Stoneskin Dragon (Stone Shifters Book 1)

by Zoe Chant

  "What did they do to—" he began.

  "Talk later! Go, go!"

  The doors had been shattered when Black Robe and his stoneskins broke in. Gritting his teeth against the pain, Reive wrapped his bad arm around Jess's waist and swept her up on the run. He lifted her bare feet over the broken glass, running a few steps before putting her down again—half dropping her as she slipped from the unresponsive fingers on that hand.

  "Wow, you're strong," Jess gasped.

  He was more impressed with her. She was easily keeping up with him as he ran at full speed, which he'd thought was impossible for humans. The injury on his arm must be slowing him down more than he'd thought.

  Late afternoon sun gleamed through the trees lining the road. The parking lot was empty. They had to get out of sight—behind the neighboring houses, maybe. It was the only available cover. Maybe he could split up from Jess again, after finding her a place to hide—

  But he wasn't fast enough. His muscles locked up again; he was arrested in mid-stride before he reached the sidewalk. Jess ran on for a few steps before noticing that he was no longer with her.

  "Reive?" She ran back to him and tugged on his sleeve. "What's wrong? Reive!"

  She got a grip on him—the bad arm, unfortunately, because it was the one he didn't have wrapped around the book. He gasped through his teeth when she pulled on him. "Sorry, sorry!" she gasped out, but she kept hold of him and pulled. His feet jolted on the pavement as she bodily dragged him forward.

  "Take the book and go," Reive gritted out through teeth frozen in a locked position. At least he could still breathe.

  "The book? Who cares about the book?" Jess demanded as she pulled on him desperately.

  Under normal circumstances he would have agreed with her, but this book held his only hope of a cure. He'd happily forget about the book if she would just go, book or not, but she showed no signs of doing that.

  "Okay, game's over," Black Robe said from somewhere behind him. Facing the street, Reive couldn't see him. "I don't know how you know about the book, but just give it to me."

  The invisible wires started dragging him backward, and at the same time they heated up. The pain was enough to sear his skin.

  Jess felt it too. She let go in surprise, and he was yanked backward a few feet before she lunged and grabbed him.

  "Oh no you don't," she ground out. She wrapped both arms around him and pulled.

  She was astonishingly strong, for a human. He hadn't realized humans could be that strong. Could she be some kind of shifter? She wasn't a dragon—he would almost certainly have known—but she might be something else, an ordinary, non-mythic shifter. It would explain the torn clothing as well.

  He could feel the strength of the invisible wires dragging at him, but Jess was slowly and steadily winning the tug of war. His feet scraped forward over the pavement as she planted each bare foot and dragged him one step at a time.

  But this wasn't going to get them out of here nearly fast enough. If she was a shifter, shifting in front of her shouldn't matter.

  "Jess," Reive got out, "I'm about to do something. Just ... don't let go, okay?"

  "What?" Jess asked breathlessly.

  Reive shifted.

  For once, it went off without a hitch. His dragon uncoiled from inside him, huge and gleaming in the sun. As a dragon, he was the same warm brown-gold color as a polished copper kettle, with red stripes down both his sides and huge wings spreading above him.

  The invisible bindings disintegrated, shredding as Reive's dragon burst out of him. They had been meant to contain a weak human, not something like him. He was free to move again.

  And he was also still holding the book, clutched in one claw. His clothes had gone with him into the shift, but it was always tricky to take a new object; it required concentration that he just didn't have at the moment. It would have been nice to have the book safely tucked away in whatever pocket dimension his clothes went into.

  The stone mottling was visible in his dragon form, a moldy-looking gray patchwork all over his right front leg. But it was slightly easier to move his leg as a dragon than as a human. He wrapped that leg around Jess's body. Her arms had dropped away from him when he shifted, her face a picture of shock. Holding Jess with one foreleg and the book with the other, he took off with a hard downbeat of his wings. Jess gasped and clung to him.

  He was flying in daylight in a populated area. Uncle Heikon, his clanlord, was going to kill him.

  Suddenly it felt like there was a powerful weight dragging him down, like he was hooked to an anchor and he had just hit the end of the anchor rope. Reive beat his wings vigorously and looked down.

  Black Robe was a small shape in the parking lot, holding both hands up in a rope-gripping motion. Reive felt that hot-wire sensation around his back legs. Down below, wisps of smoke curled up from Black Robe's clothing, and the glow of the runes was visible even from up here.

  Reive, frantically beating his wings, was dragged slowly backward. The tether became faintly visible as he fought against it, a faintly glowing rope of fire wound around his back legs and tangled up in Black Robe's hands.

  Damn it. Damn it. There was only one thing he could think of to create enough of a distraction to give them a chance to escape. He didn't want to. But if Black Robe kept pulling, they were going to fall.

  He had wings. Jess didn't.

  If they fell, she would die.

  Damn it.

  He opened his claws and let the book, and the possible cure it contained, slip through his fingers and fall, tumbling in the sun. Some of the pages came loose as it fell, fluttering in all directions.

  Jess gave a little cry, as if the disintegration of the book physically pained her.

  Reive had only meant to throw it at Black Robe, giving them a chance to get away, but then the book hit the glowing tether and abruptly burst into flames.

  The tractor-beam pull instantly vanished, as suddenly as a snapping rubber band. Black Robe and his stoneskins scrambled for flaming pieces of the book, and Reive, beating his wings vigorously, soared over the mix of trees and small houses below, putting as much distance between himself and the library as possible.

  People stared up at him. Oh well, sometimes you had to do what you had to do. As long as he kept moving fast, nobody would have time for a cell phone picture. He'd be just another cryptid.

  "Is there anywhere nearby we can hide?" he asked.

  Jess yelped when he spoke aloud.

  "There—uh—my house?" she gasped out. "It's about a mile from the library. It, uh—wow, things look different from up here, I haven't seen it like this in the dayl—er—Oh, turn right at that gas station on the corner! Up that little street there. It's the yellow house."

  It was a two-story house with a pocket-sized backyard. Reive aimed for the backyard on the general principle that he'd be less obvious shifting behind a fence, but he hadn't accounted for the backyard's small size. He crash-landed on top of several flowerbeds and a patio chair. His spilling copper coils filled the entire backyard from one fence to another.

  Carefully, he set Jess down on one of the few patches of lawn not covered with dragon, and shifted back.

  "Sorry," he said.

  "Sorry?" she echoed, staring up at him with round brown eyes and the rags of her cardigan clutched around her.

  "For, uh. Breaking your garden. And your library. And your book."

  "Hush," she interrupted, grabbing his arm. Unfortunately it was his bad arm; he tried to suppress a wince. "It's okay. Don't worry about it. Let's just get inside."

  She's got to be some kind of shifter, he thought as he followed her to the back door. She was taking this much too well not to have at least some idea that shifters existed.

  What did she turn into? Something beautiful, he thought. Something graceful and serene. A crane, maybe; a gazelle; a cat.

  Jess unlocked the back door, let them in, and locked it quickly behind them. "I only rent the downstairs," she explain
ed, "but my upstairs neighbor is a waitress, and she's at her afternoon shift right now. So, uh, I guess I'm just going to grab something to put on," and with that she fled into a bedroom off the back hall and hastily closed the door, leaving Reive standing by himself in her house.

  "Tiny and cute" were the words that came to mind. It was a comfortable little place, with a neat kitchen, shelves stuffed with books, and plants on the windowsills.

  None of which would provide the slightest amount of protection if a stoneskin crashed through the wall.

  Will they come after us?

  Honestly, he doubted it. At least not immediately. The book was what they wanted. To find Reive, they would have to search house to house, and why would they even want to?

  His hand and arm hurt so brutally that it was difficult to think. He cursed under his breath and pulled up his sleeve to see how much worse the combination of shifting and gargoyle exposure had made his illness.

  It didn't look quite as bad as it felt, but the spread of the stone was noticeably more extensive than it had been at the library. His upper arm was almost entirely stone now, which was actually kind of a relief because now it didn't hurt as much. But it also made it harder to move the entire arm, and the whole thing felt heavy.

  The patches on his wrist and the back of his hand had spread almost all the way down to his fingers. Until today, he could cover it with his sleeve as long as he was careful, but now he was going to have to keep his glove on all the time.

  As he buttoned up his sleeve, his thoughts turned to Jess. Occasional muffled rustling and thumps came from her bedroom. He tried not to think about Jess, naked. She has been so warm and nice, pressed against him when he'd flown her here.

  The thought of the gargoyles attacking her infuriated him. Inside him, his dragon's molten rage added to his own. We shouldn't have run away. We should go back, shatter them, tear them apart—

  We didn't run, Reive retorted, once again finding himself in the role of the voice of reason versus his animal instincts. We got the lady to a safe place.

  She'll never be safe as long as those creatures are out there!

  His dragon was right about that. Reive pulled his glove over his stiff fingers, and a brand-new horrible thought occurred to him.

  Jess.

  The gargoyles had attacked her, torn her clothes.

  What if they'd bitten her, or otherwise poisoned her, the way he'd been poisoned?

  She wouldn't even know to look for it, he thought in horror. It had taken weeks for the stone patches to start showing up on him. He'd felt the poison immediately, and she didn't act like she was hurt, but maybe she just got a scratch. He had no idea how common it was for gargoyles to be able to poison people that way.

  Now frantic, he hurried to the door of her room, and banged on it.

  Jess

  As soon as the bedroom door closed behind her, Jess dropped the shredded remains of the cardigan that she'd been trying to clutch across what little modesty she had left, and also incidentally to hide any parts of her that might not have changed back completely. She stepped out of the skirt, still intact but covered with rock dust. She really could have used a shower, but instead she hastily threw on fresh clothes grabbed at random, a sweater and a clean skirt.

  Then she pawed through the mess in the bottom of the closet for her beat-up old suitcase, a thrift-store thing with flowers on it, and threw it on the bed. She began flinging clothes into it, hardly paying attention to what she was putting in.

  She had to get out of here. If they could track her, they'd be here any minute.

  There was a sudden knock at the door. She jumped, dropping a handful of socks.

  "Jess?" Reive said through the door.

  "Just a minute!" She pawed items off the dresser into the suitcase. Where was her passport? Fortunately she had one, obtained for a trip to a librarian's conference in Toronto a couple of years ago. It was the only time she'd ever been out of the country.

  Canada sounded pretty good right now. Or maybe somewhere farther away. Australia, say. She'd always wanted to visit Australia. Or Singapore. Malaysia. Anywhere.

  Reive knocked again, louder. "Jess, I'm sorry, but it's important."

  "Is it gargoyles?" she yelled, flinging a handful of hair ties into the suitcase. What else was she going to need in Canaustraliapore? Her shampoo—no, wait, you couldn't fly with large bottles of shampoo; wasn't that a thing? Damn. Maybe she could put some in a little bottle. It had taken her years to find a shampoo that left her thick, unmanageable hair anything other than a frizzy tangle.

  "It's, uh, no, it's ... can you come out here so I can explain?"

  "Just a minute!" She stared at the mess of shoes on the closet floor and shook her head. She wasn't going to need dress shoes where she was going. Instead she pulled on her hiking boots. Those were probably the best general, all-purpose footwear she owned, if she could avoid destroying them the next time she transformed.

  Hmm, come to think of it, maybe a spare pair of shoes wouldn't hurt. She threw a pair of black flats into the overflowing heap spilling out of the suitcase.

  And what on earth was she going to do about Reive? He was a very nice man. A very handsome man. She would love to get to know him better. Just, not right now.

  "Jess, I really need to talk to you about this," Reive said through the door.

  What was she thinking? He was a dragon. Well, if gargoyles were real, why not dragons? As well as magical weirdos in black robes. Why the hell not. As a dragon, Reive could obviously take care of himself. Maybe she should ask him to run away with her to Singcanaustralaysia.

  "Jess—"

  "Yes, I'm coming!" she snapped. She yanked the door open, and found herself face to face with Reive.

  He was tall enough that she had to look up slightly to meet his amber eyes, clouded now with worry. Those eyes took her breath away. She tried to scrape together the tattered remains of her sense of purpose, the way she had clutched her ruined cardigan around herself.

  "Yes, what? I'm in kind of a hurry here—"

  "I need to check you for gargoyle bites," Reive said.

  Jess stared at him. "That had better not be the world's worst pickup line."

  Reive blinked, and a very flattering flush rose to his bronze skin. "I, uh, no. No, I mean, it doesn't have to be me, but you'd better. Even a scratch could do it."

  "Do what?" Her voice rose with frustration. Every minute counted, and he was wasting her time babbling about gargoyle bites?

  "They can poison you and turn you to stone," Reive explained.

  Her irritation faded away. She stared at him in shock. "They can what?"

  "It—it happened to a friend of mine." He didn't seem to want to meet her eyes.

  "Oh." She couldn't think of anything else to say. Guilt choked her. "Oh, no. I'm so sorry."

  "But that's why you have to check yourself carefully for scratches or scrapes. I don't think all of them can do it, because I, er, I have other friends who have fought gargoyles before—"

  "Dragon friends?"

  "Yes, look, we can talk about that in a minute, but anyway, I'm not sure how much it takes, or how easy it is to get poisoned that way. So you need to check yourself over carefully and make sure they didn't hurt you."

  "I'm fine, I swear," Jess said. A half-hysterical laugh bubbled up in her chest. If he only knew how impossible it was. She could turn to stone and back very easily.

  But ... what if that was what had happened to her in the first place? She didn't remember her parents; she only knew that she had been abandoned as a baby. The first time her claws had come out, she was very young. She barely remembered it; she'd accidentally torn a doll in half, in a group care home. They had punished her harshly for it, thinking she'd done it on purpose; she hastily turned her mind away from the painful memory. Anyway, she had been like that ever since she could remember, so she'd just assumed she was born that way.

  But what if she had been born a normal baby, and was poisoned
as an infant?

  Did that make it more or less likely that there was a cure for her?

  What if I could do this to anyone I touch, hurt them terribly, just by scratching them ...

  "I'm sure that I'm fine," she said to cover her inner turmoil. "I just changed clothes, and I would have noticed if there were any scratches or scrapes."

  She turned away before he could see her face. There were tears trying to well up. She blinked them fiercely back.

  "Are you packing?" Reive said, having finally noticed the suitcase.

  "I ..." There was no way she could explain why she needed to suddenly flee town without also explaining the gargoyle thing. "I ... I was thinking they might also be going after the other half of the book." Which she now realized was actually quite likely. They really did seem to want that book. What if they had located both parts of it?

  And if she was going to get there before that black-robed weirdo and his gargoyles, she had to get moving. This half of the book had been a complete wash, but there was a possibility the other half might hold the information she needed: how to turn herself fully human and stop this stone-monster nonsense.

  Reive brightened. "Yeah, you said you know where the other half of the book is, didn't you? In Italy?"

  "That's right. I thought I had all the time in the world to get it. Now I have to hurry."

  "I'll go with you," Reive said.

  "What? No!" The last thing she wanted was to accidentally scratch him and hurt him. Not to mention put him in danger if the gargoyles really were after her.

  "In fact, you shouldn't go at all," he went on. "Just tell me where the book is, and I can go find it. You should stay here where it's safe."

  "Where gargoyles and some weirdo in a black robe just attacked my library, and a dragon saved me?"

  This time the hysterical laugh did actually burst out of her. She leaned a hand against the wall, laughing helplessly. At least it was better than crying.

  "Are you—uh—" Reive looked desperately uncomfortable. "... okay?"

  "No!" she gasped between fits of giggles. It wasn't even that funny, it was just that she had to do something with all these emotions. "Did you see that guy? He looked like he escaped from a LARP event. What was that, even?"