by Russo, Jessa
He was the first gargoyle I’d ever seen.
He’s been in my clearing every day since. And like always, he’s here waiting for me, his great stone wings unfurled behind him. He smiles as my footsteps slow.
“I thought that would be you.” His voice is low and rough, almost (but not quite) menacing, which makes sense for living rock. And there’s a hint of accent I can’t place, even now. But his black eyes smile, and I’ve never heard him say a single unkind word, so the possibility of menace isn’t something I pay attention to anymore.
“Who else would it be?” I gasp, trying to control my breathing enough to talk. Since I’m not a great runner, it means my two-mile run to this clearing always leaves me very much out of breath.
“You never know. Could be a minotaur.”
He says this every morning, with the faintest hint of a smile, often rotating through his favorite paras. And most days, I’ve got a smart-ass remark ready to go. Today I just roll my eyes as he chuckles, and start walking so I don’t cramp up. Thunder rumbles again in the distance, and I can’t help the smile.
Maybe we will actually get a storm.
“Hoping for a thunderstorm?”
I laugh. “Kind of. You know I love them. But there’s a group of us that’s supposed to go scavenging down near Princeton later today. We need lumber and steel, and we’ve pretty much tapped out Hinton. We may have to start ranging outside West Virginia soon.”
“Is that a good idea? Princeton was hit pretty hard by fighting last spring.”
I shrug. “Not my plan, I’m just along for the ride. Buc wants to see if there’re gas stations along the way. His stash is about gone, and we need the truck for the bigger stuff. Besides, if it’s been hit hard, there shouldn’t be a reason for anyone to be hanging around anymore, right?”
Axel makes a face that acknowledges my point, but also says he doesn’t like it. “So when do you leave?”
“Later today. After I finish my run,” I add with a grin.
“I’ll never understand what you humans find so fascinating about running.”
“Ha. To be honest, most humans don’t know why some of us find it so fascinating.” I pace a little more, willing my heart rate and breathing to calm. “I like the freedom.”
He cocks his head, black eyes following me. We’ve been over this before, but he seems to enjoy our ritual conversations, and I never mind indulging him.
“If it’s about the freedom, I can understand that. You’d like flying.”
I stop mid-step and look at him. He’s never brought up flying before, even though that’s always my answer to why I run. Freedom. Even before the Uprising, but especially now. Escape from the war that threatens our hidden peace, and the inevitability of our town being consumed. Release from the problems of surviving in a world at war with itself, a world that no longer has internet or government or supermarkets. It’s total anarchy out there, as far as we can tell. Cell phones and internet and everything that held us together and let us see each other, they’re all gone.
There’s so little we know.
My thought’s pull back to here and now with a glance at Axel’s grey stone wings, hanging behind him like an afterthought. They look as though they belong to a giant bat, or a small dragon.
“What’s it like, flying?” I’ve always wanted to ask. But Axel isn’t much of a talker. Not when it comes to himself, or his past. I know he has secrets, had a life before me, before Greenbriar… Before the world changed.
He looks at me, and his face is unreadable. Not because the stony grey cast to his skin makes his expressions hard to read, but because he just has one of those faces. Indecipherable. The kind that says I’m not going to let you in, and it’s hard not to ask, hard to keep my always inquisitive mind from dwelling on how little I know about him, even though it feels like I’ve always known him. Except I haven’t. I’ve only known him a few months.
His sudden movement catches me off-guard. Axel usually moves slowly, deliberately. Just like you’d expect from someone made entirely of stone. I’ve always suspected he could move fast, but now—now he moves faster than anything I’ve ever seen, launching himself straight up into the sky. His wings extend behind him, pulling him up and up.
Dragon wings, definitely, I think to myself. They eclipse the grey sky, so much longer than he is tall, and my breath catches.
He’s beautiful, my gargoyle friend.
Part of me wonders for about the millionth time if he could be more than just a friend. I let it wonder while I watch him, instead of stuffing it away like I usually do.
I’m so caught up in the sudden beauty of him that I don’t realize at first that he’s showing off. Barrel rolls, flips, loops… I can almost see him grinning from here, my too-human feet rooted to the ground while he tumbles through the air above me. It stirs something in me, a longing I didn’t know I had. Maybe more than one. Watching him, I understand the human drive to build aircraft, to take a piece of the sky as ours. And then his wings fold around him like a cocoon, and he’s plummeting to the ground. My breath catches again, my lungs turned to stone in sudden fear as he falls, but his wings snap out at the last minute, grasping the air around him. He lands with a great echoing thud in front of me, shaking the ground.
“Flying is…amazing.”
The richness of his voice startles me, because I’m so busy trying to breathe after that display. And then I realize his eyes are laughing. I reach out and shove at him, which is pointless. I only succeed in pushing myself back. Stone, duh.
There’re a million and one thoughts in my head, and only one makes it out.
“You could’ve warned me, you know!”
Oh yeah, that response was really, stunningly…lame. Shockingly eloquent, Kendry. God. At least I didn’t tell him he was beautiful.
His shoulders shrug, interrupting my internal snark. His shrug is oddly noticeable, this close, because his shoulders are right in line with my eyes. I forget how tall he is, most of a head taller than me, since he’s usually sitting when I’m around. Like he’s worried he might be too imposing, standing.
But holy hell, his shoulders.
“Where would the fun be if I did warn you?” A smile pulls at the corner of his mouth.
Close up, his skin has an almost rough look, like granite. He doesn’t usually get this close. I want to reach out and touch him, feel the texture of his arms and face, his miraculous wings, but I don’t. He doesn’t have to say that’s off limits. His actions always say it for him. He doesn’t like to be touched, and even my playful shove is only barely acceptable. I know, because he’s already moving away.
It makes me wonder if he’s been hurt before, and that’s why he keeps everything locked away. But then I have to wonder, who could hurt a gargoyle?
“Kendry…” His voice interrupts my thoughts, and something in the hesitation after he says my name makes me freeze. “You know the gunfire we heard the other day?”
I nod, wondering where he’s going with this. My brain is a little sluggish to move away from speculating on his past. “Yeah. It’s been quiet the last two days though. Why?”
“I think I saw some activity around the town while I was up there.”
My heart stops, and my stomach lurches. “What kind of activity?”
We’re always worried about the war, the reason the world fell apart. The war between the humans who thought the world was theirs, and the paras who showed us it wasn’t entirely. It’s left us alone so far, here on the edge of nowhere, but we all know that as long as it drags on, it’s only a matter of time before it finds us. And one look in his eyes confirms that I’m right to worry.
“You think it’s an army. Soldiers.” Statement, not question. I know the answer, I don’t need to ask. His eyes answer me anyway.
Everything else disappears. The storm I’d been hoping for, the buzz from my run, Axel’s display and my thoughts on his past, all of it. I don’t think, I just turn and run, my feet carrying me back to t
he only home I’ve ever known.
“Kendry, wait!” he calls after me, but I’m not listening. If the war has come to Greenbriar, I have to find Mom.
Running doesn’t give me any pleasure now. There’s no losing myself in the rhythm, just panic. The panic to get home, to make sure Mom is okay. But there’s a different rhythm that overcomes my own, slower and longer and louder, and somewhere in the back of my panic-charged mind I realize it’s the beat of Axel’s great stone wings. He overtakes me in seconds, his black boots plowing into the gravel in front of me. I don’t have time to stop, to avoid him, before I slam into him. And then his hands are on my arms, holding me back.
“Axel, let me go. I have to get to Mom,” I beg.
His deep black eyes are hard, unwavering. He scans mine, his hands firm and unyielding, refusing to let me go, and then he sighs. “At least let me take you. It’ll be faster.”
My brain races past the fact that he’s breaking all the unspoken rules he’s set between us. Past the realization that he’s talking about carrying me. I have to get home, and I don’t care how. I hesitate just for a moment, before nodding my head.
He moves so fast that I don’t even see. My arms are around his neck, my legs clutching at his waist, and we’re airborne. His wings pump hard, an odd sensation beneath the weight of my chest. I want to stop and enjoy this, enjoy the rough feel of his neck and wings, his oddly stiff hair in the wind, his hard body beneath me, and the elation of flying (because he was right, it is amazing). But I can’t. I’m too worried about what we’ll find. So I commit it all to memory, promising myself that I’ll come back to savor it, when I have time. When I’m not so worried.
When the only person I have left isn’t in danger.
We arrive impossibly soon.
*
Even from the air, I can see I’m right to worry. Whichever group of soldiers this is, they’ve already been through the town. I can see smoke rising. They’ve been burning things, destroying things. Breaking things, just because they can, and because it’s what they do. And it’s a human militia, not para. The few para fighters we’ve seen have left us alone, because we are exactly what they want—peace, and proof that we can share the world. Humans, though, their armies and militias just burn and destroy. The towns we’ve lost have been to them.
Ironic, really.
I have a fleeting thought, as I’m scanning below, that it’s a good thing Axel is stone. I think my arms might be strangling him, I’m holding on so tight. Not because I’m scared of flying, but because I’m so worried. I think he understands though. I hope, anyway. Because I can’t make my grip loosen.
He sets down a block away from my house, where it’s quiet. But the quiet just puts me more on edge. This decades-old neighborhood has always been full of noise and kids, even after the Uprising. And this seems to hit me harder than the Uprising did, because I’m suddenly struggling to hold back tears. The sudden revelation of stories made real is nothing next to my family and friends being threatened.
“Over here, I think,” Axel whispers, reminding me that those friends, that family, is why I came back, why I didn’t just leave when it might’ve been the safer and smarter choice.
But two steps are all I get. Two steps. That’s how quickly the soldiers throw off their camouflage and surround us, guns pointing. I freeze, but Axel moves as fast as he did in the woods.
“Go with them. Be careful. Be safe.” His quickly spoken words are all the explanation I get before he’s airborne and flying away, and I’m left here.
Damn it! Thanks for nothing.
“Another filthy sympathizer.”
The voice pulls my attention back fast. I don’t see whoever spoke at first. But then I catch the smell of his cigar, and see him pushing his way through the crowd of gun toting goons. Like all the others, he’s wearing grey urban camo, and has about six guns strapped to him.
My eyebrow quirks up in an expression I’ve never been able to help. “Wow, really? Overcompensating much?” My arms cross in annoyance. Axel’s abandoned me with nothing more than a handful of confusing last words, and these assholes just stand here pointing guns in my face, like I’m some über-dangerous monster or something. Who the hell do these people think they are, anyway?
My focus narrows in on their cigar-wagging leader. He isn’t much taller than me. His eyes do an up and down over me, grunting.
I can’t help it. The way he’s standing, like he owns the world, just brings out the snark in me. “Can we say Napoleon complex?” God, you idiot, shut up!
His lack of height puts me at a disadvantage though, since he just sucks on his cigar and blows the smoke in my face. Ugh. So gross.
I turn away, coughing, and he laughs.
“You’re lucky I’m feeling generous today. Otherwise I’d shoot you right here. You damn monster lovers are why we’re in this mess in the first place. If we’d just killed them all when they first showed up, life would’ve gone back to normal. But no, you people had to try and live with them.”
He blows another cloud of foul smelling smoke in my face.
“Put her with the others.”
Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Epilogue
About the Author
Sneak Peek of ParaWars: Uprising
