by Zoe Chant
She had never used them as weapons before. But without hesitation, she lashed out at the rearmost of the gargoyles, gouging deep into his back.
It was always a strange feeling digging her claws into rock—not painful exactly, but like digging her fingernails into something tough but not hard enough to bend her fingernails backwards. Like raking her fingers through hard-packed dirt, maybe.
Chips splintered around her claws. These creatures really were made of stone!
But then, so was she, now.
At least her hands were.
Reive and the other gargoyle had already vanished deeper into the library, but her target stumbled to a stop and turned around.
Strangely, she felt her fear fade away. She was no longer a terrified child. And now that she didn't have to worry about Reive seeing her monster form anymore, there was no need to hold back.
Her shirt split up the back, and her wings unfolded from beneath it. Her shoulders humped up and tore through what was left of her shirt and cardigan. Her clawed hind feet tore apart her shoes. The only thing that wasn't a casualty was her skirt; it was loose enough to expand around her thicker, more muscular thighs. That was one of the reasons she preferred wearing skirts, especially long, loose skirts.
She could feel her face changing too. This was the part she hated most, the feeling of her teeth turning into jutting fangs, her hair rearranging, her ears growing.
But for once, it wasn't horrible, because she wanted to be scary. She wanted to be ugly. She wanted these things, these creatures, to know she was just like them. If they were terrible and frightening, so was she.
I'm not a little girl anymore. It's your turn to be afraid of ME.
She let out a primal scream of fury and slashed at the creature with her claws.
Her claws bit deep into its arms and chest. It seemed to feel no pain, and there was no blood, although there was a faint red glow in the deep gashes she dug, like distant lava bleeding out of dull gray rock.
She also knew, instantly and instinctively, what kind of rock it was made out of.
Shale, her instincts told her. She clawed again, gouging out great handfuls of stone. Shale and sandstone. Local rock.
Pieces of stone, some as big as her head, crunched to the floor. It looked like bites had been taken out of the monster's great arms and shoulders.
It finally made some kind of decision on what to do with her. A big, crudely-made stone paw swept at her head, slow-moving but inexorable. Jess ducked. The monster might be slow, and dumb as a—ha—rock, but it was bigger and heavier than she was. A blow like that could have broken her neck.
She lashed out again, leaping to slash at its face. Her claws peeled off chunks of stone and scored across one of its eyes.
Behind the banked-coal glow of the eyes, there was only more stone. It was stone all the way down, she thought—they really were just big statues. Feeling bolder, and less afraid of killing an innocent creature that was only doing what it was told, Jess clawed its face again and raked her claws down its torso.
Sandstone. Mudstone. ... Fire?
Even though it was made entirely of stone, there was still something inside. Her senses told her so. She had never felt anything like it before.
There's fire inside this thing! How?
She clawed again, peeling off slabs of rock. Using her wings for leverage, she lashed out with her big hind feet and kicked it in the chest, knocking off more pieces. Marion was going to be so confused to come in and find big piles of stone and gravel all over the library. Of course, the whole library was going to be a wreck if they didn't stop these things.
Rock, sandstone, shale. Fire.
Its torso cracked open and fire blazed out.
Jess stumbled backward, throwing her arm over her face. It wasn't hot, she realized a second later. It was heatless light, the same red-orange as a banked campfire.
And the gargoyle crumbled.
Its arms came off; its head came off. Pieces of gargoyle rolled under the shelves and bounced off nearby books.
For an instant, the dull red glow flashed all over the shattered pieces, seeming to form runes or glyphs that looked strangely familiar. Then it faded, and she was left with nothing but what looked like the pieces of a broken-up statue.
Jess cautiously prodded at one of the legs. It didn't move or even twitch. Whatever vitality had animated it was gone.
Is there something like that inside ... me?
A yell from somewhere near the front of the library drew her attention away from her worried contemplation of the broken statue. Jess growled, her lips pulling back from her fangs.
At least now she knew the things could be killed. Or destroyed. Whatever. And Reive was still in danger.
She jumped, caught hold of the top of the nearest shelf, and pulled herself up to the top. There was just enough space between the top of the bookshelf and the ceiling that she could crouch there, with her wings folded tightly against her back.
From here she had a good overview of about a half-dozen gargoyles systematically working their way along the bookshelves, stripping the books from the shelves and leaving a trail of disordered heaps of books behind. Jess growled again. It was going to take weeks to fix all of this, and that was even aside from the property destruction, or the books that were being crushed and destroyed as the gargoyles tramped over them with their big lumpy feet.
Two competing urges tore at her.
One: find Reive and make sure he was okay. He was only a human; he didn't know what he was getting into.
Two: stay far away from Reive so that he would be safe.
Loud crashing from up front decided her. Whatever was going on, if Reive was involved, she couldn't stay away.
Reive
When Reive left Jess, he went at a mad run, spurred by the rhythmic crash of gargoyle feet pounding along behind him.
Well, he wanted them after him, and he got it, all right.
He had learned in his earlier encounters with gargoyles that there were two different kinds. There were gargoyle shifters, who were just like any other kind of shifter, human-looking in their regular bodies, with a stony winged form they shifted into.
But these were the other kind, called stoneskins.
They weren't alive as such. They were constructs made out of stone and animated by the gargoyle who created them. Because of their mindlessly obedient nature, they usually weren't dispatched on long-distance missions alone; they had little independent decision-making ability. They just followed orders. Therefore, their creators usually stayed close to them.
Which meant their gargoyle master was somewhere nearby.
There was little room to shift here, even if Reive had been confident that he could shift on command. Also, he didn't want to destroy even more of Jess's library. The thought of her upset face when she saw the gargoyles destroying bookshelves kept coming back to haunt him.
There was more room in the lobby, where the circulation desk was. He could try to shift there.
He sprinted in the direction of the lobby, and nearly ran into another gargoyle coming the other way. He was now trapped between them, outnumbered three to one.
Or—wait—two to one? There was only one of them behind him. Was the other one going after Jess? Pure fury surged through him, and suddenly the most important thing was taking out both of these creatures so he could go find out what had happened to her.
Still reluctant to shift, he caught hold of the nearest bookshelf and used shifter strength to pull down on the top shelf, tilting it ponderously inward toward the aisle. He felt it start to go on its own, and ducked hastily. Books rained down on him as the shelf tipped forward, and then accelerated, and crashed into the one next to it.
The two stoneskins, coming toward him from opposite ends of the aisle, could easily have ducked if they'd had the ability to think on their own, although their relatively large and ponderous size put them at a disadvantage. But instead, they didn't seem to notice the tilting books
helf until it hit them, smashing their heads and torsos into the shelf on the other side of the aisle.
Reive didn't have a chance to get a good look because he was too busy shielding his head from a bruising rain of books, but he caught a glimpse of the shelves pulverizing the stoneskins' massive but relatively brittle bodies. They weren't fragile, exactly, but as glommed-together constructs of stone, they could be easily broken.
And maybe it was just a trick of his eyes, but they seemed to flash red all over before disintegrating into a shower of rock chunks.
That was new. But then again, gargoyles were different. The stoneskins he'd fought before didn't have glowing eyes, either.
When books and pieces of rock stopped falling, Reive pushed on the bookcase and tilted it upright again. He straightened up and looked around him at the wreckage. The air was full of rock dust, and the gargoyles had done as much damage to the bookshelves as the shelves had done to them. The entire aisle was knee-deep in books and pieces of gargoyle. Both sets of legs still stood, like an ancient sculpture shattered from the knees up.
He desperately wanted to go find Jess and make sure she was all right. But he had no idea where she was now, whereas he did know where the book was. If she had run for the emergency exit, she would even now be clear of the building and safely away from everything happening here. He had to trust that she had done that. If they really were after the book—and he couldn't think what else it could be, since they didn't seem to be after him, specifically—he could use it to lead them away from the library, and Jess.
He scrambled past the macabre gargoyle legs and sprinted for the storeroom with the book in it, only to come to a skidding halt in the lobby. The sight that greeted him was so bizarre that all he could do for a minute was stare.
There were a few more stoneskins, just standing around. The focus of their attention was a figure in a long black robe. The robe even had a hood, fallen forward to hide its owner's face. The person looked like they had stepped out of a B-movie about demon-summoning cultists.
And the black-robed cultist was perched in a cheap plastic chair, sitting at a library terminal, typing and muttering under his or her breath.
Reive shook himself out of his incredulous staring. He crept closer, using the stacks for cover. His arm burned and itched. He fought to keep from scratching it.
As he got closer, Reive was able to decipher the annoyed muttering. The black-robed cultist's voice was male.
"Come on, what the hell is it filed under? This is insane. It's got to be in one of the architectural categories ... 'Landscape design of cemeteries'—why are there so many of these? Couldn't there just be a 'gargoyles' category?" More annoyed typing and muttering. "Did it have to be Dewey Decimal?"
He was definitely looking for the book. And he hadn't found it yet. If Reive could just slip around him and get to the storeroom, he could grab it and make it out the back.
Then the stranger grunted and looked up, straight at the shadowed corner behind the circulation desk that Reive had just ducked into. His face was still shaded by the hood, but Reive caught the flash of paler skin.
"Who's there?" Black Robe said sharply.
Reive hissed out a quiet breath through his teeth. His arm hurt sharply, tingling all the way up to the shoulder. It felt like a thousand bees were stinging him. Was it possible gargoyles could now sense him, the same way he seemed to be alert to their presence?
Great. That's all I need.
Black Robe turned to the stoneskin standing at attention beside his chair and reached out. His hand was ungloved, with long pale fingers. He touched the lumpy stone body and stroked two fingers across its rough surface.
It seemed to Reive that he saw a glowing trail in the wake of those fingers. The cultist, or whatever he was, swiftly traced an odd, complex sigil, visible briefly as a dull red glow, as if the stone had been heated, before fading back to the dull gray of ordinary rock. The creature's eyes flashed a brighter red and then returned to their previous banked-coal glow.
What the heck was that? Reive had never seen a stoneskin being created, so he wasn't sure if that was a normal part of the process of animating them, but he'd also never seen anything like it with any of the others that he'd fought before.
And yet ... there was something oddly familiar about that symbol, like he'd seen it before, recently.
Black Robe turned and repeated the process on another one. Since he was watching for it now, Reive got a better look at it—the fiery sigil, the flash of its eyes. And this time he recognized the symbol, not specifically, but its general style.
It was like the alchemical symbols in Jess's book.
"Find whoever is hiding over there, and bring them to me," Black Robe said, and the stoneskins lurched forward, directly toward Reive's hiding place.
Uh-oh.
There was nowhere to go from here without being seen. He didn't want to lead Black Robe to the book, but he didn't really see that he had a choice; they were going to find it sooner or later if they kept searching. He and Jess had just left it out on the table in the storeroom.
Unlike some that he'd seen before, none of these stoneskins had wings. They also weren't especially fast in general. Maybe he could grab the book and outdistance them in the air as a dragon.
Reive tensed, got ready, and then bolted from his hiding place, legs striking out like a spring uncoiling.
Behind him, he heard Black Robe yell, "Get him!"
He dashed into the storeroom and snatched up the book. Then he skidded to a halt, realizing that he'd trapped himself. He hadn't thought this part of the plan through.
The stoneskins loomed in the doorway. As a dragon, he could easily have torn right through them, but his shifting had become incredibly unreliable. The last thing he needed was to get stuck halfway in the middle of a shift.
Also, it occurred to him that, if possible, he wanted to keep Black Robe from finding out about his true nature for as long as he could. It never hurt to have a completely unexpected ace in the hole.
So he backed up behind the table, edging around it, trying to keep it between himself and the stoneskins. First they got jammed up in the doorway, and once they managed to clomp into the room, they didn't seem to know what they were doing. They kept running into things.
Even for stoneskins, these were badly made. They looked like poorly carved statues, crudely hacked out of stone or clay. Their fingers were clublike and incapable of picking up anything except by pawing at it.
It also turned out that big clumsy stone monsters weren't the best choice for retrieving anything from a confined space. They bumped into the table and the walls, knocking things off the shelves. The table seemed to confuse them deeply. They seemed to expect to be able to reach Reive, and yet the table kept blocking them.
Pushing forward, they shoved it against the far wall. Reive was nearly crushed against the wall, but scrambled on top of the table, clutching the book. He ran forward and dived between the two stoneskins, got his feet under him, and sprinted out the door.
And nearly ran into the black-robed cultist.
"Hi," Reive said, and hit him in the face with the book and ran for it.
Behind him, there was a lot of crunching and crashing as the stoneskins fought their way out of the storeroom without paying too much attention to the location of the door.
Running for all he was worth, dodging stoneskins, he made it almost all the way to the library's front doors before he was vaguely aware of Black Robe shouting something behind him and then he suddenly just—stopped. It was like he'd slammed into an invisible wall. His feet wouldn't move. His arms and legs wouldn't move either. He could still blink his eyes, but every other part of him was frozen in place.
His first horrified thought was that he'd been turned to stone.
But no, he could still feel his body: his fingers pressing into the book's plastic-wrapped cover, the pain in his arm, the pressure of his weight on the soles of his feet where he'd been frozen in mid-strid
e. He could feel something else too, a hot sensation on his skin, as if invisible, strangely heated wires were wrapped around him.
The invisible wires began to tighten. He was dragged slowly around to face the other way, like a puppet on strings.
Black Robe had his hands up, fingers curled like he actually was holding onto invisible ropes, and he was glowing.
No ... not precisely glowing. He had glowing tattoos. Or something similar. His long black robe had fallen open to reveal a bare chest, and his chest was glowing in twisting runic patterns, similar to the ones that he'd sketched onto the stoneskins. The glowing patterns continued on down his arms; Reive could dimly see them through the robe, like there was fire underneath the sleeves.
And it was hot, too. Smoke curled up in charred patterns from the robe's sleeves and shoulders.
The hood still covered most of Black Robe's face, but what Reive could see of it—the lower half, mostly—was twisted in deep concentration and, apparently, pain.
"I really liked this robe, too," Black Robe muttered between his teeth. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to find decent black robes these days? You can't exactly buy them off the rack at Target."
Reive stared—which, to be fair, was the only thing he actually could do at the moment.
"Get the book," Black Robe gritted out at the stoneskins.
They lurched forward toward Reive. He gathered himself for a shift.
"Hey!" Jess's voice yelled, and a large hardback book came flying out of nowhere and bonked into the side of Black Robe's head.
Black Robe staggered sideways with a yelp, and suddenly Reive could move again.
"Jess!" he yelled. "Door!"
"I see it!" Jess came charging out of the library stacks, running incredibly fast.
Reive saw in a moment of startled horror that somehow most of her clothes had been shredded. She was clutching the ragged remains of her cardigan around her shoulders. She still had her skirt, but her feet were bare. What was she doing, fighting them physically? His defensive instincts bristled, his dragon rising in fury.