by Anton Strout
The blaze of approaching sirens grew louder with each passing second, and Marshall snapped his book shut. “We need to go,” he said. “Now.”
“We’ve done pretty good of steering clear of the law so far,” Rory said.
“Getting found out isn’t going to help us,” I said. “Marshall’s right. We need to go. We need to prepare, more than just for evading the police.”
I turned and headed back up the dead-end alley, an uneasy tension falling among the three of us. If I was being honest with myself, it had been there for months, really.
Prepare, Stanis had said. The implied threat behind Stanis’s single word, the idea of a coming war for those arcane secrets between Kejetan Ruthenia—Kejetan the Accursed and us . . . It seemed a little less likely every day, given the way they had all but disappeared after getting Stanis back from us. The fact that my older brother, Devon, had given up his humanity all for the promise of eternal life only added to that bitter-to-swallow pill.
Add to that month after month of frustration with slowly learning the arcane familial legacy of Spellmasonry, and the fire had died down a little, but the questions that had haunted me for months were still there.
Where was Stanis? Was he alive? Dead? And why hadn’t we heard from him, either in friendship or on behalf of Kejetan?
I couldn’t help but hold him responsible for the awkwardness among me and my friends at that moment, but what I really hated him for just then was leaving me.
Two
Stanis
There were times over the centuries when I missed the flesh of my once-human form, and as a metal spike drove through the tip of one of my wings, I experienced such a moment. Human flesh would have yielded with little resistance, but the arcane stonework of my wings was made from a higher quality of material.
Yes, there would have been pain, but none like that of my wings being torn through.
Still, feeling something was perhaps better than the nothing of the last few months, a time shrouded by total darkness—that of the mind and of the body with only a small circle of light shining down on me from somewhere above.
The weight of my heavy stone frame slammed down onto the steel of the ship’s hull, ringing out with a dull echoing thud. I lay there, unwilling—unable—to move, my only movement that of my claws digging into the cool metal beneath me. The hum of the ship’s mechanisms ran through my prone body, a different rhythm from that of the sway of waves against the freighter as it sailed on.
“Will the damage be permanent?” a deep and empty voice asked, that of my father.
I tilted my head to one side, seeking him out. Kejetan Ruthenia’s inhuman form was barely perceptible in the darkness of the cargo hold, a distant, malformed shadow barely visible beyond the small circle of light that surrounded me.
He was not the human I had known centuries ago, no. This monstrosity bore more of a resemblance to a jagged pile of rocks, its crags and lumps held together in a mockery of the human form. For every carved bit of grotesque beauty that had gone into my maker’s work, Kejetan’s own arcane attempts had created an equally opposite abomination.
“Will the damage be permanent?” Kejetan asked again, his voice growling with impatience this time, waiting for an answer . . . but not from me.
“Nothing I can’t fix,” another voice replied from the darkness off to my right. The one who had driven the spike through my right wing, the one just outside my line of sight. I did not think I knew the voice, fairly certain I had not heard it before. By the tone and the fleeting glimpse I had of the figure off in the shadows, I knew him to be human, but that was all I had gathered. “You wanted answers . . . This should speed up the process considerably.”
“Are you certain?” Kejetan asked.
“Honestly?” A short laugh barked out of the stranger. “I’m not sure. I’ve never done this to one of his kind. I’m not even sure if there is another of his kind.”
“We are of his kind,” my father snapped.
The stranger laughed again. “Have you looked in a mirror lately?” he asked. “No offense, but I wouldn’t exactly call you cut from the same cloth . . . I mean, stone.”
“You need not remind me,” my father said, the tone of his voice becoming more measured, darker. “Of this I am well aware.” His shadowy form turned away, looking across the dark cargo hold. “Devon!”
Another of the stone men walked over and stepped into my circle of light. This creature I recognized, its having only months ago still been human. This abomination in particular had once been the human Devon Belarus.
Kejetan joined him in front of me, the two stone men staring down at my prone form. “My son Stanis has claimed for months that the knowledge I seek has been stored—built—into him. Yet for months, we have not been able to extract it from him. You were once of the family who made him. Is what Stanis says true? Does he possess the secrets of the Spellmasons?”
Devon shifted from one jagged stone leg to the other as if uncomfortable with the question. If anyone here had a claim to discomfort, it was surely me, which made a grim laughter rise to my lips before I shut it down.
“You’re asking the wrong Belarus for that,” Devon said. “You want my sister, Alexandra.”
At the mention of her name, a surge ran through my body, and I pushed myself up to the full extension of my arms until I could look first at him, then my father at the edge of the circle of light. “No!” I shouted, rising to my knees. “You promised to stay away from the Belarus family, and I told you I would give you the secrets that I hold. That was our pact, Father.”
Kejetan stepped toward me. The rough stone of his hand grabbed at my face, jerking my head back until I was looking into the dark hollows where his eyes should be.
“Someone here has not lived up to his part of his bargain,” he said. “So perhaps it is time we revisit your dear Alexandra.”
Rage filled me at the very thought of it, but, weakened as I was, I could do nothing but stare back at him. “You know what will happen if you do,” I said. “The information you seek has been locked away inside me, and if you break our pact, you will lose all of it. The rules set upon me by my maker will once fill me, forcing me to fight you, unrelenting, until I am torn apart. You will have lost both your son and the secrets of the Spellmasons.”
I kept my eyes fixed on him, not daring to break contact or even hint that I was not exactly telling him the truth. It was, if I recalled Alexandra’s word for it correctly, bluffing.
Kejetan stared at me a moment longer before letting go of my face. “Then we are at an impasse,” my father said. He turned to the stranger. “Can nothing be done about this?”
The stranger, twirling a second spike just barely on the edge of my sight, stopped and sighed. “Possibly,” he said, “but it will take time . . . and money. This one will cost a good chunk. You sure you can afford it?”
Kejetan stepped toward the figure, towering over him. “I did not cross oceans to bandy around about money or riches,” he said with a bit of menace to it. “Just see to it.”
“I’ll need to do some research first,” the stranger said.
My father moved away from him, taking a position directly in front of me again. “Don’t you think you should finish stringing my gargoyle son up first?” Kejetan asked.
The word came off his jagged lips in a mix of disgust but also resentment. He wanted my form. He would kill for this form.
The stranger moved around behind me and pulled my left wing away from my body, stretching the stoneflesh of it out to its full extension. He raised the spike high overhead. “I said I need to research first,” he repeated, but raised the spike high overhead anyway. “But still, I suppose it can’t hurt to start breaking down this golem’s will . . .”
As the spike pierced my other wing, the pain was far worse this time. All sensation had returned to me tenfold since Alexandra had restored my soul, and pain was no exception.
Was this what humans felt all the time? Was t
his what I had felt centuries ago when my father had accidentally taken my human life away from me? So white-hot in my thoughts was the pain this time that all other thoughts fell from my mind, and I once more collapsed to the floor.
“Not so fast, big fellah,” the stranger whispered from behind, and he bent over me, affixing chains to both spikes. “You’re not getting a reprieve just yet.” The shadowy figure walked away toward the left of the cargo hold, the sound of chains pulling through fixtures high above us filling the hold. The slack on the lines attached to me pulled tight, my wings spreading out farther apart from each other with every passing second. When they could stretch no more, my body rose off the floor until I hung with the tips of my clawed feet just barely touching the steel below me.
The stranger stopped, but the resulting pain coursing through my stretched wings and body did not.
My father moved forward to me. “Will you reveal the secrets of the Spellmasons now?”
Dazed, I found it impossible to respond, my head hanging slack between my shoulder blades. I hung there for how long I knew not before Kejetan finally spoke again.
“Very well,” he said, turning away from me to the other stone man. “What say you, Devon?”
“Sometimes you’ve got to blow up a safe to get to what’s inside,” he said.
Kejetan looked back at me, then to the human stranger off in the shadows. “Break his will.”
“It’s your dime,” the stranger said, and there followed the sounds of his working with a tray of bottles, beakers, and vials I knew lay off on a table against the wall of the cargo hold.
“Now get ready, freak show,” he said. “This is going to hurt me as . . . Well, actually this shouldn’t hurt me one bit. You will be bent into servitude.”
I could not imagine anything feeling worse than the pain I was feeling across my shoulders and extended wings, but as a shaft of bright, hot light appeared in front of me, I was proven wrong. Somewhere in front of me, a small, focused beam shot into my shoulder, the low hum of electricity thrumming behind it.
“Ultraviolet,” I heard the man say although I knew not what the word meant until a second later.
Daylight.
The change in my body hit me, but only in the one spot and the area immediately surrounding it as the malleable surface of my stoneflesh turned to solid stone. My body seized up, the grinding of rock rising from the spot, and I could not help but let out a roar.
Can I endure? Can I take this pain, unbearable though it is?
Yes, if it means keeping the Belarus family safe, if it keeps Alexandra safe. Like the initial spike, there was a perverse pleasure in the pain. After centuries of being deprived of any sort of emotion or sensation, part of me welcomed feeling something. And if I was being honest with myself, something felt better than the nothingness I had experienced after ensuring Alexandra’s safety by forcing her to break her bond with me.
I could only hope she had been using these months wisely. My father could not be held by my bluff or mutual impasse forever.
And, there was also the fear that, quite possibly, I would eventually break.
Three
Alexandra
It was amazing how a stupid pile of bricks could really bring a woman down.
Rory and Marshall had gone back to the apartment they shared down in the Village, but thoughts of tonight’s failed experiment and Stanis filled my mind so completely that I was restless. Giving up on the idea of sleep, I instead stopped by the old Belarus Building to grab up Bricksley, stuffing him into my Coach backpack before heading out to Brooklyn. Sadly, it wasn’t to party.
I let Bricksley loose on the docks along the Hudson, setting his tottering brick body off on wire legs and clay feet to the task of patrolling for any sign of Kejetan’s freighter docked there. I knew it was in vain, but at least it felt like I was getting something accomplished, even if it was simply eliminating locations where it might return.
As the sun came up and the docks rose to a bustle of activity, I knew that Bricksley would freeze up the same way Stanis would in daylight, and I set off in search of him. Minutes later, I reclaimed the frozen, inert form of Bricksley from a pool of sunlight by the slip where the floating home of Kejetan Ruthenia had once docked. I stood there longer than usual as the world around me moved on, a small part of me expecting the ancient cargo ship to just sail in after its six-month absence, but when that little pipe dream didn’t come to pass, I gave up and headed back into the city.
A taxi dropped me off on the west side of Gramercy Park in front of the half block where my family’s building stood. I stared up at my by-then-vacant home, admiring the one bit of Gothic-inspired architecture on the whole park. I hadn’t felt too bad about self-condemning the place—both for the safety of my parents as well as getting some more alone time with the arcane library of my great-great-grandfather. If I was lucky, I could manage several hours of research work up in the art studio before the construction crews arrived. Continued reinforcing of the underlying structure of the catacombs was still going on—thanks to the damage Kejetan, his men, and Devon had done—but the art studio at the top should be fine for just little ol’ me.
Could I have fixed much of the stonework myself? I wondered as I paid the taxi driver. Possibly, but I didn’t want to hang the entire structural integrity of our wholly unique multigenerational building on my still-fledgling arcane skills. No, I told myself, it was best to leave it to professional builders and engineers, and thanks to years in the real-estate business, my family knew the best of those around.
The cab pulled away as a I caught a sudden, swooping figure out of the corner of my eye. I jumped back on the thankfully quiet sidewalk just as one of those magic-craving creatures from the night before dove through the space I had just occupied. Stone biters, Marshall had called them. Despite the faded and broken protections on the building, it was comforting to know there was still enough magic within it to draw the random passing monster, no matter how tiny and annoying.
They truly were more nuisance than anything. It swooped through the air around me, correcting its course and heading straight for me. Its tiny claws and sharp teeth looked like they could totally do some damage, so I treated it the way I had been treating a lot of things over the past few months—I was going to kill it.
Rory would be proud of my self-preservation instinct.
I didn’t bother going for my backpack. I didn’t need any of my notes or my great-great-grandfather’s spell book to deal with this. I whispered out one of the most basic of phrases I had learned, reaching my will out into Gramercy Park. The sense of stone was everywhere within it, and I latched onto something that would be easy to replace—one of the cobblestones from the winding path within.
There was no resistance as I pulled it to me in a high arc over the street itself, bringing it straight down toward the creature. The little bastard was fast and dodged my first attempt at him, his tiny wings swirling him up and around the cobblestone. Since the cobblestone was close, and I had a good visual lock on it, the stone itself became easier to handle, bending more easily to my will. A few more practice swipes at the creature, and I had a good idea of its maneuverability. With each pass, I drove it closer and closer to the ground, giving it less room to shift its course, but by the time it realized it was running out of room, it was too late. I pressed pure hate and strength into the stone, feeding the darkest of my will into it, and the cobblestone slammed down on the creature, catching it dead center. The wings stuck out from under the stone, fluttering against the pavement for a moment before all life drained out of the creature, and they stopped.
Once I was sure the thing was dead, I checked the still-quiet street and lifted the cobblestone, arcing it back into the park, where I expertly fit it back into its spot along the path.
I looked down at the flattened, broken creature, almost feeling sorry for it despite the fact that it had been moments away from clawing my face off. Still, the sight of its twisted little body
sent a shudder down my spine.
I couldn’t just leave the thing there. It was daylight, and it had been risky enough using my powers as it was. I could hear the sound of people scattered elsewhere around Gramercy, and it was just a matter of time before any one of them came this way. Using the toe of my boot, I nudged the broken body into the gutter of the street and reached for my backpack. I dug down deep into it, past my notebooks to the bottom, where my growing collection of tiny metal vials lay bunched together. Cool to the touch, I pulled a fistful of them free to examine my handwritten labels before finally selecting one.
Kimiya—one of the more all-purpose concoctions from my great-great-grandfather’s mixes. Part of an ever-dwindling collection thanks to all the experiments I had been running.
Pouring it over the lifeless creature, I spoke my words of power, transforming the stonelike skin of the tiny monster. It cracked and flaked into a pile of pebbles as I pressed my will over it until the figure could no longer hold its form. When there was nothing more than a pile of dusty rock shards left, I scattered it with my foot, most of the remains going into the nearby sewer grate. Other than a small dark stain on the sidewalk, it was like the creature had never been there.
Turning, I headed into our building’s foyer, startling as the doors before me flew open. No one was supposed to be in there yet today. I jumped back, calling out to the stone around me, readying my will to defend myself . . . until I saw my foe, that is.
“Alexandra!” Desmond Locke exclaimed, raising his bushy black eyebrows in surprise. With thinning gray hair pulled back into a ponytail and a goatee, my father’s spiritual adviser reminded me of Sean Connery from that movie Marshall had insisted we watch where all these immortals cut each other’s heads off. Hadn’t really been my thing, but Mr. Locke looked like a business-suited version of the actor nonetheless. Seeing him caused me to stand down from high alert despite the fact that he still creeped me out. I fought the niggling urge to drop the keystone of the vaulted arch of the foyer onto him, anyway.