Stoneskin Dragon (Stone Shifters Book 1)

by Zoe Chant

  For a short yet endless while, they just held each other under the shower's hot cascade, wrapped up in each other. Finally Jess ran a slow hand down his wet back. "Feel like getting out of here, getting dressed, and seeing if we can find something to eat?"

  "That sounds amazing."

  At least the shower made cleaning up easy. They washed each other down one more time, and then stepped out onto the fluffy rug and toweled off. Or at least, Jess did. Reive watched her, unexpectedly captivated by the simplest things that she did. Then he began struggling with his towel. It was easier said than done, getting dry with only one working arm and the other frozen into place by his side, elbow slightly bent and fingers gently curled in a position he could never change.

  "Can I help?" Jess asked.

  With anyone else, he would have said no. With her, it was only the matter of a moment's struggle to bend his pride enough to nod.

  Jess took the towel and began working on him, ruffling his wet hair and rubbing down his back, careful of his bruises and the aching joins where stone met flesh. The pain had begun to return as soon as they broke apart, but now it receded again, and his knees wobbled slightly with relief.

  He couldn't just go through his life with Jess's warm body wrapped around him ... but right now he really wished he could.

  "How are you feeling?" Jess asked as she carefully dried his stone arm. "I don't think it looks like it's spread any more. Maybe it's slowing down."

  "Maybe," he said, but he could tell that it wasn't. The shortness of breath was less noticeable now that he was learning to cope with the tightness around his ribs by breathing shallowly, but it was still there. And, if his earlier experience was anything to go by, the advance of the petrification would only accelerate if he was staying in the home of a gargoyle. He wondered if Jess had thought of this yet.

  As if brought on by the thought, burning pain shivered up his nerve endings, and he flinched.

  "What is it?" Jess asked, pulling back. "Did I hurt you?"

  "It's not you. There are gargoyles around. Other ones, I mean, besides you." He twisted awkwardly to put himself between her and the bathroom door.

  There was a knock on the outer door of the bedroom, and the distant sound of the door opening. "Anyone hungry?" Mace's voice asked.

  Reive tensed. Jess looked less worried than aggravated. "No!" she yelled through the bathroom door. "I mean, yes! Please come back in five minutes!"

  Mace chuckled softly. "Will do. Five minutes it is. You found the clothes I left for you?"

  "Yes! Now please leave!"

  The outer door closed. They looked at each other and then Jess burst into giggles.

  Reive smiled, but he didn't feel particularly like laughing. It worried him that Jess seemed, in just a few hours, to have gone from viewing Mace as a stranger to treating him like some kind of older relative. He didn't trust Mace, and it worried him that she did.

  Mace was the first member of her kind that she'd met, he reminded himself. At least the first who wasn't trying to attack her. It was little surprise that she'd bonded quickly. And he didn't want to second-guess her; she had spent more time with Mace than he had.

  Still ... he was going to need to be suspicious enough for two. Because there was no telling what Mace really had planned.

  "I guess we should get dressed before Mace comes back," Jess said. She stifled another giggle behind her hand. Circumstances aside, Reive was glad to see her laugh. She seemed lighter, somehow. Happier than she had been since he'd met her.

  All the more reason to make sure this Mace guy didn't break her heart.

  We'll protect her, his dragon growled inside him. She's our mate.

  Their mate. His mate.

  And then reality crashed down on him fiercely, penetrating the warm haze of unaccustomed good feelings that had surrounded him ever since he'd awakened with Jess's warm body pressed to him.

  His mate.

  And he was going to die, and leave her alone.

  Shock and horror froze him where he stood.

  You didn't get over that. Nobody got over that.

  He had no right to do that to her. And he had no idea what to do about it. There was nothing to do about it.

  Except not die.

  Which might be out of his control.

  Jess, who had started to turn to leave the bathroom, turned back as if she'd sensed his turmoil. Perhaps she had; mates generally had a sixth sense for each other's emotional state. "Reive, what's wrong? Are you hurting?"

  He was, ever since Mace's proximity had sparked a fresh wave of pain in his arm and shoulder, but his body wasn't where most of the pain was coming from.

  He'd finally found his mate. And he was about to deal her an injury that would never heal.

  So we can't die, his dragon said. It was far closer to the forefront of his mind than it had been in months. When it had come forward for Jess, it hadn't gone back down, which was probably contributing to the amount of energy he currently had.

  It might not be up to us, he replied in his head.

  We will simply have to make it be so.

  You couldn't really argue with your inner animal. At least it was hard to. It was your instinctive side, the part of you that was sure enough to overcome the doubts of your conscious mind. As he had said to Jess, it was the part that just knew things.

  Wish I was as sure as you are, dragon side of me.

  "Reive?" Jess said again. Her soft hand brushed his shoulder.

  Reive touched her chin, drawing her forward, and lightly kissed her lips. The touch was soothing, but more than that, it was a reminder of everything he had to fight for, all the reasons why he needed to make this work.

  "I'm just hungry." He smiled. "And Mace will be coming back soon. Unfortunately. But at least he'll have food with him."

  "Right," she said. "Let's get dressed. And while we do that, I can get you caught up on what you missed this morning."

  Reive

  Jess sketched out the broad strokes of a story Reive wished he hadn't missed, while they dressed in the slightly ill-fitting but clean clothes that had been left for them. Mace's jeans were baggy around Reive's legs, and the burgundy sweater hung off his shoulders. He was more slightly built than Mace, but it wasn't all bone structure. He'd lost both weight and muscle mass since he'd been sick.

  We're going to fix this, his dragon said. We have to. For our mate.

  You better be right.

  "Wow, whoever Mace borrowed these from has retro taste," Jess said, doing a small pirouette to look down at the cuffs of the borrowed jeans swishing around her ankles. "Look, these are bell-bottoms. Embroidered, even. Very 1970s."

  "Are there other gargoyles here?" Reive asked. "Besides Mace, I mean."

  Jess looked surprised. "Um ... I don't know, actually. Why?"

  "Because if your clothes belong to one of them, they might be that old, or considerably older." Reive sat on the end of the couch and carefully opened the book they'd come so far to find. "Dragons are very long-lived. Gargoyles might be the same. There's no telling how old Mace really is."

  "Wow, really? Does that mean I could live that long? How long are we talking here? Wait, if we're not the same—"

  "Hundreds of years, possibly. Mates adjust their lifespan to fit each other."

  Jess's face lit up. "Then nothing can happen to you, right?"

  Reive shook his head. "It doesn't work that way. We can still die of any normal thing. It's just that we'll age at the same rate." Her face fell, and he looked quickly down at the book in his lap. "Have you had a chance to look through this yet?"

  "Some. I've only just started. It's not obvious whether there's a solution in it, but now that we can combine it with my translated pages, Mace thinks it might be useful."

  Mace again. If that guy had used some kind of mind-magic on Jess to get her to trust him, Reive planned to take him apart slowly, stone or no stone.

  "Feeling okay?" Jess asked. She sat down beside him and leaned ge
ntly against him to look at the book past his arm. She smelled wonderful, shower-fresh with a faint hint of some old perfume from the clothes she wore.

  "Yeah, I'm okay." He turned a page. This book was as indecipherable to him as the other one, though he thought he could recognize some similarities in the diagrams. "Can you read this?"

  "Most of it." She leaned over his shoulder. "It's very metaphysical, for the most part. Runes and talk about phases of the moon and that sort of thing. I thought if we could find this half of the book, maybe it would have more concrete information than the first half. It doesn't. But ..."

  "But we've both seen some pretty crazy things."

  Jess blew out her breath. "No kidding."

  She was so close that he couldn't resist brushing his lips along the soft skin beside her eye. She had just turned her head for a deeper kiss when a sharp spike of pain rippled along his side and down his arm. She flinched in the same instant.

  "You felt that?" he asked quietly.

  "I ... felt you feel it, I think." She brushed her fingers lightly over the back of his hand. "Is that what it's like for you to be around us?"

  "Not you." The pain was already fading as long as she had her hand on his.

  Mace's brisk knock came a moment later. Jess hesitated, then got up and went to open the door, the flared legs of the bell-bottoms swishing around her bare feet.

  "Good morning, again," Mace said, as he entered with a large tray balanced in either hand. "I hope you're prepared for a good solid—" He stopped, staring at Jess.

  "What?" Jess said nervously, shoving a stray curl of her damp hair behind her ear. "Am I that much of a mess?"

  "No, you're just ..." Mace shook his head and went to put the trays on the table. Jess hastily swept in to move the other tray to the windowsill. "I thought my sister's clothes would fit you, and they do, but it's more than that. You're the spitting image of her."

  Jess stared at Mace with wide, hopeful eyes. "Do you think there's any possibility we're related? Can we ask your sister, maybe?"

  "She's gone. Dead. And I have no children. But ..." He hesitated, looking down at the tray, idly moving things around. "It's possible she might have had a child. I lost touch with her long ago."

  "Is there any way to find out?" Jess asked. "I've had no family as long as I can remember. I'm an orphan, and I kept getting put in different group homes because I was ... trouble, they said."

  Reive felt rage fill him at the sorrow in her voice. He couldn't imagine anyone like Jess being trouble to anyone, at least not to anyone who wasn't trying to hurt her and those she loved.

  We will find them and destroy them, his dragon snarled.

  He got up and put his good arm around her.

  "There are people I can ask," Mace said, giving her another careful look. "I'll also find a picture of her for you to look at. There aren't very many gargoyles; it's not at all unbelievable that the two of us would be related, even if not that closely. Anyway ..." He whisked last night's tray off the table and replaced it with the new one. "As a Newfoundland gargoyle of Scottish and Irish heritage, it is my cultural duty to feed you a proper breakfast. And you both look like you could use it. Come over here and eat."

  He didn't need to ask twice. The tray was loaded with an enormous country breakfast. There were massive heaps of eggs and slabs of thick-cut bacon, piles of beans and sautéed mushrooms, stacks of toast and sausages, pots of jam and honey, and a large number of what appeared to be biscuits drizzled in syrup.

  "Toutons," Mace said, seeing Jess poking curiously at hers. "Fried bread with molasses. Think of it as a sort of donut, if you like. Dig in."

  There was also both coffee and tea, a full pot of each, with cream and sugar. Mace poured himself a cup of coffee and cleared a space at the edge of the table, while Jess and Reive started eating.

  Reive had to handle the utensils a bit clumsily, only able to use his left hand, but most of the food was easy enough to pick up with his fingers or scoop with a spoon.

  "This is amazing," Jess said between bites, as she wolfed down sausage and eggs. "I don't know if my body thinks this is breakfast, dinner, or a midnight snack, but whatever it is, it's fantastic."

  "Your body needs additional energy when it goes through a shift," Mace said. "At least, mine does, and most shifters I know are like that." He reached under his jacket and took out a sheaf of papers. "Do you mind if we talk while we eat?"

  "Go for it," Jess said indistinctly through another huge bite of eggs. She was making a good effort at clearing the entire tray of food in front of her.

  Mace spread the pages on the edge of the table. Reive glimpsed Jess's tidy handwriting. "These are the faxed pages that you were able to reconstruct from the other book. There's not much here to work with, but from what I've read so far I believe that my speculation was right. Between the two parts of the book, they contain a secret that was believed lost to the world long ago."

  "What's that?" Reive asked.

  Mace fixed each of them in turn with his clear, green gaze. "The secret of making gargoyles."

  "Wait," Reive said. "Making?" Jess had said something about that, come to think of it, when she was telling him of yesterday's events. It had slipped past him because it was so impossible. You didn't make a shifter. At least not as far as he knew. The old legends about werewolves being able to bite people were just that—legends.

  "That reminds me," Jess said, after clearing her mouth with a large gulp of coffee. "You said you'd tell me everything when Reive woke up, so you didn't have to tell it twice."

  Mace sat back in the chair and regarded the two of them with his clear green eyes. "That's right. You deserve to know where you came from. What you are."

  "I know what I am," Jess said. Her voice came out strong, with only a slight hitch in it. "I'm a monster. Fixing Reive is what I'm most worried about."

  Reive slipped his good hand under the table to squeeze her fingers in his.

  Mace shook his head slowly. "You are not a monster. We are protectors. We were made to guard."

  "Made by whom?" Reive asked, seeing Jess hesitate. "To guard what?"

  "The first gargoyles were protectors of towns, castles, and churches." Mace smiled slightly. "It was a fortunate town indeed that had a gargoyle protector. Our very presence was said to bring luck to the place under our protection. And even if that is only superstition, it's definitely true that anyone who attacked a town defended by a gargoyle could expect to find themselves in a fight they weren't likely to win."

  "And who ..." Jess swallowed. Her fingers flexed in Reive's grasp, curling around to clutch his hand. "Who made us? How?"

  "There are different tales of our origins," Mace said. "But the one I choose to go with, the one I believe has the most convincing evidence, is that we all started out human."

  "I thought we used to be statues." Her voice was breathless.

  "No, not at all. The ability to animate and manipulate stone is one of our powers; I can teach you. But that's how you get stoneskins, the mindless near-gargoyles that we fought at Gio's villa. Real gargoyles, those like us, are descended from human beings who volunteered to give up their normal human lives to become long-lived town guardians."

  "That's actually not as bad as I thought." Jess gave Reive's hand a final squeeze and pulled her hand out from under the table to pour them both more coffee. She looked much less shaken and pale. "So we're not ... things."

  "You were never a thing," Reive said fiercely.

  "No, of course not." Mace looked mildly surprised at the idea. "We are people, no less than humans or shifters."

  "So what happened?" Jess asked. "From what you're saying, we didn't used to live in the shadows like we do now. What changed?"

  "And you still haven't answered the question about who made gargoyles in the first place," Reive added.

  Mace inclined his head in a nod of acknowledgement. "The original secret of transmuting humans into gargoyles was discovered by a secret society of alchemis
ts during the Middle Ages. What do you know of alchemists?"

  "Jess mentioned them earlier," Reive said. "Those guys who used to try to turn lead into gold, right?"

  "It's more complicated than that," Jess said promptly. "Alchemists were the scientists of the medieval period. It wasn't exactly what we'd recognize as science today, but they didn't understand the scientific method yet. Today we might call them chemists or physicists." She ducked her head with a blush. "Sorry. Please go on."

  "I think you'll enjoy examining my library later," Mace said, and Jess looked bright-eyed with eagerness. "Yes, you're right, but they also dabbled in magic, and in the process, they made us. Some of us were chosen from the early alchemists. Others were volunteers. And then—this is where the story takes a dark turn, child. This is the hard part of our history. This is our fall."

  "Darker than everything else that's happened to us?" Jess asked pointedly. It was her turn, this time, to reach across the table and curl her hand over Reive's. "Our lives haven't exactly been a bed of roses, you know."

  The corner of Mace's mouth curved in a slight smile. "You're right. What happened next ... was what often happens when people get a taste of power. There were those among the alchemists who wanted to use us to do more than protect. What do you know about the fighting between the dragons and the gargoyles?"

  Jess only shook her head. Reive said, "Just that it's been going on for a long time, and I've always been told the gargoyles started it."

  "And we did," Mace said. "But not because we wanted to. Our original purpose, to guard and protect, was twisted and warped. We were forced to be fighters and assassins instead. We attacked the dragons because our creators ordered us to, for the dragons were warlords of great power, the only other power that could stand against us. We led armies to conquest. But eventually, we rebelled, destroyed our creators, and tried to live quiet lives afterward."

  There was a brief silence. Jess's hand was warm on Reive's.

  A skeptical part of him wanted to disbelieve it. But it had the ring of truth. And he knew there was no harm in Jess.