by Zoe Chant
Especially with Thea on the boat. He could fly; she couldn't.
There was one thing Mace was pretty sure about, though, which was that Javic wasn't faking not being a threat to them right now. He looked scared. His face was very pale.
"What are you?" Mace asked quietly. "You manipulate the element of fire as we gargoyles control stone, don't you? But that's not all you can do. Are you some kind of shifter?"
Javic didn't answer.
"You don't hate us," Mace said. He was increasingly confident of that. He knew hate; he had encountered it from dragons in the past. With the cultists, however, their confrontations had seemed more purpose-driven than anything. "What is it that you want from us? Information about what we are?"
Still no answer. Mace growled softly, revealing fangs, but Javic simply stared back at him.
To his frustration, Mace realized that he had no way to make Javic talk. Not without doing things he refused to do. It frustrated him even more to realize that he respected the magician's courage. Javic was completely out of his element, literally and figuratively, a prisoner of people he'd tried to kill. He would have every reason to be terrified, but instead he met his fate with quiet stoicism.
Of course, it might not be courage. It might be anticipation of a rescue that was even now preparing back on land.
But Mace had a theory about that.
"You're the only one who can open portals, aren't you?" he said, and he saw an expression flash across Javic's face, a crack in his armor. "Ha. I thought so. That's why you're always there when we've fought them. Not only are you the one with most of the magical power, if not all of it, but you're definitely the only one who can do those higher-powered tricks. So no rescue's coming, not if you don't open the door to let them in."
Javic said nothing and settled his features back into composed calm. Damn it.
The door to the pilothouse opened and Tor strode out. "Hey!" Mace said. "Who's piloting the boat?"
"My dad. We need to talk."
Mace allowed himself to be drawn aside, out of earshot, although he kept an eye on Javic. The magician barely looked strong enough to sit up, but Mace wasn't taking chances.
"Your dad is at the wheel, the guy we just pulled out of a bar? Last I saw, he was incoherently drunk!"
"Shifter," Tor said offhandedly. "Also, I trust him to know what he's doing, in this at least. He's taking us to some island he knows about where we can tie up. That's what you wanted, right? Or at least it's as close as we can give you." He nodded toward Javic. "Now you tell me why you're kidnapping a guy, and what all that was back there at the docks."
"You saw enough of the fight to know that we didn't start it. This man and his friends have been after my family for a while now. I need to find out more about them to protect me and mine. Which," Mace added, "includes your family as well, and the entire village."
"Yeah, about that. You know our secret," Tor said. "But you didn't trust us with yours."
That hurt, even though it was true. "I couldn't," Mace said softly. "We've been hiding for a very long time."
"Shifters know what it is to hide," Tor said. He nodded toward the pilothouse, at Thea's slim shadow, visible within. "Does she know? No, of course she does. She wasn't surprised to see you shift on the dock." He looked at Mace curiously. "Do gargoyles have mates?"
"We do," Mace said. "But before you ask, it's not like it is for shifters. We don't know immediately. So no, I don't know yet if she's mine or not."
"When do you find out?" Tor asked.
"When we fall in love."
It was strange to think that he didn't love Thea already. If not for the confirmation of the mate bond, or rather its lack, he would have said that he did.
Because he did love her. He loved her intelligence and bravery, her tenacity and her infectious enthusiasm. He loved her stormcloud eyes and the freckles sprayed lightly across her nose and scattered even more lightly everywhere else, like a treasure hunt.
But it was a warm, sweet love, a love for a friend. It had not yet blossomed into a white-hot forest fire.
He didn't want to walk away from her, not ever. But he could have without destroying himself. And maybe that was why the mate bond hadn't torched off yet. Because he was not yet completely gone. But if he stayed with her, which he had every intention of doing, he could see that he was going to be.
Or maybe she's not the one.
But he didn't believe that, not anymore.
They traveled across the dark waves for a while. Tor went back into the pilothouse, and Thea came out. She and Mace stood at the railing, keeping an eye on Javic but far enough away to talk quietly without being overheard.
Thea filled him in on what Stieg had told her about the island. "This really might be it, Mace. Or at least it's more of a lead than we've found so far."
Mace laughed quietly. "See? This is why I needed you. It was right under my nose the entire time. I just didn't ask the right questions to the right people."
"Now you're making me sound like a mafia don." Deepening her voice, she muttered, "I'll make you an offer you can't refuse."
Her Brando impression was absolute terrible. It was also irresistible. If they hadn't had an audience—and an audience he definitely didn't want getting leverage over him, no less—he would have bent her backwards over the railing and kissed her until they were both out of breath.
Instead, he said, "You definitely did."
Thea gave him one of her unbearably cute little puzzled frowns, and then turned her attention on Javic, who was slumped against the wall of the pilothouse, head resting on his chest.
"Yeah," Mace said quietly. "I know. I don't like taking him there either, but we're sort of committed at this point, at least without finding somewhere else to put in along the coast. I really don't want to take him to Stonegarden."
"What would happen if you did?" she asked, her tone curious. "How does this protection magic work?"
"In theory I could take him there if he went with me. I'm not sure, though. It's powerful. No one who means harm to the residents of Stonegarden or the town can come near it. They can't portal in, they can't walk or drive in."
"Seriously? What happens if they try?"
"The way I understand it, they'd get disoriented and lost. Keep in mind, my people have been hiding for hundreds of years. If it wasn't the dragons trying to wipe us out, it was humans who feared and hated us. Protection magic is, after all, our area of expertise, and we got very good at it."
Thea shook her head. "I still can't get over the way that we're talking about magic, real magic, as if it's a perfectly normal everyday thing." She tapped her fingers on the railing. "Is it possible that no one found the medallion for all these years because of spells like that?"
"Maybe." Spells did tend to degrade over time. It was possible the island they were going to had been literally unfindable before the last few decades.
Abruptly the boat began to slow its rapid skipping across the water. The engine pitch changed to a low, deep thrumming, and the rolling of the waves became more noticeable. Javic stirred and raised his head.
Thea and Mace leaned over the railing, eager to see. Against the faintly luminous water on the open sea, the island was visible as a great dark mass, blotting out the sea and sky. Mace sucked in a breath, and then held it, as tumbled pillars of rock appeared with seeming suddenness out of the darkness around them, cast in the boat's running lights. They motored slowly past the sea stacks and into a sheltered cove. The boat's steady rolling lessened on the more placid waters.
They pulled in beside a ridge of stone projecting out into the bay. At first, in the dark, Mace thought it was a dock. Then he realized it was some kind of natural stone formation projecting fingerlike into the water, perhaps an ancient, toppled sea stack or a basalt ridge.
The boat nudged up next to it. Tor leaped nimbly ashore and began tying off the boat to a rusty metal ring hammered into the rock.
The engine died, taking the running
lights with it and leaving them in abrupt silence broken only by the lapping of the waves. It was very dark, and the stars were astonishingly bright overhead.
Thea came out of the cabin, feeling her way along. This made Mace remember that human night vision was less acute than the shifter equivalent. He could see adequately to make his way around, but Thea looked like she was almost blind.
Having a sudden, worried vision of Thea stepping off the side of the boat into the inky water, Mace leaped forward and started to put his hand on her shoulder.
Thea gave a cry and jerked around.
"It's just me," Mace said. He settled his hand lightly on her forearm.
Thea laughed nervously. "Sorry. It's just so ... dark."
"I can see. I'll keep you safe."
She moved her arm under his hand, sliding his grip down so that she could lace her fingers through his. "I know," she said simply.
Still holding Thea's hand, Mace got a grip on Javic and pulled him up. Interestingly, the magician didn't seem as blind as Thea was. He can see in the dark, too. Mace filed that away for future reference.
"Big step here," he said to Thea, and they stepped from the boat to the ridge of rock.
It was a strange formation, nearly flat on top, though parts of it had tilted and collapsed with age, so there were uneven sections and places where they would have to jump over cracks to get to shore. Still, it seemed very solid for its apparent age. Mace couldn't imagine what sort of geological processes had formed it; he had never seen anything like it before. Instinctively he reached into it to find out what kind of rock it was.
What he felt was completely unexpected.
"Someone take him," he said absently, thrusting his prisoner in the general direction of the polar bear shifters.
"What is it?" Thea asked quietly as Tor, grumbling, hustled Javic off toward the shore.
Mace went down to one knee, pressing his hand to the rock. "This stone has been shaped by gargoyles."
"You can tell that?"
"It's like the way you could sense the spell back at the house." Which reminded him that he wasn't the only one with magic-attuned senses. "Do you feel anything here?"
"I don't know. I'm not used to doing it on purpose." She was quiet for a moment, head bowed, fists clenched, obviously concentrating. Then she shook her head. "I don't know."
Mace was increasingly less sure himself, the longer he knelt here. It had the faint tingle of rock that had been changed by his people in the past, something he was very familiar with due to growing up in Stonegarden, where that sort of thing was everywhere. And yet, it felt very different from Stonegarden's familiar walls and statues. Maybe because of its age?
Someone had done something to this rock, long ago—he was sure of that. It was no coincidence that this rock formation was conveniently shaped like a dock, long and flat with deep water beside it. Someone had made it. But it didn't feel like the gargoyle-manipulated stone he was used to.
Some other kind of rock magic?
He extended his senses, feeling for other traces of that tantalizing, long-ago magic. The island was an ancient basalt extrusion, worn to its present shape by millennia of wave action. That part was straightforward. He had felt similar in many coastal places.
But the farther out he reached, the stranger things got.
There was an absence at the heart of the island. He had never felt anything like it before. He could read the rocks around them as normal, but then it just ... stopped. It was the same way that a wooden house or a steel office tower might have felt to him, a total absence of ability to read it, even more opaque to his senses than soil or concrete, which at least he could sense somewhat.
What is it? It's like something is blocking me.
He would never have found this on his own. He hadn't even realized the island was here, and with whatever was blocking his ability to read the local rock, he couldn't have sensed it even if he had somehow gotten close. At most, he might have felt those elusive, ancient traces of rock-shaping from nearby, but it wasn't strong enough to sense at a distance. He hadn't even noticed it until he had touched the pier.
I think we might have found what we were looking for, he thought, dazed with possibility.
Or, if not, then a much better clue than anything they had found elsewhere.
Thea gave a sudden cry and nearly fell off the stone pier into the water.
Mace spun around, claws extending, a growl gathering in his throat—and bumped into a stone flank.
"It just came up out of the rock," Thea gasped, pressing her hands to her chest. "Is that Gio? Please tell me that's Gio and not something else."
"It's Gio." Mace patted the stone lion's shoulder. "I guess he was following us underground. Nice to see you, friend."
Gio swiveled his head to look toward the main bulk of the island. His ears pricked forward and his stone tail lashed his flanks. If it was possible to read a statue's body language, he seemed nervous.
"There's definitely something here," Mace said quietly.
Thea stepped closer to him. "What kind of something? Are we talking, like—more cultists? Something else?"
"I have absolutely no idea what we're going to find here." Mace took out his flashlight and flicked it on. The small white beam seemed very tiny in the vast pelagic darkness around them. "And for that reason, I'd be a lot more comfortable exploring it by daylight."
By the time they reached the shore, firelight flickered through cracks in a small hut out of reach of the waves. The fisherman's shack was of much more recent vintage than the ancient stone pier ... and in far worse shape. When Mace opened the door, it fell off its hinges.
"Yeah, it did that to me too," Tor said from inside. "Just lean it back into place."
Mace glanced back for Gio, but the stone lion had vanished.
"He went into a boulder," Thea murmured. "I wish he'd stop doing that." She edged closer to Mace. "I know this doesn't sound very scientific of me, but this place is creepy."
Mace knew what she meant. That black-hole absence at the island's heart echoed in his senses. It was as if the island was hollow, with something unknown, something ancient and eldritch at its core.
It was worse in the dark. In the daylight, there would be wheeling seabirds and sunstruck waves, and no doubt gorgeous vistas of ancient stone. At night, though, the darkness felt ominous, a cloak behind which anything could hide.
At least the inside of the shack, though crude, was filled with homy, flickering firelight. The fire was burning in a crude hearth made of stacked stones, with Tor crouched in front of it, tending the flames. There was no furniture as such, but someone in the past had dragged a number of flat rocks into the cabin that served equal duty as benches or beds. Mace felt nothing magical from them; they were just ordinary rocks.
Stieg was digging into a couple of anachronistic-looking plastic totes with snap-on lids. "Aha," he said, shaking out a pair of canvas rain pants. "Got some blankets here too. We'll have a cozy night."
Javic sat against the wall. He rolled his shoulders to ease his tied arms, but seemed to be feeling a little better already now that they were off the boat. This worried Mace; if Javic got his powers back, he wasn't convinced they could keep him imprisoned.
"The two of you should probably go back," Mace said to the polar bear shifters. "There's no need for you to spend the night out here with us."
Tor shook his head. "Safer and easier to just stay moored overnight and go home in the morning. We've got some food from the boat, and Dad's little stash of survival supplies."
"Ah, the crown jewel of the collection," Stieg declared, brandishing a whiskey bottle.
Tor tossed him a tin can with a torn paper label. "Make yourself useful and open some cans."
Thea looked around uncertainly, and then seemed to steel herself and marched over to Tor and the fire. "May I?" she said, kneeling down. "You're going to asphyxiate us all, the way you've got that stacked up. Here, if you don't mind ..."
&n
bsp; She began rearranging the pieces of smoldering driftwood. Tor leaned out of the way with a grin.
"Hey, Mace, your girlfriend knows her way around a campfire!"
"I'm used to camping out at dig sites," Thea explained, poking at the flames. "Best-case scenario, you get to stay in a hotel or at least a pretty decent base camp, but tents and pit toilets are not unfamiliar."
"How do you feel about canned beans?"
"Pork and beans, or Bush's?"
Since Thea seemed to be unexpectedly in her element, Mace went and crouched beside the hostage. "Having problems?" he asked mildly, as Javic rolled his shoulders again to ease the strain on his arms.
"I'm not going to be very useful to you if my hands fall off from lack of circulation."
Mace sighed, but he untied Javic's hands and retied them in front, watching carefully the whole time for any signs of magic or attempts to escape. There were none, and Javic still looked pale and weak, which definitely did not mean he wasn't up to something.
"How does your magic work, anyway?" he asked. "You have to draw runes on things? Or gesture?"
"I think you'll have to trade some information if you want to get any," Javic said. "Why this island?"
"Because it's far away from anywhere and there's a place to spend the night."
"And that's the only reason."
"I gave you information; do I get anything in return?"
Javic regarded him levelly. It was plain that nothing useful was forthcoming. Mace went to see how dinner was coming along.
It was actually a much better meal than beans heated in a can over a campfire. Stieg brought out a battered tin saucepan and a coffeepot, and the boat's food supply also included canned hash and freeze-dried potatoes, as well as assorted spices. They were soon enjoying a hot, filling pottage eaten off tin plates, with bottled water and, for those who wanted it, slightly gritty boiled coffee.
Thea accepted a dash of whiskey in her coffee from Stieg's bottle. Mace went for straight coffee, especially when he noticed Javic wasn't drinking either.
Mace had no intention of sleeping tonight.
But it was peaceful, and even sort of comfortable. The fire warmed the little cabin despite the chilly sea breeze blowing in through the numerous cracks in the warped slats of its walls. Mace sat on a rock bench near the fire and leaned back against the wall, casually sipping a metal camp cup of Tor's awful coffee while idly listening to the others chat. Javic actually looked like he'd fallen asleep, though Mace didn't trust it for a minute. Stieg was drowsing on his bench, but all of a sudden he woke up with a snort and sat upright.