Stone Guardian (Entwined Realms)

by Danielle Monsch

Men were stupid. It was all she could come up with most days. Change of subject. “What time are you going to pick us up?”

  “Seven.”

  “We’ll be ready.”

  He leaned down and kissed the top of her head. “Love you, baby sister. No matter what else, you have to remember that.”

  “I always know that.”

  When Michael was gone she went to the balcony and did her patented wave and dance, which had always worked in the past to get Terak’s attention.

  No Terak. Not then and not for the next several minutes.

  The image of that little silver ball popped up. Yes, thank gods Terak had the foresight to get it. Going into the bedroom and opening the top drawer of her nightstand, the silver ball was where she left it, safely stored in a velvet bag in the corner.

  All right, hold it tight and start speaking in your head. Terak. Terak, I need you. Can you hear me? Fallon wants to meet with us tonight, and I need you here.

  Thirty minutes later she had a pounding headache and not heard a word from her erstwhile gargoyle.

  The next two hours were spent between going to the balcony and trying to use the silver ball, but Terak never arrived at her side.

  This couldn’t be about the kiss, could it?

  Did he hate himself?

  Did he hate her?

  Maybe he felt guilt. It didn’t matter if he wasn’t in love with his fiancée. The fact was he was engaged to marry one woman while he kissed another. She wouldn’t like him if he was the type of male who thought so little of his promises and responsibilities.

  Whatever the reason, he wasn’t here, and Michael was arriving in five minutes for their meeting with the Guild.

  This meeting had to happen. Working with the Guild was her best bet of finding out the information needed. She wasn’t going to let necromancers use her to destroy this world, and she needed to protect her kids and anyone else close to her the necromancers might use to get to her.

  Terak would hate that she left without him, but there was no choice.

  It was time for her to step up.

  Michael arrived at seven sharp. A smile plastered on her face and her hands stuffed into the pockets of her slacks to hide the shaking, she said with all the false confidence she could muster, “Let’s go meet with the Guild.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Michael drove to the town hall, parking in the back. There were no other cars around, and all the lights had somehow stopped functioning, making the parking lot pitch-black. Nice touch.

  “This way,” Michael said, guiding her toward the emergency exit. No alarms went off as they opened the door. He led her to the elevators, and they went up to the fourth floor where the meeting rooms were. They walked three doors down into the only lighted office.

  Fallon and Laire were waiting, tonight’s outfit of choice for the mage a lime-green catsuit. Maybe she was colorblind. Or someone who really hated her bought all her outfits.

  Fallon nodded. “Thank you for coming. Did your bodyguard decide to take the night off?”

  Larissa might want a truce with the Guild, but that didn’t mean she was going to become best buds and tell them everything. “Terak has other duties, as you well know. Besides, considering how tense conversations can become, I thought it might be best to leave him out of it.”

  Fallon nodded again. “I hear you. That’s fine by me. In fact, it makes my life lots easier.”

  Warning bells went off at Fallon’s words and the smug way she held herself. This was a mistake. Larissa shouldn’t have come here without Terak. “Tell me what you wanted to tell me, and then I need to go.”

  “Sorry, not going to happen.”

  “What the-” Michael’s voice cut-off and Larissa turned. The shadow man from that first night was emerging from the wall, at least his torso was, the rest of his body still hidden. He wrapped his arms around Michael and pulled, taking Michael…

  …through the wall.

  “Michael!”

  She ran to the wall and beat on it, but it was unyielding. “Michael!”

  “He’s safe, I promise,” and Fallon was there in front of her. Larissa shrank back, but the wall was solid behind her, not allowing any more movement. “Sorry, Teach. You need to come with us now. The time of pussy-footing around is over.”

  Laire’s voice popped up. “Is that what pussy-footing means? Why was I thinking it was something sexual?”

  “Just read from the scroll.” Fallon sounded like an annoyed instructor during last period instead of someone in the midst of a kidnapping.

  Laire huffed, but brought out a parchment sheet. Larissa recognized it from pictures in her lecture books. It was a magic scroll, which gave a magic user the ability to cast spells they normally couldn’t. There were several conditions to be able to use one, not the least of which was the magic user had to be a powerful caster – the book said only ten percent of casters were powerful enough to make any use of scrolls.

  “What are you going to do to me?” Larissa hated that she couldn’t keep the tremor entirely out of her voice.

  “You are going unconscious. This is the easiest way,” and even as Fallon explained, Larissa could hear Laire chanting in some strange language, a mixture of smooth vowels and guttural consonants.

  Laire finished.

  Nothing happened.

  “Laire,” and Fallon’s annoyed voice was now ratcheted up several notches.

  Laire was looking at the scroll with confusion plain on her heavily made-up face. “I have never had a scroll not work before. It’s a beginner spell – there should be no way they could mess it up.”

  Larissa made a break for it, sprinting past the women, but as she stepped out the door someone picked her up, giving her body a hard squeeze. Even as she struggled a blindfold was placed over her eyes and ropes wrapped around her body.

  “Hard way it is.”

  It was an interrogation room – big and white, with a long table and two chairs in the middle, a couple spare bulbs hanging overhead, and one wall consisting of what was undoubtedly a two-way mirror.

  Larissa sat on one of those chairs, looking toward the mirror. She wasn’t going to throw anything, not until she had a living, breathing target. Those mirrors were notoriously hard to break.

  Fallon and Laire walked into the room. Well, more accurately, Fallon glided in, her balance centered on the balls of her feet. In contrast, Laire was wearing six-inch stilettos and was doing a hurried shuffle to keep up.

  They stopped in front of the mirror. Fallon never so much as glanced at her reflection and leaned back against it. Laire was the opposite, leaning close to the mirror fix her make-up and slick on a very shiny gloss on her lips.

  “My brother?” Larissa asked. Keep it cool. She could do that.

  “He’s perfectly fine,” Fallon answered. “He’s back at his home right now without so much as a hair out of place, though very pissed over what happened. He’s calling his commanding officers even now.”

  Several moments of silence followed. “Why?” So much for playing it cool. The word exploded out of Larissa. “Why am I here? Why did you kidnap me? You said we were meeting to talk, and I trusted you.”

  “Told you we should have waited for Aislynn,” said the tiny mage to Fallon, still looking at herself in the mirror.

  Fallon’s jaw tightened. She probably wasn’t the one often engaged in diplomacy, and the peeved look on her face told Larissa everything she needed to know about how Fallon felt being put in that position. Fallon said, “This was necessary. You are in a lot of danger and we had no other way to keep you safe.”

  “Don’t try to sell me that crap. You’re mad that I didn’t play your game, and you decided to change the rules.”

  “It was necessary,” Fallon repeated. Her sword kept peeking out from behind her head, a deadly reminder of what she could do. Well, she might be counting on that to help her out, but fat chance. This woman’s intimidation tactics weren’t working today.

 
; Larissa put as much scorn in her voice as she could. “Keep telling yourself that if it helps you sleep at night, though I can’t imagine anything could.”

  Laire, in the process of adding more eye shadow, spoke to Fallon then. “You aren’t helping the situation.”

  Fallon turned, narrowing her eyes. “I notice you aren’t speaking to her.”

  “I’m smart enough to recognize my weaknesses. I don’t do that empathy shit. That’s Ais’s department.”

  As if in answer to their words, the elf came through the door, followed by a man Larissa had not seen before. Overlong dark blond hair and deep-set yellow eyes, and a scar that ran from the bridge of his nose below his cheekbone to end somewhere under a close cropped beard. He wore blue jeans and an open flannel shirt over a T-shirt.

  He came to sit in front of her. “I’m Wulver,” he said, smart enough not to offer his hand when his advance caused an involuntary flinch on Larissa’s part. “I’m leader here.”

  Fallon was still standing with her back to the mirror, not reacting to those words at all. Larissa pointed to her. “I thought that was her, the way she acts.”

  He smiled but refused to be drawn in by her words. It was a nice smile, his teeth white and sharp.

  Maybe a little too sharp.

  No, no she was not going to ask. There was enough on her plate right now without wondering if the guy in front of her was a human or not.

  Guess the human. That might make a neat game.

  Well, he said he was boss. It gave her someone else to yell at. “Since you are in charge and not her, I’m assuming it was your order that brought me here?”

  He nodded. His eyes did hold some compassion, but something in the set of his shoulders, the way he carried himself, all told that while he might be sorry she was so upset, he felt no remorse in grabbing her and bringing her here against her will. “I’m sorry it was done this way, but with that last attack, we decided it was too dangerous for you to be free any longer.”

  That was an interesting way to put it. “Who’s this we if you are the leader?”

  Once again, he didn’t answer her question, the compassion in his eyes morphing into something harder. He said instead, “We want your stay to be enjoyable. Is there anything we can bring you?”

  “A nail file.”

  “Sure. Any nail polish? May I suggest red? It’s a personal thing, but I prefer when women stick with the classics.” He smiled again, and in that grin she saw the easy charm he possessed and could project when he wanted to. That might be the secret why he ran things, because in moments she was half under his spell, imprisonment be darned.

  Enough of that. Charm wasn’t going to get her home. “How long are you going to keep me here?”

  His grin faded, and her stomach sank to the soles of her feet. “You must understand how much danger you’re in-”

  “How long?” she repeated.

  He leaned back in the chair, trying to project nonchalance but failing. “Until you’re safe.”

  She crossed her arms and directed at him her hardest stare, the one that kept even her most unruly student in line. It didn’t do anything to free her, but she got some satisfaction in using it. “Meaning you’re keeping me here indefinitely, unless you know why I’ve been targeted and are only holding me here until you get your man – well, necromancer. Is that the case?”

  “There are things going on-”

  Screw this. She was here against her will, but she was here, and she was going to get some gods damned answers right now. “How are they going to use me to rip the realms apart?”

  Wulver jerked, and she’d bet money he rarely looked as surprised as he did right now. He looked at Fallon. Her brows were lifted slightly, the lines of her face softened from their usual intensity. She shook her head.

  He turned back to her. “You’ve learned a lot in a relatively short period of time.”

  “Did you think I was sitting on my butt waiting for the zombies to eat my brains?”

  Laire turned away from the mirror. “It’s not really true that zombies eat brains, it’s an urban legend…mrph.”

  The impromptu lesson was finished when Fallon clapped her hand over Laire’s mouth. Wanting to move the conversation forward before any possible explosion between the two could take place, Larissa said, “So why me?”

  Wulver settled in the chair, the smile and charm fading as weariness settled over his features. He half-opened his mouth before closing it, his gaze shifting away for a bare moment. His confusion was tangible. “We’ve searched and dug and researched and watched, but there is nothing about you that tells us what is going on.”

  That was not telling her anything she didn’t already know. She pressed on. “Do you know how the spell works that the necromancers would use?”

  “It isn’t one spell. There is a final spell that would need to be cast at the end – the one that rips the realms asunder. That one doesn’t change, but before that spell can be cast, certain requirements must be met. The problem we have is there are a lot of ways and a lot of roads to get things ready for that spell.” Wulver’s jaw tightened, and certainty once again infused his demeanor. “Bottom line is you are in danger. We still don’t know why you’ve been targeted, and all the paths we’ve traveled thus far have led to dead ends. With you here, maybe together we can figure this out. Isn’t that why you were going to meet us tonight, to get some answers?”

  “Yes, by talking and working together, not to be treated like a criminal. I came to you in good faith, to answer questions and open up my life to you so we could get answers together. But now I’m in jail and while you can take your sweet time figuring out what’s going on, my life will be in shambles. Isn’t that special?”

  “I promise I’ll get you home as soon as possible.”

  “Forgive me for saying that your promises don’t mean squat.”

  He drew in a deep breath, his eyes searching hers, as though he was trying to figure out how she worked, at least enough to say something that would have her agreeing to stay by her own free will.

  The door creaked and opened and a man entered. He had curly ginger hair with sideburns and was wearing jeans and scuffed up tennis shoes, with a grey T-shirt under a battered dark brown leather jacket. He walked over to Wulver, leaning close and whispering into the leader’s ear.

  Wulver’s eyebrows furrowed and he stared at ginger boy. Ginger’s mouth turned down and he nodded, then left the room.

  Laire, Fallon, and Aislynn looked on with curiosity. Not a sliver of sound reached Larissa, but from the way Wulver’s mouth tightened and his eyes narrowed, she knew he didn’t like what he heard.

  His eyes settled back on her. “For having the cleanest record I’ve ever seen, a whole lot of people want to meet you. What is your secret?”

  “Wulver,” Fallon called. “What’s going on?”

  Yes please, what the hell is happening now?

  Wulver sighed. He closed his eyes and scrunched up his face, the way people do when they’re expecting an explosion. “The Oracle has summoned her.”

  “Ah, hell no!” Fallon said, and Larissa flinched. Wulver really could have warned her about the volume Fallon could achieve, at least given her some ear plugs. “What do you mean summon? We only just got her to the safety of the compound.”

  Wulver stood, facing the swordswoman. “The Oracle commands that Larissa be brought to her at moonrise.”

  “The Oracle can also feel the backside of my boot.”

  Anyone who irritated Fallon that much couldn’t be all bad. This might be fun. And hey, she was an Oracle – hence the name. Maybe answers would finally be forthcoming.

  Larissa stood, looking to Wulver. “Can she tell me why all this has been happening to me? Is that why she wants to see me?”

  Wulver didn’t look like he believed that was a possibility, but after a moment he plastered on a smile and said, “I don’t know why you’ve been called, but yes, the Oracle may give you some answers.”

&n
bsp; “Wouldn’t count on it,” Fallon muttered.

  Wulver pinned his gaze on Fallon, command and authority in his bearing. Yes, this man was leader here. “She is to go to the Oracle.” Do you understand? was unsaid, but Larissa felt it.

  Fallon crossed her arms, slouching back against the mirror. “Yeah, got it.”

  Wulver left the room. The second the door closed after him Laire started jumping, a huge smile on her face and her body shaking in repressed excitement. “I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go! You don’t even like the Oracle. Let me.”

  Before the first words were out of Laire’s mouth, Fallon started to shake her head, and as soon as the green-haired woman took a breath, Fallon used it as her opportunity to say, “No way.”

  “Please please please.”

  “Let me rephrase. No way in hell.”

  Laire stopped jumping, a small pout coming to her lips. How she had been able to prevent an ankle fracture on those spikes, Larissa didn’t know. “Why not?”

  “Because if they have an orgy going on, you’ll want to join. And if they don’t have an orgy going on, you’ll want to start one. I’ll take Aislynn with me.” Fallon looked over at Larissa. “Congratulations. You are about to do something many mortals dream about but few get to experience. You’re about to meet the Oracle.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The acolyte was a young elf male, no more than hundred years old. His hair was shorn in the way of all those newly pledged to their necromancer master while the scar pattern on his chest denoted who his master was to those that knew the code. His eyes gleamed with a feral and fierce devotion, one the gargoyles had yet to crack.

  Terak stood before him as he had the last several hours. “I ask again, why are you here trespassing on our lands? Your master knows my kind is resistant to your magic, so it is not in his best interest to court the wrath of gargoyles.”

  The high-pitched giggle teetered on the edge of sanity. “Perhaps my Master knows he has nothing to fear from a gargoyle obsessed with a worthless human woman. Tell me, Gargoyle, is what’s between her legs so unique that you let it take you away from your Clan?”