Heart of Stone (21 page)

Kees stared at her pale little face. Her jaw was set, as stubborn as her heart, and her lips had compressed into a firm line, but her brow was furrowed and dark circles shadowed the tender skin beneath her eyes. She looked set and fierce and heartbreakingly fragile. He wanted to go to her, to touch her, but the minute his weight shifted forward, she drew back, pulling herself even farther away from him.

The itching in his palms intensified, and Kees wanted to roar his irritation. He just didn’t know whom he wanted to roar at.

He nodded. “Agreed. We will do this as you desire. Shall we go find Parsons and tell him to proceed?”

“Might as well.” Ella nodded briskly and turned to leave the room by the exit the Warden had used earlier. He followed close behind and thought he heard her words drift back to him as they entered the hall.

“Before I change my mind.”

Chapter Eleven

The binding spell had been brief, simple, and disarmingly anticlimactic, especially since when it was over, Ella felt absolutely no different. She even asked Alan if he’d done things properly, and he laughed as he assured her he had. She and Kees had been well and truly bound.

She supposed the short, simple nature of the spell should be counted as a plus. After all, being new at this whole magic thing, she wouldn’t have wanted the unbinding Alan had taught her—and included in her textbooks, as she called them, just in case—to be something long and complicated that had to be recited in ancient Sumerian under the light of a gibbous moon and over the body of a sacrificial salamander, but still. She’d expected something a little more impressive. Would one tiny whiff of frankincense have hurt anybody? A tingle in her right big toe? Something.

But no, Ella had felt nothing.

Kees had wanted to wait for morning to do the spell. By the time they found Parsons and made their request, it was nearly three in the morning, and Ella was swaying on her feet—but no, she’d wanted to get it over with before she lost her nerve. Sleep, she figured, would come the instant her head touched the pillow, so better to have it done now, when she wouldn’t have time to lie around and brood over it.

Famous last words.

Turning her head, she glanced at the small alarm clock that sat on the bedside table in Alan’s comfortable guest room. The Rose Room, he called it, not because it was pink, but because a beautiful climbing rose twined around a trellis just outside the bedroom window. Ella had cracked it open before she climbed into bed, and the sweet scent of cool and fading roses soothed her into sleep.

Or it would have. If she hadn’t been lying here wide awake, trying to count sheep and force herself into dreamland. At this point, she thought she had enough of the woolly little beggars to start her own ranch in New Zealand.

She knew exactly what her problem was, of course. It was hard to miss, considering it stood over seven feet tall, growled like a grizzly bear, and currently slept in the room beside hers.

Ella tugged at the covers and twisted onto her side to stare out the rose-bordered window. Every time she thought she’d adjusted to the Guardian, regained her equilibrium and had her feet back on solid ground, he went and jerked the rug out from under her. Did he realize how maddening that was?

It had started That Night, which now glowed in capital neon letters in Ella’s confused mind. He had spent all that time telling her that he experienced as little emotion as the stone he appeared to be carved from, yet all the while he treated her with a tenderness she had never expected. He had touched her as if he cared for her, and when he emptied himself inside her, he’d done it with her name on his lips like a prayer.

And yet, the next morning, he treated her like a disease. The shock had almost knocked her down, but Ella considered herself stronger than that, and smarter. She’d taken the hint, and she’d given him what he seemed to want: space, distance, and chilly formality. Of course, she’d continued to argue with him, because the gargoyle operated under the vastly mistaken assumption that he was always right, and Ella felt she had a duty to point out how misguided such a belief really was. But she’d stopped trying to show him that for a cold, emotionless, warrior monster, the man showed an awful lot of heart.

Take their earlier argument, for example. She had to wonder if he’d actually heard himself speaking. She had, and she saw right through his bellows to the meaning behind it. He worried for her. Worry. That human emotion. And he felt the need to protect her, almost as if he cared (another emotion) about what happened to her. He also hadn’t liked the idea of her staying in Seattle while he returned to Vancouver one little bit. He’d sounded darn close to possessive to her.

Did she sense a theme developing?

She really had to wonder if all gargoyles were so stupid, or was it just Kees? The man honestly appeared to believe his own nonsense about lacking emotion, as if by pretending the feelings weren’t there, he could make them go away. He reminded her of a toddler playing peek-a-boo; just cover his eyes and no one else would be able to see him.

Ella could definitely see him, crystal clear and in living color. Now, she just had to decide if she should continue trying to make him open his own eyes, or just let the whole thing go. Would the chance that she could convince Kees to recognize and acknowledge his own emotions be worth the effort—the supreme effort—it would take her to accomplish the seemingly Herculean task?

She had no trouble recognizing her own emotions. Ella was falling in love with the gargoyle, as strange and ridiculous as that sounded. A week ago, she hadn’t even known he existed, hadn’t known a creature like him
could
exist, and yet here she lay, staring out into the night and trying to reconcile her increasingly hard-to-ignore feelings for a man who wasn’t even of her same species.

Who’da thunk, right?

Maybe she would understand the emotions tormenting her more easily if she felt them for a different man. You know, a nicer one. Kees, she admitted, was a grumpy, grouchy, dictatorial, annoying, and often thoroughly unpleasant individual. But he was also protective, patient, intelligent, and fiercely loyal.

His commitment to what he called his mission never wavered. He never questioned the long, lonely period he spent trapped in sleep waiting to be released for the sole purpose of fighting. He believed absolutely in the need to defend the world against the forces of evil, and he would do whatever he deemed necessary to emerge victorious. Ella could admire all of that. God knew she’d met more than enough human men in her life who could barely commit to what they wanted for dinner, let alone to the sacrifice required of a Guardian. His strength, both physical and mental, left her slightly in awe.

He had also demonstrated often that he had the ability to be gentle and supportive. Not just when he touched her, although her body heated and softened every time she remembered That Night, but when he taught her. She would have expected him to be a stern, unforgiving teacher, but while he demanded a lot from her, he never failed to offer encouragement when she needed it, or praise for a job well done. She knew that he had grown to respect her magical abilities and her mind, if not her ability to protect herself from the enemies they were likely to face. And soon. He showed that respect in the way he spoke of her to Alan, and the way he never hesitated to offer her a new challenge when she had demonstrated mastery over an earlier skill.

There was a lot to love about the ornery, stubborn, closed-minded jerk. And unfortunately, her heart seemed determined to ferret out all of it.

In a way, her own uncontrollable feelings for Kees made it easier for her to understand why he seemed so determined to deny his every emotion. Life would be a lot easier if she didn’t have feelings. Then, she wouldn’t experience the hurt that sliced her every time the gargoyle pushed her away. She wouldn’t be lying in bed wishing for something she could never have. And she probably wouldn’t be having any trouble sleeping.

Kees, she thought bitterly, was probably snoozing like a baby next door. The jerk.

With a groan, Ella flopped onto her back again and stared up at the ceiling. Maybe she should just give up on sleep. Trying to force it had gotten her nowhere. She’d noticed a small stack of books—non-magical ones—arranged artistically on the dainty writing desk under the window. Maybe one of them would be boring enough to numb her overactive brain into submission. The last thing she needed was to be too sleepy to drive home tomorrow.

She threw the covers back and swung her legs over the side of the mattress. Through the small opening in the window, she could hear the quiet sounds of the night, wind rustling leaves, a few remaining insects, something small scampering through the undergrowth. The scent of faded roses and pine needles drifted in on a soft breeze, carrying with them the sharp, incongruous smells of gasoline and magic.

Shit.

Ella jumped to her feet even as her door burst open and thudded hard against the bedroom wall.

“Hurry.” Kees’s voice remained low, but carried a hard note of urgency. “
Nocturnis
are here. I can feel them.”

“I know. I recognized the smell of that nasty Dark magic, and I can smell gas,” she said, grabbing her jeans from the back of a chair along with the knapsack of training texts Alan had given her. She padded quickly and quietly to his side, the bag slug over her shoulder. She sniffed the air again. “And smoke. Kees, this is bad.”

“I know. Hurry,” he repeated, and stepped back into the hall.

Ella tugged on the denim and rushed after him.

The air around them appeared hazy, the scent of burning intensifying rapidly. Before they had reached the top of the stairway, the thickening smoke was making it uncomfortable to breathe. Ella pulled the collar of the T-shirt she’d gone to bed in up over her nose and mouth and peered through the fumes.

She spotted flickering light at the bottom of the stairs, and tugged the edge of Kees’s wing. “We can’t go that way. The fire’s on the ground floor. I can see the glow from here. We need to go out a window or something. I think this is spreading fast. And what about Alan?”

Kees set his jaw. “He sleeps down there. He will have to get himself out. We will make our way out of the building and regroup outside.”

“Which is where the
nocturnis
will be,” she guessed. “They’re trying to flush us out.”

He nodded grimly. “It will work, but not, I think, as they imagined.”

Ella followed as the gargoyle turned away from the stairs and headed down the hall in the direction of the clearer air. Smoke was everywhere now, but it was thicker near the opening to the lower level, thinning as they approached the end of the hall. Throwing open a door, Kees strode inside to peer out the window. She noticed that he remained to the side of the glass and used the curtains to conceal his presence from the outside.

“I see one of them near the tree line and two more closer to the house,” he said, his voice beginning to take on that gravelly rumble that indicated he wasn’t a happy gargoyle. “They are bold. There are too many humans in this neighborhood for them to make such a brazen move. Even with the covering of the trees, they could be spotted at any moment.”

Ella chewed the inside of her lip. “It sounds almost like they don’t care who sees them.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. If that is true, the situation may be even more dire than Parsons indicated. No fear of discovery means they do not worry about the human authorities.”

“And we already know they’ve made a serious dent in the magical kind of authority.”

Oh, wow,
Ella thought. Bad just kept getting worse.

“We can’t go out this way. Exiting by a window in sight of three Dark magic users would make us easy targets.”

Kees stepped away from the window and left the room, crossing the hall to a door on the opposite side, overlooking the street at the front of the house. Ella knew just from his expression that
nocturnis
lurked there as well.

Still, she couldn’t hold back her incredulous murmur. “In the middle of the street?”

“In plain view,” he answered grimly. “They show no fear.”

Fear rushed through Ella, tightening her chest even more than the smoke had done. She pushed it back and shrugged into the second knapsack strap. With the bag more secure now, she was ready to move. She looked at Kees. “Okay. So what do we do now?”

He headed for the door before she could finish speaking and stepped back out into the hall. Peering into the progressively thickening smoke above the two-story entry hall beside the stairs, he grunted.

“We go up.”

Reaching back, he grabbed Ella hand and towed her after him. She used her other hand to press her shirt more firmly over her mouth. The smoke was so dense now, she could barely see a foot in front of her, a task made even more difficult by the way her eyes stung and watered from the vapor. She wanted to ask Kees what he meant, but the air had gone too warm and thick to talk. She hadn’t noticed an attic entrance earlier, but maybe the gargoyle was more observant than she was.

He stopped abruptly at the edge of the banister, and Ella humphed as she collided with his back. She would have stepped away, but he turned and hooked a large, powerful arm around her waist beneath the backpack.

“Hold on,” he growled, and then the world dropped away beneath her feet.

She heard the heavy beat of enormous wings and felt the rush of air against her skin as they rose toward the cathedral ceiling of the house’s entry hall. With the smoke thickening the higher they went, she had no way to protest, and once the realization that they were flying hit her, the last thing she wanted to do was distract the gargoyle and get dropped to the tiles for her trouble. If the fire didn’t kill her, she didn’t want a thirty-foot fall to do it either.

For an instant, it felt as if they hovered just beneath the peaked roof, and the change in the light levels finally clued Ella in to what was happening. Kees had remembered the enormous skylight in the ceiling and had flown them right up to it.