Heart of Stone

by Christine Warren

  It rushed through her with force and momentum just as it had the other night when she tried to use it to drive away the monster at the museum, but just like last time, Kees stood firm and let the power flow around him. He might actually have been made of stone, standing like a boulder in the path of a rushing river. He remained solid and untouched by the current.

  That helped to reassure Ella. For several minutes, he instructed her to do nothing, to just let the magic go and give up trying to hold it back. Keeping it all pent up just made it harder to handle, he told her, and she found that his words almost made sense. For instance, the flood didn’t last as long this time as it had the other night, when it had been years and years since she allowed much of the energy to escape. This time, it burst out at first, but then settled into a strong, steady but bearable stream.

  Before the power could begin to thin and drain her as it had the last time, Kees’s voice cut through the electric hum and told her to ground the magic. She didn’t understand what he meant at first, but he talked her through it, his voice remarkably patient if still devoid of any emotion. He told her to picture her spine growing downward like the root of a great tree. He told her how it sank through the floor, through the building beneath her until it tapped into the rock and soil below.

  His voice guided her as she imagined the root branching, spreading, burrowing through the earth until she felt truly anchored, more settled than she’d ever been in her life. It was glorious.

  Ella could feel the power of the earth all around her. It all but vibrated with untapped energy of life. The potential in it shook her. Here, she realized, was a natural resource she’d never know existed, more infinite than any water or mineral known to man. Magic, she now knew, was what really powered the earth.

  She gasped softly as she learned to hear the power, like a sweet song sung by a billion voices.

  “That’s the Source.” She heard Kees’s voice, a low rumble that somehow provided the perfect bass note to the music filling her soul. “You can always draw on the Source for power, but right now you’re going to give power back. You have too much built up inside you, and it’s time to restore the balance.”

  Ella could think of nothing she wanted more.

  She listened intently and followed his instructions to the letter. Holding herself still, she just waited, listening to the earth’s song and feeling her own magic flowing through her. Slowly, she felt understanding flower, felt the rhythms whispering to her, and when Kees spoke again, she understood instinctively how to follow his commands.

  Carefully, she reached out to gather the magic to her, not so much interrupting the flow as redirecting it. Rather than overwhelming her, this time the magic enveloped her and started to sing its own song. It shifted and formed until she could perceive it with her artist’s eye, now perceiving the layers and layers of color in the stream that had previously appeared an even bluish white. Now she could see red and orange and yellow and green and purple and brown and every color she could imagine all twining and blending together in masterful brushstrokes of power.

  She wanted to weep at the beauty of it.

  Instead, she followed Kees’s instructions, forming the magic to her will and directing it to the center of her, to the root she now had planted deep in the earth. The magic cooperated eagerly, feeling joyous as it anticipated returning to the Source of everything. Ella felt a sense of joy herself, knowing that for the first time, she could nourish the earth that had nourished mankind for so many hundreds of thousands of years.

  When the stream of magic inside her ebbed, the last trickles sliding down into the earth, Ella realized she didn’t feel drained, but exhilarated. Somehow she knew that with her newfound connection to the earth, she could call upon the magic at any time and it would answer, because the magic was part of her.

  God, she felt like dancing for joy.

  “Open your eyes,” Kees said.

  Ella obeyed and took a second to focus. Kees sat across from her, crouched as if on his pedestal, which considering his tail was probably the most comfortable position for him. It took her a minute to realize that he was glowing, and another minute to realize that the glow wasn’t actually coming from him. It encompassed the entire room, a warm white light sparkling with all the colors Ella had just seen. The beauty of it made her smile in wonder.

  “What do you see?”

  She described the radiance of the light covering almost every surface of her apartment, floor to ceiling, end to end, and Kees nodded.

  “Good,” he grunted. “That’s what you’re supposed to see. All of that is magic that’s been leaking out of you for years. You might think you’ve been in control because it didn’t escape in a huge rush most of the time, but it has been escaping. It had to, or you would have exploded. There’s only so much power a human can contain at any one time without going insane. You’ve been lucky so far, but luck will last only so long. Now you have to learn to be good. Control the magic, or eventually it will take control of you.”

  Ella nodded, her smile fading until she faced him with a look of pure determination. “Okay. So what do I need to learn?”

  “Everything.”

  Chapter Nine

  From that moment on, Ella spent every spare second learning to control and use her magic. She practiced for hours a day, coming home from the museum and heading right into her training until she didn’t even have to think to ground herself, and she could call the magic forth as easily as she could sink it into the earth.

  Gradually, Kees changed the focus of her lessons from simply learning to control the magic and see it in the space around her, to manipulating it into actual spells. Too bad he seemed so determined to stick with defensive magic to start with, because she had an intense desire to learn how to change him into a banana slug.

  He hadn’t touched her in the four days since their one night together. Most of the time, he went out of his way not to look at her, and Ella had run the gauntlet of emotion from anger to hurt to confusion and back to anger. Usually, thinking about the dumb-ass gargoyle made her blood boil, but that didn’t make it any easier to ignore the way he turned her on just by existing, or the way he could make her laugh out of nowhere with one jab of his dry, sly wit. It would be so much easier if she could just settle into a nice consistent hate-on, but no—Kees had to go ruin it by being … Kees.

  Ella hadn’t repeated her attempts to get the gargoyle to acknowledge his feelings, or the fact that he had feelings. Frankly, she was no longer certain he did. He treated her like a piece of furniture, or maybe more like a valuable vase, or something. He took care not to hurt her, physically, but he spent absolutely no time or attention on her that wasn’t required by their daily lessons.

  Well, okay, that wasn’t quite true. He did exert himself enough to ask her each day how her search for the descendants of the Wardens he had named for her was going. Unfortunately, she hadn’t found much worth telling him.

  As it turned out, two of the five men—all the Wardens Kees named had been male, and she was starting to detect a certain amount of sexism among the Guardians and their ancient Guild, which she should address later, if she ever became a member—had never had children at all. Of the other three, one had fathered a single son, but another had clearly had too much time of his hands, because the records Ella found listed eight sons, five daughters, and a total of five wives during his lifetime. Busy little beaver.

  The fifth name was the one currently giving Ella fits. She’d uncovered the names of three daughters of a Warden called Josiah Jameson, who had lived in Brighton in the south of England during Kees’s escapade of 1703. Unfortunately, the parish records of the time had not all been uploaded onto the Internet, and what information she managed to dig up offered a far from complete picture of the Jameson family. Add to that the fact that a woman’s name changed when she married, and changed again if she was widowed or divorced and subsequently remarried, and the hours spent poring over Web pages had given Ella more than
one vicious headache.

  And that was in addition to the seven-foot headache who alternated between pacing her apartment and decorating the fire escape and roof of her building.

  She’d given up worrying that someone would see him and cause trouble. As he’d pointed out on the night-that-was-not-to-be-mentioned, most humans would look at him and see the statue he had been, not the living creature of myth and legend. While Ella had learned over the course of her lessons that gargoyles could not cast spells the way he was teaching her, as a mage-in-training, to do, the magic that had created them offered them certain advantages, and the ability to go mostly unnoticed in the human world was one of those.

  With a noisy exhalation—she was much too mature to consider blowing a raspberry at the world, no matter how much it sucked right now—Ella dragged her attention back to her computer screen and continued reading. A couple of paragraphs later her gaze caught on a juicy tidbit, and within minutes her fingers were flying over the keyboard and scrolling through links and pages with the speed of a hyped-up greyhound.

  Hot damn! She was finally on to something.

  A little over an hour later she picked up a pen and scribbled down a few lines on the back of a torn envelope. She was too excited to look for the notebook she had supposedly been using to organize her information, organization not being her strong suit.

  Grabbing the envelope, she raced through the bedroom, scrambled through the open window with more urgency than grace, and dashed up the last level of fire stairs to the roof of the old building. She found Kees right where she’d expected him to be, crouched on the elevated roof edge, staring out into the night like an unblinking sentry in the darkness.

  “Kees.”

  Her voice remained quiet, but carried a low note of urgency that actually caught the Guardian’s attention. He turned to look at her, but his face remained expressionless. It always did these days.

  Ella bit back a sigh. “I found something. There’s a man in Seattle, Washington. His name is Alan Parsons, and he’s the bunch-of-times-great-grandson of Josiah Jameson. The Internet doesn’t tell me if he or his parents and grandparents were Wardens, of course, but he’s the most direct descendant of any of those five men that I was able to find. I think he’s worth checking out.”

  Kees rose to his feet and stepped away from the edge of the roof, his tail twitching restlessly behind him. “How far are we from Seattle?”

  “Well, it’s like a two-and-a-half-, maybe three-hour drive,” she noted, wrinkling her nose, “but we have to cross the border. That usually adds a few minutes these days.”

  “We should leave immediately.”

  Ella raised an eyebrow. “Hold your horses, big guy. It’s not quite that easy. First of all, showing up on a stranger’s doorstep at—” She checked her watch. “—one o’clock in the morning is not normally the best way to endear yourself to him. Second, we can’t go until I have a day off, because the last thing I can manage right now is time off, not with the museum still buzzing over your disappearance. And lastly, we have to rent another car, and my bank account is not going to like that.”

  Kees scowled. “You are worried about money? That is no problem. Once we make contact with the Guild, they will reimburse you for any expense.”

  She goggled. “The Guild has money? I didn’t know the magic business paid well.”

  “No organization remains alive and active for hundreds upon hundreds of years without funds. The notion that money makes the world go round is not a modern invention.”

  “Huh, good to know. But that’s still not the big problem.”

  “Then what is the problem?”

  “The border.” When he continued to frown at her, Ella sighed. “Right, sometimes I forget you’ve missed some stuff about the modern world. To get to Seattle, which is in the State of Washington, we have to cross the Canada–U.S. border. That would be a bigger deal if the countries weren’t longtime allies, but it still requires a passport be shown at the entry point.

  “Paperwork that proves what country you have citizenship with,” she explained when he remained silent.

  “Do you not have this passport?”

  “Of course I have a passport,” she said, pursing her lips. “But somehow I doubt you’ve got one stashed in that skirt of yours.”

  Kees didn’t react to the taunt about his clothing, but he looked thoughtful. “So you believe I will not be allowed to cross the border unless I have one of these passports you speak of.”

  “I know you won’t be allowed to.”

  The gargoyle shrugged and started to walk toward the fire escape stairs. “Then I will just have to make certain these border officials do not see me cross.”

  Ella glared at his back. “What? You think you have the ability to make yourself invisible while we drive into the U.S.?”

  “Of course not. But I do think that I have wings. If I cannot go through the border, I will simply go over it.”

  * * *

  The gargoyle had no intention of listening to reason. He insisted that they could not afford to waste more time in reaching the possible Warden in Seattle. Since Ella had absolutely no notion of how a person went about obtaining a fake passport, she didn’t fight too hard on how he planned to get over the border, but she did fight him about almost everything else.

  Kees originally proposed that he go to Seattle alone, just fly there immediately and return with whatever information he could gather before dawn. Ella called that idea idiotic. First she reminded him that the middle of the night was not the best time to ring a human’s doorbell, Warden or not, and second, she told him it was stupid to risk the sun rising before he made it back, since it increased his chances of being spotted by humans. As likely as the average person might be to chalk up seeing a huge gargoyle-shaped thing sitting on a roof to someone’s weird taste in statuary, it would be a lot more difficult for one to ignore seeing that same gargoyle flying through the sky on enormous bat wings. It just wasn’t worth the risk.

  Besides, though Ella didn’t point this out, now that she’d invested so much time into this whole experience, she had absolutely no intention of being left behind.

  Ella countered with an alternate proposal. Since the chances of a man deciding to move in the next twenty-four hours seemed small, the two of them would wait until tomorrow afternoon. She was already scheduled to have the next two days off, so she could spare the time. They would rent a car and begin the drive to Seattle with the intention of hitting the border shortly after dark. If they timed matters properly, Ella could stop a few miles north of the border in an unpopulated area and let Kees out of the car. He could then fly across the border and meet Ella, who would drive through the checkpoint normally. Once they rendezvoused in Washington, Kees would return to the car, and they would complete the drive to Parsons’s house together, arriving late, but still at a reasonable hour of the night.

  And just to be sure Kees didn’t decide to forget waiting for her and fly straight to Parsons’s house without her, Ella made certain he didn’t catch so much as a glimpse of the man’s address. So there, Mr. Take-Charge-Alpha-Gargoyle-Man.

  Kees agreed bad-naturedly, but for the first time in days, Ella went to bed with a sense of anticipation that actually outweighed the heaviness of her heart. Her bed might still be big and lonely and too filled with recent memories of the best sex of her life, but at least tonight she had something to look forward to that wasn’t seeing her Guardian’s grumpy, beloved face.

  * * *

  In the end, getting a few minutes in the car without Kees turned out to be a positive thing. First off, she didn’t have to worry about anyone questioning the guy’s species and thus winding up in Guantánamo Bay for the next eighty years; and second, the break allowed her to calm down after the steady buildup of irritation caused by the first forty minutes of the trip. Sure, Kees had been avoiding her for the past five days, but she didn’t know he would manage to continue that little feat while trapped inside a car with her.
Talk about hidden talents; the man was full of them.

  Well, he was full of something.

  Ella passed through the Peace Arch border crossing without incident and continued south along I-5 to the designated meeting point at the rest area in Custer, just south of Blaine. By the time Kees emerged—in human form—from the tree-lined darkness to the west of the parking area, she had schooled herself to appear just as detached and remote as her traveling companion. It would serve him right.

  They completed the rest of the trip in silence, Ella using the rental car’s built-in GPS to navigate around the unfamiliar city. Alan Parsons, it turned out, lived in an outlying suburb of a city called Newcastle, and Ella had to maneuver off the busy highway and onto I-90 to reach the smaller community.

  By the time the computerized voice of the GPS advised her to turn onto Parsons’s street, Ella felt stiff and weary from the stress of driving. She’d done more of the miserable task in the week since she met Kees than she had in the last year, and she hated every second of it. Maybe next time he pestered her, she’d actually let him get behind the wheel.

  As she slowed the car close to their destination, Ella risked a glance at her silent, brooding companion. “So. Do we have a plan?”

  Kees actually looked at her for a change, though she wouldn’t call his expression exactly encouraging. More like, “dour.”

  “Why would we need a plan? We meet this Warden and gather what information we can.”

  Ella parked the car at the curb, across the street and about fifty yards down from their target address. Trees lined the road here, but she preferred not to pull into the man’s drive or park right out front. No other cars lined the street here, and she got the feeling that if she parked in front of a house, every neighbor in the area would be peering out their windows wondering what was going on. An audience was the last thing they needed.