The Complete Gargoyle and Sorceress Boxset (Books 1-9)

by Lisa Blackwood

  While he was distracted, she eased one hand above her head.

  Sliding her fingers along the bark, she sought the rivulets of liquid bleeding down the tree’s trunk and used the dampness to guide her to the first stone fragment. Her fingers closed on a cold, sharp object. She clawed at it with her nails, dragging it from the wood.

  Agony burned in her hip. She embraced the pain. It was better than the cold, sucking sensation of having her life drawn out of her injury.

  Yeah. That was the other situation her mind couldn’t rationalize away, no matter how hard she tried. As impossible as it seemed, her own injuries were somehow linked to the tree’s. But that was an impossibility she could mull over later...if she survived.

  Not for the first time, she wished she had one of her hunting bows.

  But she didn’t.

  Moaning about it wasn’t going to change that fact.

  Her fingers worked at the second piece of stone as Alexander finished skirting the tree and came to face her.

  With a grunt, she freed the second shard and flung it with all her strength. Sap-blood flew in a splattering arc.

  Her aim was true, and the stone coated in a tree’s blood collided with Alexander.

  He roared in agony, a tone of near glass-shattering quality.

  Take that, you bastard.

  Hopefully, such an unholy sound signaled a mortal injury.

  The fragment had embedded itself in his neck where an artery should have been.

  And...was the stone smoking and hissing?

  Yes...yes, it was.

  Alrighty then. Shit’s getting weird again.

  Other drops of the tree’s blood had eaten away at Alexander’s skin like she’d tossed acid upon him. A human would have hit the ground, dead by now. She didn’t know what he was, but he wasn’t human.

  Silent now, the creature collapsed to his knees but continued to smile at her. Oh, he was in pain. She could see it in his pinched expression: the white skin drawn tight across his face, the slight grayish hue of his complexion. But it was the sharp fangs when he hissed at her that gave him away.

  A vampire?

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she whispered to no one in particular.

  Impossible. There was no such thing as a vampire.

  Yet what else could he be?

  And what else was more than it seemed?

  Her gaze landed on the gargoyle statue and studied him speculatively.

  It was only then that she noticed the strange runes glowing on his chest and arms.

  Lillian shook her head and blinked, trying to clear her vision, but the marks were still there.

  Could it be so simple?

  Could killing these creatures be as easy as getting to the statue and triggering some other form of protection?

  She needed to try. She was already dead. She was losing too much blood to live, but perhaps she could still protect her family.

  Gathering her will, she straightened and held the second stone fragment like a knife. Doggedly, she lurched toward the statue. The ground seemed more uneven than she remembered. Three steps later, she tripped over a piece of broken stone from the ring and fell to her knees.

  As she forced herself back up, she saw someone in her path: a blurry blob with a cloud of dark hair around it. The strange, feral woman she’d first noticed outside the maze stood between Lillian and her goal. Anger stirred to life.

  A sense of something powerful and old flowed through her body, guiding her movements.

  She surged to her feet; the stone fragment held low against her good thigh. Lillian darted forward, the land around her a blur. Her opponent was moving far too slowly. One more step, and then she snapped her arm up and forward, burying the stone shard in the woman’s stomach. Her opponent’s mouth fell open as she gasped in shock.

  Growling, the woman clawed at the stone fragment. Lillian sidestepped her enemy and continued toward the gargoyle. Three strides from her destination, a heavy weight slammed into her and claws ripped into her back.

  Kicking desperately, Lillian dragged herself out from under the crazed woman.

  With a last, desperate strength, she crawled up the pedestal and over one of the gargoyle’s stone legs. Protected on three sides by his body and wings, she collapsed forward onto his lap. She wanted to close her eyes and know no more pain or suffering—to know the peace of cold stone.

  Again, those strange instincts stirred within her. All she could think to call it was power: old power, deep and familiar. Her body tingled.

  Was this what dying felt like? Was this her soul preparing to leave? Such a strange sensation. It didn’t seem right, dying like this. A useless death. Never to know why her world had been turned on its head.

  Sleep called, wooing her into darkness. All she wanted was to answer that summons, but that old power within her insisted otherwise. She lifted her head and gazed at the gargoyle.

  Her attention drifted to the strange symbols on his chest. She reached out with one blood-covered hand and touched the nearest symbol. A flash of light seared her retinas, and her hand fused to the stone as it turned hot all around her.

  She screamed in pain and terror. Both her body and the stone now glowed with a blue light.

  Power danced and pulsed between them. A wave grew, about to crest. She screamed again, instinctively knowing she would be consumed if she didn’t direct it in some way.

  Ancient memories sparked to life and flooded foreign thoughts and verses into her mind. With nothing else to do, she screamed those words.

  “I trust the Father’s choice. Dark Watcher, immortal servant of the Light, with my power I summon you to wake. With my will, I do claim you. Hear me and awake. Evil walks the land. Your Sorceress has need.”

  Darkness crept across her vision, stealing the sights of the world from her until only the gray-edged image of the brooding stone gargoyle remained.

  At her cry, the power surged into the stone. It softened under her hands. The shadow of his wings moved up and away as his muzzle dipped down.

  A warm, wet tongue brushed her cheek as she collapsed forward against his warmth.

  This day isn’t going anything like I thought it would. Vacuum. Dust the china. Polish Gran’s sword collection. Get attacked by mythological creatures. Die in the arms of a gargoyle. Nope, she mused in the last few moments of consciousness before darkness swept in from all sides. Totally didn’t see this coming when I got up this morning.

  Chapter 4

  STONE NO LONGER, HE answered his lady’s call. The dark world came alive around him as his senses awoke, one by one. The thump of many hearts hummed in his ears. One fluttered rapid and weaker than the rest, on the edge of death. He inhaled a deep breath, and three things became apparent:

  Air tainted with blood and death-scent filled his lungs.

  A warm weight slumped across his lap.

  Blood covered him in a sticky coating.

  He opened his eyes for the first time in many years as his mind slowly sorted order from the chaos of his senses. A woman sprawled across his lap. Surprise melted away, replaced by cold dread as his soul recognized her.

  She was still. Too still, her pale skin gray-tinted. A sheen of sweat covered her face. The only color was the bright splash of her blood.

  His lady’s blood. Horror clamped his stomach and unleashed a churning void in his middle.

  Why had he not known she was in danger?

  He dragged in another great lungful of air, the lingering scent of her desperation and fear strong on the back of his tongue. Blood and burning fury rushed through his veins with each beat of his heart. Pointing his muzzle at the nearest enemy, he roared. But it didn’t expel all the hate and helpless rage trapped within him. Again and again, he howled out his agony until it echoed across the width of the glade in a deafening wave.

  Rage destroyed reason. Muscles tensed for battle as talons sprang from his fingertips. He gathered his lady into his arms and fed her power while he straighten
ed from his crouch to face his enemies. At the sight of them cowering away, another low rumble built within him. His lips curled back from his fangs, the need to rend and destroy overwhelming.

  The invaders fell back as they retreated to a safer distance. By the scents permeating the meadow, his enemies were a mix of fae-bloods. A breeze picked up and blew the weakening essence of evil to his nostrils.

  Silent now, he curved his wings around his shoulders and cupped the escaping scent closer to him. He’d nearly missed it—the corruption of a demon-touched corpse. A Riven. An ancient weapon used by blood witches.

  One of his lady’s attackers knew what he was, and the Riven had run to save itself.

  He lowered his lady to the ground with gentle care, then standing over her, he began whispering spells to slow the flow of blood. While he unfurled his wings, he gathered more power. Using his soul-link to the Spirit Realm, he tapped into the torrent of creative magic.

  The cold power from the Spirit Realm mixed with the warm air of the Mortal Realm, creating lift. Magic whirled around him like gale winds before a thunderstorm.

  A fae-blood shapeshifter with a gaping hole in her stomach growled and started to back away from him while three of her comrades advanced. By her unmistakable wolf-musk scent, she was a dire wolf. With the flick of his tail, he decapitated the female. Before her body toppled to the ground, he was moving.

  He swept out a talon-tipped hand, ripping out the throat of one of the males and then gutted a third with a kick from his hind legs. He pushed the body over backward and lunged at the next creature within reach: a silver-skinned female with pointed ears. A snapped neck freed her soul from the anchor of her body.

  He was winning, but there were too many to fight his way free quickly, and half his attention was trained on his lady. She was losing her battle to live. Why was her magic not healing her as it should?

  Then a memory floated up from the depths of his mind. She couldn’t touch her magic because he’d caged it. But why? Nothing made sense.

  Another dire wolf female darted at him. His tail snaked up and speared her in the throat. A prolonged battle was too dangerous with his lady so vulnerable. This needed to end, now. He directed his magic at the encircling horde. Threads of power condensed in the air and the shadowy wisps latched onto any warm-blooded creature near enough to touch. The scent of burning flesh filled the air, and the screams of his enemies echoed in his ears.

  Seeing he had devastated half their companions, the other creatures vanished into the shadows of a surrounding maze. He curled his lips and caught their individual scents on his tongue, committing each to memory. When he had them all, he sent deadly little shards of his shadow magic to hunt them.

  Turning his full attention back to his Sorceress, he gathered her in his arms and studied her. She was far paler than she should have been. Even without her magic, her wounds shouldn’t have been fatal.

  Detaching a portion of his consciousness from his body, he sent it into the woman in his arms. Her power still drained away.

  He checked the weavings he’d placed over her wounds, but they were holding. No magic or blood hemorrhaged from those points. Elsewhere then, but where? His consciousness stretched beyond his body, following the scent trail of magic back to its source. A tree. Two long gashes. Heartwood deep.

  By the Light! His lady was a dryad. How had he missed that fact? His memory was full of unexplainable holes. But his proximity to the dryad’s tree explained why he hadn’t at first felt his Sorceress’s distress. The hamadryad tree was much stronger in magic and overshadowed her dryad. The tree had tried to wake him instinctively, but she wasn’t the Sorceress. Though, that still didn’t explain why he hadn’t felt danger.

  Nothing was as it should be, but he’d have to solve that mystery later. He had greater concerns.

  Looking up at the tree, he admitted he had much greater concerns than a few foggy memories.

  Blood leaked down the tree’s majestic trunk and saturated the ground at its roots. Instincts jerked him into motion, and he summoned wards to shield the wounds. The prickle of power danced along his skin a moment before he directed the spell. An insubstantial webbing spun out between his outstretched hands, like a delicate, blue lattice. It adhered to the bark and sealed the wounds, preventing further loss of the hamadryad’s blood.

  The Sorceress never chose to be reborn as a dryad. It would be too great a temptation for their vows. Yet she was obviously a dryad and must have had a small cutting of her hamadryad with her when he’d rescued her from the Battle Goddess’s kingdom and brought her here.

  At the time, his dulled senses and the stench of blood magic had disguised her scent, and he’d mistaken her for a sidhe.

  Her soft moan brought him back to the present. It didn’t matter how her spirit tree came to be here. Here it grew, and here it bled its lifeblood upon the ground. He dropped to all fours and circled the tree. He sniffed at the ground until he pinpointed the area where the greatest concentration of magic saturated the loam. The scent of sap and blood triggered instincts and dragged him back to memories of his infancy.

  Many times, in many lives he’d come to awareness hearing his mother’s deep, slow heartbeat and the sounds of wind and lashing rain in her branches as he grew within the heart of her tree.

  There was something here in this memory he needed.

  Safe in his watery cocoon, deep inside his mother’s wooden heart, he’d grown strong.

  Ah, yes.

  Along with the food and water of the earth, he had absorbed his dryad mother’s memories.

  There it was—the knowledge to heal his mistress.

  More of his memories returned, both recent and ancient. Heal her hamadryad and the dryad should live.

  Tonight, the second time his lady had called to him in this life, had been as chaotic as the first. Worse. Now she lay dying along with her tree. If her hamadryad had been older, he could have put her in the tree to rest and heal, but such an attempt in this magicless place might kill the tree. He scrounged his mother’s memories for other healing methods and found what he needed.

  He had to act quickly. The power was dissipating, sucked up by the earth like water on drought-cursed land. He dropped into a trance and summoned his power for the delicate work of separating his mistress’s magic from the magic-starved land.

  The highest concentration of magic pooled just below the grass, in the layer where small, fibrous roots sought food and water. With one hand pressed against the hamadryad’s trunk and the other on the ground, he flexed his talons. After he absorbed the magic from the soil, he drew it up into his body, purified it, and returned it to the spirit tree. He drained the small pool and reached deeper. His mind rushed down into the earth, probing for the smallest tendrils of power. He continued until the smallest scrap—every little fragment, no matter how tiny—was returned to the hamadryad.

  After he reinforced the wards on the hamadryad’s larger wounds, he healed the small punctures his talons had made. Those larger wounds would need intensive healing but must wait for now. Mending the tree would be useless if...

  No, he would not permit failure.

  Returning to the prone dryad, he sat on his haunches and lifted her into his lap. He licked at her face. Feeling her skin’s clamminess and noting her gray-hued pallor, he knew he didn’t have long to prepare for healing.

  Before he began the arduous task of healing her, he’d need to find a shelter more defendable than this maze. He repositioned the small dryad in his arms and broke into a ground-eating stride. He navigated his way free of the leafy corridors and emerged into a lush garden. The cool shadows beckoned to him, offering a way to hide from the sun’s revealing rays.

  Summoning the shadows to him, he swiftly wove a cloak of invisibility.

  He exited the gardens and encountered a stone home, large and spacious but surprisingly empty of people. He wondered where the servants were, and the guards. There should have been some defenses guarding this house, y
et he detected nothing.

  After one more probe of the house and surrounding lawn, he tightened his hold on his lady and entered the stone cottage by a back entrance. As a precaution, he placed a ward around the entire structure and keyed it so only he could pass. Then as an added measure, he mentally scanned the area immediately around the building.

  Still no one.

  With the outside of the building as safe as he could make it, he turned his attention to the inside of the dwelling. A stone-tiled floor stretched out under his talons. He made soft clicking sounds with each step.

  A large table of polished wood sat at the room’s center, and a counter stretched around two sides of the room in an L shape. The table held a loaf of freshly baked bread and a basket of sweet-smelling fruit. The room lacked a hearth, but he guessed it to be a kitchen of some sort.

  He laid his precious burden upon the table. The rapid beat of her pulse worried him, and her breathing was too shallow. Dropping into a deeper trance, he summoned his magic. At his silent command, the magic flowed out from his body. It was less than he’d hoped, lacking the wild turbulence he was accustomed to, but it would be enough to heal the Sorceress. It had to be. He bowed his head until his muzzle touched her breastbone and he breathed more power upon her.

  Nothing happened. His magic didn’t even penetrate her skin. What had the Battle Goddess done to her when she was a helpless child that his power could not now meld with hers?

  Panicked, he leaped upon the table and hunched closer, attempting to will power into her. Then he remembered he’d caged her magic for reasons that still remained elusive to him. With no other choice, he reached with his power and unraveled the spell preventing her from calling upon her own magic.

  She jerked awake, her chest heaving as if a nightmare suddenly gripped her. Her eyes focused on him and her expression softened in recognition.

  A shaky hand caressed his muzzle, before reaching back into his mane, circling his neck. Still, she didn’t take what he offered, power she desperately needed. He bumped her face with his muzzle and licked at her skin but was careful not to sip even the smallest drop of her dryad blood for fear of losing his concentration.