by Anton Strout
Fear jumped up in my throat, but I did not want to find out how ferocious toward me Stanis could actually be.
I shot up into the night sky, stunned at my own speed, the count of one, two, three, four ever present at the back of my mind, going faster and faster with each repetition. I wasn’t nearly as practiced as Stanis was in the art of flight, but I was ahead of him. That wouldn’t last, but I sped away from the Belarus Building, hoping it would give Caleb the time he needed on the roof.
Despite my quiet panic, I found myself enjoying the chase. I was flying, after all, of my own volition. Part of me missed the gentle care with which Stanis had held me on our previous flights months ago, but to be flying by myself was a whole different experience, filled with a refreshing and powerful freedom I hadn’t expected.
As I left Gramercy and hit the lower part of Midtown, I rose higher, soaring well above most buildings there except one: my target. The Empire State Building was awash in a dazzling bright white that night, brighter still at the angle from which I was coming at it. Its luminescence had been my guiding beacon, but it was also my turning point to head back home. I pulled my wings in close as I shot past the building, speeding into the bank of my loop around it, chancing a look back over my shoulder. I’d expected to find Stanis hot on my heels but was relieved to find I had pulled far enough ahead that he was out of sight. As far as speed was concerned, panic was doing an excellent job at keeping me motivated.
The changing of the wind as I hit the crosstown side of the building had my hair in my face. I wished I had at least brought a hair elastic with me. But with my wings doing all the work, my hands were free to clear my vision, and I banked around the Empire State Building heading back downtown.
I needed to keep my lead, and I once again sped up the count in my head. My concentration broke as movement rose in front of me, and I snapped my focus to the looming figure of an oncoming Stanis, claws out and wings pumping away with fury.
My wings faltered as I lost my count, but I willed them to close tight around me. Immediately I dropped like . . . well, a stone. Stanis flew through the space I’d occupied just seconds ago. His momentum was too much, and he crashed into the side of the building, glass shattering as chunks of stone exploded away from it as his figure vanished inside.
The debris plummeted down, catching in the netting meant for jumpers and dropped belongings—the reason I had picked the Empire State Building in the first place. The less damage on the ground, the less chance someone would get hurt.
It would take Stanis a second to right himself, caught within the confines of the building as he was, which thankfully bought me more time. I forced my wings back open, my torso screaming out in the stone harness as the inertia of my falling body met with the resistance of taking flight once more. I grunted as pain spread across the lower part of my rib cage, but I held my concentration and started heading back to the Belarus Building.
Moments later, the explosion of more glass and stone sounded behind me, but confidence filled me. My lead was greater now. As long as Caleb was ready, we should be good to go.
As Gramercy Park came into view on my horizon, I circled over the trees, angling back into the space above the Belarus Building. I scoured the rooftop for signs of Caleb, but in the darkness, I couldn’t make him out. The fleeting thought that he might be double-crossing me filled my brain, but I pushed it away. Time would tell on that count, and just then unhelpful thoughts like that were nothing more than distracting.
Pain shot through me as I suddenly found myself tumbling across the sky, my wings thankfully absorbing much of an impact from behind. Without them, Stanis might have torn me in two, but the concussive force was enough to stun me. My wings fully locked and froze out to either side of me, the aerodynamics of that formation barely keeping me in the air.
Before I could compose myself, Stanis’s wings and claws were all around me, grabbing me as he spun my body around in midair to face him. I forced my own wings back to life, pressing them between us, the tips driving against his shoulders.
Stanis’s eyes met mine, and there was anger in them.
“Why would you do this?” he shouted. “I warned you against telling me where Alexander’s secret lay. Now you force my hand to treat you like my enemy. I do not understand.”
Hurt rose within me, and I used it to fuel my efforts, flexing my wings to break his hold on me. I don’t think he expected such strength out of me, and, truthfully, I didn’t either, but with my emotions running high, my will was strong, and I pushed away from him, his claws losing their purchase on me. With one giant swoop of my wings, I shot myself above Stanis.
“I can’t stand seeing you like this,” I said. “You’re not yourself. I don’t know who you have become, but I won’t be afraid of you. I won’t.”
“But you should be,” he said, rising to catch the tip of one of my wings in his clawed hand. Stanis flapped his own, sending the two of us spinning in a circle. He closed his fist into the structure of my wing, his claws sinking into it until the tip crumbled apart in his hands.
Broken but free, the centrifugal force of my damaged wing sent me spinning up and away from him. I fought to focus, dropping my count.
Keeping a steady rhythm wouldn’t help me fly right at present. What I needed was stability, and up there that meant spreading my wings as far as they could go and steadying them. With the tip of one wing gone, I found myself, despite my efforts, slowly slipping into a descending arc back toward Stanis. The physics of flight were winning, whether it be magic-powered or no.
“Do you see the ease with which I can break you?” he shouted up at me. “You are far more delicate and fragile than that. Do not make me hurt you. Give me the secrets I have come for.”
“Sorry,” I said, pulling my wings in close to me, immediately plummeting toward him. “But I can’t. And either I save you here and now, or I go down trying.”
Stanis might have far more experience with flight, but what I hoped for was that he was far less equipped to deal with falling—especially since I was going to be the cause of it.
I dove straight for him, entirely giving up on controlling my flight and pressing my wings around me into a protective shell. I fell, and with the bulk of my wings sitting as deadweight, I fell fast. I slammed into Stanis. The impact had all the force of an auto accident, and despite bracing myself, my teeth came down hard on my tongue, the fresh and coppery taste of blood filling my mouth.
Focusing past that, I popped my wings open and entwined them with Stanis’s own. The strength in Stanis’s wings was superior; I felt that. In a slugfest, I’d probably be a smudged red spot on the side of a building already, but I had two things going for me.
Surprise was still on my side, first by using my new set of wings and actually engaging Stanis in aerial combat. There was no way he had been prepared for that.
The other was that at that moment, my basic knowledge of physics and gravity were my best friends. Even if Stanis was stronger than me, it didn’t matter in midtumble. If he couldn’t spread his wings, he couldn’t fly, and as long as I concentrated on keeping mine tangled with his, the strength in his couldn’t crush me like a bug.
The pride in my small bit of triumph, however, didn’t have much of a shelf life. We were, after all, falling out of the night sky at an alarming and accelerating rate. I needed to act, and immediately.
We were locked together, tumbling, Stanis trying to force my wings away from his, his claws tearing larger and larger chunks out of them. I had to keep mine in motion swirling just out of Stanis’s reach to minimize the damage, but there was another problem.
The roof was coming up fast, and I was relieved to see Caleb’s now visible X in fresh orange spray paint marking the target zone. If I wasn’t careful, I was going to be the one hitting it first, with Stanis’s entire weight coming down on top of me.
The tips of my wings shot f
orward and wrapped themselves just behind Stanis’s shoulders, near the base of his own wings. What I needed was leverage
Instead of wrestling with Stanis and fighting against his wings, I used his body as an anchor to shift my position around. Using the harness I wore as a focal point, I steered my body out of the danger zone by rolling to my left, pulling our tumble into another revolution. I shifted to my far right to compensate for the spin of our turn, so that Stanis would take the full brunt of the impact. Only in the last seconds did I attempt to disengage my wings from Stanis, hoping to catch a bit of air with them like an emergency parachute.
And while that seemed like a great plan, Stanis apparently had another, refusing to disengage his own wings from mine. I braced for impact with the rooftop. This wasn’t going to be pretty, not at the speed we were falling.
Thankfully, Caleb had pulled off his part of the plan. Stanis and I hit the X, but instead of crashing against the roof, the stone gave way like freshly poured concrete.
Hitting the surface jarred my whole body with pain, but the roof was more trampoline-y than stone had any right to be. The worst of the blow came from the impact of my flesh scraping against the hard stone of Stanis’s body, his wings finally going slack as the two of us sank down into the liquid stone.
The first time I had seen Caleb pull this arcane trick of his, I had lost a pair of boots in Alexander’s guild hall. With its happening in large scale, I was happy to have it save my life.
I went to moan, only to find my nose and mouth weren’t breathing air. This semiliquid stone went deeper than I had imagined it would, and my face had become submerged in its soupy, gluelike substance. Panicking, I struggled to pull myself out of it, praying that I wasn’t still too firmly entwined with Stanis’s wings.
My head broke the surface, my mouth gaping wide as I took my first free gulp of air, arms flailing. I fought to get my legs under me, pressing against Stanis’s submerged body to help me stand, but it was like trying to get out of quicksand while wearing a burlap sack. My own wings only added to my troubles in finding balance and keeping my footing.
Fingers clamped down over my wrist, and I screamed.
“Easy,” Caleb said, trying to pull me out of the liquid stone from where he stood safely on solid roof a foot or so away. “I don’t want to get pulled into that.”
“I’m covered in it,” I said, barely moving. “Did you have to make so big a pool of it?”
“We only had one shot to catch Stanis,” he said. He rocked himself back farther, and I started to move. “I didn’t want to miss our opportunity, even if it meant depleting our remaining Kimiya.”
I stopped and looked up at him, wiping the liquid stone away from my eyes. “We’re out of it now?” I asked.
“Almost,” he said. “I saved just enough to complete the rest of our plan, but essentially, yeah.”
“Shit,” I said, standing still knee deep in the liquid stone.
“You okay?”
“All things considered?” I said, doing a quick physical inventory, taking stock of the aches and pains of my body in all this. I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Good,” he said, and started pulling me out once again.
Slowly, I came free, the liquid stone running from my body and my damaged wings back into the pool below. I couldn’t help but notice some of it was the color of my blood. My own set of wings, still partially intact, drooped against me as I concentrated on my footing. When I was finally out of the pool, I let go of Caleb’s hand and turned to assess the situation.
The tips of Stanis’s wings lay against solid roof on either side of the pool, the rest of him still submerged.
“I know he doesn’t need to breathe,” I said. “But still . . . Stanis . . . ?”
While I waited for Caleb to give me his thoughts on it, I was met instead by a flurry of explosive activity from the pool itself. Stanis’s wings rose out of the liquid stone, their struggling flutter reminding me of birds caught in an oil spill. My heart ached to think of poor Stanis but was replaced by fear for my own safety when his claws broke the surface, struggling to find some kind of purchase.
“Shit,” Caleb said, scrambling off to the right side of the pool, fishing his notebook out of his jacket pocket.
Stanis’s wings twisted and turned, churning the liquid stone around him. One of them grazed Caleb, who was so caught up in his notes that he stumbled back with a grunt before looking over to me.
“We need to finish this,” he said. “I need him a little more docile than this. Actually, a lot more.”
“On it,” I said, watching the roof beneath my feet as I stepped forward, wanting to remain on the solid part of it.
Stanis’s head finally broke the surface of the liquid stone, letting out a monstrous roar. I wanted nothing more than to turn and run for the doors leading off the roof, but I held my ground. If I didn’t deal with Stanis immediately, I thought my chances of ever helping him might vanish completely.
Truthfully, I wasn’t sure how much help I would be in restraining him, but surely he was weakened from the fall.
The only solution seemed to be in the brute force of the stone I still controlled. I extended what remained of my wings out full to my sides, then pushed all my will into them as I turned their purpose from beauty and flight to that of blunt objects of destruction. The right wing looked worse for wear, and I slammed it into Stanis, pinning him back down beneath the surface of the liquid stone. Then, as much as it tore me up, I slammed the heft of the left wing over and over again into Stanis’s chest.
“Stay,” I screamed, catching my breath between efforts, “down!”
Stanis raised his arms to defend himself against the brutality of my attack. My natural strength would never have stood a chance against his raw power, but at that moment in time, my magic was powered by my raging will, and the wings were actually having an effect. Stanis struggled to rise, but with him pinned securely beneath the one wing, it was impossible.
Chunks of my wings broke away as they slammed down on him. Blow after blow drove him further and further into submission, and when little remained of the left wing, I switched to the one pinning him and continued the onslaught with it.
Again.
“Alexandra!”
And again.
“Alexandra!”
And again.
“Lexi.”
Hearing the familiar friendly form of my name, my mind snapped to, pulling myself out of my attack. Caleb’s eyes were wide, switching from me to Stanis, now motionless in the liquid stone.
“Easy,” he said. “I think he’s down.”
Not until I had stopped did I realize how crazed I was, teeth clenched, and my breath coming out in a raspy hitch. I needed to calm myself.
“Sorry,” I said. “Did I . . . ?” I couldn’t finish my sentence.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “But we need to finish this. Can you lift him?”
I looked at the torn and tattered remains of my wings.
“Maybe,” I said.
“I just need you to for a minute,” he said. “I need him standing.”
I moved closer to where Stanis lay submerged, then lowered the wings into the pool, bits and pieces of them crumbling away as I searched. I slipped their broken tips under his arms and raised him until he was standing knee deep in the pool, unconscious.
Caleb went to the edge of it and knelt, pouring the entire contents of the vial in his hand into it. Like watching sped-up footage of a lake in winter, the stone froze, once more becoming solid.
I lowered Stanis until he was lying back, bent at the knees with his legs trapped in the by-then-solid roof. I stepped away, unable to take my eyes from him.
“He’s not moving,” I said.
“I know,” Caleb said, already flipping through his notes.
“Will he be his old
self?” I asked.
“Only time will tell,” he said, moving to an assortment of containers that lay near the door leading off the roof. “I need to work on that still.”
I stood in silence, watching Stanis for several minutes before I felt Caleb’s hand on my shoulder, squeezing gently.
“This may take a while,” he said. “Also, you might want to clean yourself up. You’re sort of soaked in some of that liquid stone, and it’s starting to seize up.”
I lifted my arm, the stiffness in it making it almost impossible to move. Chunks of my hardening coat broke away, but in another couple of minutes I was going to be in trouble if I didn’t get clean. I touched a spot of the stone I felt solidifying near my mouth.
“At least it stopped some of my bleeding,” I said, hobbling away toward the door.
I don’t think Caleb even heard me. He was already mixing various containers together and moving them into place around the still-lifeless Stanis. Just then, I wasn’t sure what more I’d have to say anyway.
As Caleb said, time would tell as far as Stanis was concerned.
I planned to use that time wisely—a hot shower in my old room, a change of clothes that hopefully wouldn’t involve a jackhammer, and a call I needed to make.
Judging by the strange mix of confused emotions creeping over me at present, I wasn’t sure I was ready to deal with both Caleb and Stanis by myself just yet.
Eighteen
Stanis
I awoke with my wings spread out beneath me, my head clouded with thoughts, many of which were not my own. As I stared up at the night sky, my true voice fought to make sense through the madness of the dominant one within, but when it could not, I instead drew my focus to the world around me, the location feeling familiar.
I attempted to rise, but the only movement I found possible was to sit up, and when I did, I discovered the reason for my lack of mobility.
The lower halves of my legs were encased within the stone of a roof I had known for centuries, the one where I had once stood a lone sentinel, watching over the family Belarus. No amount of struggle would release me, strong was the stonework of Alexander, even now, and as I fought to recall how I came here, the sensation of being watched overcame me.