Stoneskin Dragon (Stone Shifters Book 1)

by Zoe Chant

  "Careful," she warned, passing it to Reive. "There's more like that in here, tabloids and the like. I don't know if that's the kind of thing you're looking for."

  He tilted it to the light to glance over the article. She couldn't help watching his face, distracted by the intensity of his copper gaze.

  "You haven't said what you're researching," she prompted, and somewhere deep in her chest, there was a flicker of hope. He hadn't simply dismissed the article as fiction or sensationalism; he was still reading it, as if he thought he could glean useful information from it. Did he know? Somewhere out there, other people must know. Someone must have the answers she had fruitlessly sought in the books and periodicals she'd gleaned from estate and remainder sales across the country. Maybe he would be the one.

  "I was actually hoping that you had some firsthand sources," he said, glancing up at her. "Journals and that kind of thing."

  The tentative hope in her chest unfurled a little further. Most people who expressed interest in the gargoyle books were researching school projects or just wanted to look at the books with pictures.

  Except for their mysterious visitor yesterday. She was still annoyed with Marion for not even getting the stranger's name.

  "You weren't in yesterday, were you?" she asked, reaching for a box of latex-free gloves on a nearby shelf. "Marion said—"

  "That someone else came in to look at the gargoyle books. No, it wasn't me."

  "Oh well," she said. "Maybe he'll come back. That's really interesting, two people in two days. Normally the only people who ever ask me about it are kids doing school projects." She pulled out a pair of gloves. "Here, put these on. What I'm about to show you is fragile."

  Reive dropped the backpack on the floor to free up his hands. "Is this okay?" He made a slight gesture, and she noticed that he was wearing a black glove on his right hand. Not the left one, though. He also held his right hand stiffly, struggling to pull the plastic glove onto his other hand.

  "Yes, that's fine," she said. "I just want don't want to get hand oils on the pages." She wanted to ask if it was a disability or injury—he held his hand like it hurt him—but she didn't want to be rude. Anyway, it wasn't like she didn't know enough about keeping secrets of her own. "I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but I'm excited about having it in our little library. I've been thinking about getting a display case for it."

  She opened a drawer under the shelves, and very carefully took out the book she considered the pride of the collection, even if it had been a personal disappointment for her. Like everything else she had acquired or read over the years, it had offered no answers for her. There was no explanation between its worn pages of what had happened to her to make her the way she was, let alone a cure for her condition.

  But it was still a spectacular find. She had no idea how old it really was, but she was confident it was the oldest book she had ever personally handled. She could never have bought something like this with an ordinary small-town library's budget or her own pocket money, but she'd stumbled onto it by pure chance in a lot of books she had obtained in a batch from an estate sale. Most of the lot had simply gone into the library's book sales, but she'd made some good finds, and this was one of them.

  It was only half a book. There was a front cover, but no back cover, and it looked like it had been torn down the middle. It had been a beautiful book once, before age and wear left it in this sadly bedraggled state. The flaking leather cover was embellished with gold leaf, but unlabeled with any form of title.

  Jess had bound it carefully in plastic to help stop any further deterioration. She opened it now with exquisite care. Inside, the yellowed, crumbling pages were covered with cramped handwriting in faded brown ink.

  And there was, bound to the first page with ancient glue and a strip of fabric, a shard of stone that could easily be the broken tip of a statue's stone claw.

  Reive

  This could be it, the thing he'd been searching for. Reive found that his hands were trembling slightly as he took the book from Jess.

  That was definitely a gargoyle claw; he'd seen them before. The wounds on his arm, beneath his jacket sleeve, seemed to pulse as he stared at it. Shuddering, he turned the page.

  The first few pages were covered with crabbed writing, mixed with diagrams and formulas he couldn't understand. The writing itself was faded but legible. Or at least, it seemed to be—but when he looked closely, he couldn't make heads or tails of the words.

  "It's Latin," Jess said, leaning over his shoulder. "Well, this page is. There's also Greek and a number of pages with ancient Norse runes. But most of it is Latin."

  She was so close. If her hair hadn't been braided back, it would have fallen down to brush the side of his neck. She smelled very nice, like soft and sweet vanilla sugar. He could taste it on the back of his tongue, as if he'd brushed his lips against her skin.

  "Do you read Latin?" he asked, forcibly wrestling his mind back on task.

  Jess nodded. "I have a degree in library science and classical literature. I mean, it's not Harvard, of course; I went to a small-town college, but ..." She trailed off, looking embarrassed.

  Reive had no idea why she would be embarrassed about that. "I didn't go to college at all," he said. He carefully turned another page. Rather than more handwriting, this part of the book was printed, either with a printing press or extremely tidy calligraphy, on cream-colored, very old-looking paper. "What about this?"

  Jess pointed to the page, not quite touching it even with her gloves on. "This is a long passage discussing the alchemical elements and their application to—er—magic. But every part of the book is different. This book appears to have been bound from a number of different sources. Some are copies, but some are originals, as if pages from other, older books were collected and stitched together. See?" She turned a page, and the next pages were visibly different yet again, a little bit smaller and printed on yellower paper.

  "So this book is made out of pieces of other books? Like a Frankenbook?"

  Jess drew a breath. Her eyes sparkled with interest. "It really wasn't that unusual back in those days. Today we think of a physical, printed book as a single item. We buy books new and discard them when the binding falls apart. Bookbinding is no longer a common vocation."

  She turned a page carefully, handling it with the tips of her gloved fingers.

  "But back in the very early days of printing, books were sold as loose pages—signatures, actually, a group of pages printed together—and the customer would have them bound together in their choice of binding. Books were rare and expensive, and if your book started to fall apart, you could have it rebound. And if you were going to do that anyway, you didn't have to stick with the original contents of the book. You could have more than one book bound under one cover, if you wanted to. Especially if your books were short, like—oh, any kind of thing, pamphlets and broadsides and song lyrics and, in this case, parts of other books. There's even a word for it, sammelband, a book made of individual shorter books bound together as one—" She broke off and dropped her gaze. "Ugh, I'm sorry. I can really go on when I start talking about this kind of thing. I'm probably boring you."

  "Not in the slightest." Reive's dragon was in rapture, absolutely captivated by her. Reive was equally fascinated. "It's interesting."

  Jess's cheeks turned pink. "I hope you still think that after you've heard me ramble on for an hour about the history of bookbinding." She ducked her head. "Anyway, I've never seen anything else like this book before. It's like someone took a commonplace book—that is to say, a journal; some of these are original handwritten pages—and mashed it up with other published books and treatises, annotated in the margins. It seems to have had different authors, and I don't think the person who wrote the journal pages is the same one who annotated it, because the handwriting is different." She turned the pages again. "See, this is all Greek, a copy of an original Greek manuscript from classical times."

  "Don't tell me
you read Greek too."

  There was a smile, a shy little twitch of her full lips. "Greek, Latin, some French and Italian."

  "Wow," he said, honestly impressed. "Have you translated this at all?"

  Jess shook her head. "I read all of it, of course, to find out what was in it, but ..." She trailed off, looking pensive, as if she'd started to say something else and changed her mind. "Anyway, no, I never thought of doing an actual, formal translation, since I can read it myself. Well, except the Norse runes. I've contacted a university in Oslo to see if they can help me with those, but I haven't heard back from them yet."

  "What about the rest of it? What's it all about?"

  Jess pushed aside a large heap of ragged paperbacks to make room on the table. She took the book carefully from Reive's hands and laid it down.

  "I mean, broadly, it's an alchemical text, so it's a mix of philosophy and natural history and ritual magic, or what the author believed was magic, and—well, gargoyles. It's funny you mentioned Frankenstein earlier, because that's what this is, basically. It's a book on creating gargoyles, how to make them and bring them to life. I mean, a fantasy about how gargoyles would be created, of course," she added quickly. "Because they're not real. Right?"

  "Right," Reive said absently. His heart beat faster. This really did sound like it might have the information he needed to heal himself. He leaned over the book, wishing he could understand it himself. "Do you mean gargoyles are—constructs of some kind? I mean, hypothetically speaking. If living gargoyles were a real thing."

  There was a slight hesitation before Jess said, "Well, according to this book, they were created in the Middle Ages using alchemy. I couldn't say exactly how, because the book itself doesn't say precisely. It's so chaotic, and there's so much missing. It's like having a recipe with half the ingredients and instructions missing, and what instructions you do have are out of order."

  No. He couldn't come so close, have it at his fingertips, only to fail. "What about the rest of it? There's a lot more here than just a ... a gargoyle recipe."

  Jess stifled a laugh. "Whoever compiled this was pulling in every source they could find that had anything at all to do with gargoyles. Medieval manuscripts, myths, poetry ... between the mix of sources and the annotations, it's really a mess. And then there's all the occult stuff."

  "Magic."

  "Magic according to alchemists, anyway."

  Reive said nothing. As far as he had always believed, there was no such thing as true magic. He'd never heard any of the older dragons talking about it. But then again, the list of things he knew for a fact were real included shifters, mate-bond telepathy, and gargoyles capable of turning stone to living statues and moving the earth itself. Who knew what else might exist?

  Also, it was hard to concentrate with her heady vanilla perfume filling his senses, making his dragon distracted.

  Not to mention the itching-burning of his bad arm. It was as if the proximity to the gargoyle claw was making it worse.

  "Can you show me a page with one of the magic rituals?"

  "Sure." She flipped carefully, and stopped on a page with a bunch of symbols and circles sketched in brown ink. "I mean, for whatever it's worth, there was a lot of this kind of thing back when alchemists were around. It doesn't mean it actually does anything."

  But that doesn't mean it doesn't work, either, Reive mused. His shoulder was almost touching hers. Inside him, his dragon seemed to stretch out as if to touch her.

  What's with you, anyway? You said she's not our mate, right?

  I don't think so, his dragon said unhelpfully. But she smells nice.

  "So these are magic spells we're looking at? What are the ones on this page supposed to do?"

  "Hmm." She frowned for a moment, studying the words and diagrams. "This one is ... something involved with binding the element of air to the element of earth, I think? It's complicated, though. There are a lot of steps to it, and—" She flipped a few pages until she found what she was looking for. "See, here's another version of the same thing. It's not like TV special-effects magic where there's a simple spell and you wave a wand and get a fireball or something. There's page after page of this sort of thing."

  Perhaps, but binding air to earth sounded awfully like the kind of thing you might do if you were trying to make gargoyles. What if gargoyles had been created, and not all that long ago in terms of a dragon's lifetime? Well, that would make it easier to kill them, Reive thought grimly, if they weren't people at all. And maybe if he could piece together this gargoyle recipe and reverse it, he could undo what had been done to him, and heal himself. For the first time since he had realized that he was turning to stone, he felt true hope.

  He leaned in close to study the book, and accidentally bumped his forehead into Jess's.

  "Sorry!" they both said at once. She jerked back, and Reive pulled away quickly too, but not before he caught an intoxicating rush of her spicy sweetness.

  "No, no ..." Jess was laughing now. "It was all my fault. I can get a little lost in what I'm doing sometimes, when books are involved."

  "Did I hurt you?" He reached out with his good left hand and started to touch the side of her head.

  His fingers had just brushed her braided hair when there was a brisk tap on the half-open door. Reive and Jess sprang apart as Marion peered quizzically in.

  "There you are, dear! I've done all the locking up, but if you could just finish shutting down the computers, I have to run over to the pharmacy to pick up my pills."

  Jess straightened up, took a deep breath, and hastily tucked a few stray strands of hair back into her braid before putting on a quick, friendly smile. "Yes, of course, I'll finish. Thank you, Marion."

  Marion gave them both a knowing look as she left.

  Jess stripped off her gloves, turning pinker. "Reive, I'm just going to help Marion finish closing up. Feel free to look through the book while I'm gone, okay? I'll be back in a few minutes."

  "Yeah—yeah, sure," Reive said, but she was already on her way out, in a whisk of her skirt and a waft of vanilla.

  Reive took a slow breath once she was gone. He went over to the door and glanced through it to make sure she and Marion were nowhere near. All he could see were book stacks. He closed the door and pulled up the sleeve of his leather jacket to examine the mottled patchwork of flesh and stone that now made up his arm.

  It had been months since he'd been attacked by a gargoyle and stabbed with the creature's poisonous spines. At first it had only seemed as if his wound was slow to heal. And then he had begun to notice hard, numb patches around the places where the spines had penetrated his skin. They were cool to the touch and clicked softly when he tapped them.

  His skin was turning to stone.

  By now, the numb patches had grown from quarter-sized to saucer-sized, and they had begun to join together, mottling his arm in a patchwork of cold gray stone and warm light-brown skin. And it wasn't merely aesthetic. It hurt. The pain was particularly bad around the edges, where flesh met stone. It ached all the way down to the bone, making him fear that the damage he could see was only the tip of a very deep, stony iceberg.

  He pulled off the black glove and flexed his right hand, feeling the bone-deep ache and sluggish response. The gray, stony patches were still mostly hidden by his sleeve. This morning there had been just a little bit of visible stone around his wrist and the back of his hand. He preferred covering it with the glove, but even uncovered, it wasn't that noticeable.

  Now it was all the way down to the middle of the back of his hand.

  He swallowed hard. Could being in close proximity to the long-dead gargoyle claw in the book have that much of an effect?

  The advancing progress of the disease—or poison, or whatever it was—seemed to go in surges, and it was possible that he'd suffered another through sheer chance. But every time he got close to the book, his arm hurt. And he didn't think it was a coincidence.

  He cracked open the door and glanced out. He he
ard voices from somewhere up near the front of the library, even from here recognizing the cadence of Jess's warm voice as she spoke to someone, a late library patron or volunteer, calmly but firmly chivvying them out the door.

  He closed the door again and went swiftly to the table with the book. Carefully he flipped back to the front of the book, where the claw was fastened to the page.

  A shiver of pain flashed across the raw nerve endings of his affected arm.

  Was it possible that all gargoyle stone could be ... connected, somehow? If they were all really constructs, invented creatures rather than natural ones like dragons and other shifters, perhaps the gargoyles' stone bodies carried some vestige of alchemy, magic, or whatever forces had been used to create them.

  Gritting his teeth, braced for further pain, he lowered his arm and let the one of the stone patches click lightly against the chip of gargoyle claw.

  It hurt, but in a different way than he was expecting. It was the almost-satisfying itch/ache of rubbing at a healing bruise. A cool sort of feeling, like a ripple of cold water spreading outward on his skin—

  The door began to open, and he jerked his arm away, hastily pulling his sleeve down.

  "Sorry about that!" Jess said as she came in. "I just finished closing, and I don't have to be anywhere, so we can stay as late as you—" She paused, and Reive wondered if he was staring at her as guiltily as he felt. "Is something wrong?"

  "No, I'm fine," he said, and out of sight under the edge of the table, carefully pulled the black glove back in place. "Sorry. I've just been looking at the, uh—at the pictures."

  "Did you find these yet?" She came around the table to his side, picked up a tissue and carefully used that to flip some pages, not touching anything with her ungloved hands. He found himself distracted by those hands—her long dexterous fingers, the nails cut short but painted a sparkly gold at odds with the rest of her demure librarian persona. It hinted at a secret wildness that fascinated him, an entire hidden inner life—