After freeing him, she wasted no time hurrying out of the room and he had to make haste to follow her. Only … he stopped and looked back toward the worktable … toward the metal box. On impulse he grabbed for the box, opened it, and snatched the Amulet from within it. Then he hurried out of the room.

They were underground, as he had long suspected for all they had behooded his head on his way to his cage initially. But it was barely a basement, free air hitting them after only two flights of stairs. He heard a lot of shouting and saw people running away from them across what looked to be the yard of an old prison. It was full of fencing and barbed wire at its rims, but the openness allowed him to see there was a fire and a hole ripped into the fencing and the ground. A distraction, he realized as he turned to look back at her. But he was in free air and that was all he needed. He shifted form instantly, his stone skin rippling over him and his wings bursting forth from his back. He grabbed her up against himself and with a thrust of powerful legs he launched into the sky, making sure to protect her from anything that might be thrown at them from the ground. But what he worried about most was that he was burdened and that other Gargoyles they would send after him would not be.

CHAPTER THREE

“It is not an ugly monument of metal with no purpose. It’s an ugly monument of metal that’s allowing us to carry on this interference-free phone call.”

That small bit of logic released a tirade of venom about the evils of modern technology from the other end of that lovely connection and Katrina Haynes rolled her eyes heavenward, as if that were going to help deal with her mother for whom logic was a fluid thing. The ugly cell tower they’d just placed on her mother’s neighbor’s property on the mountain above was a blight and an eyesore and entirely not necessary said she-who-was-infamous-for-bitching-about-dropped-phone-calls and she-who-was-attached-at-the-hip-to-her-barely-understood-smartphone. Her mother had to have the best, whether she could use it to its potential or not.

Katrina’s own smartphone had been a gift from her mother for Christmas; otherwise she’d still be making do with her much beloved flip phone, and being quite content with it. Although, she had to admit to an Angry Birds addiction. She had several different variations of the game.

“Well, Mother, then you’ll have to be content with looking down the mountain and not up the mountain where the cell tower is. After all, isn’t that what a vista is all about? Looking down around you?”

She whistled sharply, looking down her own drive to where Karma had disappeared. She exhaled, her breath clouding on the deep sigh. The air was cold and crisp, just the way she liked it, and as she looked down at her own vista, a breathtaking view of the valley and the small town of Stone Gorge, Washington, where she lived, she guessed she’d probably be a little pissed off, too, if something marred her view in any direction.

“Momma, Karma’s disappeared again. I’m going to have to call you back.”

“That dog.” Her mother tsked. She didn’t like the thundering Newfoundland dog. Her mother said it was because the dog reminded her too much of a black bear rather than a dog, and being so close to the wilderness where bears often came down and ravaged her mother’s birdfeeders, Katrina could understand the trepidation. Although Karma was a bounding bundle of soft, sweet, slobbering devotion and wouldn’t hurt a fly, never mind a birdfeeder.

Kat said her goodbyes and hung up the phone before moving down the steeply sloping drive and whistling again for her dog. But as she came around one of the drive’s many curves, she found the dog snuffling into the thick leaf fall left over from that autumn’s annual shedding. Karma’s big body was blocking her view of whatever it was she had found. Fearing she’d come up with a skunk, Kat hurried forward.

“Karma, come out of there!” she ordered sharply.

And that was when she saw it. Him. It. She couldn’t decide and she was frozen in place, rooted with fear and shock, her heart pounding with sudden madness in her chest. He was probably the largest man she had ever seen in her life, and living in nearly wild mountain country that was saying something. He was almost twice as big as the gigantic dog sniffing at him. But the most shocking thing about him was not that he was half naked in the slush of the last snowfall that was half melted yet, but that half his skin was gray, like the coarseness of a stone, and half was dusky, perhaps deeply tanned or maybe racially swarthy with an acre of sculpted muscle. He was lying on his stomach, seemingly dead.

Then he groaned, proving himself alive, and rolled onto his back, and all her fear melted away when she saw a copious amount of bright-red blood. She lurched forward, shoving her dog aside, as she dropped to her knees and reached out to touch him. Her hands fell onto his shoulders, one of which was chilled human skin, the other of which was as rough as stone. But that couldn’t be, she thought in some corner of her mind. Skin simply did not turn to stone. Perhaps it was a full thickness burn or some other kind of injury … But the sectioning of skin to stone fluctuated under her touch and suddenly the shoulder opposite turned to stone and the other to flesh beneath her trembling hands, robbing her completely of any further excuses.

But with that change came a sudden gush of blood down the ridges of his defined abdomen before it dripped heavily into the snow, much of which was already stained a melting red.

“Don’t … move,” she said, fumbling for her phone. “I’ll call for help.”

“No!” He reached out to grab her by her front, her thick coat suddenly feeling like nothing in the grip of his fist as he jerked her forward. She felt like something fragile all of a sudden, like he could snap her in two at his whim. “You see what I am. I canna control it. The pain … They would see what I am.” He looked up then, searching the dark predawn skies. She and her mother always spoke in the freakishly early hours before dawn, and they always called each other through a cup of tea and coffee, respectively, touching base and bookending their days to the sound of each other’s voice. “I need shelter. Please. I canna be caught out in the daylight.”

Katrina sat there on her knees, the wet snow melted by her body warmth seeping into her jeans, frozen with fear and indecision. In the end it was the bright red of another gush of blood that galvanized her.

“This is crazy, this is crazy,” she said under her breath in a fast, heated whisper. “Okay,” she said so he could hear her. “I’ll bring you inside. But … that doesn’t mean I won’t call for someone. If you try to hurt me … my dog will attack you.”