by Zoe Chant
"Oh, hey, archaeology lady," Stieg said, interrupting Tor and Thea's casual chatting about the history of the town. "Those carved stones I was telling you about—this is one of them. Want to look?"
"What?" Thea asked, bolting upright. "Where? Wait, are you sitting on it?" Her voice rose in an outraged squeak.
Stieg shifted his bulk aside, and Thea bent over the flat slab of rock. "The light is terrible in here. Mace, do you have your flashlight handy?"
Mace leaned over her shoulder and she took it from his hand, flicking it on. The rock's surface was rough, a weathered slab of the same rock that made up the rest of the island.
"At least I think it's that one," Stieg said. He yawned.
"It's so hard to tell." Thea fumbled in her pocket, got out her reading glasses and perched them on her nose. She bent over until her hair brushed the rock, tilting the flashlight to light up the stone's rough surface at an angle. "Mace, do you feel anything?" she asked in a whisper.
Mace laid his hand against the side of the rock slab. He shook his head. "Just normal stone," he murmured. It was slightly metamorphic granitic basalt, but he didn't think she wanted that much detail.
"There's definitely something here." Thea traced her fingertip across the surface. "It's very badly weathered. If these are Norse runes, this could be a proper name—Ulfrik? Something like that. Where did this come from? What was its original context? Stieg?"
Stieg, who was falling back asleep sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, cracked an eye open. "Before my time. Looked flat and good for sitting on, I guess."
"Is this an actual Viking artifact?" Mace asked softly.
"I have no idea! It would be helpful if I could see where it came from. There are a lot of fake Norse runestones around North America and this could be one of them." She pulled out her cell phone and began taking pictures. "But it could be real." Snap, snap. Mace found her face fascinating, drawn into lines of concentration. "It's certainly not recent. This weathering is genuine."
She stood up abruptly. "I'm going to take a look around outside."
Mace scrambled to his feet. "I'll go with you."
Tor roused from where he was drowsing by the fire. "Be careful walking around in the dark. These kinds of places are treacherous. Lots of loose rocks and sinkholes."
"We're not going far." As Tor began to smirk, Mace pointed to Javic, apparently asleep. "Keep an eye on him while I'm gone."
He picked up the flashlight, and they went out into the night. Thea leaned back inside to grab her jacket.
The flashlight lit up a rough, pebbled beach as they walked away from the shack. A cool breeze off the ocean tugged at their hair. The boat bobbed at its mooring, rising and falling on slow waves.
"This would be a lot easier in the daylight," Mace said as Thea shone the light around.
"I know, I just can't bear to wait until morning when we could be standing on top of the biggest archaeological discovery of this century. You think so too, don't you? This island is the place we've been looking for."
Mace hesitated. "I think it might be."
"Do you feel the amulet here?"
"I can't feel anything," he said. "Which is very unusual. There's something here blocking me."
Thea turned to look at him. She was grinning. "Want to walk around a little, see what we can find? I know you do."
Mace huffed out a laugh. "You're a terrible influence. Tor's right, you know. Climbing around an unknown island in the dark is very dangerous."
"I'm not afraid," Thea said. "You're with me. You have wings. You won't let me fall."
Her faith punched him under the sternum, in a way that was both pleasant and frightening.
No one had trusted him like that since—
Since my sister went out in the world, and I didn't protect her, and she got herself killed and left behind a niece I didn't even know about until last year. And Gio ...
His track record at taking care of people wasn't that great.
But Thea trusted him. And he gathered that Thea didn't give her trust lightly. He took her hand.
"Just a little bit of exploring," he said, and Thea laughed, a throaty, delighted sound.
"Stieg told me there's a path leading inland from the beach," she said. "He told me that he'd show me tomorrow, but we might be able to find it tonight. Can you sense where it is? Or, no, wait, your rock thing doesn't work here."
"It's not that it doesn't work; it just doesn't work on the interior of the island." He touched a boulder and reached out, feeling his way around the local geography. As he did so, he began to feel more of those elusive tingles of long-ago rockwork. "I think it's up ahead just a little ways. Over here."
They picked their way up the rough beach, over giant slabs of long-fallen, broken rock. Mace was beginning to see the difficulty of figuring out where the runestone had come from. It could have been anywhere along here—or from somewhere else entirely.
"Mace, look," Thea said.
Her flashlight illuminated a narrow crack in the rocks, and in the crevice, a flight of badly cracked and weathered steps leading upward. They were uneven and might have been natural, but it took only the barest touch for Mace to recognize the old traces of magic calling to his own.
"This wasn't done with tools," he said. "Someone moved the rock aside to make this stair."
"Gargoyles?" Thea whispered.
"Or someone with powers like ours."
Thea hesitated a little before they started to carefully climb. The flashlight illuminated only a few paces ahead, and reflected off the narrow walls, which were so close on either side that Mace could have touched both sides with his elbows. He wasn't sure if he could shift here, at least not without displacing the rock around him.
It felt very defensible. He wondered if this island, whatever it was hiding, had been designed with attackers in mind.
"Thea," he said quietly. "If we run into anything up here, I might not have time to shift and fly. The safest place to go is into the ground."
"You can if you need to," Thea said. Her voice was very tight, and Mace slowed. He reached out a hand to touch her shoulder and felt her jerk.
"Thea? What's wrong?"
"I'm fine," she said stiffly.
"You're trembling. Did something frighten you?"
"I'm not afraid," Thea said, sounding deeply annoyed and more like herself. She pulled away from him. "I'm just—it's—oh look, we're almost to the top."
The last came out in a long, relieved gasp. The close stone walls opened up around them. They were on some sort of high, rocky tableland above the island. The wind was stronger here, more intense and cutting.
Thea promptly sat down on the ground. Mace crouched next to her.
"Are you okay?" he asked quietly.
This time she didn't pull away when he put an arm around her. He could feel her rapid breathing. She was rigid with tension.
"It's okay," Mace said, though it wasn't. He had no idea what had frightened her, or what was upsetting her now. "You're going to hyperventilate. Breathe with me, all right?" He placed a hand on her chest. Her heart was pounding. "In." He moved his hand slowly out from her chest. "Out." He lowered it again. "In ..."
After a few repetitions in which she gave stuttering little gasps, she was breathing in time with him. She raised a hand and closed it over his. Her fingers were cold.
After a few more slow breaths, she sucked in a deep, ragged lungful of air, and said fervently, "I hate this."
"What happened down there?"
Thea didn't answer for a moment. Then she said, "I felt so much better. I really thought I was getting over it, you know? I was excited about this. I felt like my old self, before—"
She broke off abruptly and raised a hand to rub her eyes.
"Thea?" The sudden buckling of her resistance worried him. She was so strong most of the time. He hadn't seen her like this since—
Since the panic attack she'd had when he took her underground.
Oh.
"Thea, did I cause this, talking about stonewalking with you? I swear I'll never do it without your permission. It's entirely up to you."
Thea drew a hitching breath, and let it out on a shaky laugh. "No, Mace, it's not you. I know you won't. I trust you. It's ..."
She balled up a fist and struck the rock by her thigh.
"It's that stupid staircase. I didn't think it would get to me. It wasn't even that closed-in. I haven't even been able to go in elevators since—"
She broke off again.
"Since what?" Mace asked gently.
Thea turned her head away. "You don't want to hear this."
"I do, if you want to tell me. I'm here and I'll listen." He glanced around at the high, lonely clifftop. "There's no one else around. It's just us. If you want me just to sit with you and hold you, I can do that too. But I'm here if you want to talk about it."
Thea huffed out a breath. Then she said abruptly, "All right. You know, I haven't talked to anyone about this, except the therapist I was seeing back in Toronto. My coworkers know some of it, because it was impossible for them not to, but I'm not used to talking to people about it."
"I'm listening."
There was a pause, broken only by the low roar of the surf and the wind moaning through the rocks at the top of the cliff. While Thea worked her way to whatever she wanted to talk about, Mace turned his head, listening to the sounds of the night. It was difficult to tell if they were alone up here. He focused his senses into the rock for a moment, but couldn't determine anything from it. They were too close to whatever it was in the island that was blocking his rock-sight.
Thea spoke up suddenly. "Do you know what rescue archaeology is?"
"I haven't heard of it," Mace said. "I'd assume from the name that it's something to do with saving people, or artifacts."
"Sort of. It mostly refers to surveying and removing artifacts before land is developed, like for a road or a housing development or that kind of thing.”
She paused again, and then went on, slowly at first and then with more confidence, as if she had pushed through some barrier inside her."Two years ago, I was doing rescue archaeology, working with a team affiliated with a university in Norway. We were excavating a Viking longboat ahead of a bridge construction project."
Her voice warmed, becoming more excited. "It was an amazing find, incredibly well-preserved. In an ideal world we could have left it in situ—that is, in place—and excavated it at our leisure, but the problem with rescue archaeology is always that you're racing a clock. The project can only stay on hold for so long. So we scrambled to get it out as quickly as possible, with as much of the surrounding material as we could get, cutting corners where we had to.
"The weather was terrible. It rained heavily throughout the excavation. We just covered everything with tarps and brought in pumps and did the best we could. But the entire area was badly saturated and unstable."
Her voice faltered. Mace stroked her shoulder.
"We pulled the largest intact part of the boat on a miserable, sodden afternoon following a solid week of rain. We'd already dug out a lot of the material around it, so the boat coming out left a hole in the riverbank. I was down there with two colleagues, shoring up the hole and supporting the boat so it wasn't damaged while it was lifted out. It was terribly dangerous and we shouldn't have been doing it like that, and we knew that, but we just didn't have time to wait for the weather to clear up or stabilize the bank more thoroughly. We were all wearing safety harnesses so we could be pulled out, and we thought that would be enough."
She stopped again. Mace said gently, "You don't have to go on if you don't want to."
"No. I want to talk about it. I've treated it like this shameful secret for a long time, but it really isn't. We did something stupid and I knew it was stupid at the time. It wasn't the first time I've been on a dig where corners were cut and risks were taken. It's just that we didn't beat the odds this time. You've probably guessed what happened. The hillside came down on us."
Mace clasped her hands in his. "You're here. You're okay."
"I know," she said with a hint of impatience. "The thing is—it wasn't—I mean, I wasn't buried for long. None of us were. It all happened so fast they couldn't do anything, and I was the only one whose head went under. They started pulling us out right away, then realized they couldn't, not without—um—damaging us, because of the suction and weight of the mud, so basically they had to dig us out. But they got down to me immediately and I just had to hold my breath for a little while. I just didn't know ..."
She trailed off, but Mace, imagining the scene, could guess how that sentence would have gone.
I didn't know how deep I was. I didn't know if anyone was coming.
I didn't know if I was going to die there.
"The average person can hold their breath for between thirty seconds and two minutes," Thea said after a moment. "They told me later that it was just a little over a minute before they were able to clear the mud away from my face and get oxygen to me. I was buried the deepest. No one else was even in over their waist; I was just unlucky enough to be knocked down when the mudslide hit us. But getting us out took hours. And the entire time we didn't know—none of us knew—if the hillside was going to slump again, and bury us along with the rescuers, or if the river was going to rise while we couldn't get out ..."
She stopped, and sat for a moment, composing herself. Mace gripped her hands and tried to think of something to say.
But all he could think of was how helpless she must have felt. There were many things he had learned about Thea by now, but one of the most important was how independent she was. Even worse than the physical danger must have been the feeling that she couldn't do anything about it. Whatever happened to her in that excavation pit was out of her hands, and that, he thought, was the single thing out of the whole experience that had been the most traumatic for her.
"In the end," Thea said at last, "I was fine; we all were. They warmed us up and we stayed overnight in the hospital and then I flew back to the States. I didn't realize, at first, how bad it was going to get. It actually wasn't that bad in the beginning. The first time I had a flashback was in an elevator weeks later. And every time I thought about going back out in the field, it was like a giant hand had closed around my chest. I could hardly breathe. I tried to—to deal with it with small steps, I mean, I'm not stupid, I knew I had a whole lot of trauma around the cave-in, but I figured I should be able to deal with it by working on some small-scale, open-trench digs around Toronto, and then slowly work my way up to regular fieldwork. There's no need to go crawling into cave systems and traipsing around catacombs right away, you know? But I couldn't even do that! Just being around a dig made me anxious. Getting down on my hands and knees with tools in the dirt—forget it. It didn't seem to matter that there was bright blue sky overhead and the pit I was digging in was no deeper than my waist. I just couldn't do it."
"What did you do?" Mace asked gently.
"Skipped a summer of fieldwork and went back to the university offices, was what I did. Most of us teach part of the year and fit in our research around our classes, so nobody was going to look a gift horse in the mouth if someone wanted to stay in all the time and teach other people's classes to give them more field time. But it also felt like, the longer I did that, the harder it was going to be to actually go out and get back to work."
Mace found himself smiling slightly, not at her story, but at her courage. "I'm amazed you didn't just kick me out of your office."
"Are you kidding? You were the most interesting thing that had happened to me in years. It would kill me to give up fieldwork forever, Mace. I just let myself stall out at a stage of my recovery because the recovery had started to hurt, which led to me avoiding anything that caused me pain or reminded me of what had happened to me. It's like knowing you need physical therapy to walk again, but staying in bed instead because the therapy is difficult and painful. The mor
e you lie around and let your muscles atrophy, the worse it's going to be when you finally do it."
"Still, having me drag you underground wasn't therapeutic. No wonder you reacted the way you did. I'm lucky you didn't strangle me."
"I probably would have if I hadn't been having a panic attack at the time," she said with a shaky laugh, and squeezed his hands. "You're right, it didn't help, but you've been great about it ever since, and honestly, I think just getting out of Toronto, getting back into the world, is doing me a lot of good. I thought I was doing better than I guess I am, until those cliff walls got to me."
"But you kept going," Mace pointed out. "I know it was hard, but you didn't collapse, and you didn't have a full-blown panic attack. You got yourself to the top of the hill."
"Huh," Thea said. "I guess I did, didn't I?"
"You did." He smoothed her hair back. "I can't imagine what you went through. But I really admire what you've done. It's—"
Mace broke off, staring at her.
"What?" she asked, eyes wide.
He couldn't speak for a moment.
The feeling that flooded through him was indescribable. It was the sun coming out from behind clouds after weeks of rain. It was a satisfying meal after days of hunger. It was finally being warm when you had only ever known cold.
He had never experienced it before, but he knew instantly what it was.
"Mace?" Her brows scrunched together. "What?"
"You're my mate," he breathed out.
"I'm your what?"
"My mate," he repeated.
He had known that gargoyles didn't recognize their mates until they fell in love; he was just unprepared for the impact of it. Shifters had it easy, but for his own imperfect, artificial kind of shifter, there was no shortcut, no easy path. They had to find their mates the hard way and learn to love them just like humans did. But then the moment would come, his parents had assured him, when you experienced the fullness of love that you could feel for another person—and you knew.