Juliet Dark - The Angel Stone

Unsurprisingly, the gargoyles became agitated at these horrific scenes. They beat their wings and raised a great raucous howl that tore away the fabric of Soheila’s vision like claws shredding silk, replacing her desert scenes with a wintry waste where gargoyles wandered cold and naked, expelled by their beautiful fathers. This is what we have suffered , their cries told us. I felt the angel stone pulsing at my throat in sympathy with their grief. I touched the stone, wanting to communicate to them that I heard their cries and felt their suffering, but as soon as my hand was on the stone, I plunged deeper into their twisted psyches, finding myself in a wasteland colder and bleaker than the arctic tundra. The gargoyles were insane, their minds rent by centuries of captivity in dark caves with only hatred for company—hatred for their fathers for turning their backs on them, hatred for their sons for sealing them beneath the earth, but, most of all, hatred for humans, whose DNA had turned them into monsters. Our smell was inciting them now into a lather of bloodlust. Amid that seething maelstrom was a calm voice directing their rage: Duncan’s voice. He had tapped into the gargoyles’ minds and was controlling them, funneling their inchoate rage into a pungent stream.

“They’re going to attack,” I told Frank the second before a hundred pairs of talons pushed off their stone perches and a hundred pairs of leathery wings beat the air.

“Go!” Frank screamed. “We’ll hold them back. Get Duncan.”

Silver flashed in the air as Frank unsheathed his sword, and he leapt to attack the flying gargoyle heading for Soheila. A trow got it first with his club. I aimed the angel stone at another winged beast headed for Frank. It exploded in a shower of ash that rained down over me. Then I was running toward Main Hall under a swarm of gargoyles sweeping through the air like huge bats. Whenever one came close to me, I shot it with the angel stone. When I reached the front door of Main, I hesitated. Should I stay and fight with my friends? But Frank was right. If Duncan was controlling the gargoyles, I had to get to him.

I pulled at the door … and found it locked. “Sprengja ianuam!” I hissed the spell under my breath, and the door swung open. As I crossed the threshold, though, I felt a sizzle of energy that made my hair stand on end. A ward. I passed through the electric shock, wondering if this was how dogs felt when they hit an invisible fence. The jolt fried my nerve endings and made my heart miss a beat, but I made it through into the empty lobby, where I stood panting, heart palpitating. I swept my eyes over the marble floor, worn from the tread of generations of students. I scanned the walls, with their portraits of past deans and bulletin boards announcing student events. Looking for guards, I was overcome by the ordinariness of the academic setting and a longing for that world, where students walked these halls on their way to class to discuss literature and art. Instead, my students were outside, battling gargoyles. A surge of anger swept over me and I strode across the marble floor toward the stairs—and into a second ward.

This one knocked me off my feet. Sprawled on the hard floor, I looked up at a shimmering wall. Runes and sigils flashed in the air and then melted in a shower of sparks, like fireworks fading in a night sky. The wards were hastily created. Duncan must have hurriedly put them up as he retreated to the dean’s office. I just needed to see the runes and sigils again. I searched the floor for something I could toss at the field, but other than a crumpled Cheetos bag and scraps of paper, which were too light, there was nothing. All I had was the angel stone. I held it up to the field and the sigils and runes lit up like a computer screen. I scanned the symbols, looking for one that glowed brighter—a trick Duncan himself had taught me, to unlock wards—and saw it just before the field melted into a shower of sparks: a sigil shaped like a half-moon with a squiggle on top, located in the lower left-hand corner of the ward field. I crouched low on the floor, positioned my left hand in front of where I thought it had been, and, with my right hand, held the angel stone against the ward. When the sigil flared, I placed my hand on it. Electric bolts shot up my arm, but I kept my hand on the sigil and turned. The ward field vanished and I rolled through where it had been. I scrambled to my feet and charged up the stairs. Two more wards were at the top of the stairs and one was midway down the hall. I figured out how to disarm each one using the angel stone, but the process was wearying. By the time I reached the dean’s office, I felt like a drained battery.

The office door was open. And Duncan sat behind the desk, leaning back in the sleek ergonomic chair, his feet up on Dean Book’s lovely Louis XVI desk.

“Ah, Callie,” he said, smiling at me as if I’d come to discuss my tenure review. “I’m so glad you made it. It’s always gratifying to see a student using the skills you’ve taught them. But, then, I always suspected you would be good at disarming wards. You are a doorkeeper, after all. Please have a seat. As you can see, I’ve made a fire. Winter comes early to these mountains.”

I glanced at the fireplace and saw a roaring fire in the hearth. A thick manila envelope succumbed to the flames.

“So you’re destroying all evidence of your plans?” I said. “Do you imagine that will save you?”

“I was hoping it would save the nests of gargoyles and nephilim that remain. That way, you won’t know where I’ve gone.”

“What makes you think I’m going to let you leave?” I asked, stepping closer to the desk and holding up the angel stone. “You’d only come back again—or victimize humans and witches somewhere else.”

“The latter, actually. We can usually find some war-torn corner of your world where women are so victimized that we can continue our breeding program unnoticed.” His eyes sparkled as he saw me wince. “I don’t think I’ll try for Fairwick again so soon. Not while you’re still here. But in a couple hundred years when we’ve built up our strength again …” He shrugged, one shoulder lifting higher than the other. “Who knows? And as for why you will let me go …” He took his feet off the desk and leaned forward. I saw now that, where his wing had been torn from his back, a new one was growing. I gripped the angel stone in my hand and extended my right arm, using my left to steady it. “You’ll let me go because you no longer have the power to stop me.”

I directed my power through the stone and aimed for the middle of his chest. Nothing happened. I looked down at the stone, which lay cold and inert in my hand.

Duncan laughed. “The wards,” he said, almost gently. “They drained the stone. It’s only temporary, but”—he looked down at the gleaming gold Rolex on his wrist—“it should give me enough time to get far away from here.”

He stepped over to the window, his wings unfurling. Outside, the sun was climbing higher over the eastern mountains. The light touched the tips of the feathers and limned his wings with gold, like the gilding on a Renaissance painting. He was as beautiful as an angel. A few more generations and, who knew, perhaps the nephilim would create a race of exquisite creatures—but they would subjugate human women to do it, and the race would be as heartless as it was beautiful. I couldn’t let him go. I bowed my head … and felt a tug at the nape of my neck. My hair, twisted hurriedly into a knot when I’d left the croft, pulled at my scalp. I touched my hand to the back of my head and felt among the tangles. There, still clinging despite all the battles I’d fought in the last twenty-four hours, was one of the knitting needles William had made for me.