by Anton Strout
We fell from the sky into the park, our bodies and wings tearing through limbs until the two of us hit the ground in a tumble. A wide swath of dirt opened from our impact, the cut of it growing larger and longer as we went. I used the momentum of our roll to give me the advantage when we finally came to a stop, the spread and motion of my wings pushing me into position on top of my prey.
“Which of my father’s men are you?” I shouted at it. With its wings pinned underneath my knees, I balled my hands together and raised them high over my head, ready to unleash my fury upon the creature.
“Please don’t hurt me!” the voice cried out, that of a woman, and I faltered in my downward swing, stopping myself.
“You serve Kejetan Ruthenia, do you not?”
“Yes,” the grotesque shouted, but the voice was an unfamiliar one.
I had known most of the people who had served my father in his human life, the ones who had earned a place as Servants of Ruthenia, but I could not place this one.
“You are not of my father’s kind,” I said, unable to hide the surprise and curiosity in my voice.
The grotesque looked up at me with fear and confusion on its face. “I—I don’t understand,” she said.
“You serve him,” I said, “but yet you are not one of them, not of the Servants of Ruthenia.”
“Please!” she pleaded. “I don’t understand any of this. They told me they’d take me in, that they’d care for me. I don’t understand what has happened to me!” The creature looked at the sharp claws at the tips of her fingers. “Why do I look like this?”
I lowered my arms but did not release her. “Who are you, then?”
The creature’s face struggled as she thought, but her body relaxed. “Emily Hoffert,” she said. “My name is Emily Hoffert.”
“Listen to me, Emily,” I said. “The men who made these promises to you are liars.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head in earnest. “They’ve taken many of us in already.”
I cocked my head. “Us . . . ?”
She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “There are others like me. Lost, confused . . .”
Of course, I thought, remembering the night Kejetan and his men had come to claim their new forms on top of the Belarus Building. There had been far more statues than necessary for the Servants of Ruthenia to occupy.
“How old are you, Emily?” I asked.
Again, she paused in thought. “Twenty-three.”
“And what year is this?”
“It’s 1963,” she said with no hesitation.
“I do not understand how it happened, Emily,” I said, “but it would seem your spirit found this form as its new home.” I stood, freeing her and offering her my hand. She took it and rose, her wings fluttering behind her, but I held her eye, and they calmed after a moment.
“We are going to have to have a long discussion about a few things, Emily,” I said. “But first you must tell me: What did Kejetan promise you when you found yourself in this form the other night?”
“It wasn’t him exactly,” she said. “It was the one called Devon. He offered me safety. He said they had a ship where I would be safe.”
I cringed at hearing the name of Alexandra’s brother. “The Servants of Ruthenia do not make promises lightly.”
“Who are the Servants of Ruthenia?” she asked. “I had not even heard of them until I awoke in this form the other night, when they offered their protection.”
“What price did Devon set for such protection?”
“There was no price,” she said. “He only asked one favor.”
My wings fell against my back, a sinking sensation overwhelming me. “And what was that favor?”
“He told me all I had to do was look for the building on Gramercy Park with all the broken statues on it and if another grotesque should try to talk to me there, I should fly as fast as I could away from it.”
“That,” I said with growing dread, “is what we call a diversion tactic.”
I spread my wings and leapt into the sky.
“Wait!” she cried out. “Don’t leave me here!”
“We will meet again, Emily Hoffert,” I said, already shooting straight up into the night sky. “Seek me out where we met at a later time. Let us hope then, however, I am not as foolish as I was just now.”
Twenty-five
Alexandra
Our building on Gramercy Park was close enough to the subway that I was used to feeling its rumblings, so with my focus entirely on the clay sculpture I was working, that was what I took the initial shaking for.
When it persisted and grew in intensity, my mind shifted to only the most paranoid New Yorker’s fear—the fault lines under Manhattan were finally giving. Books fell from the half-broken shelves of the library as the light fixtures swayed and smashed up against the ceiling.
I didn’t wait to see what else would happen. I scooped up Bricksley and shoved him in my bag with my other belongings and ran for the back of the art studio as my ears erupted with a cacophony of sound.
I spun around in time to catch much of the terrace outside the French doors fall away, followed by the entire exterior wall on the front of the building. My favorite sofa over in the library tilted and slid out of sight as the wood of the flooring twisted and snapped apart, looking like a nightmarish set of wooden teeth.
I turned to the stairs, ready to run, but I could do nothing more than watch as more and more of the art studio got eaten away by a great cloud of dust rising from the crumbling building. The area of the studio just over my old bedroom crumbled away and disappeared down into the cloud. I wished that the old sympathetic connection between Stanis and me still existed in the hopes that he’d fly in to rescue me, but alas, that had died the night I granted him his freedom.
The shaking lessened, dying down, a good third of the art studio/library gone. Coughing, I covered my mouth with the sleeve of my sweater as the cloud rolled over me. The earthquake was over, but as I moved toward a still-intact set of windows to my left, something strange struck me.
All the rest of the buildings surrounding Gramercy Park seemed fine, the only damage being to my family’s building. The dust was already settling, and as I stepped to the edge of the damage, the cloud before me parted with a mighty gust of air as the shadowy form of a gargoyle came through it.
To my shock, it was not Stanis, as I had hoped, but one I knew nonetheless.
“Dear sister,” Devon said as he landed in what remained of the room.
The shapes of other winged creatures off in the distance danced through the dusty cloud behind him, but none of them came into the building.
Angry tears ran down my face, making tiny rivers in the dust already caked there. “Where’s your master?” I asked, shock filling me.
“Not here,” he said, closing his wings. “Oh no. This is family business.”
“This was your home,” I said. “You grew up here. How . . . Why would you do this?”
“Any sentimentality I had died with my human form,” he said, then he folded his wings and stepped forward. “While the old mad lord has been willing to wait for what he seeks, I am not. Kejetan is weak. He’s willing to take his time waiting for his monster-son to reveal Alexander’s Spellmason secrets. As if somehow the boy he killed forever ago would somehow forgive him. Dude’s got issues. He’s thinking Stanis might see the light and join Kejetan at his side. The way I see it, Kejetan’s wasted months while that idiot potion maker of his kept promising he can make Stanis give up the secrets of the Spellmasons and rule by his side. Me? I’m not tied so much to all that family sentimentality.”
“Then that makes you worse than your master,” I said, shaking with rage.
“Kejetan is a fool,” he said.
“This coming from you . . .”
“He’s wasting his time trying to con
trol every last one of these gargoyles,” he said. “His Servants of Ruthenia and the rest that were created. Rather than simply enjoy our new forms! He wants to lead, but I say why lead when you can just live by your own rule, doing what pleases you? Want something? Take it. Someone tries to stop you? End them.”
“Have you forgotten your humanity so completely?” I asked.
“All that is behind me now,” he said. Devon spread his wings and arms. “Look at me. Do you see even a hint of my old form?”
“No,” I said. “And that is the problem. Whatever and whoever you once were is lost.”
“Flesh is a weakness,” he spat out at me.
I shook my head. “Feeling a little mad with power, are we?”
“Don’t believe me?” he asked, crunching over the rubble toward me. “Let me show you how weak it can be.”
Halfway across what remained of the room he stopped, raised his hands over head, and brought them down onto the art studio’s floor, again and again. The old boards beneath my feet tore apart as the foundation beneath gave way, and my entire section of floor tilted out into the open air, falling away.
Devon spread his wings to keep airborne, but I tumbled down through the air as the broken section of the floor started to drift away from me.
I needed to get control of it and get it back under me if I was going to live. The piece of floor moved farther below me, crashing and rolling down the landslide of debris that was all that remained of one side of our building.
Determined not to end up underneath it all, I lashed out with my will for the stone foundation of the floor piece beneath me, bending it to my control. I twisted it around until the piece lay horizontal enough for me to land on it, and I slammed into it with both knees, grabbing on, scraping my palms on its jagged edges.
Holding on for dear life, I could do little more than control its fall, riding it like a sled, forcing all my will to keep it from rolling over and crushing me. It bounced and sparked off the caved-in part of the building, a rain of broken but recognizable belongings flying by me as I went until the chunk came to a stop on at least a story’s worth of piled wreckage.
I stood, exhausted, staring up at my family’s building. By my best guess, I was roughly where our main living floor used to be. I felt overwhelmed by a nightmarish burst of the surrealness of it all. The damage to my great-great-grandfather’s work had my soul in torment, and when my brother’s winged form landed behind me, I spun around to face him, a newfound fury building in me.
“Give me the book, Alexandra,” he said, holding out a clawed hand.
“After what you’ve done?” I shouted. “I’d rather die.”
Devon let out a disappointed sigh. “So be it,” he said. “What’s one more dead human anyway?”
His wings stretched out, and his sharp stone claws came up as he charged. Stanis’s roar sounded out of the sky above as it erupted with the sound of combat. The crash of stone on stone filled the air like thunder, and seconds later, the broken form of one of Devon’s gargoyle cronies slammed out of the sky into the wreckage of the building. The sound of battle raged on above.
Stanis had definitely arrived, but given the battle above, I was on my own against my brother.
A primal snarl arose from Devon as he closed, gaining speed as he came, my mind becoming a mix of fear and fury. I braced for the impact as my will whipped out into the debris all around me, and by the time Devon would have crashed into me, there was a wall of broken stone, which took most of the blow, standing between us.
Most, but not all.
Chunks of it fell away as I stumbled back, driving me into the open floor of the building. I tumbled over a couch in what used to be our living room and landed hard on bits of broken furniture.
Devon reeled from the impact, sliding partway down the ever-shifting mound of building debris.
I didn’t waste a second. I rolled off the upturned couch and ran for the edge of the living room where the damage began. Picking my way carefully to the still-stumbling Devon below, I called out to the stone all around me. It responded with ease, having been crafted by the master Spellmason, after all. Like pieces of a puzzle, I brought it close to my body, fitting it over my form as I went. By the time I arrived at Devon, I looked roughly like one of the jagged stone men he and Kejetan had once been.
“What could you possibly hope to do to me?” he shouted. “Kill me? It’s not in your nature, Alexandra.”
He swung at me, his claws slamming into my right side. Pieces of stone chipped away, the pain of the blow cutting into me, but it was lessened by my stone suit.
“That’s the great thing about nature,” I said. “It allows for evolution.”
My mind and body worked as one. When I swung my arm, so too swung the stone of my suit. While my own physical strength stood little chance against my brother, each of my blows was stronger than that, powered instead by my will.
My fists hammered into Devon, driving him back as he fought to strike, but he could not keep up. His own attempts to combat me turned defensive as he curled his wings around him in a ball—but I would not let up. The pain of everything he’d done was too great for me to relent. I smashed at him till his wings fell open, and I brought both hands swinging from left to right at his head, the blow knocking him over.
His body slid down the pile, and I went to him, my rational mind taking over. What was I truly prepared to do? Devon was barely moving by then, just looking up at me, sensing my hesitation and managing to get out a weak laugh.
“You sure have toughened up since I used to torment you down in the family crypt,” he said, and while the words stung, I shook my head.
“Don’t,” I said. “You’re preying on my humanity, my sympathy for who you were. Don’t you dare try to pretend like there’s any kind of connection between us now.”
“But there is,” he said, anger rising in him. “You’ve got your precious memories, your weak humanity, your flesh that makes you hesitate right now. You’re not going to kill me, Alexandra, and even if you did, my spirit has already occupied two stone vessels. I’ll just find another.”
Damn him, but he was right. While I felt like I could end this creature that had once been my brother, there was always a chance he might find a way back. The pack on my back squirmed against me, and I let the stone suit around me fall away, the pieces rolling off onto the pile of debris.
“That’s a smart girl,” he said. “Showing your compassion, even for your annoying older brother.”
“You’re not my brother,” I said, removing my backpack once the last of the stone suit dropped away.
“Of course I am,” Devon said, struggling to get off his back, pressing his wings up to get some leverage.
I unzipped the pack. Bricksley was squished in there with several of my other items. Alexander’s stone spell book, my own spell notebook . . . but it was the box from Caleb that Bricksley’s tiny clay hands tapped against.
“You’re not my brother,” I repeated, sliding the box out and opening it. I plucked the orb from within and held it in the palm of my hand, the elixir which Caleb had used to control Stanis swirling around like a miniature tempest within it.
Devon looked up at it from where he knelt before me, wary. “What is that?”
I hesitated, and this time I was glad for that most human of sensations. To do what I was about to do without hesitation would mean I, too, was as monstrous as Devon.
“An insurance policy,” I said, and smashed the orb down on his head. The liquid oozed over him, a fine mist rising up from it until the air around him became a thick, noxious, gray cloud.
Devon screamed, falling back to the ground.
The sounds of combat overhead had stopped, and the graceful form of Stanis descended out of the air, a stark contrast to the writhing, mewling mass before me that was Devon.
“Forgive my la
teness,” Stanis said. “I believe I was what you call tricked.”
“No worries,” I said with a dark smile. “Happens to the best of us.”
When the last of the arcane smoke cleared, Devon rose to his feet, his face a mask of confusion as his eyes darted back and forth between the two of us.
“I’m sorry,” I said, reaching out for the connection over Devon as I forced my will into him. “I truly am. But the last piece of my brother died the night his flesh did on Saint Mark’s.”
“What are you doing to me?” he cried out in panic, clutching the sides of his head as if that could somehow stop my intrusion.
“The same thing you and Kejetan did to Stanis,” I said.
“You think you can control me?” he shouted. “Force your mind upon my own and hold it down as a slave?”
Devon thrashed about as if wrestling with something I could not see, but I knew his struggle was internal, and he had no way to contend with what I was doing. My brother had been an opportunist, even a slick businessman, but in a contest of spirit and will, he was not my match. Certainly not after all that had happened. To him. And to me.
I pushed my will further upon him, feeling his spirit being crushed beneath the power of mine.
“No, I’m not looking to control you,” I said. “That would mean taking responsibility for you in this form. But what I will do is drive you down so far into the background of this creature that you won’t have the ability to even blink on its behalf. Then? I’m shutting it down. With you inside it.”
“No!” he cried out. “Please, take pity.”
“I am taking pity,” I said, stepping to him, inches from his face now as I met his eyes. “On humanity. You? I couldn’t give a shit about.”
I wondered if Stanis would approve of this, having gone through it himself, but if he had any problems with it, he did not voice them. I wasn’t sure I would have stopped even if he had.
