Page 30 of Petrified

Lev turns around immediately. “What happened?”

Medusa keeps both hands on the snake while she catches her breath. “It’s returning.” Her voice sounds strained, but there is relief underneath it now. “The connection is closing as I take it back.”

I watch the stolen signature continue collapsing into hers. The distinction between them gets harder to feel with every second until there is no longer a separate pulse coming from the snake at all.

Medusa forces herself through the last of it.

When she is finished, she remains crouched beside the empty container with her eyes closed and one hand braced against her thigh. Her snakes slowly begin moving again, some curling closer to her while several continue hissing at the box as if it has personally offended them.

Lev approaches only after the room has settled. He avoids the container entirely and stops close enough to Medusa to take a careful breath through his nose.

I know what he is checking before his expression changes.

“The petrification signature is gone.” He takes another breath, slower this time, and looks around the shop as if testing the absence from several directions. “I can smell you because you’re standing here, and his native magic is still all over this place. But the mixed signature we’ve been following isn’t there anymore.”

Rowan’s shoulders finally loosen. “Completely?”

Lev nods. “Completely. Whatever was tying his magic into hers through that snake is gone.”

Medusa rises, pulling off the gloves with obvious relief before dropping them into the empty container. “Then he cannot use my petrification again. If there are smaller pieces left somewhere, they have nothing to draw from now.”

I pull out my phone and call Essence before we leave the room. One of the evidence techs checks the fragment we sealed after Rowan was petrified and confirms it has stopped moving completely. When Lev takes the phone from me and asks them to open the outer evidence locker, he cannot catch Medusa’s signature through the container anymore.

“Dead?” Rowan asks when Lev hangs up.

“Dead enough that it isn’t trying to turn anybody into patio furniture.” Lev hands the phone back to me. “The connection is gone.”

Rowan looks down into the box for several seconds, as if he needs to see the emptiness himself before accepting it. “Good. That part of this is finished.”

Lev looks too, regrets it immediately, and turns his attention toward the rest of the shop. “I would still prefer we leave before anybody decides the residue in there is scientifically interesting.”

I look at the container and consider it. There probably is useful residue, but the expression Lev gives me when he notices where my attention went convinces me that can wait.

We search the rest of the building instead.

The farther we go, the clearer it becomes that the gargoyle left in a hurry. The upstairs office has an open bag on the floor with clothing still folded inside it, and several papers have been abandoned beside a portable heater instead of packed away. A mug sits near the edge of the desk with dried liquid still coating the bottom. Nothing about the room looks like someone deliberately cleared out a temporary base.

At the back of the office, one window has been forced open far enough to crack the frame. Fresh stone dust lies across the sill and the floor beneath it, heavier than the old dust covering the rest of the room.

Lev moves toward it and rests his fingertips against the stone frame.

Gray spreads over them almost immediately.

None of us comments this time. Watching his skin take on the texture of stone has already gone from something startling to something useful, and Lev seems more comfortable letting the magic happen now that he understands what it's trying to show him.

He closes his eyes for several seconds with his hand against the frame, then opens them and looks through the broken window toward the alley beyond. “We pushed him out. He didn’t have time to hide this properly.”

Rowan comes up beside me and looks over the room again. “Good. Means we’re finally close enough to make him nervous.”

I study the open bag, the abandoned papers, then think about the snake downstairs. He kept it protected while he moved from place to place because it gave him access to a weapon no gargoyle should have had. Now he has lost it without choosing to give it up.

“He didn’t leave because he was finished here,” I say. Lev looks back at me, his fingers still gray against the window frame, and I gesture toward the room. “He left because staying became more dangerous than abandoning everything.”

The satisfaction in Lev’s expression fades almost immediately.

Rowan sees it too. His attention moves from the abandoned bag to the broken window, then toward the floor below where Medusa is waiting.

Until now, the gargoyle has controlled nearly every part of this pursuit. He chose his victims, decided when to test the stolen magic, hid whenever we came close, and let us run beyond him while he stayed buried in the landscape.