CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I’d been in my flat for a few weeks, and it wasn’t lost on me that the fire escape conveniently sat a few dozen feet from an old, crumbling stone dock that was no longer in use, where a short staircase led down to a waiting platform at the water’s edge.
The walls of stone around it were already charred black.
Scores of leathery wings flapped through my skull on a relentless loop as I trudged after Griffon in the dark.
There was no denying it now. Nowhere left to run.
No more certainty that I was right and Davina’s claim was just another lie perched atop the mound of her deceptions and half-truths.
I smothered the winged circus long enough to shove four words to the forefront of my mind: I am a gargoyle.
I stumbled on an exposed root and caught myself with a thorny branch that jutted out of a bush. I glanced at my hand; the little scratches and holes were already knitting shut. I shook my head and raised my eyes to the male stomping along ahead of me.
“Hey, uh…” I cleared my throat. “Griffon?” His name felt odd on my lips as anything but a curse.
“Hmm?” He shoved himself between two overgrown bushes and all but disappeared on the other side of them.
I glared at the obstruction and sighed before shoving my way in.
Thorns raked across my cheeks and hands.
I punched through the last foot and found Griffon waiting on the other side, his arms crossed and a bored expression plastered on his face.
I spat out a leaf. He chuckled, the sound low and velvety as it rolled past me, and started walking again. I rolled my eyes and slogged onward.
“What happens if a gargoyle’s wings are—” I choked on the words “cut off,” some primal part of me recoiling from the very thought. I cringed and finished with, “Removed?”
A shudder rippled down Griffon’s back. He tried—and failed—to bury it in the smirk he tossed over his shoulder. “Considering divesting me of mine before I become your long-awaited ceremonial pyre?”
The blood on my hands was too heavy to dredge up the energy for verbal sparring. My shoulders slumped. “Just…answer the question.”
The smirk fell off his face. He held the next branch aside long enough for me to pass by him. I cocked a brow, but he ignored it and fell into step beside me.
“When our hypothetical gargoyle shifted back to Flesh, he would lose his ability to move his arms, given a significant portion of his shoulder blades would be missing. Even twitching his shoulders would send agony shooting down his back. Shifting would restore his ability to move, as he would regain Stone’s modified bone structure, but his wings would still be nubs, and it’s said that that shift is worse than the first.”
I cringed. That agony was imprinted on my soul. I couldn’t fathom it being worse.
Griffon sighed. “Most eventually shift to Stone and refuse to go back. Once they turn feral, they have to be put down. It has been outlawed as a punishment on all three continents, but back in the days of the old wars? Well, let’s just say you stumbled on one of the more unpleasant fates a gargoyle can suffer. ”
“One of?”
Griffon pointedly looked away.
I rubbed my hands up and down my arms, a deep chill creeping into my bones at the thought of what he had described. “So, don’t get my wings whacked off,” I muttered. “Got it.” I ignored the travesty of the words my and wings being linked together.
My feet ached from the almost twenty hours we’d been walking, but Griffon had been right; my stamina was far improved, given I was still upright.
Falcos and the ramifications of my choices were drawing near.
But I couldn’t scrub out the image of a person left to rot in a dirty dungeon cell all those centuries ago, trying to balance the agony of shifting with not losing his mind to Stone.
Of his dwindling hope and resolve with every shift that he could make himself do it again.
How long did it usually take, to give up and surrender to the madness?
Days? Weeks? I didn’t want to know, but some morbidly fascinated part of me needed to.
I opened my mouth to ask—
Screaming filtered through the trees, faint but unmistakable. Griffon and I glanced at each other.
“What in the Fade?” I muttered.
He bolted. I streaked after him, my body fully pissed at every jarring step. My keener vision separated roots and holes from the forest floor in a flash, my feet nimble as I dashed around them. I glanced up and—
Slammed into a veritable wall of stone. The air whooshed out of my chest and I hit my ass with a grunt before I could even think about catching myself. I glared up at the man-shaped shadow.
Griffon dropped beside me and put a finger over his lips, pointing ahead of us.
My gaze whipped forward. I squinted, picking the thick trunks of the cedars and a slew of bushes from the darkness.
The faint stench of rot crept over us as my narrowed eyes finally separated patches of deeper shadow from the gloom.
I sucked in a tight breath and whipped toward Griffon for confirmation.
He leaned over and pressed his lips against my ear. A shiver tripped down my spine at the contact.
“Da’kai.” The word was little more than the ghost of an exhale.
My hands began to shake.
“Wait here.”
The air fluctuated and I felt it in my core as he shifted.
He was gone before I could utter so much as a single threat of annihilation if he left me alone in this cursed forest. The hairs on my arms stood at attention, my skin tingling with his sudden absence.
The screaming intensified, carried with chilling clarity on the frigid night air.
I jumped when Griffon landed beside me. My squeak was muffled by his hand before it made it out of my mouth, like the bastard just assumed I was a skittish coward. I glared at his outline. His hand closed around my wrist, and he hauled me into the darkness.
He led me to the base of the mountain, just inside the valley that led to Falcos, and pulled me close. “There are hundreds of da’kai attacking Falcos, with more waiting in the forest. There’s another way in.”
But he just stood in front of a crack that trailed into the mountain’s depths for one heartbeat.
Two. His hands flexed at his sides, his jaw rigid in the moonlight that washed over us now that we were beyond the reach of the forest’s oppressive canopy.
With a shudder, he shifted, his wings retracting in a blink.
He turned sideways and inched into the crack.
“Wait!” I hissed. He paused, a brow raised. “Can’t you just fly us in?”
“No,” he said sharply. “Never fly over Falcos during a siege. It is an old law, from when there were only gargoyles, but we still abide by it. We use this instead.” He inclined his head toward the black abyss.
“But this is…unpleasant.”
He rolled his eyes and disappeared. I tossed one glance back toward Bardon’s Landing, then sighed and followed him into the tiny, pathetic excuse for a passageway.
“What about going over the mountain? Coming into Falcos from behind it?” My back brushed stone and I shuffled forward, only to meet rock a few inches later. My heart rate kicked up.
His snort dripped derision. “Before the Rift, back when Alarin was still tearing itself to shreds, there was growing unrest between Privalt’s factions, too. One of them built Falcos and chose this valley precisely because no gargoyle can fly over those peaks. They’re thousands of feet tall.”
“I don’t like tight spaces,” I hissed.
His face appeared just in front of me and I yelped again. “Lucky for you, you aren’t a male.”
Was that a joke? “Thank fucking gods, more like. And stop doing that!”
He winked and vanished into the inky black. “We’re almost there.”
The crevasse fanned out and I shuffled to his side. A flat expanse of rock stared back at me. “We’re not anywhere,” I ground out. “Get me out or I’m taking my chances with the demons!”
He shot me a sideways glare. “Maybe you’ll learn some damned patience after you’ve lived a few hundred years.”
I took a step back, my eyes flying wide. He’d mentioned it before, but I hadn’t believed I was—
They lived for hundreds of years. Thousands. In the day since that alley, I hadn’t—
I could—
Gods.
Griffon pulled a dagger from his waistband and pricked the tip of his thumb. He smeared the bead of blood over a crack in the wall and the slab just…vanished. I blinked. He turned to me, a brow cocked.
I wiped any hint of surprise off my face. “It better get wider.”
He chuckled and sauntered into the tunnel. “So hard to impress.”
My nose crinkled with distaste as I followed him into the mountain.
One full step beyond the archway, Griffon’s faint outline winked out.
I whipped back toward the exit and groped around in the dark.
My hand slapped against the solid slab that had entombed us in a true darkness.
I swallowed hard and slowly pivoted, keeping a hand on the rock until it again sat at my back.
“Maybe if you showed me something impressi—”
Griffon’s arm careened into my chest and shoved me against the wall.
“Wh—” His hand clamped over my mouth. I glared into the swathe of darkness in front of me. He rolled my head to my right and I sucked a tight breath through my nose.
A pair of eyes hovered in the air, reflecting light too dim for mine to detect. They were impossibly far off the ground. Fear took root and blossomed in my chest. The faintly glowing orbs vanished for a split second, then turned away from us and disappeared.
Griffon lowered his hand and cursed under his breath. “How did they get in here?” I felt his head swivel toward me.
“Don’t you dare look at me,” I hissed. “I didn’t know this not-so-secret tunnel was here!”