Anton Strout: Stonecast

“Just because Lexi hasn’t heard from him in six months doesn’t mean anything,” Rory said as if I needed defending.

And maybe I did.

The last half year rushed to the front of my mind, overwhelming me. Life had erupted into chaos upon learning my great-great-grandfather Alexander Belarus had not just been an unparalleled architect and sculptor but also a practitioner of Spellmasonry—the arcane art of manipulating stonework to one’s will.

That in itself would have been cool, except for the part where the servants of an ancient stone lord named Kejetan Ruthenia were intent on trying to kill us to reclaim said mystical secrets. If Alexander Belarus hadn’t set the gargoyle Stanis to secretly watch over our family centuries ago, I probably would have been dead by now.

No, I’d definitely be dead by now.

We had been losing badly when they invaded our family home on Gramercy Park. Our saving grace had been when Stanis discovered he had been killed and transformed by his father, Kejetan, centuries ago. Only by agreeing to go with the mad stone lord was he able to save the rest of us, leaving me with a parting message that we should prepare ourselves.

“It’s okay,” I said, giving her my best Bambi eyes. “I’m a big girl now. I can handle it.” I turned to look at him. “No, Marsh, I haven’t seen Stanis. The last you saw of him is the last time we all saw him. He did it to buy us time, and he has, all right?”

Marshall closed his notebook and crossed over to us. “So . . . where is he, then?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said, feeling the hollowness I had been trying to avoid within myself—the hollowness I had tried to fill with studying all I could in my great-great-grandfather’s library on the subject of the Spellmasons. Not that I had come away with any such mastery of the subject. “Stanis told us to prepare. So that’s what I’m doing.”

The blaze of approaching sirens grew louder with each passing second, and Marshall snapped his book shut. “We need to go,” he said. “Now.”

“We’ve done pretty good of steering clear of the law so far,” Rory said.

“Getting found out isn’t going to help us,” I said. “Marshall’s right. We need to go. We need to prepare, more than just for evading the police.”

I turned and headed back up the dead-end alley, an uneasy tension falling among the three of us. If I was being honest with myself, it had been there for months, really.

Prepare, Stanis had said. The implied threat behind Stanis’s single word, the idea of a coming war for those arcane secrets between Kejetan Ruthenia—Kejetan the Accursed and us . . . It seemed a little less likely every day, given the way they had all but disappeared after getting Stanis back from us. The fact that my older brother, Devon, had given up his humanity all for the promise of eternal life only added to that bitter-to-swallow pill.

Add to that month after month of frustration with slowly learning the arcane familial legacy of Spellmasonry, and the fire had died down a little, but the questions that had haunted me for months were still there.

Where was Stanis? Was he alive? Dead? And why hadn’t we heard from him, either in friendship or on behalf of Kejetan?

I couldn’t help but hold him responsible for the awkwardness among me and my friends at that moment, but what I really hated him for just then was leaving me.

Stanis

There were times over the centuries when I missed the flesh of my once-human form, and as a metal spike drove through the tip of one of my wings, I experienced such a moment. Human flesh would have yielded with little resistance, but the arcane stonework of my wings was made from a higher quality of material.

Yes, there would have been pain, but none like that of my wings being torn through.

Still, feeling something was perhaps better than the nothing of the last few months, a time shrouded by total darkness—that of the mind and of the body with only a small circle of light shining down on me from somewhere above.

The weight of my heavy stone frame slammed down onto the steel of the ship’s hull, ringing out with a dull echoing thud . I lay there, unwilling— unable —to move, my only movement that of my claws digging into the cool metal beneath me. The hum of the ship’s mechanisms ran through my prone body, a different rhythm from that of the sway of waves against the freighter as it sailed on.

“Will the damage be permanent?” a deep and empty voice asked, that of my father.

I tilted my head to one side, seeking him out. Kejetan Ruthenia’s inhuman form was barely perceptible in the darkness of the cargo hold, a distant, malformed shadow barely visible beyond the small circle of light that surrounded me.

He was not the human I had known centuries ago, no. This monstrosity bore more of a resemblance to a jagged pile of rocks, its crags and lumps held together in a mockery of the human form. For every carved bit of grotesque beauty that had gone into my maker’s work, Kejetan’s own arcane attempts had created an equally opposite abomination.

“Will the damage be permanent?” Kejetan asked again, his voice growling with impatience this time, waiting for an answer . . . but not from me.

“Nothing I can’t fix,” another voice replied from the darkness off to my right. The one who had driven the spike through my right wing, the one just outside my line of sight. I did not think I knew the voice, fairly certain I had not heard it before. By the tone and the fleeting glimpse I had of the figure off in the shadows, I knew him to be human, but that was all I had gathered. “You wanted answers . . . This should speed up the process considerably.”

“Are you certain?” Kejetan asked.

“Honestly?” A short laugh barked out of the stranger. “I’m not sure. I’ve never done this to one of his kind. I’m not even sure if there is another of his kind.”

“ We are of his kind,” my father snapped.

The stranger laughed again. “Have you looked in a mirror lately?” he asked. “No offense, but I wouldn’t exactly call you cut from the same cloth . . . I mean, stone.”

“You need not remind me,” my father said, the tone of his voice becoming more measured, darker. “Of this I am well aware.” His shadowy form turned away, looking across the dark cargo hold. “Devon!”

Another of the stone men walked over and stepped into my circle of light. This creature I recognized, its having only months ago still been human. This abomination in particular had once been the human Devon Belarus.

Kejetan joined him in front of me, the two stone men staring down at my prone form. “My son Stanis has claimed for months that the knowledge I seek has been stored— built —into him. Yet for months, we have not been able to extract it from him. You were once of the family who made him. Is what Stanis says true? Does he possess the secrets of the Spellmasons?”

Devon shifted from one jagged stone leg to the other as if uncomfortable with the question. If anyone here had a claim to discomfort, it was surely me, which made a grim laughter rise to my lips before I shut it down.

“You’re asking the wrong Belarus for that,” Devon said. “You want my sister, Alexandra.”

At the mention of her name, a surge ran through my body, and I pushed myself up to the full extension of my arms until I could look first at him, then my father at the edge of the circle of light. “No!” I shouted, rising to my knees. “You promised to stay away from the Belarus family, and I told you I would give you the secrets that I hold. That was our pact, Father.”