The Gargoyle and the Lady (Nightfall Guardians #2)

Chapter 1

Hannalinde

If there was one thing she’d learned in life, it was that pretty things don’t last. Inevitably, they wilted or tarnished or gathered stains and were cast aside.

She was one of those pretty things once, meant to add beauty to the room with her fair face and polite manners.

Then, she did not know that she was just as disposable.

Her father used to buy her the most beautiful flowers, arms full of them from the markets, back when it was illegal to grow anything inside the walls of Solvantis.

She’d arrange them in every room of Lamont House, tend them as though they still grew, but she was lucky if they lasted a week before the petals fell.

Then he would buy her more, so she wouldn’t miss them.

Even with a house perpetually full of flowers, she had dreamed of growing her own, so when the gargoyles loosened their grip and finally allowed it, her father had rose gardens planted all around the house.

The vines grew along with her hopes, but she’d hardly seen them bud when it was all ripped away due to his treachery.

When he was convicted, her father’s title was stripped, and so was hers. She was a lady no more, merely a daughter of a criminal. It was then that she was uprooted, torn from her home and cast aside like a faded flower. Ten years later, did anyone remember her bloom?

The needle slipped, and Hannalinde drove it straight through the pad of her thumb.

She hissed through her teeth, pulling the finger to her mouth before a drop of blood could stain the silk.

The taste of copper bloomed on her tongue, sharp and animal, and her stomach pitched sideways.

She set the embroidery hoop down on the table and pressed her thumb against her apron until the sting dulled.

She’d had worse from a day’s work, and her fingertips were so ridged with old scars that they barely registered a shallow prick anymore.

But the nausea was new, appearing at odd hours and lingering like an uninvited guest. She blamed the fish she’d bought from the market two days ago.

It had looked and smelled fine, but one could never be sure with the vendors in the outer rings.

She picked up the hoop again. The commission was a wedding veil for a mercer’s daughter, fine enough work that would pay for a month of candles and a wheel of cheese.

She’d have it done within the week if the bride didn’t change her mind about the pattern of bleeding hearts, as she’d changed it twice before.

The wasted fabric was no matter. A mercer’s daughter had an endless supply. But the wasted time was expensive because she couldn’t get it back. She could not afford to lose any more of it, so she stitched bleeding hearts until her eyes blurred.

The rooms she rented above the cobbler’s shop were cheap enough.

One just large enough for a narrow bed and washstand, the other with a hearth, a worktable, and a chair that wobbled unless she wedged a folded rag beneath one leg.

On the window sill, her little garden box basked in the afternoon light.

Three tenacious roses clung to life on the single vine.

It was the last survivor of the gardens at Lamont House, dug up and carried here in a sack on the day the king’s men changed the locks.

If she were inclined to lean out the small window and crane her neck to the right, she could just make out the back of her old home from here.

The pale stone townhouse, once the prettiest in the palace quarter, sat dark and shuttered behind a curtain of dead vines that swallowed the carved lintels and choked the balcony railings.

She’d loved those vines when they were green, but now they looked like veins on a dead man’s hand.

She did not lean out the window if she could help it. Not since the gargoyle learned where she lived.

The thought clenched her stomach tighter than the nausea.

Hannalinde set aside her embroidery and drew the shutters, though it was nowhere near sunset.

Ridiculous. He’d be stone until dusk, frozen on whatever perch he favored.

She knew that the way a mouse knew the hours of the house cat. Dawn was safety. Dusk was danger.

Still. She latched the shutters and lit a candle to illuminate her stitches, though it cost her precious tallow.

Safe until sundown. She repeated the words in her head. Work now and worry later.

The trouble was that later always came. And he always came with it. She did not know if she could bear it any longer.

She wasn’t the soft thing she’d been. She’d become accustomed, in the nearly a decade since her father’s trial and execution, to the fact that the name Lamont had become something people spat rather than spoke.

She had always understood their anger, even agreed with it.

Her father had conspired with goblins, after all.

He’d fed them information that had gotten soldiers killed.

Good gargoyles. Good humans. All to advance his own position and fill his coffers with gold.

Bloody gold that funded her endless bouquets. During the trial and the extensive reviews of evidence, she’d been found blameless. But blameless was not the same as forgiven, and Solvantis had a long memory.

She’d accepted the turned backs in the market.

The way former friends crossed the street when they saw her, as though treason were both heritable and contagious.

She’d accepted the loss of her home and her title, her personal jewelry and invitations to court events.

That was the price of her father’s sins, and she would pay it without complaint, because it was nothing compared to the loss of life.

But this price, she could not pay any longer. It was more than even she could bear.

The first time, she’d been walking home after delivering a mended tablecloth to a customer near the east gate.

A shadow dropped from the wall, blocking the lane.

She’d stepped aside, eyes down, as humans were taught to do when they encountered gargoyles.

Most did not want to be troubled by humans as they went about their business.

But he was there for her. His voice ground her family name like a millstone. Lamont.

She didn’t dare look at him. Nor did she remember much of what came after.

Only the wall scraping her cheek. And the bite.

The terrible, burning bite on her shoulder that eclipsed any other pain.

She’d screamed, but the lane was empty, and the moths in the nearest streetlamp scattered into the dark.

He’d left her there like a pile of soiled linens.

After that, he found her when he liked.

Not every night. Not even every week. But often enough that she’d learned the habits of his cruelty.

He liked it when she was frightened. He bit her in places she could hide beneath her clothes, but when she covered one wound, he seemed to take it as an invitation to make another, each one strengthening the mental bond he’d forced on her.

She could feel when he was hunting her. A sick, oily pressure at the base of her skull, like thumbs pressing into the hollows behind her ears.

She’d tried everything she could think of to deter him.

She’d stopped going out after dark. He found her at home.

She’d barred the window. He tore the bar out of the frame.

She’d slept in the cobbler’s shop downstairs, curled behind the counter, but he’d found her there, too, and she had to repair and replace all of the cobbler’s supplies and equipment that he’d ruined in the discovery.

She tried to report it to the city guard, but she did not know the gargoyle’s name. She did not know his rank or tier. She knew only the shape of him in the dark and the taste of her own blood in her mouth. The guard had sent her away with a shrug. There was nothing they could do.

She had endured it for years now, and it couldn’t go on. Something was changing inside her. The nausea. The tenderness in her breasts. She could not think about what it meant. She would not.

The candle guttered. She trimmed the wick and returned to her bleeding hearts, but her hand trembled, and the stitches she set were crooked. If she continued, she’d have to unpick them anyway, so she wrapped the silk in a cotton sheet to protect it from stray dust and ash and blew out the candle.

Then she sat in the dark, watching the tiny crack of daylight between the crooked shutters fade.

She only had one hope left: the Nadir, the gargoyle assigned to address grievances between their kind and humans.

Visiting his office meant she’d have to go out at night, something she’d avoided so long that it felt forbidden. But there was nothing else to be done.

Just before dusk, she made the dash to the Nadir’s office, hoping to time it right so she’d arrive at the door just as the sun slipped away so her tormenter would not accost her along the way.

The familiar stairs down to the street were narrow and smelled of leather and boot polish from the cobbler’s shop.

Outside, she pulled her cloak around her shoulders and walked briskly, dodging the carts headed for the market, a group of children chasing a three-legged dog, two keepers walking in step with their hoods drawn against the dust.

The Tower, which she usually avoided at all costs as it was the likely home of the gargoyle who plagued her, rose above them all, marking her destination.

Every step toward it felt like pulling a needle through stiff leather, pained and slow.

But she persisted and eventually reached the stone steps of the Nadir’s office without incident.

The queue was short, only a handful of people waiting to enter the Tower’s lowest tier. She took her place at the end of the line. The woman ahead of her, a broad-backed laundress with a basket on her hip, gave her a brief, incurious look and turned away as the line began to move.

Hannalinde climbed the stairs one at a time, her hand braced on the cool stone wall for balance until she reached the top and entered through the imposing, carved wooden door.

A hooded keeper at the desk, one of the humans who served the gargoyles of the Tower, greeted her as she entered. “Name and nature of your complaint?”

She opened her mouth. For one terrible second, nothing came out. “Hannalinde Lamont. A gargoyle has been…troubling me.”

The keeper’s quill paused in recognition. His gaze flicked to her face, her much-mended gray dress, her white-knuckled grip on the edge of the desk. Would he turn her out?

He wrote her name in the ledger and gestured toward the waiting room. “Take a seat. He’ll see you when he’s ready.”

She sat. She folded her hands in her lap to hide their shaking. And she waited for a monster to save her from a monster, because there was no one else left to ask.