Shadows of Stone

by Jenna Wolfhart

  My mouth went dry as I dragged my gaze from my mates to Silas. I loved them all, so terribly so. I couldn’t bear to see this end in some kind of horrible fight where someone got hurt.

  “Listen, I don’t understand how this all works,” I began. “But Silas has been in my life from the start, just like you all have. He’s been there for me in ways I can’t even explain. Please don’t fight him.”

  “We’re not going to fight him, love,” Marcus said, his voice dropping into a low growl. “But we are going to have to bring him into the mating pack just like all the others. We can’t help ourselves. It’s instinct. You know that. We couldn’t stop it, even if we wanted to.”

  “It’s okay, Rowena.” Silas stood from the bed, standing tall as he met Marcus’s eyes. “It’s just something we have to do.”

  Footsteps thudded in the hallway outside, and we all turned to find Sebastian joining this strange, testosterone-fuelled party. He stopped and stared when he saw a very naked Silas with his arms flexed, and my three other mates bristling with energy.

  His jaw clenched, and he glanced away. “I can see I’m interrupting something, but I came to say that there’s a vampire clan that needs hunting down. I thought that might be everyone’s priority, but I guess I was wrong.”

  “Sebastian,” I said, taking a step toward him. I had the sudden urge to explain myself to him, though I didn’t know why. He wasn’t one of my mates, but he seemed far more upset about this situation than any of them did. In fact, if I didn’t know he was an unfeeling assassin, I would have thought he almost looked hurt.

  “No need to explain, princess. I understand how it is.” He turned his back on us, his entire body rigid. “You’ve gone and gotten yourself another mate. These assholes will accept him, regardless of how much they puff out their chests. You lot...” He gestured at the five of us. “You were always like your own little clique, even from the moment you first met. Have fun.”

  And with that, he strode off down the hallway, leaving the rest of us to figure out what the hell happened next.

  Sebastian had been right. After he’d stormed down the hallway, my three mates had done a lot of wing flapping and chest puffing, but they’d accepted Silas as one of their own easily enough. The entire thing didn’t take more than five minutes, a fact that I was deeply grateful for.

  After all of the excitement, I got dressed and found Sebastian waiting for us in the dining hall. He was shovelling eggs and bacon into his mouth, glaring down at his plate as if it had done some terrible crime against him. I was pretty certain he was imagining that plate was me, especially when he stabbed it with his fork.

  “Hi.” I eased into the chair beside his and perched on the edge of it so that I could take flight if I needed to get out of here fast.

  He merely grunted in response.

  “I can tell you’re upset with me.” I gave him a timid smile. “I mean, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to be able to figure that one out.”

  “I’m not upset with you,” he said, dropping his fork onto the plate. He pushed back into his chair, and for a moment, I thought he was going to leap up from the table and storm away from me again. “The truth is, I thought you were done adding mates. Or, at least, that was what it seemed like the other day. But now I’ve realized it wasn’t that you felt as if your harem was large enough. It was just that you didn’t want me to be a part of it.”

  “Sebastian.” My heart squeezed tight.

  “It’s alright, princess. You can’t help how you feel.” He stiffened and twisted toward the door that Jasper and the others were now striding through. “Ah, speak of the devils.”

  “Is he bothering you?” Marcus asked, his tone going sharp when he saw the blatant tension between me and Sebastian. My back was stiff and straight. My hands were curled around the edge of the table. And tears pricked the corners of my eyes. Sebastian’s body language wasn’t much better than mine.

  “No, we’re fine,” I said in a tight voice.

  “You look like you’re about to cry.” Jasper stalked across the room and glowered into Sebastian’s face. “Now, look here. Despite my gut feeling on the matter, we’ve allowed you to stay on, even after everything you did. You want to know why? Because Rowena wanted you to stay. Now, if you’ve gone and upset her—”

  “Jasper, it’s fine,” I said quickly. Jasper, Marcus, and Silas had never been particularly fond of Sebastian. In fact, they pretty much hated him, and it was hard to blame them after everything he’d done. But I didn’t want them to get the wrong idea and push him away. We needed him on our side if we wanted to win. Besides, I wasn’t yet ready to say goodbye.

  “Rowena, if Sebastian is upsetting you...” Silas trailed off when he saw the expression on my face. He’d always been better at reading and understanding me than anyone else. With the slightest of glances, I could communicate to him exactly how I was feeling, not that I truly understood how I felt myself.

  “Right now, we need to go to this vampire clan,” I said, clearing my throat and hoping to dispel all the tension in the air. “There’s no telling how they’ll react when we show up, and we need Sebastian to come with us, so let’s not get into an argument right now. Okay?”

  “Fine.” Jasper grunted and crossed his arms over his beefy chest. He would drop it, but he wouldn’t forget it for an instant. When all of this was over, I knew we’d come straight back to it, and I had a sinking feeling that fists would be involved.

  “Luckily, the clan isn’t Nosferatu,” Sebastian said, plowing forward with a wearying sigh. “They’re just your normal run of the mill vampires. The ones that aren’t demonic in origin. That means they probably won’t rip our heads off, but they also probably won’t be too happy to see us. They aren’t wild animals, but they aren’t angels either.”

  “Right,” I said with a nod. “So, what’s the plan?”

  “We go in, we get the goddess trap, and we leave. Easy peasy.” He gave me a strange smile. “Of course, we should take our weapons. Just in case the vampires decide they want to eat us.”

  Chapter 13

  The Nosferatu I’d battled in the past were a lot different than the vampire clan we were on our way to visit. For one, there was nothing demonic about them. They were born as vampires, and they didn’t need blood to survive. On the other hand, they did need to drink blood if they wanted to access their powers: immortality, strength, ageless beauty. The problem, of course, was that many couldn’t resist the siren call of immortality, so they ended up giving in to the more feral side of their nature. And once they’d had a taste of blood, it was next to impossible to go back.

  We now stood in the streets of East London, huddled on the sidewalk opposite of an old abandoned church that had recently been transformed into a nightclub. Rumor had it that the father of the Vespa Clan owned and operated this club, laundering money through it to support his many descendants. His name was Athan Vespa, and I’d been warned that he could be quite...intimidating in person.

  “You see.” Marcus shifted closer to me when he pointed out a group of young twenty-somethings turning into the entrance of the club. A bodyguard gave them a nod and opened the double black doors, revealing the strobing neon lights inside. “Those were vampires.”

  “How can you tell?” I asked. To me, they’d just looked like ordinary club-goers. Nothing like the pale-faced, red-eyed, rotting Nosferatu I’d fought.

  “One of them had blood on his chin.”

  “Oh.” My veins ran ice cold. Having my blood drained by a vicious creature of the night frankly scared the shit out of me. Sure, I would survive it, but I was pretty certain it would hurt like hell.

  “We might as well go ahead and try to get in,” Jasper said. “No sense in waiting around like they’re going to notice us and invite us inside.”

  “Oh, they will have noticed us,” Silas said, flashing us his teeth. “They’re vampires. They will have smelled our enhanced blood miles away. They’ll know exactly what we are, how many
of us there are, and they’re probably trying to determine what Rowena is right this very minute. In fact, I daresay that’s why they’ve left us alone. An unknown being of power standing on the sidewalk outside of their club? They won’t take that lightly.”

  My mouth went dry. As great as it felt to imagine that the vampires might be intimidated by me, the rest of Silas’s words did little to settle my nerves.

  Because that meant they were watching us.

  “The gargoyle is right,” an icy voice hissed from behind us. We all whirled toward the sound, only to find a group of men and women surrounding us. Like the people we’d seen going into the club, they looked absolutely normal, though I felt a strange kind of energy in the air.

  One woman strode forward out from the crowd, her narrowed eyes scanning our group as she licked her lips. “Athan Vespa would like to have a word with you. You’ll be coming inside with us.”

  Sebastian crossed his arms over his chest and shifted his body in front of mine. “Oh yeah? Well, I think we might be just fine right here.”

  She flashed us a smile full of sharp and pointed teeth. “If you would rather remain out here, that’s up to you. But she will be coming with us. Whether or not that’s willingly or unwillingly, you decide.”

  Right. My mouth went dry. So, basically she was saying that I could walk in there on my own two feet or they’d carry me inside.

  “Sebastian.” I stepped out from behind him. “It’s fine. We wanted to go inside and talk to them anyway.”

  He grunted. “On our terms. Not theirs.”

  “In is in.” I turned to the other gargoyles, eyebrows raised. “That fine with everyone else?”

  A few grunts and nods were the only responses. The gargoyles hated this, I could tell. They were so used to being the ones who were in control of every situation that came their way, and they preferred to be out in the open when facing off against potential enemies. Inside, their ability to fly was sorely limited, which meant the vampires would have a home court advantage.

  Still, we’d come here to talk to the head of the clan.

  The vampires surrounded our little group and escorted us across the street. I felt their eyes on my back with each and every step. I could tell they were curious about me, which I could hopefully use to my advantage. Perhaps they’d never smelled a goddess’s blood before. Hopefully, they didn’t want to taste some.

  Inside the club, the heavy thump of bass reverberated in my skull, and the flash of neon lights almost blinded me. For a moment, I paused to stare at the writhing bodies on the floor, whirling their arms and legs to the beat of the electronic song. A part of me felt a sense of loss as I watched them. Having been locked in a tower all my life, I’d never gotten to live the way a normal girl would. I’d never gone out dancing. I’d never gotten tipsy with my friends.

  Hell, until recently, I’d barely had any friends.

  When the gargoyles had first shown up in my life, all I’d wanted was to run away and experience everything that the human world could offer. I wanted to see it all, experience it all, feel like a normal person. But now, I knew that kind of life would never be on the cards for me, and I was surprisingly okay about it, most of the time.

  Now, I hoped for a future that I would love. A life with my mates. A city full of stone and gargoyles and wings. We just had to beat Eris for us to get there.

  The vampires escorted us past the dance floor and through a door behind a thick red curtain. We entered a dimly-lit hallway, the bass of the club still echoing down the steel-encased space. When we came to a room at the end, the vampires stepped back and motioned me forward, as if I were to go through the door on my own. With a shaky breath, I pressed down on the handle, my heart racing inside my chest.

  I had no idea what I would find on the other side of this door.

  Steadying my nerves, I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  We were inside what looked to be an elaborately-decorated living room. Everything was covered in shades of crimson red, from the carpet, to the walls, to the claw-footed sofa that curved around a coffee table hidden under a collection of vials. In those vials, well...I could only imagine the red liquid was blood.

  And there was a lot of it.

  A man with slick dark hair twisted my way and smiled the kind of smile that was bright and blinding but didn’t meet his eyes. He gestured to the sofa beside him, beckoning me to come join him.

  I glanced at my gargoyles. They were all bristling with that intense energy of theirs, two seconds away from launching an attack on the head of the Vespa clan of vampires.

  “Just the girl, if you please,” he said in a smooth melodic tone of voice, one that would be no doubt charming to anyone who didn’t know exactly who and what he was. “The gargoyles will be staying where they are.”

  His little group of bodyguards surrounded the gargoyles once again, and one of them gave me a slight shove forward. Narrowing my eyes, I glared at the vampire who had pushed me, but I kept my feet moving toward the clan leader regardless. I made it across the room without incident and perched on the edge of the sofa, gripping my hands tight together in my lap.

  “Introduce yourself, my dear.” A command, not a question.

  I took a deep breath. “My name is Rowena Mortensen. I came here to ask you for...well, a favor, I suppose.”

  “Rowena Mortensen,” he said slowly, as if he were trying the name out to see how he liked it. “Well, Rowena Mortensen. As I’m sure you know, us vampires have the ability to scent supernaturals. The interesting thing is, you smell extremely different to any supernatural I’ve ever met. Why don’t you tell me what you are.”

  Another command.

  “I’m not sure that’s important information,” I said in response.

  Athan Vespa pursed his lips and leaned back in the sofa, his deep black eyes penetrating mine. He’d been relatively polite since we’d arrived at his club, though I could tell that the cordial treatment would only continue as long as I didn’t piss him off. And I was coming dangerously close to doing just that.

  “It is not good manners to stalk a man’s club and then hold back information about who you are,” he said, his eyes glittering. “Especially when you expect him to grant you some kind of favor. Tell me, Rowena Mortensen. What are you? And think very carefully about how you’d like to respond.”

  “Ro, you don’t have to do this,” Eli called out from where he was literally trapped with my other mates. I didn’t have just my safety to worry about here. I had to look out for the gargoyles.

  “I’m a goddess,” I finally said. “Well, a demigod, specifically.”

  He steepled his fingers underneath his chin and nodded. “I see. That does explain your scent. Now, tell me why you’ve come here looking for a favor from a vampire.”

  I took a deep breath and plowed forward. This was our one hope of beating Eris. “Our research suggests that you have an object that could be of great value to us. You see, another goddess has come to this realm. She means to destroy magic and rule the realm herself. By doing so, she would actually have a negative effect on your immortality. The magic keeping you as you are would vanish.”

  Okay, so I’d fibbed a little, but he wouldn’t know that. As far as anyone else but me and my gargoyles were concerned, we still thought that was part of Eris’s plan. This vampire didn’t have to know that Eris actually planned to take my magic, instead of destroy it. It was just a little white lie. One that was necessary.

  Athan’s face clouded over, and he pursed his lips. “Yes, we’ve heard rumors about these magic hunters, and we’ve seen some weakening of strength in some of my clan members. I am actually inclined to offer you some assistance, but I’m not entirely certain there’s much we can do. If you expect us to fight in some kind of army, that’s out of the question.”

  “You have an object of great value to us,” I continued. “An object given to you by the fae. It has the ability to trap a god.”

  “Ah.” Understanding
lit his dark eyes. “I know the object of which you speak. And truth be told, it does far more than that.”

  “Okay. Well—”

  He held up a hand to stop me, and it was then that I noticed the long curved point of his fingernails and the deep red veins that spread throughout his arms. On the surface, Athan Vespa looked like any ordinary—though slightly unnerving—man, but in the details, it was clear he was something else.

  “The object is quite valuable to me and my clan.” He leaned forward, and the iron stench of his breath swirled into my nose. “But I understand the importance of your mission. So, I will make you a deal. You will go and retrieve something else that is of great value to us, and you can have your goddess trap.”

  Chapter 14

  While the visit to the Vespa clan hadn’t been a total disaster—they didn’t want to kill us or drain our blood—the result wasn’t quite as good as I’d hoped. We needed the trap, and soon. Going off to retrieve something else for them, well...it was a diversion that we didn’t need right now.

  Of course, we didn’t have much of a choice. If we wanted this trap, we’d either have to force it from their hands, or we’d have to go get this thing for them.

  “What is it that you need?” I asked through gritted teeth.

  He gave me a patronizing smile. “Good girl. I had a hunch you’d make the right choice. What we need is quite simple really. We have a rival clan that lives in the tunnels beneath Edinburgh. They have taken my brother from me. He’s been stabbed with a stake and frozen in time. They’ve put him in a coffin and have left him down there. I would like him brought back to me.”