Alchemystic (25 page)

I spoke the last of them and dropped to the floor, waiting to see if my power would ward them off, but the sound of the statues continued to grow louder as more joined the pack on the other side of the debris pile. “Shit,” I said. “I tried.”

Rory came running around the side of the pile of debris, skidded out, and fell down next to me and Marshall.

“Great,” she said, breathless. “Looks like more running, then.”

“Ladies—”

“I don’t think I can,” I said, my legs seizing up when I tried to force myself out of my crouch.

“Me, either,” Rory said. “Just wanted to get a little sarcasm in before they crush us.”

“Ladies—”

“Fair enough,” I said, grabbing my oldest friend’s hand.

“Guys!” Marshall shouted, stopping both Rory and me. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?” I asked, listening hard. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly,” he said, and scurried to stand up.

Rory and I joined him, albeit a bit more slowly, and looked back over the pile of debris. All of the statues were simply standing there in a uniform line, motionless.

“It worked,” I said, allowing myself a small smile in all this.

“What are they doing?” Rory asked.

“Awaiting orders from their master, I would guess,” Marshall said. “Alexandra.”

“You think?” I asked, taking a tentative step out from behind the pile of debris.

“Try,” Rory whispered, but I didn’t notice her making any effort to step out with me. “Before they take a swing at you.”

“Okay,” I said, then turned to face the statues full-on. “Good work, men. Excellent job. This was just a test of our security here, and, ummm…you passed! Congratulations.”

The statues remained stone still, and I looked over at Rory, who was rolling her eyes at me. “Do you think they want praise or smoke blown up their ass?” she asked. “You said yourself that they’re far less complicated than Stanis.”

I shrugged. “So what do I do?”

“Give them an order,” she said.

I looked back at the statues again. “Back to where your maker intended you to stand,” I said, then added, “Please.”

Without hesitation the statues turned on their heels and returned to their original spots all along the walls of the old subway station, settling back into their places.

“‘Please’?” Rory repeated, raising her eyebrows at me.

“It doesn’t hurt to be polite,” I said, staring down at the green stone resting in the palm of my hand.

“Can we get out of here,
please
?” Marshall asked, brushing the grime and muck away from his face. “I think I may have swallowed something living.”

“Yes, let’s get,” Rory said, leaning down to pick up the sprawled contents of his bag for him, slipping the Leatherman into his bag among them all.

I didn’t argue. I wanted out just as much, especially since I was dying to see what effect the return of the gemstone would have on Stanis.

“Next time, we bring the gargoyle,” Rory said, rubbing her shoulder.

“Agreed.”

Stanis

A
strange pulling sensation of the maker’s kin called to me in a slow, subtle rhythm, and I dropped down off the roof to the terrace below, my extended wings slowing my descent. The double doors leading into my maker’s study were wide-open, and I pulled my wings into my body to fit through them, entering.

Alexandra stood with her friends on the far side of my maker’s studio, the three of them holding glasses, clinking them together. They turned as one as the sound of my stone feet on the wood floors carried over to them.

“What sort of ritual is this?” I asked. “Is this alchemy?”

Alexandra gave a laugh. “Sort of,” she said. “We’re toasting.”

I cocked my head at her. “Toasting?”

“We’re celebrating,” the blue-haired one explained.

“Celebrating what?” I asked.

“Living,” the man said, and shot a closed fist up into the air.

Alexandra offered me her glass, but I had no need for such things and waved it away. “When I awoke, I felt something pulling at me, as if I missed something, something that had passed.”

“That would be from how we spent our afternoon,” she said. “I have a little surprise for you, Stanis.”

Alexandra pressed her other hand out toward me and opened her closed fist. A pale green stone sat in the center of her palm.

I took the stone using just the tips of my claws to grab it and examined it. There were many facets and the inside of it seemed to swirl in a pale green cloud of mist. “Is this a part of me?” I asked.

She nodded, then set her glass aside. “I think I’ve even worked out how to implant it.”

“Stanis is getting implants,” Marshall said with a snicker, which I did not understand, and now did not seem the proper time to ask.

Alexandra grabbed me by the wrist and walked me over to the workbench off to her right, away from the bottles and glasses. One of the maker’s books lay open there, and much like she had the night she introduced me to her friends, she laid her hands on the smooth stone of my chest and incanted the words written on the page. I still did not understand the language, but I felt the effects of her words as they washed over me. The stone deep in the center of my chest twisted with sharp jags of pain and unwound as it had done the time before. The sensation was strange, but my growing familiarity with it brought back memories of the way her great-great-grandfather had worked his arcane knowledge over me so many years ago. There was comfort in her efforts and I found I welcomed it despite the pain involved.

She pulled her hand away, revealing the knot work symbols carved there with its four indentations marking the slots for the stones.

“Is this like Operation?” Rory asked. “Maybe this stone restores his funny bone…”

“Each piece has its own shape,” Alexandra said, raising her hand with the gem in it, spinning it around and trying it in each of the slots. When it finally settled in the one on my left side, she stopped. “There.” She looked up into my eyes. “You ready?”

I nodded.

She pressed her right hand over her left and turned back to the book. When she spoke this time, a calming warmth spread through me, radiating quickly from her hand throughout my whole body. I welcomed it, basking in the sensation…until it kept growing, burning. Every piece of me, even the tips of my wings, felt as if it were on fire and I could only imagine this was what true and total pain felt like. I held my place while she worked her arcane words on me, the claws on my feet involuntarily digging into the wood of the floor beneath me, tearing great strips of it away. The gem gave way to the stone of the intricate knot work, bonding to me.

A flash of new memories washed through my head, driving like a spike into the center of my being. Walls of stone rose up all around me, but I did not get long to assess where I was. All of it was lost as the core of the memory took hold of me. The sensation of crushing weight filled my body, every part of me screaming out until the world went dark and silent as I stumbled forward, once more in the study with the maker’s kin’s hand still against me. At the center of my body the stone and the setting were becoming one as the pattern coiled in on itself once again, closing up, my chest restored to its smoothed-over state.

Alexandra’s hand felt warm against my chest, and strangely I did not want her to pull it away from me, but her arm dropped, exhausted, as she stared at the spot.

“How do you feel?” she asked with trepidation in her voice. Her face was flushed.

The unbearable heat ebbed away from me, dying down in my chest, leaving me with a strange connection to Alexandra as if her hand were still against me. I sensed she felt it, too.

I uncurled my claws. “I think I am fine,” I said. “Although there was a memory of great pain, weight crushing down on me.”

“Are you all right now?” Aurora asked.

I nodded.

“Other than that, do you feel any different?” Marshall asked.

I turned to him. “Not that I am aware of, no.”

I was not sure what I was prepared for, but other than the flash of pain from the past, I had not expected nothing. I pressed my hand against my own chest, half thinking the stone would be where I could feel it, but the stone there was smooth now.

Rory raised her glass to me. “Glad we almost died for nothing,” she said, then tipped the glass to her lips, emptying the half-full vessel.

I looked to her, then back at Alexandra. “Died? Where exactly did you find this piece?” I asked.

Alexandra laughed, then crossed back to her glass and a small leather notebook sitting by it. “I’ve been doing my homework while you were busy being petrified by daylight,” she said, raising her glass as well. “My great-great-grandfather wrote about where the four stones are hidden, but he does
not
make it easy to find them. After running through several of his resource books here, I pieced together some notes of my own. We found this first stone as part of one of the statues Alexander did for the early subway system lines.”

I pointed at the blue-haired one. “To be clear, what does she mean when she says you almost died?”

“It means we went through some serious shit,” Marshall said, bravado mixed with nervousness in his words. By his gentle sway back and forth, I believed he was what humans referred to as
drunk
. “Crawling down the train tracks, almost getting run over, fighting a metric ton of large stone statuary that came to life.”

“That would explain why I awoke feeling that lingering sensation of alert,” I said. “Without being able to deal with the incident during daylight, my body still somehow felt the connection, experiencing some of it.” I felt the sensation returning, then realized, no, this was different. Something unfamiliar began to fill me, and I could not help but react to it—I was angered.

“I do not appreciate when you needlessly put yourself in harm’s way,” I said, my voice rising to a low growl. “You make it very hard for me to do what I was
made
to do.”

“Hey!” the male one said. He stepped with a stagger between Alexandra and me. The young man looked like he might be ill, but his words came out strong nonetheless. “It sounds like pretty poor planning to make a protector who can only do his job fifty percent of the time, in darkness. Most of that Lexi spends asleep!”

“I have watched over this family for centuries,” I said, moving close to him, staring down to meet his eyes with mine. My hands closed into fists, my own claws digging into the palms of my hands. “I will not be lectured by one who is not the maker’s kin.”

“But seriously, Lexi,” he continued on, turning to her, unfazed by the threat of me. “Did he think your family would just be peachy-keen fine during the day?”

This, to my surprise, seemed only to fill me with a deeper anger, my voice coming out in low, measured tones. “Alexander was a great man. I will not stand by and hear anything less than that. Do you understand my words? It was always his intent to make my kind able to function during the daylight hours, but he passed away far too soon for that. Do not speak ill of him.”

“I’d just like some answers,” he said, an earnest and angry quality to his words. “It seems pretty ridiculous to me. I mean, how much protection do we really need while
sleeping
?”

“Maybe you should take a break,” the blue-haired one said, lifting his glass out of his hand.

I could not control this long-dormant but growing feeling of anger. I lashed out, grabbing the man by the front of his jacket, my claws tearing though the heavy cloth of it with ease. I stormed across the room and out onto the terrace, one of my wings catching on one of the doors, pulling it from its hinges as I passed. “Trust me,” I said, throwing him into the open air up above the balcony. He flew several stories upward, his arms and legs flailing like he might somehow gain the power of flight, his mouth locked in a silent scream. I leapt into the air, wings spreading as I rose to meet him on his descent. I let him drop past me, then grabbed him by one leg. I landed
on the edge of the balcony, dangling the fragile human over the edge. “Your kind does need protecting.”

“Let me go!” he shouted, his voice coming out much higher than normal, panic in his words. He reached for the ledge, but it was not close enough. “No! Wait!”

I stood there on the ledge, unmoving, leaving him struggling and failing to catch hold of the side of the building. There was…satisfaction in that, I discovered. I rocked my arm back and forth, swaying him away from the side of the building.

“Stanis!” the maker’s kin shouted. “Stop it!”

I froze in my actions, the power in her words binding me in place.

“Easy, now,” the blue-haired one said.

“Put him
down
,” Alexandra said, concern rolling off her with a nervous smile on her face, then added, “on the
terrace
.”

Part of me resisted, a part I had never felt before. The sensation was so unfamiliar that I snapped to, finding a comfortable familiarity in doing what she said. I pulled my arm back over to the terrace side. The man grabbed hold of the carved ledge and held on to it until I lowered my arm. He pulled away from me, rolling onto the open area of the terrace before scrambling to his feet and clutching the edge of the remaining door.