by Zoe Chant
He turned and strode swiftly away before he could give in to the weak part of him that wanted to take her in his arms and never let go. Keeping her safe was what mattered.
Which meant dealing with Sharpe ... alone.
The mansion was very quiet. Distantly he heard the thump of helicopter rotors. He climbed the stairs to one of the upper balconies and opened the door by touching a concealed sensor pad that read his fingerprints. From the balcony, with the night wind blowing his hair back, he watched the helicopter's lights receding against the stars. Maddox and Elvie would have been the last ones aboard, and now he remained, alone, to deal with Sharpe.
He had spent most of his life alone, and this felt very fitting. It was how things should end. His people were safely away, and Loretta was somewhere Sharpe would never get to her. Darius rested his hands on the balcony and looked down at the brightly lit lawn of the mansion.
The gargoyles were coming.
They appeared first at the edge of the woods, hints of movement between the trees. And then the lawn began to move. It bubbled up as if giant gophers were digging up from beneath, then split apart just like the mountain glade earlier in the evening, so the stoneskins could crawl through.
They were all different, he noticed with a vague, detached interest. All of them were recognizably gargoyles, not so different from the carved ones that crouched on rooftops and fountains. But they might have short, stubby horns, or wide curving ones, or a single horn like a grotesque parody of a unicorn, or even none at all. Some had great arching bat's wings; others had vestigial wings that jerked spasmodically as they moved. And some of them were even more bizarre. He saw one with four arms, another that skittered on spiderlike, strangely jointed legs.
Darius took out his phone and thumbed to the house controls.
With a deep rumbling that he felt through the soles of his feet, a wall rose along the base of the mansion's foundation, shedding grass and dirt and ornamental plantings. He had never raised it, and smiled with grim satisfaction as it rose smoothly to its full height of fifteen feet. Looking down, he watched the stoneskins pause, milling about in confusion. Then they turned with renewed purpose and rushed the wall.
They weren't smart enough to reason through that kind of problem on their own, he thought. Sharpe had to be down there somewhere, directing them.
The faster ones with the longest legs reached the wall first; others bounded over it or took to the air. Darius waited until the last minute and then touched the next button.
The wall electrified. This didn't hurt the stoneskins much; it simply caused additional confusion as the electricity crackled over their rocky skin.
But the lasers were more of a problem for them.
The first zap from the top of the wall seared through a bat-winged stoneskin like a hot knife through butter. The edges of the cut glowed with the dull red of molten rock as the two halves of the gargoyle plummeted to the garden and landed in a flowerbed, where they lay sizzling and sending up small tendrils of smoke. A pungent smell of hot rock and burning vegetation reached him.
This time the stoneskins didn't even hesitate. They came in a wave. The motion-detecting lasers reacted as designed, and the air filled with the hot-rock smell and the ear-splitting snap! of breaking rock. Pieces of the stoneskins' constructed bodies showered the lawn and clattered off the walls of the house.
But they kept coming, scrabbling up the wall. Some of them were clambering up the walls of the house now. A few who had managed to dodge the lasers landed on the roof.
Darius hissed softly to himself. He tucked the phone into his pocket for safekeeping and shifted. His coils spilled over the balcony; his tail dangled off the edge. He raised himself to his full height, an alpha dragon in his prime, at the height of his strength.
"Sharpe!" he bellowed.
One of the stoneskins launched itself off the roof at him. Darius swatted it like a fly. The hard stone body sent a numbing shock up his arm, but it sailed over the railing and smashed to pieces in the rubble of an ornamental fountain.
In this body, he didn't find them hard to fight ... individually. There were just so many of them.
"Sharpe! Coward! Come out and face me!" Furious, he smashed more of the constructs, hurling them down to the ground or over the cliff.
Was that a movement at the edge of the trees? Darius reared up on his hind legs, his sharper-than-human eyes scanning the shadows.
There! A flash of something paler in the dark.
Appearing to realize that he'd been seen, a heavily built blond man strolled out into the open. He wasn't fat, but he was large, giving a sense of heft and power with every movement he made. Stoneskins flanked him on all sides.
Darius had never seen Rodan Sharpe in person, but there was no one else this could possibly be. It was clear from the way the blond man moved that he was no construct, and he had the casual, arrogant power of one who knows himself to be in charge.
Darius roared and launched himself into the air. In his fury he nearly forgot to turn off the lasers. The phone was inaccessible, so he snapped a voice command.
As soon as the stoneskins could get through the laser barricade, he was mobbed. They came from all sides, piling onto him. Darius roared and whipped his body from side to side, shedding scales as he tore himself free. Bleeding heavily, he crashed onto the balcony.
Instantly he launched himself again, his rage so great that he barely felt the pain. The stoneskins dragged him down, their stone claws ripping at his scales, stone teeth tearing his flesh. Their weight was so great that he fell out of the air, crashing to the lawn.
Still he struggled to break free, even as more erupted out of the earth, and all the while, all he could see through the blood running into his eyes was the blond man at the edge of the woods, mouth curved in a sadistic smile.
Chapter Seventeen: Loretta
After yelling herself hoarse, Loretta sank down in front of the door with her hands pressed to its surface.
"Darius, you idiot," she muttered. There was a part of her that wanted to collapse in tears, and another part that was sinking into a gibbering panic attack at the thought of being locked in. She hadn't known she was claustrophobic, but there was something truly panic-inducing about knowing that she couldn't get out even if she wanted to.
But giving in to despair and panic wouldn't solve any of her problems, she reminded herself. Taking a deep, calming breath, she got up and began to explore the room.
There wasn't much to see. Darius had done it up nicely so that it didn't look like a prison cell, but it basically was a prison cell, just a tasteful one. The nice wallpaper and paintings on the walls didn't disguise the fact that there were no windows. In a closet, she found cases of prepackaged meals and jugs of water, which didn't do much to reassure her. She tested the taps in the bathroom to reassure herself that there was running water, and stood on the toilet to feel in front of the vents for a comfortingly strong air flow. Of course, she knew Darius wouldn't lock her up to suffocate, but she didn't want to be the victim of a technical glitch either.
Her phone had no service down here. The computer on the desk booted up when she turned it on, but all she got was a login screen. She tried a couple of test passwords, such as TOBLERONE, but none of them worked and she gave up.
"When I get out of here, Darius, you are in so much trouble."
The one thing he hadn't thought to supply her with was something to do. Not that she would've been able to focus on a book or a game of solitaire at the moment anyway. She paced anxiously, used the bathroom, got herself a granola bar from the closet and then put it down uneaten, and paced some more.
When the door opened, she was staring at a painting on the wall, trying to figure out whether the cows and horses in the pretty rural scene were actually following her with their eyes, or if it was just her imagination. The sound of the door sliding back into the wall made her spin around. "Darius—" she began, and then stopped, surprised. It wasn't Darius. It was Maddox
.
"Come," he said simply.
"What are you doing here?" Loretta asked. With vast relief, she hurried out of the room after him. "I thought you were on the helicopter."
"I decided to stay back and see if the boss needed a hand. Good thing, too. Stay with me."
Loretta didn't have to ask why. She could hear eerie scrabbling noises on the walls. Then a sudden crash came from somewhere upstairs. "Are they inside?" she asked, breathless. Her stomach turned cold at the memory of those things she'd seen in the woods and on the monitors.
"Some of 'em, and more all the time. Sharpe managed to goad Darius into turning off the defenses and coming out to him," Maddox said grimly, opening the door to Darius's office. "We got one chance left now. The self-destruct."
"Wait, the what? His mansion has a self-destruct? Who in the world puts a self-destruct in their house?"
"You really gotta ask?"
"Good point," Loretta muttered, looking up at the screens on the walls, and her mouth dropped open in dismay. Some of the screens had gone dark, but most of the cameras were still working, and all of them showed her scenes straight out of a low-budget horror movie.
Gargoyles. Gargoyles, everywhere. Crawling on the walls, smashing through windows, heaving their way up out of the lawn ...
Wait, she thought, moving past Darius's desk, where Maddox was busy at the computer. What was that?
One of the cameras showed a view of something that looked like a gray, seething mound. She couldn't even figure out where it was until she recognized part of the mansion's rooftop in the background—although there was some sort of stone or metal wall in front of it that she didn't remember seeing before. But that made her realize that the scale of that heaving gray mass was much larger than she'd thought. Squinting at it, she made out wings and claws, elbows and tails, and she thought: It's gargoyles. It's a big pile of gargoyles. Doing what, though?
Then there was a flash of a dragon wing, and Loretta let out a small shriek.
"Darius!" There was no doubt now. She saw his tail lash in the grass, and the mass of gargoyles surged forward for an instant as whatever was underneath them moved. Those gargoyles were piled on top of Darius.
"Maddox!" Her voice came out as a strangled cry. "Maddox, we have to help him. They're killing him!"
"I know," Maddox said simply. "Gimme a minute."
"We don't have a minute. He doesn't have a minute!"
"I said gimme a minute!" His voice sounded frustrated enough to make her turn and look.
The computer screen now had a large set of numerals in the middle. It read 3:00.
"I can't change it," Maddox said. "The timer countdown is hardwired. Once I push this button, we got three minutes to grab the boss and get out of here."
"I don't care! We're his only chance, Maddox."
That seemed to decide him. "Here goes nothin'," he murmured and tapped a key.
The numbers changed to 2:59.
"Run!" Maddox snapped. He sprang to his feet and sprinted for the door, catching her by the arm.
They ran down the hallways. Maddox had to stop to open one of the sealed doors, then cursed and slammed it shut as something large and gray sprang at them from the other side. It slammed into the door with a hollow ringing sound.
"Guess we go another way," he muttered, turning to haul her down another hallway.
Loretta couldn't help counting down in her head. How much time did they have left? Two minutes? One?
"Is this going to take us outside?" she panted. She hadn't run this long or this fast in years.
"We're goin' to the garage." Maddox stopped to haul up an overhead-mounted door. "And here we are."
The room was dark. Maddox flicked a switch, lighting up a vast long space with what must have been two dozen cars neatly parked, each in front of its own separate garage door. There was everything from beautiful classic automobiles to the limo they'd been driving to a big sleek truck with a lift kit, dual rear tires, and a heavy front grille.
It was the last one that Maddox took her. Loretta scrambled up into the passenger side and, by habit, snapped her seatbelt.
"This thing isn't gonna last long when we hit the stoneskins, I bet," Maddox said. "You gotta get ready to move."
Loretta nodded wordlessly. Maddox started the truck and threw it into gear.
She thought they were going to ram the garage door, but Maddox reached for a controller on the sun visor and the door rolled up a split second before the grille smashed into it.
The truck roared out of the garage—straight toward a wall looming right in front of them. "Damn it," Maddox muttered, twisting the wheel and slewing them to the side. "Forgot about that. You see any doors in this thing?"
"There!" She pointed.
This time he did ram it. The doors were big and steel, but they opened outward and clearly weren't meant for an attack coming from this direction. The truck jolted violently and the doors gave way, twisting on their hinges. They bounded out onto the lawn, with Maddox twisting the wheel and skidding around the bodies of fallen stoneskins (many of them trying to get back up, even if they were missing limbs) and huge holes in the lawn.
At least Darius wasn't hard to find; he was bigger than a city bus, with all the nearby gargoyles converging on him. Loretta realized, as Maddox tore across the lawn, that Darius was leaving a trail of shattered, destroyed stoneskins behind. He was bashing his way through them by brute force. It looked like he'd destroyed hundreds already. Yet there were more coming all the time, and the glimpses Loretta could get of him tore at her heart. He was covered in blood, but snarling and furious, crawling inch by inch through a mob of enemies toward a blond man who was standing at the edge of the woods and smiling in cold triumph.
That must be Sharpe. Loretta's insides clenched in fury. She'd never felt this way about a person before, but after everything Sharpe had done to Darius, she wanted to hurt him with her bare hands.
The most important thing, though, was getting Darius away from the gargoyles. "What can we do?" she asked Maddox, trying not to bite her tongue as the truck jarred over bumps.
"This," Maddox said grimly, and rammed them.
The truck's massive metal grille bent on impact, but it sent smashed gargoyles flying in all directions. Maddox turned the truck and jolted over several more, trying to scrape them off Darius's sides.
"I'll get him," Loretta gasped. She screwed up her courage and opened the passenger door.
She expected the stoneskins to pounce on her as soon as she jumped down to the torn-up lawn, but they ignored her, entirely focused on Darius. She remembered what Darius had said about stoneskins not being very smart. Still, she had to dodge swipes of their claws and wings as she ran toward Darius's head.
"Darius!"
Her worst fear was that he wouldn't recognize her and would try to attack her as well as the gargoyles. Yet she couldn't find it in her to be afraid of him. She managed to get a hand on his massive, scaled snout.
"Darius! Shift back! We've got to get away!"
Darius snarled and heaved his body. More gargoyles were crushed under his weight.
"Darius!" He was all dragon now; the human part of him was clearly not in the driver's seat. She put a ringing note of command into her voice, the same voice she used to tell two dozen preschoolers to stop what they were doing and sit down right now. "Darius, shift back, now!"
He stared at her with his dragon's fiery gleam in his eyes—and then he shifted, collapsing to a man in her arms. His suit was ragged, soaked with blood, and he stumbled against her.
The gargoyles were caught off guard for a moment. Taking advantage of their moment of confusion, Loretta looked around for Maddox and the truck. A sudden, booming explosion got her attention, and her heart sank when she caught sight of him. He was standing in the truck bed with a shotgun, and she could see immediately that the front end of the truck was destroyed. Even now, the stoneskins were bashing mindlessly at it, destroying it further.
; She didn't see how they could possibly get to him. There were too many gargoyles in the way. And even if they did, the truck wasn't going anywhere.
Maddox seemed to realize the same thing. "Go!" he yelled. "Get him to fly you out. I'll distract 'em."
"What about you?" she shouted back.
"Don't worry about me! I'll be fine! Just go!"
"Darius!" she said, giving him a little shake. "You need to shift again. Darius, we need your dragon. We have to get out of here!"
She wasn't sure if he heard her or if instinct took over, but suddenly she had her arms around the neck of Darius's dragon. He was now standing on a number of the gargoyles who had been reconverging on them. Loretta scrambled up his blood-slick side as the gargoyles surged forward. "Fly, Darius!" she screamed. "Fly!"
His ragged wings beat powerfully downward, and he leaped into the air. Distantly, Loretta heard a man's voice scream, "Stop them!"
With a startling Boom!, one of the gargoyles closing on them shattered into pieces. Loretta looked down at Maddox in the truck bed, racking another shell into the shotgun. He fired again and again, each shot perfectly placed, disintegrating one flying stoneskin after another as she and Darius climbed higher and higher.
There weren't very many of the flying stoneskins left. Darius must have taken care of most of them himself already. And they were outdistancing the rest.
How long has it been? she thought wildly. Surely the three minutes were up. And Maddox was still in the truck bed, a tiny, dwindling figure, besieged by gargoyles.
"Darius!" she shouted toward his head, leaning forward and straining her voice against the wind rushing over her. "We have to go back! Maddox is—"
A rumble drowned out her words. Loretta looked down again, just as the mansion erupted in a roiling ball of flame and smoke.
It was an astonishing sight from above. They were high above the valley now, and so she could see the mansion lighting up in a series of explosions, taking out one wing after another. The building, the gardens, the helipad ... the whole place erupted in explosion after explosion.