Stonewing Guardian

by Zoe Chant

  "Yes, the book with the secret of making gargoyles. I know that part. But why, Mace? What makes a person decide to leave their ordinary life behind and put on a black robe and hunt for gargoyle secrets all day long?"

  "I don't know; maybe they're brought up in it. Maybe they're hungry for magical power. People do weirder things for less reason."

  "Have you ever thought of trying to question one of them? Maybe arrange a meeting?"

  "They shot at me with drugged darts on the last two occasions I encountered them, so I'm not about to leave myself wide open for another instance of forced drugging and kidnapping. For all I know, they've decided to get gargoyle secrets the old-fashioned way, by dissecting one of us."

  "Look, I know it's not a great plan, but it's a fallback plan," Thea suggested. "If nothing else pans out, maybe we could get some useful information that way. You said yourself that they might have information we don't."

  "Well, I'm not inviting them to attack us, whatever we do."

  "They do that anyway, don't they? Maybe next time they try it, you could try to take a hostage for questioning."

  Mace grimaced. "I'll think about it."

  "It's just an idea."

  "I know, and it's not a bad one. I'll consider it." He smiled, and laid her back in the heather, her hair spilling around her. "This is growing out," he murmured, running a hand through it.

  "I know. I'll need to get it cut the next time we're in town."

  "I think I rather like it this way." His hand trailed through the brown strands.

  "Keep doing that and I might start to like it too."

  She raised her head a little, to see that Gio had discreetly vanished, giving them privacy.

  And then Mace pulled off his shirt, displaying a gorgeous view of his abs, and she stopped thinking about anything else.

  Later, sated and relaxed and slightly sunburned, they dressed and collected their belongings and the picnic trash, packing it all up to carry back. Gio joined them on the walk down the hill, frisking along beside them as if he had never been gone. He faded away into the heather and boulders before they reached the shoreline.

  The Codfather motored into the bay a few minutes after they got there. Thea climbed back into the oversized fishing boots and waded out with Mace's support. Tor hauled her up on the deck and then went back into his pilot's cabin, while Thea leaned down and gave Mace a hand out of the water.

  The boat motored slowly out of the fjord. In the pilot house, Thea found that Tor had a cooler full of cold soda and beer waiting for them. She cracked open an orange cream soda and gulped it down blissfully.

  "You are an excellent host," she told Tor, who grinned back at her.

  "I have coffee too, if you want that."

  "No, this is absolutely lovely. Just what I needed." She sat on a pile of rope to change back into her shoes.

  Mace came into the pilot house and availed himself of the offered drinks, cracking open a beer.

  "Did you guys have a dog with you up there?" Tor asked.

  "Dog?" Mace said.

  "Yeah, I thought ..." He waved a hand. "Never mind."

  "Oh, there was something we wanted to ask you," Thea said quickly, trying to divert the conversation. "Remember the conversation we had earlier about the mine shaft your dad found? I was wondering if we could ask him about that. I wouldn't know where it is, but Mace might recognize the place."

  "You can do that," Tor agreed, steering casually. "But first you have to find him."

  Thea's mouth opened in horror.

  "He's not missing," Mace said. Then, warily: "Is he missing?"

  "It's not unusual." Tor sounded resigned and even slightly amused. "The old man vanishes a few times a year. He's either out fishing or bar-crawling through every dive in St. John's. My money's on the second one."

  Thea and Mace shared a glance, and Mace said, "Which bars, exactly?"

  Mace

  They found Stieg Nilsson in the fifth dockside dive bar they tried. In fact, they could hardly miss him. He was right in the middle of a bar brawl.

  The sound of shattering glass and yelling was audible down the street. Thea hung back nervously. Mace moved in front of her and growled to himself. He let a little gargoyle rise to the surface, enough to bulk up his shoulders and harden his fists.

  Then he waded into the bar, where he found a barroom full of Newfoundland fishermen going at each other with beer steins and furniture, while the barmaid, standing on the bar and clutching a baseball bat with all the power of her not-inconsiderable shoulders, yelled at them to knock it off.

  Mace bulked up his chest a bit too, enlarging his lung capacity, and bellowed:

  "Which one of you is Stieg Nilsson?!"

  There was a brief pause in the fighting.

  "Mace! Duck!" Thea yelled from behind him, stepping inside the barroom doors.

  He'd meant for her to stay outside, but he ducked automatically, and a chair swung over his head. Mace moved in front of Thea, shielding her instinctively. He raised an arm, hoping that no one would notice, in the dim light of the bar, that it had expanded to twice its normal size and changed to the color and consistency of granite as he clenched his fist. Another sweep of the chair shattered on his forearm. Pieces of wood went everywhere.

  "Go back outside!" he snapped over his shoulder.

  "Believe it or not," Thea said grimly, grabbing a piece of the shattered chair, "this isn't my first bar brawl."

  "What?"

  "Let me tell you about drunken archaeologists sometime!"

  Thea was actually laughing, and Mace couldn't help laughing too. It was just so ridiculous.

  He unashamedly pushed his gargoyle to the point where he was going to have wings and horns erupting any minute, hardening his skin all over to the consistency of stone, and forced his way through the fighters.

  Thea followed in his wake. He stopped worrying about her after the second time she fended off a patron's drunken swing with her makeshift cosh.

  He pushed his way to the bar and tapped on it. The barmaid swung the bat down at his head. Mace caught it effortlessly. "I don't want problems," he said politely, reminding himself to hold it loosely enough not to crush the wood. "Do you know a Stieg—"

  "There!" the barmaid snapped, pointing. Mace glimpsed the massively burly patriarch of the Nilsson clan, with bare, tattooed arms and a scruffy head of white hair, slugging it out with four or five people at once.

  "Mind if we get him out of here?"

  "Please!" she shouted over the noise, and ducked a flung beer stein. "He started it!"

  Mace unceremoniously gripped the two brawlers in front of him with one hand on each scruff and flung them out of the way. Then he got his hands on Stieg Nilsson.

  "'Ey! Getcher hands off me, y'—"

  "Oh, shut up," Mace said, and slugged him.

  Nilsson wobbled, not entirely unconscious. Mace threw him over his shoulder. There was a smattering of cheers and applause. Someone who hadn't quite gotten the memo that the fighting was over tried taking a swing. Mace blocked it casually with a gargoyle-shifted forearm, and the Mike Tyson wannabe reeled away, clutching his fist and yelping in pain.

  "Thea?"

  "Right here!" she said from behind him.

  They stumbled out onto the street, fielding a few more thrown objects and one beer stein that someone smashed over Stieg's head as he hung head-down over Mace's shoulder. Mace could feel Stieg beating on him feebly with a fist while muttering something about the lineage of Mace's grandparents.

  At times like this, it was less difficult to believe that Stieg was actually the younger of the two of them, chronologically speaking.

  "So this isn't how I was expecting to spend my Saturday evening," Thea remarked as they beat a hasty retreat, looking around for cops, back to Tor's boat down at the waterfront. She was still clutching a broken chair leg, which she didn't seem to know what to do with; she looked around for somewhere to throw it away, didn't see any trash containers, and just
held onto it as she circled around to Mace's back and matched pace with him. "Mr. Nilsson?"

  Stieg groaned something that sounded profane.

  "I'm really sorry about this, Mr. Nilsson," Thea said. "We just need to ask you about an abandoned mine shaft that your son said you know about, something that might date back to Viking times. Does that sound familiar?"

  "What time is it?" Stieg slurred. "I'll tell you the time ... lemme at 'em ..."

  "I don't think this is helping," Mace said over his shoulder. "Go back to the boat and tell Tor—"

  He had no warning of trouble before something tangled around his arms and legs, rough against his skin. He stumbled to a stop.

  "What's wrong?" Thea asked, her playful manner instantly dropping away.

  "Don't worry about me! Tell me if you see anyone nearby!"

  He was wrapped up in heavy nautical rope. It had crawled up his body as if animated by its own inner life, and now it was wrapped around him. He could break it, but it would take a minute.

  Magic. This is definitely magic.

  Thea looked around wildly, gripping her broken chair leg in both hands. "There!" she cried, pointing with it.

  There was no portal this time. The cultists were about fifty meters away down the dockfront. They wore dressed in ordinary civilian clothes, and Mace wouldn't even have recognized them if not for the fierce orange glow around the blond magician's hands.

  There were three of them. The blond fire mage, in a hoodie and jeans, had his hands held in an intricate cat's-cradle arrangement, with glowing lines between his fingers that must be controlling the ropes. His magic didn't have the ability to trap and hold gargoyles directly; they could shrug it off. Apparently he'd figured out a workaround.

  There was also a middle-aged bald man in a docker's jacket, and a woman with a dark braid who looked like the same one who'd showed up when Gio was attacked. Both of them were holding mini crossbows.

  "Javic, you fool, you shouldn’t have attacked him so soon! We're still too far away to use the darts!" the woman snapped.

  The bald man was already running along the dockfront, getting near enough to unleash the crossbow's load.

  "Run!" Mace ordered Thea.

  Rather than trying to break the ropes one at a time, he shifted. The change flowed through him, ropes tearing away and stone rippling across his body. Just in time, too. A dart clattered harmlessly off his shoulder.

  There was a roar and Gio bounded out of nowhere—absolute nowhere, possibly from the rock or pavement along the harborfront.

  The cultists yelped and scattered. Javic lashed out a glowing line of force at the stone lion. It hit him and dissolved instantly. Apparently gargoyles’ innate ability to resist his magic applied to Gio as well.

  "Thea!" Mace said, holding out a hand to her. "I can stonewalk us—"

  "No!" Thea yelled. She stepped away, gripping her chair leg.

  "Here, then! Get him to the boat; I need to be free to move!"

  Mace unloaded his drunk, unwieldy burden onto Thea. She dropped her chair leg and staggered under Stieg's considerable weight. He wasn't fat, or at least not much; he was burly, bulked up from a sixty-year lifetime of hauling in nets and flinging around cargoes of fish.

  "Mace, what are you going to—"

  She broke off in a scream.

  All of a sudden, instead of a drunk fisherman, she had her arms around half a ton of yellow-white fur, muscle, and teeth.

  Damn it, Stieg, not now, Mace thought.

  The Nilssons were polar bear shifters.

  Thea staggered back from Stieg. He plunked down to all fours and looked around blearily. Shreds of clothing hung off him.

  "What!" Thea yelled, reeling into Mace, who caught her.

  "Yeah, the Nilssons turn into polar bears," Mace muttered. "Sorry. Wasn't my secret to tell." He thrust her apologetically back. "Stand behind me, please?"

  "The Nilssons plural?"

  "Uh."

  "You're the worst at keeping secrets," Thea hissed at him, flattening herself against his back.

  "I'm good at secrets!" Mace waved a hand in Stieg's general direction to indicate that it wasn't his fault this time.

  Stieg looked back and forth along the waterfront. He shook his head and roared. Then he charged the cultists, apparently considering them responsible for his current state of confusion and headache.

  It was clear from the cultists' body language that none of this was going according to plan. The blond mage was holding off Gio with a shield made of random bits of junk—barrels and anchors, hovering in midair—while the others had tried to regroup, but now a polar bear charging into their midst threw them into disarray again.

  Two more showed up just then, running toward the docks with those little crossbows in hand. Mace put an arm around Thea, shielding her.

  "What in the hell is going on over there?" Tor yelled from the boat. "Who are you fighting?"

  "We can't fight them all," Mace muttered. "Thea, get to the boat, I'm serious. I'll be fine. I'm going to go grab Stieg before he gets himself tranq-darted and I'll be right behind you."

  He wasn't sure what the darts would do to a shifter. Shifters were considerably more resilient than humans, so they probably wouldn't kill him as they had nearly killed Gio. But he didn't want to test that.

  There was a sudden yell as Stieg’s bear slammed into the blond magician, bowling him over. They both tumbled off the dockside into the water with a tremendous splash.

  "Go!" Mace shouted, giving Thea a push.

  She sprinted for the boat. Mace backed up, stone wings half spread. Up on the dockside, the cultists were still fending off Gio.

  Down below, Stieg—still a polar bear—surfaced with a small bow wave. He swam for the boat and started trying to climb up onto the deck. Tor gave him a hand up, and then turned to help Thea climb on.

  That was most of them. Mace looked around for the magician, and found him eventually, trying to climb out of the water, but he was struggling, flailing and uncoordinated. He kept slipping back in. The glow on his skin had faded completely.

  Stieg didn't hit him that hard, Mace thought, but then he realized what he was looking at. Water had completely extinguished the mage's magic. He was helpless and was probably going to drown if no one did anything.

  The conversation with Thea on the hillside about capturing a cultist came back to him. There might never be a better chance.

  Mace bounded down to the waterside in a couple of huge leaps. He grabbed hold of the sodden magician, who gave a weak yelp and clutched at Mace's arms. Mace spread his wings and jumped into the air, soaring in a swoop to land on the boat's deck.

  He shifted back as fast as he could, but it was probably too much to hope that Tor hadn't gotten a look at any of that. The best he could hope for was that nobody onshore had caught any of it on their cell phones.

  "Gio!" he shouted. "Go! We're fine!"

  On the deck, Stieg had shifted back and was lying naked and groaning on a pile of rope, half covered with a piece of canvas and someone's coat. The Codfather's engine was thrumming, and Thea leaned out to untie the boat from its mooring line.

  "You got one!" she cried, as if he'd just landed a big fish.

  "Let's hope I'm not making a mistake. Need help with that?"

  Thea shook her head and dropped the rope in a coil on deck. "We're loose!" she called to Tor.

  The boat began to back away from the dock, motoring slowly backward. Mace dropped the magician on the deck and put a knee on his chest. "Don't move," he growled.

  "Move?" the magician wheezed. "I can barely breathe!"

  Mace looked around toward the dockside. Gio had vanished, stonewalked back into the ground, he hoped. The cultists were clustered together, having an intense conversation. Someone tried to fire a dart after them, but it fell far short, plopping into the water as Tor made for the opposite side of the harbor and the open sea.

  "Are we in danger?" Thea asked.

  "I don't think he
can do magic when he's wet," Mace said. "And I'm pretty sure the rest of them can't do it at all. At least not like he can."

  Thea leaned over Mace's shoulder. "He's so young," she said in surprise.

  She was right: the magician looked like he was in his mid-20s, and movie-star good looking. His normally blond hair was dark with harbor water, dangling into his eyes. The glow on his skin had died entirely, leaving nothing behind but a faint latticework of pale scar tissue in the shape of distorted runes.

  They motored out of the harbor, past a long ocean-going ship strung out in lights, into the open sea. Over on the pile of rope, Stieg sat up abruptly. "Fight all of you—just come at me—where am I?" He looked down at himself. "Fuck. Did I shift?"

  Thea

  It was after dark, and once they left the harbor, the only light came from the boat's running lights, reflecting up from the water as they skipped across the waves. Thea felt the sense once again of events moving at tremendous speed around her, catching her up in a slipstream. At least it didn't involve going underground—so far.

  And so far the magician, who was apparently named Javic, hadn't put up a fight. He still seemed dazed, as if being drenched in the harbor had taken more than just his magic, but some of his energy and strength as well.

  Mace tied Javic's hands behind him anyway with a sturdy piece of mooring line. Thea found a flashlight clipped clipped to the side of the Codfather's pilothouse and they did a quick search of their prisoner, relieving him of a small crossbow and a few darts—Mace handled these very carefully—a cell phone, and a small leather pouch with complex designs stitched into it.

  Mace dropped the cell phone over the side. "Hey," Javic said weakly, struggling to sit up against the side of the pilothouse.

  "No sense in letting your friends find you too easily," Mace said.

  Mace looked back toward St. John's. Thea did too. There was no sign of anyone following them. They were past the light-strung container ship, headed into deeper water.

  "Assuming they're even looking for you," Mace added.

  "Oh, they will be," Javic said. "Count on that."