The Greystone Bundle (Books 1-4)

by Taylor Longford

  "That's good," he said, noncommittally. But I could see the flicker of hope that warmed his eyes at the idea that his brother and cousins might be somewhere nearby.

  "You and your family must be really tight," I ventured.

  "Aren't all families?" he asked.

  "I guess so," I agreed.

  I followed his gaze as it strayed to the rough piece of plywood covering the window.

  "Do you think that piece of wood will hold off the harpy?"

  He rolled his shoulders as he considered my question. "A harpy's strong enough to tear through the wood, but she won't be sure what's waiting for her on the other side. I think it will hold her but I'd like to pick up a hammer tomorrow, just in case. It'll be more effective than a knife."

  "Assuming the plywood does do its job, doesn't that just mean she'll snatch you the first time you step outside?"

  "We should be safe enough in the daytime," he answered. "The harpy won't risk an attack in broad daylight, not in a city like this where there are so many people around."

  That was reassuring.

  "But we'll want to avoid going out at night."

  That was disconcerting. The idea of being closed up in a small space with Reason every evening wasn't a comfortable one. Exciting, maybe, but not comfortable. "Is there anything else I should know?" I asked. I figured since he hadn't warned me about the harpy, there might be a whole crapload of other things he'd left out.

  He studied the plywood without answering and I could tell there was more.

  "What? What is it?"

  Finally, he took a resigned breath and swung his gaze back toward me. "The harpy might target you if she thinks we're…friends."

  Chapter Nine

  I almost started laughing. We were so not friends. I probably sounded a little incredulous as I asked, "How's she going to know whether we're friends or not?"

  "She'll be watching," Reason said solemnly.

  "Watching?" I exclaimed. "From where? That thing was huge. Too big to hide. If she's watching us, we're going to know it."

  "Not necessarily," he argued quietly.

  He got to his feet and walked across the room to the door. I hopped up and followed him outside to the landing. The crisp winter air cut through my indoor clothing, chilling me and making me wrap my arms across my upper body. The night was clear and the stars were like a handful of silver glitter thrown across a backdrop of black velvet. Reason swept his hand toward the lighted buildings a few blocks away. It had been the main shopping area maybe fifty years earlier. Most of the brick buildings were two or three stories high with flat roofs enclosed by chest-high walls. A rooftop in Boulder wouldn't get much traffic and I had to admit it was the perfect place for a harpy to hide and watch us. While I was adjusting to this idea, Reason's hand swept higher, toward the dark foothills that rose from the plains on the west side of Boulder. "Harpies have good eyesight," he said. "Even in the dark."

  "Okay," I gave in. "I get it."

  "When we leave the apartment in the morning we should probably act like we don't like each other, Elaina."

  So, we were back to Elaina, already. That didn't take long. Evidently, I was only Lainey when I was saving his life with a fry pan. "That shouldn't be too hard," I said dryly as he ushered me back inside the apartment.

  "So, you're pretty good with a fry pan," he pointed out while I shut down my laptop. It was the first thing he'd ever said to me that sounded remotely like a compliment. It was the first thing he'd said to me that didn't sound like an insult!

  I snickered. "Three years of tennis lessons will do that to a girl."

  "Tennis lessons?" he murmured. "I wouldn't have thought maids had money for tennis lessons."

  "They don't," I answered with a smirk. "At least I didn't. But Jackie Fairfield had money for lessons and I wanted to destroy her on the court. Her lessons really sharpened my game."

  The corner of his mouth kicked upward. "Did you beat her?" he asked.

  "Eventually."

  Grinning back at me, he grabbed his sports bag and stepped into the bathroom. A few minutes later he reappeared wearing a dark pair of pinstriped pajama pants, his black wings wrapped around his upper body like a vest. Coiled muscle and sinew flowed gracefully beneath his tightly stretched skin and I couldn't help wonder what it would feel like to be held in the circle of his arms. With a conscious effort, I tore my eyes away and took my turn in the bathroom.

  I thought I'd be too nervous to sleep with a gorgeous gargoyle lying a few feet away in the same room, but I guess the harpy fight took a lot out of me. I slept like a dead thing, the alarm on my phone waking me at seven. I spilled out of bed and scuttled toward the bathroom, determined to get in there before Reason. I didn't want him slowing me down.

  I needn't have hurried. When I stepped out of the bathroom twenty minutes later with a towel wrapped around my head, he hadn't moved. He was still sprawled on the couch with his pillow—actually my pillow—punched into a ball under his head.

  Okay, maybe someone can tell me what's so attractive about a guy who's asleep. Maybe it was just because he wasn't scowling at me but he was definitely up there on the stareworthy scale. His eyes were closed, his thick lashes shadowing his cheeks, his brow finally free from tension. His mouth was relaxed, his lips sensually parted. He was just really extra-very-yum. My eyes glommed onto him and had a nice long stare.

  But I didn't trust myself to give him a shake, so I threw my pillow at him to wake him. That was probably a mistake, considering he came from an era when a sudden attack wasn't all that unusual and a person could die if they were a heavy sleeper. He rolled off the bed into a battle-ready crouch. When he realized there was no danger, he straightened and shot a dark glare in my direction.

  "Sorry," I said. "It's time to get up."

  With lightning reflexes, he shot the pillow across the room at me. "Don't ever do that again," he warned me.

  I caught the pillow and tossed it at the couch. "How do you want me to wake you?"

  "I usually respond well to 'Good Morning'," he growled.

  "I can do that," I answered and sent him a prim smile.

  While he was in the bathroom taking his shower, I toasted some bagels to get us through the morning. I scarfed mine down and left his waiting on the counter with a cup of hot coffee. When he stepped back into the room looking all steamy and damp and delicious, I used my thumb to manually close my open mouth then hurried past him to get in the bathroom and do my makeup.

  Frowning at myself in the mirror, I gave myself a serious—but silent—lecture about keeping my head and not falling for strange, other-worldly beings. After that was out of the way, I took my time and made sure my makeup was extra especially perfect. Reason had finished his breakfast by the time I was finished making myself beautiful for him. Not that he seemed to notice.

  "We've got about fifteen minutes to get to class," I announced as I grabbed my coat from the closet. I'd bought on sale, marked down several times, probably because of the muddy orange color. But it looked okay with my black hair.

  Reason reached around me for his leather jacket and pulled it up his arms.

  I slung my messenger bag on my shoulder and looked him over, my eyes snagging on the long blade hanging from his belt. "Okay, that knife has gotta go," I told him.

  He blinked down at me. "I don't go anywhere without the knife," he stated in a way that didn't leave much room for negotiation.

  I pushed out an exasperated sigh. "Believe me, Reason, they aren't going to let you into the school wearing that thing."

  "Then I need another way to carry it," he said, and his gaze drifted down to my bag.

  I stuck out my hand. "Give it to me," I said, impatiently tapping my foot against the floor while he unbuckled his belt and slid the blade off. I buried it in the bottom of my bag. "We should do some shopping this afternoon," I told him on our way out the door. "Get you a new belt, maybe."

  He lifted his arms away from his sides and looked down at the belt
in question. "What's wrong with this one?"

  "It's a little, uh, dated."

  "I like it," he stated stonily.

  "Where'd you get it?" I asked on a hunch.

  He gave me a chilly look. "It was a Christmas gift from MacKenzie."

  Right. So, I guess we could safely assume he wasn't going to part with the belt, no matter how ridiculous it looked.

  "But we do need to pick up a hammer today," he reminded me.

  We spilled down the stairs and hurried along the sidewalk that ran in front of the house. After about a dozen steps, I came to a quick halt. "Oh, I almost forgot," I said as I turned and smacked his face.

  His eyes flared with blue fire. "What was that for?" he demanded, hulking over me and rubbing his jaw.

  "You said we should act as if we don't like each other. I'm just doing my part," I answered airily. "Don't thank me; I'm happy to cooperate."

  After that, he strode along a few paces behind me, acting really mad. Or maybe not acting. I couldn't tell.

  Our first class was History of Art, held in a fairly large lecture theatre. We got there with about two minutes to spare and that meant most of the seats in the back were taken, which is where I'd have sat if I'd had the choice. Since that wasn't an option, we made our way down the stairs, turning female heads like crazy. Everywhere we went, every step we took, girls stopped talking and turned to stare. I'd never seen anything like it. But then, I don't suppose they'd ever seen anything like Reason.

  We found two seats together in the middle of the room and sat down while a low murmur of noise filled the lecture hall. It sounded like several hundred girls breathing "squee" all at once. I figured I might as well get used to it.

  My Drawing class was smaller but not by much. I was going to tell the instructor that Reason was a friend who was checking out the class but she didn't take attendance. She gave us a drawing assignment, right off. Our task was to create a work from memory that expressed our impression of our first day at school. Reason tore my sketchpad in half, sat down beside me at the long table and started drawing.

  I gasped at his complete disrespect for my brand new school supplies and sent him a dirty look. He responded by grabbing one of my spare pencils, standing up and moving over a few seats. He wasn't alone for long. The stools around him filled up pretty swiftly. Strange, how his new neighbors were all girls.

  I ignored him and went to work, resisting the temptation to draw Reason asleep on my couch. Instead, I drew a row of quaint buildings from the old main street in Boulder. As I finished up, I found myself shading in a dark shape on the rooftop. I leaned back on my stool and gave it a critical look. The dark shape looked vaguely like a harpy. It kinda creeped me out the way the monster had worked her way into my picture and I wondered if I'd perhaps seen something out of the corner of my eye that morning on the way to school.

  With a shrug, I pushed the idea out of my mind and looked down the table at Reason's sketch. It was a bit on the complimentary side, but other than that, it was a good likeness of the professor.

  I leaned forward and got his attention. "It's supposed to be from memory," I hissed at him.

  "I haven't looked at her since I started," he hissed back, which surprised me because it was a pretty accurate sketch.

  When we were done, the class did a quick critique of everyone's work, all the girls in the class gushing over Reason's sketch. It was a nice enough drawing but I thought they were way overdoing it.

  Class ended at the top of the hour and the quiet room filled with the babble of conversation and the sound of wooden stool legs scraping across the linoleum floor. I turned an enquiring look on Reason, expecting him to join up with me before heading out of the room but he'd been waylaid by one of my classmates.

  She was really pretty and really curvy. Not a stick girl like me. I think her name was Savannah or Sequoia or something like that. She had a lot upstairs—but all of it was south of her neck, if her conversation was anything to go by. It always amazes me how some girls can talk all day and never actually say anything. She launched into a personal monologue that sounded like it might last an hour or more so I stuffed my things into my messenger bag and got going. But it didn't take Reason long to catch up with me on the sidewalk outside the building, so I could tell he didn't plan to let me out of his sight for more than thirty seconds.

  "Looks like you made a new girlfriend," I commented pleasantly as we walked toward home in the bright Colorado sunshine. Yeah, I was faking it. Truth is, I didn't feel all that pleasant about the situation.

  "Sequoia?" he shot back right away. "Give me a break."

  "What's wrong with Sequoia?" I asked, thinking most guys would be falling all over themselves for a girl who looked like that.

  "She's just…not a very nice person," he grunted.

  I almost asked him how he could possibly know anything about her when he'd only just met her. I'd forgotten about his ability to read people. So, Sequoia wasn't all that nice. Hmmm. From my point of view, that wasn't exactly bad news.

  Back at the apartment, we dropped off our sketchpads and got in the car, heading across town to the giant hardware store. I followed Reason inside, expecting him to lead the way because he's a guy and because it was a hardware store. But after several minutes of searching, he couldn't find the hammers, mostly because he couldn't read the signs at the ends of the aisles.

  "You really need to learn to read," I told him as I pointed him in the right direction.

  Down the tool aisle, he didn't spend much time deciding which hammer to buy. He headed for the biggest thing there and picked it up.

  "This ought to do," he said, hefting the hammer and testing its weight.

  It was a freaking sledgehammer. I'm not kidding. The handle was almost as long as me and the head was as big as a rural mailbox. I doubt I could have even picked it up but Reason carried it easily in one fist.

  "Okay," I snickered as we headed for the checkout. "But Thor's gonna be coming after you when he finds out you've got his hammer." I was just teasing, but I felt mightily safer once we were back in the apartment and that long-handled harpy-killer was leaning against the end of the couch.

  Chapter Ten

  So, our first week of school zipped by. I checked in with Mom every other day and heard from Amie whenever she broke up with her boyfriend, and every time they made up again. Reason and I went everywhere together, generally looking like inseparable sworn enemies, while every female within the Boulder city limits tried to glom onto him every chance they got.

  I spent my evenings doing homework for all my classes. He just did the art assignments, and skipped anything that involved reading or writing. In the classroom, we sketched from models and still life arrangements. For homework, we were asked to draw from memory.

  Sitting at the kitchen counter in my apartment, Reason drew pictures of the pack—Victor, Dare, Havoc, Valor and Defiance. After he turned those in, he drew a few new faces I'd never seen before.

  "Should I recognize these guys?" I asked, stopping at the counter and looking over his shoulder.

  "This is my brother," he murmured. "Chaos. He's younger than me. He was the wild one. I guess it wasn't easy for him to grow up with no parents in a family where his brother was the leader of the pack and I was second-in-command. With both of his brothers in positions like that, he probably thought he had to compensate somehow."

  I thought I knew what he meant. Amie had a gorgeous older sister who was a perfect student, and my best friend always felt like she could never measure up. "Is your brother's hair that dark?" I asked, a little surprised that he wasn't blond like Reason and Victor.

  "Dark brown," he confirmed. "My mother's hair was dark."

  "Was she pretty?" I asked, just making conversation.

  "Lovely," he said quietly. "Like a still pond in the morning."

  I thought it was kind of unusual the way he described her, not in terms of her looks but more in terms of her personality. But, let's face it, it was pret
ty poetic and I couldn't help but wonder how he'd describe me. When it came to water comparisons, I was afraid I wouldn't fare much better than a small tsunami or maybe a flushing toilet.

  "She died when I was about thirteen," he continued with a distant look in his eyes. "I lost my father a few years later."

  "What happened to them?" I asked tentatively. I didn't want to pry but it seemed like he wanted to talk about his family.

  "My mother had been ill for a year. My father tried to rescue a young lass from some harpies. He never came back."

  "What happened to the girl?" I asked.

  "She was saved."

  "So, his death wasn't…for nothing?"

  The look in his eyes darkened. "I didn't say that," he muttered on a tight sigh.

  I wanted to ask what he meant by that but I got the impression that his father's death and the girl he saved wasn't one of his favorite talking points. I was finished with my other homework assignments, so I pulled out my sketchpad, took the barstool beside him and went to work. "Did your mother ever take you flying? When you were little?"

  He looked at me a long moment, his brow creasing into a slight frown. "My mother was human. Like you."

  "Really? I thought…I just assumed that your whole family would be gargoyles. Was it common for a gargoyle to marry a human, back then?"

  "Very common," he answered with a dry snort. "Considering there are no female gargoyles."

  I stared at him with my mouth open. "At all?"

  He tipped his chin. "At all."

  "Well, what happens when a human and a gargoyle have a little girl? Or don't they have any girls?"

  "They have girls, occasionally. When they do, the girls are human, like their mothers. The boys are all gargoyles like their fathers."

  So, that was pretty interesting. Little by little, I was learning more about the gargoyle culture. And while Reason spent the rest of the week drawing his family, my artwork was weirdly dominated by harpies. I created charcoal drawings of harpies hulking in shadowed corners, line drawings of harpies crouching for attack or clawing their way into narrow spaces, perspective drawings of harpies exploding through windows. For some reason, the medieval monsters seemed to have carved out a permanent niche in my psyche. And every time I started a new piece, they started spilling out all over the paper.