In Stone
Authors: Louise D. Gornall
In Stone
Louise D. Gornall
In Stone
Copyright © 2013, Louise D. Gornall
All rights reserved. Ebooks are not transferable. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage system without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Edited by Eden Plantz
Cover Art by Suzannah Safi
Book design by Ashley Christman
Publisher’s Note:
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
First Entranced Publishing, LLC electronic publication: 2013
Entranced Publishing, LLC
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of America
www.entrancedpublishing.com
Table of Contents
Back Cover Copy
Beau Bailey is suffering from a post-break-up meltdown when she happens across a knife in her local park and takes it home. Less than a week later, the new boy in school has her trapped in an alley; he’s sprouted horns and is going to kill Beau unless she hands over the knife. Until Eighteenth-century gargoyle, Jack, shows up to save her.
Jack has woken from a century-long slumber to tell Beau that she’s unwittingly been drafted into a power struggle between two immortal races: Demons and Gargoyles. The knife is the only one in existence capable of killing immortals and they’ll tear the world apart to get it back. To draw the warring immortals away from her home, Beau goes with Jack in search of the mind-bending realm known as the Underworld, a place where they’ll hopefully be able to destroy the knife and prevent all hell from breaking loose. That is, provided they can outrun the demons chasing them.
Rach, because when I’m convinced I can’t, you make me believe that I can.
Acknowledgements:
To my mum and dad, thank you for everything, always.
To my sisters Rachael and Lisa, my brother Nicholas, and my trio of terrific, Liam, Aidan and Faye, thanks for being awesome.
To my extended family Cathy, Laura, Grogs (Megan), Louie, Charlotte and Jen, thank you for never doubting that I could do this.
Endless thanks to my amazing critique partners, Megan Orsini and Nia Raie, this story wouldn’t have survived without you guys.
To my friends on Twitter and Facebook, your wisdom and support knows no bounds.
To everyone at Entranced, writers and staff, Ashley, my fantastic editor, Eden Plantz, and my publicists Emily Marquart and Suzanne van Rooyen, thank you for loving this story as much as me, and for helping me to be a better writer.
Chapter One
I RECENTLY READ THIS
article in
Cosmopoli-teen Magazine
that gave tips on how to handle a break-up. Basically, the article said: go out; get yourself a new hair cut; buy yourself a shiny, new lip gloss, and you’ll no longer feel the pain of being chucked away like yesterday’s trash.
Lies. Being dumped still hurts like a baseball bat to the pancreas. Only now my hair is slightly shorter and my lips taste of Strawberry Sunrise.
In real life, being dumped has me curled up on a bed of frozen grass, trying to soften the sound of a bark-cry with the snot-soaked sleeve of my jacket. I think maybe I will never love anyone ever again. Deciding on a life of celibacy at seventeen may seem a little extreme, but right now I couldn’t give a crap. My insides are bleeding.
A sudden gust of wind charges through the park. It makes the leaves of the Holly trees whisper to one another. The temperature is creeping into subzero territory. Any minute now, I’m going to pick my broken self up off the floor, head back home and probably, maybe, definitely listen to indie bands sing songs about bleeding love.
Any minute now.
I’m telepathically trying to send Mark take-me-back messages when a man’s cry echoes around the park. My eyes pop open. At first I think it’s him, that somehow my mind has found him across miles of landscape, and he’s here to scoop me up off the ground and tell me he’s made a huge mistake. But then I hear it again, louder, urgent, a strangled yelp. It’s a sharp slap back to reality, and I can’t stand up quick enough.
My house is right across the street, barely a two minute walk away, but before I can take a single step the earth beneath my feet begins to tremble. Earthquakes in Plumbridge are as rare as the Dodo bird, so heaven knows why I brace myself for the concrete to split open and swallow me. But I do. And it doesn’t. Instead there’s a dull thud. The shaking ground stills; the wind dies. My sobs cease, and silence, the sort that makes you think the whole world stopped and took a breath all at once, smoothers me. Like if I move, the atmosphere might shatter into a million tiny pieces. Slowly, I turn my head toward where the thud came from.
Across the stone path, not three feet away, the full moon sheds silver streams of light onto a motionless man, limbs twisted up all over the place, sort of like a bug smashed up against a windshield.
This is a dream. Got to be a dream. I pinch my arm. I’m not really sure how the concept of pinching yourself during a dream works. Something about only being able to feel the pain when you’re awake? The nip stings all the way down to my elbow, so I guess, according to the rules of dream-science, I’m awake.
Crap.
I look up at the sky, scan the vast, navy-blue blanket for signs of more free-falling men. I laugh, just once, because this is absurd with a big ole side of crazy. I’m spotting for men in the sky as casually as if I were counting clouds.
Minutes tick by before it occurs to me that I have to do something, something that isn’t wishing myself away from this situation. A lump that tastes like Penicillin rises in my throat and sticks there as I find my feet and edge closer to him. I kneel at his side, folding myself slowly, as if I’m about to curtsey. My mind is working at the speed of light, sifting through memories of health class, of one hour sessions trying to breathe life back into a plastic doll, while class clown, Ralph Frasier, pretends to pork his doll at the back of the room.
I push my trembling fingers against the man’s neck. There’s not a wisp of heat rising from his skin. He’s cold and clammy like the corpses at the funeral parlor where mom works. He has no pulse, and there’s no sign of a swell in his chest. He’s dead. He’s as dead as a Resusci-Annie doll.
My left eye breaks out into a twitching frenzy. I push it to a standstill because winking at a dead body is weird, even for me. In the last couple of years I’ve seen my fair share of cadavers, but never one that wasn’t wrapped in a green cloth, tagged around the big toe, and carrying its very own police report. I need to go home, call the cops, get mom.
Mom. Double crap.
She is going to kill me for being out here in the middle of the night. Screwing up a clump of hair in my hand, I slump back on my heels and take in a lungful of icy air. My pajama pants pull tight against my knees, and a cold, sticky sensation blossoms against my skin. My pants are sticking to me. My eye twitch is back with a vengeance, and it brought a dagger to jam into my eyeball. Fighting the hesitation in my fingers, I dab the damp patch. Please let it be dew from the midnight air.
Midnight dewdrops are not bright red.
“Oh god.” I choke at the smudges of blood streaked across my palm. The moonlight makes the deep-red stains glisten like rubies. A scream tears its way up from my chest, only to die in a whimper when I see something poking out of the side of the body.
A handle.
I thought the fall had killed him. Now, I’m not so sure.
I back away, pushed by the idea that this poor victim of a freak falling accident might not be a victim at all. He has a knife sticking out of him. Thoughts of who put it there and why are assaulting me when the body expels a low groan. The sound wraps around my bones like a blanket of ice. Colder than death. Without thinking, I slap my hand over my mouth to stifle a second scream. Huge mistake.
The smell of iron dances under my nose as the moist stamp of almost-corpse blood bonds to my skin. I start spitting, scrubbing at my lips with the sleeve of my jacket. I can taste it. Him. Sharp, sour. I’m so wrapped up in the horror of my macabre facial, I almost forget he’s awake. Almost. I tiptoe back over. I don’t know why I tiptoe. It’s not like the sound of my steps are going to finish him off.
His eyes are wide open. Shining pale-blue with a soft, light behind them. They’re the strangest things. My breath catches, and for a second I know what it’s like to be a moth infatuated by a flame. Then the light goes out, and the color of his eyes dulls to grey. He stares vacantly at the empty space overhead. His lips twitch and slurp at the air, trying to quell a thirst for oxygen.
I can’t decide if he has the felon look. You know the felon look. It’s not down to any single feature, but when you see a photo-fit on the news, those dark circles around tiny eyes, mussed hair and crooked grin just seem to scream the guy is a serial killer. The almost-corpse has a pointy chin, a jaw and cheeks that I think if I ran my finger over I’d give myself a paper cut. His hair is long, dark. It’s pushed back from his face and splayed out around his head like a burnt-out halo. Quite beautiful, in a fragrance commercial kind of way.
My artistic eyes -- the ones that I hope will get me into college so I don’t have to follow mom into the business of dressing up the dead -- are roaming over his features when I spot something crawling around his cheek. I hone in for a closer look. Not crawling, cracking. Something I can’t see is sucking the moisture right out of him. As if he were clay being overcooked, his skin is splitting. My jaw drops as I watch the tiny lines tear up his face. His lips start moving, slower and more defined. I tip my ear toward him.
Another mistake.
He snatches hold of my hand. His grip is vise-like. I try to pull away, but he’s strong, adamant. My fingers slip because they’re slick with blood. He gives my arm a yank, and I fall forward, stopping inches above his face. He smells like the pages of an old book.
“What’s your name?” he asks. My nails cut through his skin as I try to peel his fingers away, but he doesn’t flinch. “Your name, God damn it.” Boom. He has the voice of a giant.
“Beau. My name is Beau. Let go of me.”
