CHAPTER SIX
Bellan’s house was lavish, but it wasn’t the artwork, or sculptures, or dangling chandeliers that my burning eyes struggled to bring into focus. It was Beck, his hands wringing in front of his body. He raced for me.
I stared at her. On Gideon’s moon it was all I could do.
“I have the…shall we say, occasional, gift of premonition,” Davina prattled on.
“I foresaw the birth of a human-born gargoyle two hundred and seventeen years ago, and the woman she would grow into. You will experience your first shift in ten days, on the dawn of your thirtieth year, as all gargoyles do.”
I took a reflexive step back from her, my hands beginning to shake.
“No,” I managed. My eyes danced around the chamber, between the austere walls that abruptly felt like a prison cell, to the slits in Griffon’s narrowed eyes and the unforgiving throne atop the dais.
My gaze darted to the wing-shaped doors standing open and mocking at my back.
I whipped back toward the Archon. “Fuck no. You’re lying. ”
“No, I am not. And my magic has never been wrong.”
My palms splayed at my sides out of habit. Instead of burning the hideous lies out of her mouth, my magic only thrashed. I huffed and snapped my palms shut. No. She’s lying. I can’t— I’m not. I whirled toward those damned doors.
“I cannot allow you to leave,” Davina said behind me.
I slowly pivoted back toward her.
“The first shift is often violent and will be rather unpleasant for you regardless. That is why I had you brought here. You may not have a qualm with slaughtering innocents, but I do. And I will not allow a fledgling gargoyle to run amuck with humans.”
A ragged cackle crawled up my throat and exploded into the quiet of the chamber.
I stepped forward, her words torching my shock into an ashen pile.
“Say that to my baby brother, you bitch.” I felt the tension that sizzled the air as every gargoyle in the room stiffened.
“Oh wait, that’s right. You can’t!” I jabbed my finger toward her chest. “Because you had his head cut halfway off before he could walk!”
She stared pointedly at my finger, then dragged her gaze back to mine. “I will not humor outbursts on that topic. Nor will you goad me into telling you what you want to know.”
I growled and threw up my hands. “And what happens when, in ten days, I remain fully human?”
The Archon’s eyes narrowed. “That will not happen. As I said, my visions have never been wrong.”
“Humor me,” I snapped.
The soft smile that slid over her face belied the dagger-sharp shrewdness in her gaze.
“Fine. I will have you executed, both as punishment for the innocent gargoyles you have slain, and to prevent further loss of life.” She closed the paltry breathing room left between us.
“Now, wouldn’t things have remained more pleasant if you hadn’t pushed for an answer? ”
“Pleasant?” I spat. “What about this has been anything but a nightmare?” I briefly shuttered my eyes and drew in a deep breath, the short but volatile fuse on my temper sputtering to a dull spark. “Do you have anything else to say?”
“Not at present.”
“Then I’m leaving this godscursed chamber.”
I spun on my heel and darted for those ghastly doors.
Before my foot could cross the threshold, Davina called, “Oh, Lydia, there is one more thing.”
I ground to a halt and mashed my teeth together. I whipped back toward her. “What?”
“You will be training with Griffon every day from now until your shift.” She cocked her head and made no effort to hide the edge in her next smile. “And thereafter, until you can control it.”
My mouth dropped open and I spun toward Griffon.
His gaze cut to mine, his face twisted with enough disgust to offend the very air between us. “Archon, that isn’t—” he started, but Davina cut him off with a sharp jerk of her chin.
“Yes, it is.”
“Fuck no,” I stated. “If you’re going to punish me for the stonetalons I’ve killed, find another way to do it.”
Those cunning eyes flicked between us. “You will work together, because I am ordering you to do so. Because the two of you have something to teach one another. About the fruitlessness of hatred. And how damned wrong you can be, even when you think with every fiber that you’re right.”
I ground my teeth to keep a thousand venom-laced words trapped tightly behind my lips. I clamped my eyes shut and managed to swallow them all for long enough to hiss, “Fine.” The specter of those stupid wings was a palpable weight as I spun around and darted out of the throne room.
Laney and Alexei lounged against the wall outside, chatting. Both their heads popped up when I stormed past.
“So, the gargoyle killer is a gargoyle,” Laney said as she fell into step beside me. “Can’t say I was expecting that.”
“I am definitely not,” I snapped. “Expectations met.”
“The Archon wasn’t lying when she said her visions are never wrong,” Alexei said from my other side. “Hate to break it to you, but yeah, you are.”
I snapped my mouth shut and marched down long, drab corridor after even longer, somehow drabber corridor.
The Council Hall was stone, but somehow still light and airy, its walls plastered with magnificent works of art and its cold floors cozied up with thick rugs and long floor runners.
But this place… Never had I felt so entombed in a stone casket—or like I was six feet under with only my bare hands to claw my way free.
I dug my palms into my eyes and dredged the depths of my patience for a smidge of cordiality. If I was going to learn the truth of Solstice, I needed allies. “Your archon mentioned an ancient war. What were they fighting about?”
“Our archon,” Alexei corrected, a shit-eating grin on his face as he waggled his eyebrows at me.
I narrowed my eyes. “The war?”
“It was over a mating ground,” Laney jumped in.
I stopped walking. “Seriously? You aren’t a bunch of wild beasts.” I paused. “Not technically, anyways.”
Laney’s hand flew to her chest and she stumbled to the side. “I’m wounded.”
I rolled my eyes. “I mean, you can fuck anywhere. Why fight a war that killed so many over some giant orgy?”
Alexei snorted. “Delightful as that sounds, I don’t think that’s what happened, and it was more complicated than that anyway.
” His lips pursed in a thoughtful expression.
“Alarin’s topography is interesting. Low-lying mountains cut through her middle, but a plateau about as high up as we can fly sits in the center of the range.
With better vision, you could see the entire continent from its top, sea to sea.
They believed their goddess, Faerwyn, stood up there when she made their land, and that birthing their young on sacred ground would give them strength and vitality.
Alarin used to be five or six separate kingdoms, I forget, and they all fought for hundreds, maybe thousands of years over it.
Eventually, two grew stronger than the others.
They fought over it until they damn near extincted us all. ”
“It didn’t help that there was already particularly bad blood between the two of them,” Laney added. “One of them had assassinated the other’s queen at some point, or something like that.”
I glanced between the two of them. “For a species that offers constant commentary on how dumb humans are, a mating ground is a really stupid reason to fight a war.”
Alexei shrugged. “Not when you believe that abandoning it means your enemy grows stronger than you. They would have equated the survival of their kingdoms with control of the plateau. Not being conquered is pretty solid motivation if you ask me.”
I finally noticed where I was, but the corridor looked just like all the others; obsidian stone, bare floors, and only the sparce, dark tapestry or sculpture to distinguish Falcos from a mausoleum.
I pivoted toward Laney. “I have no idea where we are.”
Alexei draped an arm over my shoulder and I stiffened. “It’s like a maze. Makes it easier to slaughter all the poor humans who find their way here.”
Laney shoved his arm off and took my hand. “Come on. I’ll take you to your room.”
“I can go nine days without killing one of them. Nine. Damned. Days.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and twirled the annuleaf between my fingers. Every fiber itched to shove it in my mouth and burn Falcos to the ground on my way out. But two little sentences kept bouncing around my skull with impunity—Perhaps someday I will tell it to you. But not today.
Davina was going to kill me in ten days, not spill her secrets. But Falcos hoarded truths about Solstice. And I could try to find them myself in nine.
Then I would run back to Vircann as fast as my fed-up ass could carry me.
“Nine days,” I muttered, and snapped my fist shut around the annuleaf. I shoved myself off the bed and searched for somewhere to hide it. My eyes fell on a portrait on the wall.
“Hmm,” I mused, surprised by the perfectly rounded pupils that marked its subject as human.
But a brief lapse in the gargoyles’ superiority complex was not my concern—the portrait’s deep frame was.
I leaned over the squat wardrobe it hung over and tucked both sprigs onto the bottom ledge before fiddling with the corners to straighten it.
A sharp rap sounded on the door and I jumped, sending the thing skewed so far it nearly toppled off its hanger. The annuleaf plopped off the ledge and fell behind the wardrobe.
“Fucking moons!” I cursed, and darted forward to fix the swaying portrait before flinging myself onto the bed. I shoved my head between a couple pillows just as the door flew open and bashed into the wall behind it.
“Get up,” Griffon’s low voice rumbled across the room.
I raised the arm wedged awkwardly behind my back and threw him an obscene gesture.
Ice-cold water drenched my back. I yelped and launched out of the bed, glaring daggers at him. My gaze shifted to an empty glass, floating in the air with a wispy tendril of smoke wrapped around it.