14. Geo
While Cress and Ben engaged in their ritual, I separated myself from them for our mutual sanity. If Cress wanted to explore her magic…who was I to stop her? She was fairly certain it would be fine, and Ben was more confident still.
Rather than loom over them, I went to my evening post. I was staying in stone form longer and longer by necessity, not consuming valuable rations and not sleeping when our enemies were sniffing around the library at night.
In fact, it was irresponsible for me to take human form…but I craved it. Even as I stood sentry in the shadows of the library’s first floor, I ached within to transform back and hold my love through the night once I was sure she was okay.
No.I had a duty.
And no, that duty wasn’t waiting in the same room as her ritual. It was ensuring her safety, as I was doing. She could rest easy knowing that no unnaturals had slipped into the lower floors of the library, because I was standing guard.
Someone else would have to be tasked with this if I abandoned my post. They could fall asleep while keeping watch. Everyone in our little group was in some stage of exhaustion and hurt at this point. Most of our various wounds resulted from careless mistakes no one made when we first started clearing the library.
I just wished Cress would come up here and tell me how her ritual went. Maybe spend some time with me before she went to bed.
I didn’t shift my considerable stone weight side to side, but I realized after an hour that I was bored. I had never been bored in this form before. Could I still be considered a patient rock if boredom was leaking into me from my human side?
Had I truly changed so quickly to be considering this question during an ongoing crisis?
Hmm, yes. For better or worse, this was Cress’s doing as well. I would never be an unfeeling stone construct again with duty my only comfort. I loved my woman too much to revert to that state.
Glass crunched under someone’s tread, drawing my focus. “Halt. Identify yourself,” I stated without hesitation. I already had one quartz spike primed and ready to fire should I have announced myself to a roaming unnatural.
“Geo?” answered Grant’s uncertain voice. “It’s me, your favorite changeling.”
“You are the only changeling I know,” I said.
“That you’re aware of,” he said with a lilt of playfulness. I decided he sounded unapologetically like Grant and tilted my crystal shield, letting it reflect what little light remained outside from a distant streetlight so he knew where I was standing. The library was completely dark to discourage unnatural scavengers.
“Is that supposed to be a joke?” I asked.
His outline approached, and he felt for the stack closest to me. “Depends. Did you find it funny?” Only now did I notice the hitch in his voice and how he stumbled and held his side. “áine hasn’t figured me out yet, right? She’ll heal me?”
“She has more pressing matters than your secret identity,” I confirmed. “What happened?”
I saw the impression of his bright teeth bared in a grimace. “Turns out it’s nigh impossible to spy on someone who eats every supernatural placed in front of her. Still, I saw a glimpse of some real shit, my stony friend, and then the monsters discovered me.”
“Were you followed?” I demanded.
“Please,” he wheezed. “I’m not that much of an amateur. But…they might pick up my blood scent. I had to land a couple blocks away to avoid the attention of Myuna’s flying blobs.”
“I will handle it,” I stated. For a split second, I hesitated and warred with the desire to shake him down for all of his information, despite concern for his well-being. “Tell me the most pressing details of what you learned. Without jokes.”
“Yes, sir.” Grant didn’t have his mocking tone anymore. “Straight to the point…Myuna is making monsters of any animals that are brought to her and was consuming the souls and bodies of the people she gets her hands on until very recently. She’s successfully turned three people into white-eyed zombies, that I’ve seen, and…” He spent a few moments catching his breath. “Phaeron has switched sides. He’s started gathering people for Myuna to zombify.”
A sick feeling gathered in my chest. “You are certain? You have seen this for yourself?” I confirmed. Cress would be heartbroken. She’d been so certain the powercore had allowed her a connection with him to send him support. But even the greatest men broke under the right kind of pressure eventually, and we knew it couldn’t be easy to stand in a goddess’s presence unaffected.
“Yeah, I did. Hard to mistake a big scary shadow dude hauling a screaming woman toward Myuna.” He affected a shudder, which turned into a real, pained cough.
“Go seek healing. Don’t go back out again. There is no point in endangering yourself,” I said.
“Worried about me, huh? If you weren’t made of stone, I’d daresay you were getting soft,” he said with a hint of a fae’s musical, teasing laugh as he left me, finding the elevator and disappearing into the depths of the library.
Little did he know how right he’d been, and how annoyed I was that he taunted me for it.
Three doglike creatures followed the trail of Grant’s blood scent. I heard them snuffling and fired a quartz spike through one of their elongated skulls, killing it and sending the other two yipping away in fear.
Come morning, I went to retrieve my weapon and reabsorb it into my body and got a good look at it. Its eyes had glowed faintly with Myuna’s white power, making its head a target even in low lighting. The corpse, though…it was simply sad. It appeared that the goddess had stretched an already emaciated street dog, trying to form it into a doskalo. Fur and skin were split over joints not built for the sudden weight and size of its transformation.
“Rest in peace,” I rumbled. I would have to show the body to the rest of the group as an example of the unnaturals prowling the city streets.
When one of our remaining Crystal fae came up to swap places with me, he had his phone out. “We’re getting a resupply soon. Mind staying here just in case there’s trouble?”
I grinded a nod, and together we stepped outside. Cold wind and a bite of freezing rain hit us, and the fae shuddered. I scanned the drab gray of the skies, which were free of flying creatures, but a few of them lined up on the buildings around us, their glowing white eyes unblinking.
The unnatural birds were hulking, inflated in the chest with…muscle? Pus? Something of the sort. Their claws were transformed into oversized and gleaming talons.
“We are being spied on,” I said quietly to my fae companion, indicating the birds. If Myuna had even a smidge of tactical capability, she would have already corrupted and sent out a legion of these birds to have her eyes on every inch of Cerris City’s streets.
“Shit, yeah, they’re looking right at us,” he muttered back, scoffing. “Think the bounty hunters will come knock ’em down for imaginary points?”
“The endeavor may not be worth the reward,” I answered.
I did not have to explain further. Usually, I didn’t, but as the minutes rolled past and nothing else happened, I spoke up out of my usual turn, pitching my voice low so it might be chased away on the cold wind rather than reach the spying birds’ awareness. “I imagine they are newly installed spying units. Their job right now will be to watch us and see what we are doing. We can resupply in peace, or we can kill them and risk a hostile response in return.”
“I get it. I was just trying to make a joke, man,” he said through chattering teeth.
People and their jokes, I thought with a thread of annoyance. I supposed it was asking a lot for a non-gargoyle to be as direct as I was.
A large truck rumbled down the street, its bed full of crates. A second, similarly laden vehicle followed. I noted my surprise. A lot more people piled out than were needed for a supply run. I helped heft more than a person’s share of the weight and fell into step with Madigan Ashbough carrying several crates too, her arms flexed with extra muscle from a guardian witch spell.
“Hello again, Geo,” she said cheerfully enough, her voice betraying a hint of strain.
I waited until we were in the library to say, “I was not expecting our leader to deliver supplies personally.”
We put the crates down and her muscles relaxed to their usual size slowly. She motioned for me to stand aside with her as the rest of the men and women took care of moving the crates deeper into the library. “That’s because we’ve had a change of strategy.”
“You are aware of Phaeron switching allegiances,” I surmised.
“Yes. We’ve always known it would happen, but not exactly when. Our seer allies are now certain that the library will be the subject of an assault with him as its head,” she said with a grim set of her lips.
“How long do we have?”
As we spoke, I noted the presence of her mates, the Crystal Court’s Prince Orthus and the twin guardian witches, Ajax and Aaron, identical save for their different tastes in dressing style. The blood witch Daire Grimsbane was also here, fully equipped for combat; despite being a politician, it seemed he was willing to get his hands dirty fighting with us. It also seemed he was friends with the other men now, carrying on with the twins as they worked.
Orthus placed Madigan’s massive geode-formed warhammer next to her, and she smiled prettily, reaching up to kiss his cheek in thanks.
“Days,” she answered me. “But it will depend on Cress and the powercore to trigger Myuna’s greed. We still have some agency to prepare with traps and spells.”
“I will accompany you to tell her that.” A frown pulled at my stone lips, made more severe when I took a moment to transform back to human form. My concern for Cress practically pulsed out of me, along with a new emotion: anger. Phaeron was the perfect agent for Myuna to hurt Cress. Despite everything, I was halfway moved toward blaming him for this situation.
Madigan nodded. “That’s a good idea,” she said with a look of understanding.
We descended with the next set of supplies and emerged into a bustle of movement on floor negative one as crates were opened and the items divided and put away. Cress was there helping, red-nosed and puffy-eyed, and my heart sank to see her this way. She put down a jug of water moments before I swept her off her feet and into my arms.
“Hey, Geo.” She hugged me back with a soft sigh, burying her face in my shirt.
She breathed a mild protest when I carried her away to an empty conference room so she could sit with Madigan and me. I was loath to let her go, and it seemed she felt the same, as she remained in the circle of my arms when I settled. Her hand rested casually on my knee.
“How did your ritual go?” I asked.
Cress released a little watery laugh. “Fine. It was…good. I don’t feel very different, but I have to do this occasionally so I don’t overheat.” She raised her palm, which put off the same type of glow and warmth as a lightbulb.
I found that to be of dubious usefulness but kept the thought to myself.
“You will be luminous, my love,” I murmured.
Madigan cleared her throat from where she settled across from us. Cress and I jerked apart, having been about to kiss right in front of her. “I just wanted to share a few words Hana wanted me to tell you,” she said.
“About Phaeron?” Cress asked. There was a hopeful hush to her voice as her fingers knotted in her lap.
Madigan nodded. “She wants you to know that Phaeron slumbers, and if you wake him, he is yours.”
My mate’s brow knit. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
With a sigh and a shrug, Madigan leaned back in her seat. “Kid, I’d be a wealthy woman if I got a dollar for figuring out every cryptic thing an augur has said to me. I took it to mean you can shake him out of Myuna’s control by making him aware of his surroundings. But he’s coming for us soon with the rest of the goddess’s forces.”
Cress grew rigid in my lap and craned her head up toward me. “The rest of the greater unnaturals still need to be killed,” she stated with realization.
“We have reinforcements to help us,” I said.
“And Myuna has a corrupted dimensional who will teleport them away the moment their prisons are unsealed. But we will still try. It’s better than them escaping unexpectedly,” Madigan added.
Cress gulped audibly. “I need to go speak with the powercore about this and…other things.”