Page 8 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

She looks at me sideways. "You wouldn't know anything about that."

"I've been managing the upper cemetery. Landslide damage."

"For two days?" She doesn't phrase it as a question.

I shrug.

Velka stops walking. I don't. She catches up in two strides.

"I'm going up there, Sabine. Tomorrow morning. Father Corren gave me old trapping maps of the cathedral grounds, and Sedgewick is lending me iron-tipped bolts. Whatever's nesting up there in those ruins—I'm going to put it down."

"Be careful," I say, and I hope it sounds like general caution. "The upper grounds are unstable after the storm. Sinkholes."

She studies me for a long while. "You're a terrible liar, Sabine."

"I'm a phenomenal liar. You just know me too well." I manage a thin smile. "Let me get home. I'll come find you later."

Leif ison me before I'm through the door.

"Sabine." He grabs my coat by the lapels and I barely get my footing before he's pulling me inside. He's thinner than I remember. Dark circles beneath his brown eyes. "I thought something happened to you. I thought?—"

"I'm fine." I squeeze his arm. "I'm here."

"You weren't here." He releases me and steps back, and his voice drops into a register quieter and more frightened than his usual anxious loudness.

"Sabine, the things people are saying. About the shadow on the north ridge. About the sounds at night from the mountain." He swallows. "We need to pack. Both of us, tonight. There's a trade road south through the lower pass?—"

"Leif—"

"Before it burns the valley. Before it comes down from the mountain and we're still in our beds when it does." He's gripping my coat again, both hands this time, and his knuckles are white. "Please."

A sharp, splitting tension pulls me in two directions hard enough to hurt. I look at his face and I want very badly to say yes. Pack your things. Let's run.

"Give me an hour," I say instead. "There's something I need to do first."

"Sabine?"

"One hour, Leif. I promise."

Father Corren'sstudy smells exactly the way it always has: damp wool, old parchment, and the particular staleness of candle wax burned down to nothing in a cold room. He doesn't look surprised to see me, which means he was expecting trouble.

"Sit," he says, before I've said a word.

"The carvings in the great cavern beneath the cathedral ruins. The markings on the walls." He goes very still. "You know what they are."

He moves to the locked chest behind his writing desk without another word and produces a key from beneath his collar. The records he sets before me are barely records anymore—crumbling sheets wrapped in cloth, the ink faded to brown, the edges crumbling to dust at the corners. At the top, in the formal script of a cathedral official, the name Sevrik Mourne is written in careful, authoritative strokes.

I read, and my worldview quietly begins coming apart at the seams.

The gargoyles weren't invaders. They were defenders—winged protectors holding the mountain passes against raiders and predators in exchange for something they needed to survive, something the humans were glad to give.

The alliance held for generations, rooted in a mutual survival that felt less like a transaction and more like a heartbeat.

The cathedral itself had been anchored to the peaks to serve as the physical manifestation of this pact—a shared stronghold and sacred ground where the two species could meet without the shadow of suspicion. It was a monument to coexistence, built to bridge the gap between the stone and the flesh.

The great cavern beneath the cathedral wasn't a prison or a ruin. It was a gathering hall. A place they met every year, humans and gargoyles both, to renew a peace that was as fragile as it was important.

The trailback up is cold and getting colder, afternoon light going flat and grey above the tree line. I'm halfway to the first ridge when I smell blood.