by Vi Lily
She frowned again, her thoughts apparently jumping from subject to subject. "And you can time travel any time, anywhere you want?" The question was whispered with awe in her voice.
Avisha winced. He sure hoped the lass wasn't going to ask him to traverse the millennia, because while he wouldn't deny her anything she wished, time travel was extremely…uncomfortable. Especially when your future body met with your past form.
It was painful, to be sure. Excruciatingly so. Avisha snorted. That hardly described having your entire body ripped apart and then put back together again. Agonizing torture would be a more apt description.
And he'd had to go through it twice in the span of just moments for the girls…his girls. While he'd do it a thousand times over for them, he still shuddered at the memory.
Before, when he was still an angel, traveling through the halls of time was nothing. It was a thought and a few footsteps. But after taking fleshly form, it was a bit more involved. He didn't complain about the pain, though. It was surprising that the Creator had left him with the ability to traverse through history.
"Aye, I can travel to any time in history—and any part o' the future I've already been. But as fer the 'where', ye can only travel to the same point ye started at, so it can be tricky to make sure ye doonae end up in the wall of a structure or buried underground."
Avisha shuddered at that particular memory. He'd had to quickly travel back to where he'd started when he'd found himself inside a hill that hadn't existed in the time he'd traveled from.
He ran his paw gently down her back. "Time travel is no' pleasant, though. I was thankful ye were asleep fer it."
Her eyes widened again. "And Carlie?"
She was so selfless, always thinking of her sister first. Avisha wanted to squeeze the girl, she was such a treasure.
He shook his head, the memory of that moment still befuddling him. "Fer some reason, the lass wasnae affected by the travel, I am pleased to tell ye. The fact o' the matter is…she giggled through it."
Avisha frowned as he remembered the trip with the tiny lass in his arms. While he'd felt like he was being shredded, she had acted like she was being tickled. He was thankful the babe hadn't suffered, but her reaction was odd, to be sure.
"You promise?" Gwen whispered as she licked her dry, cracked lips. His eyes tracked the movement of her tongue. Avisha had put the salve Maeve had given him on her lips, but apparently, he hadn't been diligent enough, something he scolded himself for. His mate deserved better treatment.
"Aye, lass, I promise," he whispered back. "I wouldnae lie to ye, ever. O' that ye have my vow. Yer sister was no' affected by the travel through time at all."
Her wee hand moved from his chest to his cheek. Avisha wasn't sure if he could actually call the bit of flesh above his wide mouth "cheeks" however. But the lass caressed the area, as if he were sitting there as a man and not as a nightmarish creature. A monster.
She was looking at him as though she were seeing him, too, looking past the form into his true self.
Her voice was barely above a whisper as she continued stroking his face. "Thank you…for going back for her. For going through that…for us." And with that, she leaned forward and kissed him.
Chapter 5
T HERE IS no good reason why I puckered up and planted a kiss on the monster sitting on my bed. Except that he wasn't a monster. Not at all.
I mean, he looks like a monster, don't get me wrong. The…uh, guy…next to me on the bed towers over me, and that's while we're sitting. I'm guessing when he stands, he's pushing seven feet, probably more.
And he's seriously muscular. I remembered when I saw him in his human form that he was really built, but in the gargoyle body, he's massive. He makes me feel like I'm no bigger than Carlie. There is no doubt in my mind that he could literally crush me to death with no effort on his part. I also have no doubt that there's no way he would.
He's completely hairless as far as I can see, which is pretty much everywhere. He's only wearing some sort of shorts that match his skin so well you can hardly see them. And his skin is gray. Like wet concrete gray.
His face is long. I always thought gargoyles had smaller faces, more like cats, but Avisha's is more wolfy than kitty. His eyes are strange—and yeah, I know, that's the pot calling the kettle black—but, like mine, you know at first glance that they're not human. Or normal human, anyway. His eyes are more like animal eyes, a light root beer sort of color, more gold than brown. But I remember his human eyes being the same color.
What makes them strangest, though, is the fact that the pupils are going up and down like a reptile's. Or more like a goat's, I guess. And I noticed when he blinked that he has two sets of eyelids—the inner one closes from side to side and the other up and down.
His teeth…well, they're sharp and pointy like you'd expect on a gargoyle. And big, like a shark. They're longer than my fingers. With that long face, he could literally bite my head off.
Then add in the paws with these scary-looking claws that are also longer than my fingers, wings that I'm sure have a massive span, and a tail that I've only caught a glimpse of, but it's long, thick and has some spikes on the end—yep, he's for sure monster material.
But he's not a monster, like I said. He's an angel. A for-real angel. Or had been, anyway. Who can travel through time. Yeah.
It's a lot for my broken, aching brain to process. Plus, add in the fact that I'm sitting on a bed in some sixth century fortress and my brain has turned to goo, cuz, seriously, I'm living in the Dark Ages. That's kinda scary.
Okay, it's a lot scary.
I remind myself then that yeah, I might have been "dragged through the portals of time"—and I say that to myself with an announcer's echo-y voice in my head— but I'm not really worried. I have a freaking gargoyle on my side. Who was an angel.
Take that, life. Suck it.
Yeah, maybe he isn't an angel anymore because he apparently did something wrong that ticked off the Creator. But I don't care what he did in the past. He saved me and my baby sister, and that means Avisha is still an angel in my eyes. My angel.
Before you roll your eyes at me and say, "Dang, Gwen musta hit her head a lot harder than she thinks," you gotta know that I've never ever…and I mean ever…had anyone stand up for me like he did. Yeah, I hit my head pretty freaking hard, so hard that it's still ringing after a week, but it wasn't so hard that I don't remember the fact that the dude took a bullet for me. For me.
I get the distinct impression he'd do it again, in a heartbeat.
It's really weird to know that someone you just met would not only go completely out of their way to help you and your kid sister who's barely older than a toddler, but would also put their life on the line for you.
And let's be honest here, that "someone" is a freaking time-traveling gargoyle. And I'm okay with that. More than okay. Lifelong dragon lover here, remember?
Okay, so yeah, he's not a dragon. But guess what? I'm not a princess in a tower either. Well, there's a good chance that I might actually be in a tower at the moment, but I'm definitely no princess.
And I get that a normal person wouldn't just be okay with a massive, leather skinned, winged creature sitting on the bed with her, cuddling her, petting her with his gargantuan paws while telling her she's now fifteen hundred years in the past. But I'm not normal. Not at all.
And frankly, I've had to deal with weirder stuff.
Remember those other failed UniGens I mentioned? There are a handful of us, like Ven who now sings soprano thanks to my kiss-dodging skills, and my friends Janissa and Brea. We're all pretty normal…except that Janissa can literally scale any wall with her bare hands and feet and Brea can jump twenty feet straight up.
Ven can fly. Okay, not like some comic book superhero can fly, but he can do this freefall thing, like those parasuits that people wear to base jump that make them look like flying squirrels.
And I can probably beat a racehorse in a straightaway.
&nbs
p; Did you notice that all our "superness" is related to defense? Yeah, we're lovers, not fighters. Definitely not the "save the world" types.
Sorry, not sorry, we aren't useful to Dr. Smythe and his evil purposes, mostly because none of us have all the cool traits. Everyone just has one ability, except for me, but I only have a couple. Smythe said it was something to do with my mother's genes, why I had extra…and why Carlie supposedly has them all. My friends and I are not UniGens. That title belongs to my sweet Carlie alone.
The rest of us are failures in DEE's eyes.
We're normal, for the most part. We even call ourselves "norms." At least, we can walk around in public and fit in. No one would look twice at us.
The only outward difference between us and every other Joe Blow is that our eyes are all freaky colors. Mine are sort of a bright turquoise, Janissa's are this cool sparkly violet and Brea's are bright gold. Ven's are silver…and I don't mean gray. Silver, like shiny jewelry.
But considering people can buy contacts to make their own eyes look weird, even that isn't so different. I mean, seriously, I saw a guy once with lime green snake eyes, so our weird colors don't even make people look twice.
Carlie's eyes are the weirdest and the prettiest—they're a combination of all the norms' colors. They're like those mystic fire topaz stones, with the swirls of all the colors. Really amazing and startling…and they for reals don't look human.
I've had a hard time hiding her eyes from the rest of the world since I can't explain them away with contacts, because what three-year-old wears contacts? Poor kid has to wear sunglasses if we're around people and everyone sort of assumes she's blind. It works. Gets us special treatment sometimes too.
Again, we norms can fit in.
But then there are the others. The norms called them "abbies," as in "abbie normal." If you're a Mel Brooks' fan like my friends and I are, you'd get the reference and maybe laugh your ass off.
The abbies are seriously abnormal. Like "monster under the bed" freaky scary.
They're the oldest of us, Dr. Smythe's first failures. That was back when he thought it would be a good idea to "grow" the fetus outside of a body. Those abbies were actual for real "test tube babies." Or beaker babies, I guess.
Whatever you want to call them, they're screwed up.
You know those old horror movies where the serial killer is like super deformed and everyone thinks he's "soulless?" That's these guys. Well, I'm honestly not sure if they are male or female. Maybe both. Or neither.
Anyway, some of them look more human than others. At least you can tell they were supposed to be human, before falling victim to a bad weedeater accident or something. But the others…well, they're more like pieces of bodies tossed into a blender and poured out on the floor.
But we can overlook the outer, right? Don't judge a book by its cover and all that. No body shaming here. Or monster shaming.
It's not their looks that are so bad—and that's saying a lot, since I literally throw up in my mouth a little every single time I see one—but they're evil. Honestly. They have no conscience, no morals, no compassion. All they care about is ripping you to pieces. Just ask Dr. Smythe's assistants, Olan and Steffan, about that.
Oh wait. You can't ask them, because they were ripped to pieces.
Smythe always keeps the abbies on a short leash. In cages, actually. They're only let out for experiments. Blood draws. DNA tests. To be shot up with whatever chemical cocktail the doctor can think up, stuff that causes them to convulse, scream and foam at the mouth. Smythe's psychotic experiments are god-awful.
I might be a little bloodthirsty too if I were in their shoes. Not that they wear shoes.
The worst one of those abbies is so bad they keep him/her/it muzzled twenty-four seven. Otherwise, that thing will rip you apart with these shark teeth it's got. Like a piranha in a feeding frenzy. It's huge, too, like seven feet tall. It takes a tranquilizer gun with enough dope to knock an elephant out just to control it.
And it's my brother/sister/whatever. I call it Pat.
Yeah, I know, sick to think I'm related to it. But before Smythe realized that he needed to let the fetuses develop inside a human as nature designed, he'd taken egg and sperm from my parentals and grew Pat in the lab. That makes that seriously scary thing my sibling.
I know. Ewww.
So, to say that I'm okay with "weird" is an understatement. Kissing a gargoyle is not even going to make it to the top ten on my Weirdest Crap Ever list.
Honestly, I'm not even sure it was technically a real kiss, because Avisha doesn't have lips. Not like normal human lips anyway. They're more like what you'd find on a horse. Kind of big, soft flaps of flesh surrounding his mouth.
Didn't stop me from planting my human lips on his not-so-human ones though.
Before you judge me, it wasn't like I stuck my tongue in his mouth and counted his teeth or anything. This wasn't some passionate lover's kiss, not a backseat make-out session. It was just what people call a "peck," a meeting of lips from one friend to another, a way of saying "thanks dude!" Well, I suppose most dudes don't kiss as a way of saying thanks, but you get my drift.
So it makes me wonder why the big ol' scary gargoyle is acting like I tied him up and forced a lap dance on him.
>†<
Avisha was frozen. The sweet lass in his arms had just kissed him. Him, a gargoyle. A nightmare in flesh.
He was shocked, to be sure. Pleased, aye, more than he wanted to admit. So pleased, that he had to scramble off the bed to get away from her before he did something they would both regret.
As he stood by the bed staring down at the girl, he ran a claw over his mouth where her delicious lips had just been moments before. No one, ever, in all the millennia he'd lived, had shown him the slightest bit of affection. Not even a hug. He'd been an angel, for Heaven's sake, and now a monster. There hadn't been a reason for such displays. Likewise, there hadn't been anyone willing to do so.
So, he had no reference to work with on proper "after kiss" etiquette. All he knew was that he needed to put some space between the two of them. The feelings swamping over him were surprising and…overwhelming.
He didn't even know what those feelings were, what they meant. He'd never felt such a thing before. It was like he was warring with himself in wanting to grab the lass and touch every last speck of her skin, then crawl inside and do the same from within and wanting her to do the same to him, but knowing those feelings were wrong. Especially since he was in gargoyle form. He could crush her in a passionate embrace.
But the thought of having the lass touching him all over—and doing the same to her—caused a physical reaction that had him bolting toward the door.
"Uh, I'll just go see to yer Carlie," he said by way of excuse as he kept his back to her. He glanced back over his shoulder as he yanked the heavy door open.
"I'll have Mistress Kate bring the lass up, along with some food. Ye need to eat, now that yer awake."
At Avisha's words, Gwen's stomach rumbled loudly. She jumped in surprise and put a hand on her flat belly.
"Uh oh, I think there's a monster inside me," she laughed.
Avisha looked at her hand as it rubbed her belly, then he ran his own hand over his jaw.
"And another wantin' to get inside," he muttered.
"What?"
He shook his head. "Nothin' lass. Nothin'."
Chapter 6
I T'S BEEN three weeks and I'm happy in the gargoyle's fortress, to be honest. Sure, it doesn't have Wi-Fi or running water, but hey, I'm used to camping, so no big deal. Besides, I don't have anything electronic thanks to being scared that DEE would be able to track us through it, so lack of electricity and internet is also no biggie.
Not being scared to death all the time and not having the feeling I'm being watched constantly for the first time in…ever…is, as my friends and I would say, "Taco Tuesday."
That means "awesome" for those of you who aren't up on twenty twenty-three slang.
But now Carlie and I are safe, no one is watching us from every corner, no one is chasing us, we're eating regular meals, sleeping in a real bed and getting to take baths whenever we want, even if that means using this disgusting soap paste stuff that Kate makes that I swear will take the skin right off if you leave it on too long.
Best of all, Carlie is happy here. She's finally getting to park her cute little butt in one place for more than five or six days. Avisha wasn't kidding when he'd said she'd managed to wrap every person around her chubby little finger. Even the grouchy old Domnall, who makes me hide around doors whenever I see him approaching, always has a smile for Carlie.
Judging from his impressive resting bitch face, I'm pretty sure those are totally unused facial muscles.
There aren't a lot of people running the fortress—and I keep wanting to call it a castle, but turns out castles weren't even around in the sixth century—which kind of surprises me. I'd asked Avisha about that one night at dinner and he'd just shrugged and said "No' many people want to work for a monster."
Well, yeah, no duh. But he's not a monster. And the fact that other people think he is pisses me off. A lot. It makes me appreciate Kate, Domnall and the others a lot more too, for their ability to tell society to stick it. For not thinking of Avisha as something bad. Well, maybe they're just in it for the paycheck, but still.
Avisha isn't a monster, isn't even scary. I know all about the reputation that gargoyles have from growing up in Norway, but it's hard to imagine him terrorizing villagers after I've watched him play "duck duck goose" with my little sister, or pretending to be the "King o' the Fae"—complete with a pine crown Carlie and Kate wove—and then flying Carlie around the fortress.
