extremely hot, extremely smart guy who lived in a freaking mansion, and she was a single, unattached adult in her early forties who could have sex with whoever she wanted to. On some level, she'd had the urge to climb Mace like a large well-sculpted tree trunk ever since she'd met him.
But it had never hit her with this much intensity before.
"So, without sugar-coating," Mace said, and she wrenched her brain back to the here-and-now. "Where would you start looking, if you were going to check sites along the coast?"
Thea leaned over the map; so did he, bringing their heads much closer together. He had a spicy, slightly dusty scent that made her ever so slightly dizzy. "Well, the
place I'd start would be the actual site on the north end of the island, but you said you've already been there."
"All over around there," Mace said. "It's not there."
She ran her finger along the coast, looking at the elevation changes, the water depth. "If I were going to pick alternate landing sites on the island itself—here, give me your pen. Can I mark on this?"
"Go ahead," Mace said, his voice quiet. His fingers brushed hers as he passed her the marker, and she felt a pleasant shiver run up her arm.
"Okay, so I'm thinking here and here, and maybe here." She made bold X's on the map.
"I knew you'd be the person to ask about this."
He was leaning across the map, one hand resting in the middle of it to prop up his weight. His head was very near hers, dark hair framing his face as he looked down at the map. Thea had to force herself to keep her attention on the inked outline of the coast and not the sparse, curling dark hair on the back of his hand and forearm.
"That's just the tip of the iceberg, though. If they went into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, there are a lot of places they could have gone from there," she said, leaning over the map herself now to trace the coast of neighboring Labrador until it vanished off the edge. "All the way up the St. Lawrence River, maybe."
"Let's stick to the island for now."
"Let's," she whispered, raising her head.
Their faces were close together. She had only been this close to him when he had caught hold of her in the restaurant and taken her underground. She felt as if she was going under now, but for a completely different reason.
Up close, his startling green eyes were even more varied and fascinating. There was a dark ring around the pupil, shading into a dozen hues of green and blue, threaded with gold. She wasn't sure if it was possible for human eyes to be that color. They were framed with thick dark lashes, making it look like his eyes had been outlined with an artist's charcoal pencil.