2. Soren
SOREN
Iland on the roof of Stanley’s Diner hard enough to rattle every joint I have.
My claws scrape the weathered shingles before they catch.
The flight over open water took everything we had, with nothing but wet crags to sleep on between stretches, and my body aches in places stone shouldn’t ache.
Our first night in Shadow Wolf Creek, and we’re already running on fumes.
Sable lands beside me, and my older brother settles onto the roofline like we didn’t just cross an ocean.
Show-off.
I stretch my wings to work the stiffness out. “Three nights. Nothing but salt water and the occasional unfortunate fish.”
“It could be worse, little brother. Remember the migration across the Sahara?”
I grunt. I was finding sand in my joints for months afterward.
Below us, Shadow Wolf Creek spreads out in low warm patches of light, a scatter of buildings tucked into a valley between mountains. The shopping center anchors the human settlement, and this roof has a perfect view of all of it.
I draw a long breath through my nostrils. Pine comes first, sharp and cold, and then the wet soil beneath it. The thick musk of shifters is worked deep into the ground under both. It isn’t a trace or a passing scent, either. This town is saturated with them.
“Evergreen, soil, and shifters,” I say. “Many of them.”
“Just as the rumors suggested.” Sable’s eyes narrow.
My wings pull flat against my back. My parents were shattered by human hammers and chisels. My mother fell with her wings still half-spread, and some of the clan weren’t fully in stone sleep when the attack came. Their screams have never left me. My claws dig into the roof and leave deep gouges.
“We shouldn’t stay long,” I warn him. “You know what happens when we linger.”
“We need rest, Soren. Just a few days.”
He’s right, and I hate it. We are guardians, watchers, protectors. But who protects us when dawn comes and we turn to stone, easy pickings for any human with a grudge and a sledgehammer?
I settle into the crouch with the best view of the parking lot. “One week. Then we move on. We still have clan to find.”
Twelve of us left the old country, and Sable and I are the only pair who stayed together.
The rest scattered across continents in search of somewhere that wouldn’t try to destroy them.
Maybe they found safety. Maybe their stone bodies sit in pieces in some museum basement, labeled as medieval curiosities.
Sable takes position on the opposite corner of the roof. We’ve played this game for a century.
Then this town starts showing us things I have no name for.
A wolf shifter in his human form holds the hardware store door for an elderly human woman, and she pats his arm on her way through.
“Look at that,” I murmur. My claws curl over the edge of the roof.
Across the street, a bear shifter loads lumber into a truck while he chats with a human man. The bear is massive even in his mostly human shape. The two of them laugh at some private joke and clasp hands before parting. My wings loosen against my back.
A group of teenage girls spills out of a boutique, shopping bags on their arms. Two of them are human, and one has the amber eyes of a fox shifter. A man walks his dog past the grocery store while a wolf shifter leans against the wall outside, and neither of them so much as tenses.
In every town I’ve ever watched from above, there’s been a line that keeps humans on one side and shifters on the other.
There is no line here.
Sable leans forward so far he might slide off the roof. “Isn’t it the strangest thing to see them co-mingling like this?”
I nod slowly. A family passes below us. The father is a wolf shifter, the mother is human, and their children are both.
“It’s different.” My voice comes out rough. “Centuries of hiding, of watching humans hunt shifters and shifters hunt them back… this shouldn’t be possible.”
“Yet here it is,” Sable whispers.
A dragon shifter lounges on a bench with his wings folded against his back and jots something in a notepad. When a patrol car cruises past, the human officer inside lifts a hand, and the dragon waves back with a thin smile.
“Maybe the rumors were right,” I say. “Maybe Shadow Wolf Creek is a sanctuary.”
Below us, the stores go dark. The grocery’s sign dims, the hardware store’s windows go black, and even the diner under our feet is closing down for the night. Humans and shifters head to their vehicles together. A few shifters on nearby rooftops glance our way but offer no challenge.
“Do you think we could…” Sable doesn’t finish.
“Stay?” I finish it for him. “I don’t know. But I want to find out.”
Sable turns to me. “We’ll need positions. The sun will be up soon.”
The stone-sleep heaviness is already in my limbs. The shifters down there have a human shape to hide in, and we don’t. We are gargoyles, now and always.
“We should split up.” Sable’s wings shift. “This town is larger than it looks, and I don’t know how the shifters will feel about us yet.”
We don’t fit in a town where even the supernatural passes for human. By day we’re stone. By night we’re claw, wing, and glowing eyes, the thing that has frightened every living creature we’ve ever crossed.
“I’ll stay here in the shopping center,” I say. “I can listen from the stone and learn how this town runs. There has to be somewhere we can make a home.”
“Good plan.” His eyes glow brighter for a moment. “Nightfall, then. We’ll find each other and compare.”
“Be safe, brother.”
“And you.” Sable spreads his wings, and with one downstroke he’s gone.
The downdraft carries the mineral scent of his stone to me, the only familiar thing in this entire town. Then it fades, and what’s left is pine and cold air and a truck rumbling somewhere down the mountain road.
I watch the empty parking lot while the sky pales. Shadow Wolf Creek has something the other towns never did. It’s in the ground under this building, in the air, in the way those shifters on the rooftops looked at us and left us alone.
Dawn drags at me. My fingers have already gone stiff around the roof’s edge, and the stone climbs from there in no order I’ve ever been able to map—wings before knees some mornings, tongue first on the bad ones. Today it’s moving fast, and whatever position it catches me in, I keep until sundown.
I have minutes, maybe less.
All this time, and I’ve never gotten used to it. My mind stays awake while my body becomes a prison. I’ll hear every footstep and conversation, every scrape of a chair in the diner below, and I won’t be able to move until the sun drops behind the mountains again.
My claws grip the edge, my wings fold tight, and I face forward in the crouch I’ll hold all day while the world moves underneath me. A statue on a diner roof that no one will look at twice.
And in the part of me the stone can’t silence, the same question I’ve dragged across every ocean since the old country.
If I ever find my fated mate, could she love a monster?