by Anton Strout
There was nothing left except forcing them apart, which I set to. The metal did not want to give way, but slowly I forced the tips of my claws in between them and felt them begin to yield.
Chain wrapped around one of my feet, the surprise of it causing my grip to slip out of the small gap I had opened in the doors. Needing my wings once more to stay airborne, I dropped lower for a moment as I righted myself, but all that did was allow the chain around my foot to slacken, and, with a flick of the human’s wrists, it looped around me again. It caught my other foot this time, binding them together as he pulled, but other than inconveniencing me, it was not really a problem. With my superior strength, I could easily lift the man into the air, chain and all. Once I got the doors back open, I’d be skyward-bound and able to fly. Then it would simply be a matter of time and puny human strength until his arms gave out and he fell into the water surrounding the freighter.
Except I never got a chance for that to happen. The man pulled at the chain, but instead of the weak human effort I expected, there was a powerful tug that sent me crashing into the floor. I landed on my side, dazed from the display of strength. The man stood over me, rolled me onto my back with a superhuman strength, and lowered himself until he was sitting on my chest. I raised my free arm to stop him, catching him on the side of his head, which should have ended him, but it did not. My hand connected with the flesh, but the flesh felt as solid as stone.
“Fall in line,” he said, grabbing my arm, forcing it down under his leg, then raised his fists, bringing them down again and again on my head. Again, this would have been laughable under other circumstances, but the blows of his flesh hands felt just as heavy as those of my father or Devon. I fought to buck him off me, but it was no use.
“Fall in line!” he shouted with each shot he took at me.
With each passing blow, more and more of the fight went out of me until there was nothing left to do but take the abuse. My true voice subsided until I had no desire left in me.
I fell in line.
The quality of the blows changed, the stone of them quickly losing their weight, until the softness of flesh returned to them. The man stopped and stood up, wiping them against his pant legs. I remained lying where I was.
“Good gargoyle,” he said.
“Grotesque,” I replied with what hint of mental fight there was left in me. “My maker called me his grotesque.”
“I’m sure he did,” the man said, stepping back. Devon and my father joined him, the three of them staring down at me. “You see? I still have my uses. You shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss me. And you really need to control your temper.”
My father looked to him. “Like now,” he said with a restrained tone.
“Exactly,” the man said, turning away from him to concentrate on the supplies still on his table. “And as a reminder, I may be expensive, but you do get what you pay for.”
“I paid to have our arcane secrets extracted from him,” my father said.
“We can worry about the details of the old contract later,” the man said. “You’ve gotten some very useful information out of this golem, I think. And thanks to my bringing him under control, you’ve got a great tool at your disposal to help you get the information back that you wanted, right?”
“So what now?” Devon asked.
Kejetan moved to stand over my prone, exhausted form. “Now?” he asked. “Now we take what is ours from the Belarus Building. That is not a problem, is it, Stanis?”
I thought about it. Other than the barely intelligible whisper of my true voice at the back of my mind, my dominant mind saw no reason to resist.
“As you wish,” I said.
Seven
Alexandra
Despite all the time I spent trying to decipher the finer points of Spellmasonry, peace and quiet had reigned on the home front until last night. So it was with an angry and fearful heart the next morning that I set upon the dark and personal task of attempting my own arcane warding of the entrance to the guild hall.
If Alexander Belarus had protected the Belarus Building for several hundred years with the power of his wards, surely I could do a single room.
Or so I thought.
The alchemy of how to construct the safety measure was where I had the problem. If I already had prowess in any of this, I’m sure it would be as easy as following a recipe. Most recipes, however, didn’t require you to imbue carved-stone markers with the power to grant or deny entrance to a space.
How the hell was I supposed to do that? I couldn’t rightly “teach” stone how to read minds to determine intent or make judgment calls about anyone who tried to enter. And after several hours of tinkering, I settled instead on something that seemed an easier solution—enchanting the stone to activate and open by the invocation of simply speaking a password to allow safe entrance.
My stomach growled as I sat there satisfied with my work, and I set off upstairs in search of food, grabbing a quick sandwich before heading back down to the basement.
I nearly dropped my plate and soda when I saw a figure standing at the slid-back bookcase that hid the stone door, but, thankfully, it was only Rory, who was putting her key to the building back into her enormous dance bag.
She turned at the sound of my plate knocking against my water bottle, catching the surprise on my face.
“Sorry,” Rory said. “I let myself in.” She pushed against the stone door. “It’s locked.”
“After last night, I decided I needed to try my hand at upping security.”
Rory looked around, her eyes looking low to the floor. She pulled a long, tall water bottle from her dance bag and brandished it like a club. “Am I about to be ambushed by an army of Bricksleys?”
“No,” I said. “He’s actually inside there. I left him putting away a bunch of the alchemy supplies I was mixing. Our supply of Kimiya is running lower than ever down here, thanks to our thief. There’s more up at the Belarus Building, so I’ll probably head up later to grab it, but even that’s dwindling. If we don’t figure out how to make it soon, I may have to back off our experiments.”
Rory relaxed and turned back to the door. “Can you magic it open for us?”
I held up my sandwich and water bottle. “Sorry. Hands full here. You try.”
She looked at me like I had two heads. “Be serious.”
“I am being serious,” I said. “You don’t have to be all fancy magic pants to do it. It’s like my laptop: password-protected. At least, I think it is. You’re my first guinea pig.”
Rory seemed wary, then glanced back at the door, striking a pose like a wizard readying for battle. “So what’s the password?”
“I’ll give you three guesses.”
Rory thought for a moment, then, in her best Hermione Granger voice, said, “Wingardium Leviosa!”
Nothing happened. Rory looked to me, but I only shrugged at her.
She paced back and forth for a moment, then said, “A hint, please.”
“Well,” I said, thinking, “it has to be something all three of us could use, so consider Marshall in this, too.”
Her eyes went wide, and she spun toward the door, shouting, “Friendship is magic!”
Again, nothing happened. Rory sighed.
“It’s something Marshall always calls us,” I offered. “Think Lord of the Rings.”
The disappointment swept away from Rory’s face as she did her best Gandalf—which wasn’t very good at all. “Mellon.”
The door clicked and opened into the room.
“Clever,” Rory said, going in. “Now we just have to make sure we’re not attacked by anyone speaking Elvish.”
I shook my head as I marched to the table at the center of the room where I had been working. Bricksley had made short work of the mess I had left there, and I put my food down on the recently cleared space, attacking my sandwich.
I was three bites in before something hit me, and I pulled out my phone, checking the time.
“Yo
u’re early,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting you for another couple of hours.”
“Well, my dance card literally opened up for the day,” Rory said. “One of the things that the Manhattan Conservatory of Dance frowns on is dizziness and vomiting in class.”
“Rory!” I said, my mouth full of food, almost choking as I said her name. I swallowed. “You okay?”
She nodded, taking a long sip from her bottle of water.
“I will be,” she said. “I guess I was a little more concussed than I thought. Our morning study was all textbook, history and such, which left me with a headache, but our late-morning session was practical. I got into maybe my tenth or eleventh fouette before I fell over and threw up.” She laid her dance bag by the table and sat down across from me, grabbing up one of the books she had been going through yesterday. “I’ll try not to blow buckets of bile on any of your books.”
“No,” I said, taking the book from her. “No researching for you. Absolutely not.”
Rory reached for the book but missed by a mile.
“I’m not going to vomit,” she said, looking a little paler than I liked to see her. “Probably not, anyway.”
I shook my head. “Rory, you must have hit your head last night harder than we thought,” I said. “You need to see the doctor.”
Rory leaned back in her chair, folding her arms across her chest. “That’s where I spent the rest of my afternoon,” she said, but nothing more.
“And . . . ?”
She sighed, running her fingers through her Cookie Monster blue hair. “She yelled at me for not coming in sooner,” she said. “But not just because of the concussion. Under these clothes, my body is a rainbow of colors, going a bit heavy on the black-and-blue side.”
“That’s not from the dancer side of your life,” I said, pained on her behalf.
“Dancers get injured, too,” she said. “Do you know the shelf life of a dancer? It’s almost as bad as that of a figure skater!”
“You need to take it easy,” I said. “Go home and rest some more. I won’t have you falling apart on my account.”
“Lexi—”
I stood, pulling her up out of her chair. Her legs wobbled underneath her and gave out, but I caught her as she fell forward. It was an awkward grab, her forehead slamming into my chin, but when she looked up at me, the fight was gone from her eyes.
“Fine,” she said. “But who’s going to protect you if that guy comes back around here?”
I smiled. “Not this girl,” I said, tapping her on her forehead. I scooped up her dance bag.
“At least let me sit here and do some puzzle solving in your great-great-grandfather’s books,” she insisted. “I feel so useless.”
“Pretty sure you’re supposed to cut back on the gymnastics both physical and mental,” I said, walking her out of the guild hall. “And given the type of arcane stuff you might stumble across in Alexander’s books, that’s even more reason for you to steer clear for now. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”
I led Rory all the way up and out to the front door, even hailing a cab and sliding her into it. She smiled up at me as I handed her the dance bag, but there was worry in her eyes.
“At least call Marshall,” she said. “That would make me feel better about leaving you here all alone.”
“Will do,” I said, and, without another word, I shut the cab door, sending her on her way as the taxi pulled away from the curb.
I could have hugged her for her concern, worrying about me when she was the one who could barely keep her feet under her, but as I headed back into the building, I had no intention of calling Marshall.
Seeing Rory like that was more than I could stand. My body shook with the thought of my best friend since childhood coming to harm in my home over secrets that had been put upon my family generations ago. If she thought I was going to call Marshall in to watch over me and put him in harm’s way, too . . .
Such fragile creatures.
Stanis’s words came to me. In his gargoyle hands, the lives of human enemies would be in danger. What scared me more was that in my hands, the lives of my human friends were, too.
If I was going to keep them safe and out of harm’s way, I needed to step up my research, and that meant doing it on my own. For that, I needed full access to everything at my great-great-grandfather’s disposal.
I needed to be back in his library.
Eight
Stanis
Swooping down out of the night sky, I took in the Belarus Building, a welcome sight after all these months away from it. I had not known I could miss a place like this so much. With the new and dominant voice filling my head, I could only hope that Alexandra was not here even though I longed to see her after so long an absence.
I came down low over the trees of Gramercy Park, then arced up to land on the terrace that led into my maker’s library and studio.
Show no mercy in your search for the stolen secrets until you have found them, Kejetan had instructed.
Tasked as I was, I approached the French doors leading in, tearing them off the hinges. I was relieved to see there was no response from within, which meant the Belarus family was safe from incurring any of the damage I was programmed to do. Curious though I was at the silence of the building as I entered, I was also relieved at the lack of human activity. It would make what I was about to do a bit easier.
Though my true voice called out for me to stop, I tore through shelf after shelf of the books there, knocking volumes of them onto the floor, my claws gouging out large chunks as I went. Pages flew free, drifting freely in the air like leaves on the wind as I hurried through my task.
Despite the outer cloud of destruction and chaos all round me, I felt nothing but sorrow on the inside. All of these were memories of the centuries I had known the family, watched over them.
Moving into the art studio lined with its puzzle boxes and statuary, my thoughts turned more toward my own creation, the years I had spent learning under Alexander Belarus—fundamental lessons in how I functioned, how I could learn, how I could grow.
And now? I had betrayed all that.
The small voice in my head begged for me to stop, but it was not the one in charge now. Destruction while searching was what my masters wanted, and that was what my body gave them.
After a long and violent sweep of the open floor of the building, I had ruined much but found nothing of use to those who now controlled me. I stood in the wreckage of it all, wondering just what I was meant to do next. Lessons in pure destruction had not been something that Alexander had ever thought to teach me even though I had done my fair share of dark deeds against those who had sought to harm the family Belarus.
I had followed my new master’s rules, but I had nothing to show for it. My mind was slowly processing what my next step might be when the sound of footsteps came from somewhere at the back of the building, near the stairs leading down.
“Holy shit,” a female voice cried out behind me, followed by a gasp of hitched breath. I froze where I stood, part habit in a world of humans but also out of shock. The sounds of cautious footsteps followed, the shift of rubble and debris following. “What the hell?”
The footsteps came to a halt when the woman no doubt spied my shape among the shadows, followed by a stifled cry.
“Stanis?”
It had been far too long since I heard my name uttered by anyone other than the my father’s people, but just the sound of Alexandra’s voice saying it calmed me, even among all the chaos I had just caused.
I turned, and there she stood, with her long black hair down over her shoulders, her eyes wide and glistening in the near darkness.
“Hello, my Alexandra,” I said, my true voice coming forward. I did not move, but I did not need to.
She ran to me, throwing her arms around my body and squeezing tight. I returned the embrace, handling her human form with care, and foreign though it felt, I found great comfort in the gesture, even though the bond betw
een us had been broken the night she had released me to my father.
We stood there in the darkness together for a long moment, neither of us willing to break the spell. When had I last touched her? Perhaps the night months ago when I had flown us to this very building to stave off my father’s attack.
“You’re here,” she said, stepping back to look at me but keeping her hands on my arms. “You’re actually here.”
“That I am,” I said.
“I’ve so many questions,” she said. “Where have you been? Who did this? Did you see anyone?”
“Where I have been is a long tale,” I said. “As to who did this . . . yes, I saw who it was. It was I.”
The kindness in her eyes shifted, and I did not need a connection between us to see the confusion in her.
“You did this?” she asked, her voice becoming louder. “Why? Why would you do this?”
I tried to answer, but found it a struggle as my true voice fought with the dominant one that held control over me. As small as my own voice sounded in my mind, I needed it to rise, to fight, but it would not come.
When I did not answer, Alexandra shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she said. She started to shrug her backpack off her shoulders, but I grabbed her wrist, stopping her.
“No,” I said, my true self fearing what was in it. “Do not.”
Alexandra gave a dark and unsteady laugh, and I sensed her nerves and anger mixing beneath it.
“Why not?” she asked, hitching the straps back up onto her shoulders.
The dominant voice wanted the secrets of the Spellmasons, but my inner voice was determined to keep them from it. These were new rules set upon me, and like the old ones, I needed to choose my words carefully if I was going to bend the dominant voice away from harming Alexandra.
“I have been tasked to claim what is rightfully my father’s from the Belarus Building,” I said.
“So you tore the place up because Kejetan the Accursed told you to?” she asked. “Did you ever think, ‘Hey, maybe I just won’t do it and say that I did’?”
