Page 26 of Petrified

“It works on what he leaves behind.” I stand and brush the grit from my knees, still looking at the outline. “That’s different from finding him while he’s actively doing it. Right now I’m looking at mistakes he isn’t here to correct.”

Rowan gets to his feet beside me. “But you know what those mistakes look like now.”

I rub my thumb over the gray patch still fading along my wrist. “That’s the part that matters. I don’t need to find the shape of a gargoyle first. I need to find where the stone stops behaving like stone.”

Amand looks back at the wall. “The dust. The light. The pattern.”

“Exactly.” I take a few steps back and force myself not to start scanning again. From farther away, the outline becomes harder to separate from everything around it, but now that I know where it is, the inconsistencies refuse to disappear completely. “Once I know where the mistake starts, the rest of him follows.”

Rowan watches me instead of the wall. “Your magic changed too.”

I glance over at him. “What do you mean?”

“You didn’t force the camouflage.” He gestures toward my arms as the last traces of gray fade. “It happened when you stopped moving.”

Amand comes up beside me and studies my hand for another second. “And it matched the limestone more cleanly once you touched it.”

I look down at my fingers. The stone is gone now, but I can still remember the way the wall felt through my magic, not just cold and rough but layered enough that my body somehow understood what belonged there. That realization sits strangely under my ribs.

“I wasn’t trying to camouflage.”

“That’s probably why it worked,” Amand says.

I look at him. “That is deeply offensive.”

Rowan’s mouth pulls slightly at one corner. “Because you had to stop trying?”

“Because apparently my designation has been waiting for me to stand still and shut the fuck up.” I shake my head and look back at the wall. “I’m not giving either of you permission to enjoy that.”

Amand’s hand settles briefly against my shoulder before he turns me back toward the limestone. “Then use it.”

I let my attention return to the disturbed section instead of arguing. The dust line, the broken mineral pattern, the faint pressure mark against the concrete all look obvious now, but only because I finally gave myself enough time to understand what I was seeing.

“The next time the trail dies, nobody moves past it,” I say. “I stop where it stops, you two stop with me, and nobody starts searching farther out until I know there isn’t something standing right in front of us.”

Rowan nods. “You let the place settle.”

“I let myself settle.” I flex my fingers once, remembering how quickly the stone had climbed over them when I quit fighting it. “Apparently that’s the difference.”

Amand looks toward the wall again. “Then next time, you’re not just following his trail. You’re waiting for the camouflage to make a mistake.”

That sits better than anything else we’ve tried so far. I look at the shape one last time, the shoulder pressed into limestone, the wing folded along the wall, the bent leg that disturbed the dust near the bottom. He had been here while we were running around trying to figure out where he went.

I smile despite myself. “Sneaky fucking bastard.”

Rowan glances over at me, and I point toward the outline without taking my eyes off it. “Next time he does this, I’m not chasing past him. I’m going to make him sit there and wonder whether I can see him.”

For the first time since Medusa handed us this case, I’m not thinking about how far ahead the gargoyle is.

I’m thinking about what happens when he stops.

Chapter 9

AMAND

Lev’s new method works quickly enough that none of us are prepared for it.

We reach the old stone-cutting shop just after noon, following the gargoyle’s native signature through the back streets of the quarry district until Lev brings us to another limestone building wedged between an abandoned equipment yard and a row of storage sheds. The scent runs cleanly through the alley, clinging to stone and old dust, then disappears against the side of the building so abruptly that Rowan tenses beside me.