Anton Strout: Stonecast

Kejetan stepped toward me. The rough stone of his hand grabbed at my face, jerking my head back until I was looking into the dark hollows where his eyes should be.

“Someone here has not lived up to his part of his bargain,” he said. “So perhaps it is time we revisit your dear Alexandra.”

Rage filled me at the very thought of it, but, weakened as I was, I could do nothing but stare back at him. “You know what will happen if you do,” I said. “The information you seek has been locked away inside me, and if you break our pact, you will lose all of it. The rules set upon me by my maker will once fill me, forcing me to fight you, unrelenting, until I am torn apart. You will have lost both your son and the secrets of the Spellmasons.”

I kept my eyes fixed on him, not daring to break contact or even hint that I was not exactly telling him the truth. It was, if I recalled Alexandra’s word for it correctly, bluffing .

Kejetan stared at me a moment longer before letting go of my face. “Then we are at an impasse,” my father said. He turned to the stranger. “Can nothing be done about this?”

The stranger, twirling a second spike just barely on the edge of my sight, stopped and sighed. “Possibly,” he said, “but it will take time . . . and money. This one will cost a good chunk. You sure you can afford it?”

Kejetan stepped toward the figure, towering over him. “I did not cross oceans to bandy around about money or riches,” he said with a bit of menace to it. “Just see to it.”

“I’ll need to do some research first,” the stranger said.

My father moved away from him, taking a position directly in front of me again. “Don’t you think you should finish stringing my gargoyle son up first?” Kejetan asked.

The word came off his jagged lips in a mix of disgust but also resentment. He wanted my form. He would kill for this form.

The stranger moved around behind me and pulled my left wing away from my body, stretching the stoneflesh of it out to its full extension. He raised the spike high overhead. “I said I need to research first,” he repeated, but raised the spike high overhead anyway. “But still, I suppose it can’t hurt to start breaking down this golem’s will . . .”

As the spike pierced my other wing, the pain was far worse this time. All sensation had returned to me tenfold since Alexandra had restored my soul, and pain was no exception.

Was this what humans felt all the time? Was this what I had felt centuries ago when my father had accidentally taken my human life away from me? So white-hot in my thoughts was the pain this time that all other thoughts fell from my mind, and I once more collapsed to the floor.

“Not so fast, big fellah,” the stranger whispered from behind, and he bent over me, affixing chains to both spikes. “You’re not getting a reprieve just yet.” The shadowy figure walked away toward the left of the cargo hold, the sound of chains pulling through fixtures high above us filling the hold. The slack on the lines attached to me pulled tight, my wings spreading out farther apart from each other with every passing second. When they could stretch no more, my body rose off the floor until I hung with the tips of my clawed feet just barely touching the steel below me.

The stranger stopped, but the resulting pain coursing through my stretched wings and body did not.

My father moved forward to me. “Will you reveal the secrets of the Spellmasons now?”

Dazed, I found it impossible to respond, my head hanging slack between my shoulder blades. I hung there for how long I knew not before Kejetan finally spoke again.

“Very well,” he said, turning away from me to the other stone man. “What say you, Devon?”

“Sometimes you’ve got to blow up a safe to get to what’s inside,” he said.

Kejetan looked back at me, then to the human stranger off in the shadows. “Break his will.”

“It’s your dime,” the stranger said, and there followed the sounds of his working with a tray of bottles, beakers, and vials I knew lay off on a table against the wall of the cargo hold.

“Now get ready, freak show,” he said. “This is going to hurt me as . . . Well, actually this shouldn’t hurt me one bit. You will be bent into servitude.”

I could not imagine anything feeling worse than the pain I was feeling across my shoulders and extended wings, but as a shaft of bright, hot light appeared in front of me, I was proven wrong. Somewhere in front of me, a small, focused beam shot into my shoulder, the low hum of electricity thrumming behind it.

“Ultraviolet,” I heard the man say although I knew not what the word meant until a second later.

Daylight.

The change in my body hit me, but only in the one spot and the area immediately surrounding it as the malleable surface of my stoneflesh turned to solid stone. My body seized up, the grinding of rock rising from the spot, and I could not help but let out a roar.

Can I endure? Can I take this pain, unbearable though it is?

Yes, if it means keeping the Belarus family safe, if it keeps Alexandra safe. Like the initial spike, there was a perverse pleasure in the pain. After centuries of being deprived of any sort of emotion or sensation, part of me welcomed feeling something . And if I was being honest with myself, something felt better than the nothingness I had experienced after ensuring Alexandra’s safety by forcing her to break her bond with me.

I could only hope she had been using these months wisely. My father could not be held by my bluff or mutual impasse forever.

And, there was also the fear that, quite possibly, I would eventually break.

Alexandra

It was amazing how a stupid pile of bricks could really bring a woman down.

Rory and Marshall had gone back to the apartment they shared down in the Village, but thoughts of tonight’s failed experiment and Stanis filled my mind so completely that I was restless. Giving up on the idea of sleep, I instead stopped by the old Belarus Building to grab up Bricksley, stuffing him into my Coach backpack before heading out to Brooklyn. Sadly, it wasn’t to party.

I let Bricksley loose on the docks along the Hudson, setting his tottering brick body off on wire legs and clay feet to the task of patrolling for any sign of Kejetan’s freighter docked there. I knew it was in vain, but at least it felt like I was getting something accomplished, even if it was simply eliminating locations where it might return.

As the sun came up and the docks rose to a bustle of activity, I knew that Bricksley would freeze up the same way Stanis would in daylight, and I set off in search of him. Minutes later, I reclaimed the frozen, inert form of Bricksley from a pool of sunlight by the slip where the floating home of Kejetan Ruthenia had once docked. I stood there longer than usual as the world around me moved on, a small part of me expecting the ancient cargo ship to just sail in after its six-month absence, but when that little pipe dream didn’t come to pass, I gave up and headed back into the city.

A taxi dropped me off on the west side of Gramercy Park in front of the half block where my family’s building stood. I stared up at my by-then-vacant home, admiring the one bit of Gothic-inspired architecture on the whole park. I hadn’t felt too bad about self-condemning the place—both for the safety of my parents as well as getting some more alone time with the arcane library of my great-great-grandfather. If I was lucky, I could manage several hours of research work up in the art studio before the construction crews arrived. Continued reinforcing of the underlying structure of the catacombs was still going on—thanks to the damage Kejetan, his men, and Devon had done—but the art studio at the top should be fine for just little ol’ me.