Authors: Christine Warren
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Paranormal, #Gothic, #Fantasy, #General, #Sagas
Stone Cold Lover
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In memory of my grandmother, who taught me to curse in Lithuanian, but never told me how to spell any of it. You knew I’d look it up one day, didn’t you, Grandma? And I bet you were looking down laughing when I read those
real
definitions.
Oh, if only I had known what I was really saying all those years. Life is much more interesting because of you.
Thanks.
Contents
Chapter One
Orange was so not her color.
Felicity Shaltis knew this, knew it even as she slipped the purloined key into the heavy antique lock and committed her first felony. The knowledge made her hands shake, but it didn’t stop her. She couldn’t stop; all she could do was hope she went to one of those progressive Canadian prisons where they let the inmates wear blue. Or black. She looked decent in black.
If she got lucky, maybe Ella would visit her.
Ella Harrow: long-lost college pal, kindred spirit, and—Fil was beginning to think—possible art thief. It was Ella who had steered Fil down this new road to a life of crime, and she had managed it with one phone call—one request for a seemingly trivial favor. At the time, Fil hadn’t seen the harm in helping her old friend locate a gargoyle statue similar to the one that had made the news when it had disappeared from the museum where Ella worked. Now Fil wasn’t so sure.
Of course, if Fil had stopped at revealing the statue’s location to her old friend, she might have gotten off easy as a simple accessory. But, no. She could hardly continue to call herself an accessory to a theft when she was the one committing unauthorized entry, criminal trespass, and what she herself could only term felony stupidity, all because she couldn’t get that damned sculpture out of her mind.
Around her, the grounds of the Abbaye Saint-Thomas l’Apôst lay in quiet contemplation under a blanket of stars. On this hill above the bustling center of Montreal, the lighting was dim enough that she could actually see the bright twinkling, especially given the lack of moon. But Fil still felt as if there were a Broadway spotlight shining directly on top of her.
Hurrying, she fumbled and cursed, then heaved a grateful sigh when the ancient, rusty lock finally disengaged. Easing the door open, she squeezed through the bare minimum of space and quickly closed it again, sealing herself in the rear of the abbey’s old chapter house. Before she so much as had the chance to draw breath, her gaze moved involuntarily to fixate on the limestone giant in the center of the chilly room.
Her heartbeat quickened.
In the back of her mind, her rational self kicked and screamed and called her all sorts of really quite hurtful names, but Fil ignored them. To be honest, she barely heard them. Her ears rang with a strange, powerful buzzing noise, and her focus had condensed down into a kind of tunnel vision. The rest of reality faded away, leaving just the statue and the surge of adrenaline that propelled her toward it.
She’d experienced this same weirdness the first time she’d seen the sculpture, but she’d tried to ignore it. That glimpse had been brief, just enough for her to report back to Ella that she had verified the item’s existence and its location.
Even then, she’d felt an odd compulsion to look closer, to stare, even to touch, but it had been the middle of the day, and the abbey had buzzed with the activity of employees and tourists. Even behind the scenes in the storage areas only someone with her credentials could easily gain access. Fil had forced herself to leave, to push the fascination to the back of her mind and go about her business.
That had been two and a half days ago. By this afternoon, she’d felt like a junkie detoxing from a long and brutal high. Her skin had buzzed and crawled, her attention had constantly wandered, and she’d vibrated with some kind of restless energy that had urged her—hell, it had
compelled
her—to return to the abbey, to get one more look at the statue that had her old friend in what had sounded like a heck of a tizzy.
Shadows drifted past Fil as she slowly crossed the room. In the dark silence, even the cushy rubber soles of her boots made quiet padding noises against the polished marble tiles. The stillness made her soft breaths echo in her own ears, but she continued to move forward. She couldn’t stop.
Maybe she should have asked Ella a few more questions when her friend had first called, part of Fil acknowledged. Maybe her friend knew something about the statue that would explain this weird power it seemed to have over her. Then again, how exactly would Fil have phrased that question?
So this gargoyle you’re looking for,
she could imagine herself saying.
It wouldn’t happen to have freaky magical powers, or the ability to devour human souls, would it?
Sure. That would have made her sound perfectly sane.
Of course, there was always the possibility that insanity would serve her well when she went on trial. Maybe if she pulled it off, the judge would just lock her in a loony bin for a couple of years instead of throwing her into prison.
Look on the bright side, right?
Insanity might be the only logical explanation for why she was here, creeping illegally around a semi-operational historic monastery in the dead of night just to get a private, uninterrupted look at a piece of art that really wasn’t all that artful.
Medievalism had never been a favorite style of Fil’s. As a professional art restorationist, she’d studied or worked on creations from various historical eras, though admittedly her work focused on paintings, rather than sculpture.
Still, even paintings from the medieval era didn’t float her boat. The figures were too stylized; they lacked the realism and dimension that the Renaissance had brought to the medium. And while she was hardly an expert in sculpture of the period, even less in architectural statuary, she’d never been a fan. Religious figures, gargoyles, and grotesques, she thought, looked fine on Gothic cathedrals, but she’d always spent more time looking at the murals inside the buildings than the carvings outside.
So why did this one seem to have captured all her attention?
She approached the base of the statue, the enormous hunk of slate-colored granite that served as the figure’s pedestal, and wished she dared to turn on the lights. Better not to advertise her presence, but there was barely enough illumination coming in through the room’s stained-glass windows to navigate through the dark. She felt like one giant stubbed toe just waiting to happen.
Her eyes had adjusted as well as they were likely to, so Fil circled the stone platform, trying to find the angle that shed the most light on the subject of her fascination. She found it mostly by accident, when she tripped over her own feet and caught herself by shooting a hand out to brace against the granite. Instinctively, her gaze flicked up, and she stared right into the figure’s smooth, blank eyes.
Darkness hid the fine details from her, but she could make out the sharp angles of a square jaw and high, slanted cheekbones. The artist had posed his subject more like a classical archangel than a monstrous demon, slim hips clad in the kind of paneled kilt most often seen in gladiator movies, his body poised straight and tall with a spear held in one hand. He looked like Michael poised for battle, the way she’d seen the head of God’s armies depicted in a thousand Italian masterpieces.
You know, if she ignored the claws. And the fangs. And the way his legs, jointed like a stag’s, ended in giant raptor’s talons. Just those few, pesky details.
Even the statue’s enormous, mostly furled wings appeared more angelic than demonic. Heavily creased and carved as if to denote the presence of feathers, the top joints rose above the figure’s head while the trailing ends rested on the pedestal by its heels. She imagined that if the things had been real, the way they stirred the air would have more in common with a tornado than a gentle spring breeze.
Whatever church or fortress this guy had once protected, Fil figured it had stayed safe and sound from the forces of evil. Unless, of course, evil had been really, really stupid.
The itching in her palms intensified, until it felt more like a burning than anything else. She rubbed the skin together to try to ease the sensation, but it didn’t help; nothing did. Not until she reached out and laid her palm flat against the cool, smooth stone.
Fil jerked at the contact, an involuntary gasp torn from her lips. It felt like she’d just licked a nine-volt battery, the sweet shock of electricity making her pulse race. And didn’t that just add to the bizarreness of this whole situation? Not only was she inexplicably drawn to an inanimate hunk of stone, but said hunk made her feel like she’d just plugged into an electrical outlet designed specifically for her. There had to be a reason for it, for all of it. She just wasn’t sure she was going to like it.
You have to look.
The little voice in her head sounded too much like an obnoxious younger sibling to be ignored, and Fil should know; she’d been trying for years to pretend her instincts didn’t yammer at her all the live-long day.
There’s only one logical explanation. You know that. This statue has to be special. Now take a look, and
see.
The tight clenching beneath her breastbone should have been enough proof of what was going on, but Fil looked anyway. Taking a deep breath, she briefly closed her eyes so that she could open her sight. When she lifted her lids, the truth shone back at her.
The sculpture glowed.
It didn’t cast a single shadow, and it didn’t make anything else in the room easier to see, because the only one who would be able to detect the light was Fil. At least she assumed so; she’d lived for twenty-seven years, after all, and she’d never met a single other person with a talent quite like hers.
Fil could “see” energy. She’d heard some people call it seeing auras, but she didn’t like that term. The energy she saw wasn’t the normal kind that surrounded every living thing in some sort of ethereal nimbus of colored light. She could see that if she wanted to, but she’d learned almost before she could read that blocking out that kind of everyday energy was the best way to stay sane.
No, what Fil saw when she lowered her barriers and
looked
was special energy, the kind that not everyone had; and she saw it in things, too, like the statue. She’d never quite decided what to call it, mostly settling on
energy
for lack of a better term, but it was the stuff that emanated from unusual people and objects—people like her friend Ella, who had always struggled so hard to hold it back.
People like herself, if she bothered to look in a mirror, or her grandmother’s elderly aunt, who had always known who was coming to the door before the bell rang. The energy came from people with special abilities, and very rarely it came from an object with a special history.