Page 12 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

"I was walking," I say, and I'm proud of how level it comes out.

"You were wandering. There is a difference." He studies me with that single working eye. The silence stretches. "What do you see?"

"History." I glance back at the mural despite myself. "Humans and gargoyles fighting together. I didn't know that was?—"

"It was." His voice clips the sentence cleanly shut. "Before humans decided cooperation was too inconvenient." He crosses his arms, and the sound of shifting stone is audible in the gesture.

"Don’t let the paint flatter you into comfortable conclusions. Your kind looked like partners in that age too. Right up until the moment they sealed the exits."

I turn fully to face him. "I wasn't there."

"No," he agrees. "You are here now. Which is arguably worse."

He moves to the far wall, dragging one clawed hand along the stone as he goes, just occupying space the way only very large things do.

"You are soft, human girl. Not a flaw, simply a fact. Bones that break. Skin that tears. A lifespan so brief that Tovian will finish grieving you before your grave marker weathers."

He stops. Turns. The torchlight catches the obsidian planes of his face and finds nothing yielding there. The words aren't raised or cruel. They're measured, which makes them worse.

"He has not slept."

That brings me up short. "What?"

"Since you bled on him. Since the bond struck." Vorgrym's one eye doesn't move from my face. "Gargoyle instinct demands a bonded male guard his mate without pause. Tovian's body is running on Alpha energy and obligation alone. Look at him the next time he comes into the firelight. Look at his skin. You'll see what constant wakefulness does to stone-blooded creatures."

"He will not tell you. But he also never had a bond dragging at him before. Never had a small, fragile, bleeding thing he couldn't simply put down somewhere safe and stop feeling."

I want to say something sharp. Something that draws the line clearly between me and whatever responsibility Vorgrym is trying to lay across my shoulders. But the words don't quite come.

"I didn't ask for this either," I say finally.

He turns to leave, then stops. "That is what makes you dangerous. Chosen enemies are manageable. Accidents are not."

He isn'twrong about the skin.

I notice it an hour later, watching from the secondary passage above the great cavern's lower shelf where the cleanup effort is underway. Tovian stands at the center of it, directing three newly awakened Ashwing warriors in the removal of a collapsed stone beam the size of a mature oak.

In full firelight, his obsidian-gray skin should gleam the way it did the first time I saw him tear through the cave predators — sharp, almost metallic in its darkness. Right now it's muted. Stillimposing. Still enormous. But the luster is gone, like a gemstone filmed over with dust.

Centuries of Stone Sleep, and he hasn't let himself rest for three days because of me. I press my back against the passage wall and stare at the ceiling.

Don't, I tell myself firmly. Don't start making it mean something. He's not losing sleep over you because he cares. He's losing sleep over you because his body is malfunctioning and you're the cause.

Then I look back down, because I am apparently incapable of doing the sensible thing.

The hatchlings are what break me.

I don't even see them at first, small shapes clustered near the far pillar, stone-scaled and barely knee-height on the adult gargoyles moving around them. They must have awakened from a lower chamber, and they are confused. One presses itself flat to the ground. Another makes a low, resonant, almost subsonic sound that I feel more in my chest than hear.

Tovian lowers himself slowly, making himself smaller, and holds one massive, clawed hand out — palm up, not reaching. Waiting. The hatchling on the ground lifts its head. Tovian rumbles a low and rhythmic tune I can't translate but understand the shape of entirely. The small creature crawls forward and puts its head against his palm. His thumb moves in a slow arc across the back of its neck.

The arm that threw a cave predator twenty feet across a cavern is now being used as an anchor for a creature that weighs less than my traveling pack.

I don't notice I've stepped forward until the ledge moves.

One second of terrible clarity, the stone crumbling under my boot heel, my torch arm swinging wide, the cavern floor yawning below — and then I'm not falling.

I'm caught.