Page 9 of Fated to the Gargoyle

I slide into the driver’s seat, shut out the cold, and crank the heat to full. Nothing moves in my mirrors as I pull out onto the road.

I drive home with mountains on both sides and the heater blowing on my knees. My mind stays on the diner roof. A big gray stone gargoyle was up there when I walked in, and the man who works under it every day said nah, don’t think so.

I know I’m not crazy.

It was there.

What the hell?

5

SOREN

Acar pulls into the diner lot with the sun still high, and the woman who steps out of it reads wrong.

From inside the stone, heat is all I see. Shifters burn bright, and humans run a soft orange-gold, every one the same as the next. She’s red at the center with a rim of light around the edges, and in all my years of watching from rooftops, nothing alive has ever read like that.

I’ve been stone since dawn, the first day of the week I promised Sable, with nothing to hold my attention but the owner downstairs yelling and firing his dishwasher twice before lunch.

Now there’s her.

She crosses the lot careful, her chin up, and slows at the edge of the diner’s awning. Her heat tightens, and she tilts her head back for a long look at the thing on the roof.

She has no idea the thing is looking back. If I had breath to hold, I’d be holding it.

She shakes her head and drops her eyes, and when she pushes through the door, the bell jingles up through the floor.

And then I catch her scent.

It must have been rising off her the whole walk across the lot, carried away from me on the mountain wind. Then the door swings, the air turns over, and her scent rolls up the face of the building and straight into me. Strawberries, warm and sweet, cutting clean through that cheap tropical body spray. I have never smelled this woman before, and I know her.

Mine.

I forget the oldest rule I keep. The want moves before the sun lets go of me, pouring into my claws and the base of my wings, and my shoulder answers with a hairline crack. I stop fighting the same instant I feel it run. Cracks don’t close for my kind. Whatever splits under the sun splits wider at the next dawn, until a guardian who couldn’t sit still is gravel on a diner roof, and she never even learns my name.

So I hold the pressure down and think about every town I couldn’t rest in. I blamed the humans, the noise, the flat wrong smell of every roost Sable picked, and my brother let me blame them. Arguing with me is slow work. Nothing was wrong with any of those places. They just weren’t where she was.

She’s inside where I can’t get to her, and the sun is nowhere near dropping. So I listen.

She’s talking to Andy, whose name I’ve heard through the floor all day. Her voice comes up low and warm, and I’d give a wing to hear her words instead of just the music of them. I almost crack myself again straining for it, so I settle for the cadence, the easy rise and fall of someone good at her work.

A plate shatters in the kitchen, and the owner goes off like a kicked hornet nest. I’ve heard that sound all day, and I brace for the dishwasher’s panic to spike with it.

Instead her voice slides in underneath the yelling, low and even, too quiet for me to catch a single word. I don’t need words. I know that register. It’s the one you use on a spooked animal, and through the floor I watch the kid’s panicked heat settle under it.

She guards the weak one.

I’ve worn the word guardian my whole long life. This woman does it with nothing but her voice, in the middle of a dinner rush.

Then she laughs at something, bright and unguarded, and the crack in my shoulder aches like it wants to finish the job.

I listen to her work for hours. Light, quick footsteps. The register worked with a snap and a drawer-slide. One tone for the customers, another for Andy, and a third for teasing Lamar about something I don’t quite catch.

The dishwasher who keeps getting fired is named Devon. One of the truckers tips her a quarter, and I file him under if I ever see you again. Andy yells at her twice in one hour and earns a file of his own: we are going to have a conversation.

The sun takes the long way down. I’ve outwaited storms, sieges, and the slow deaths of kingdoms without complaint, and one afternoon above a diner is the wait that finally tests me.

The stone lets go at my claws first. Most nights I wait out the whole slow unlocking. Tonight I roll out of the crouch the moment I own my arms, wings half-spread, on my feet with the sun barely down behind the mountains, and my legs finish waking on the way to the roof’s edge. I drop into the alley and land without a sound.