As he buttoned up his sleeve, his thoughts turned to Jess. Occasional muffled rustling and thumps came from her bedroom. He tried not to think about Jess, naked. She has been so warm and nice, pressed against him when he'd flown her here.
The thought of the gargoyles attacking her infuriated him. Inside him, his dragon's molten rage added to his own. We shouldn't have run away. We should go back, shatter them, tear them apart—
We didn't run, Reive retorted, once again finding himself in the role of the voice of reason versus his animal instincts. We got the lady to a safe place.
She'll never be safe as long as those creatures are out there!
His dragon was right about that. Reive pulled his glove over his stiff fingers, and a brand-new horrible thought occurred to him.
Jess.
The gargoyles had attacked her, torn her clothes.
What if they'd bitten her, or otherwise poisoned her, the way he'd been poisoned?
She wouldn't even know to look for it, he thought in horror. It had taken weeks for the stone patches to start showing up on him. He'd felt the poison immediately, and she didn't act like she was hurt, but maybe she just got a scratch. He had no idea how common it was for gargoyles to be able to poison people that way.
Now frantic, he hurried to the door of her room, and banged on it.
Jess
As soon as the bedroom door closed behind her, Jess dropped the shredded remains of the cardigan that she'd been trying to clutch across what little modesty she had left, and also incidentally to hide any parts of her that might not have changed back completely. She stepped out of the skirt, still intact but covered with rock dust. She really could have used a shower, but instead she hastily threw on fresh clothes grabbed at random, a sweater and a clean skirt.
Then she pawed through the mess in the bottom of the closet for her beat-up old suitcase, a thrift-store thing with flowers on it, and threw it on the bed. She began flinging clothes into it, hardly paying attention to what she was putting in.
She had to get out of here. If they could track her, they'd be here any minute.
There was a sudden knock at the door. She jumped, dropping a handful of socks.
"Jess?" Reive said through the door.
"Just a minute!" She pawed items off the dresser into the suitcase. Where was her passport? Fortunately she had one, obtained for a trip to a librarian's conference in Toronto a couple of years ago. It was the only time she'd ever been out of the country.
Canada sounded pretty good right now. Or maybe somewhere farther away. Australia, say. She'd always wanted to visit Australia. Or Singapore. Malaysia. Anywhere.
Reive knocked again, louder. "Jess, I'm sorry, but it's important."
"Is it gargoyles?" she yelled, flinging a handful of hair ties into the suitcase. What else was she going to need in Canaustraliapore? Her shampoo—no, wait, you couldn't fly with large bottles of shampoo; wasn't that a thing? Damn. Maybe she could put some in a little bottle. It had taken her years to find a shampoo that left her thick, unmanageable hair anything other than a frizzy tangle.
"It's, uh, no, it's ... can you come out here so I can explain?"
"Just a minute!" She stared at the mess of shoes on the closet floor and shook her head. She wasn't going to need dress shoes where she was going. Instead she pulled on her hiking boots. Those were probably the best general, all-purpose footwear she owned, if she could avoid destroying them the next time she transformed.
Hmm, come to think of it, maybe a spare pair of shoes wouldn't hurt. She threw a pair of black flats into the overflowing heap spilling out of the suitcase.
And what on earth was she going to do about Reive? He was a very nice man. A very handsome man. She would love to get to know him better. Just, not right now.
"Jess, I really need to talk to you about this," Reive said through the door.
What was she thinking? He was a dragon. Well, if gargoyles were real, why not dragons? As well as magical weirdos in black robes. Why the hell not. As a dragon, Reive could obviously take care of himself. Maybe she should ask him to run away with her to Singcanaustralaysia.
"Jess—"
"Yes, I'm coming!" she snapped. She yanked the door open, and found herself face to face with Reive.
He was tall enough that she had to look up slightly to meet his amber eyes, clouded now with worry. Those eyes took her breath away. She tried to scrape together the tattered remains of her sense of purpose, the way she had clutched her ruined cardigan around herself.
"Yes, what? I'm in kind of a hurry here—"
"I need to check you for gargoyle bites," Reive said.
Jess stared at him. "That had better not be the world's worst pickup line."
Reive blinked, and a very flattering flush rose to his bronze skin. "I, uh, no. No, I mean, it doesn't have to be me, but you'd better. Even a scratch could do it."
"Do what?" Her voice rose with frustration. Every minute counted, and he was wasting her time babbling about gargoyle bites?
"They can poison you and turn you to stone," Reive explained.
Her irritation faded away. She stared at him in shock. "They can what?"
"It—it happened to a friend of mine." He didn't seem to want to meet her eyes.
"Oh." She couldn't think of anything else to say. Guilt choked her. "Oh, no. I'm so sorry."
"But that's why you have to check yourself carefully for scratches or scrapes. I don't think all of them can do it, because I, er, I have other friends who have fought gargoyles before—"
"Dragon friends?"
"Yes, look, we can talk about that in a minute, but anyway, I'm not sure how much it takes, or how easy it is to get poisoned that way. So you need to check yourself over carefully and make sure they didn't hurt you."
"I'm fine, I swear," Jess said. A half-hysterical laugh bubbled up in her chest. If he only knew how impossible it was. She could turn to stone and back very easily.
But ... what if that was what had happened to her in the first place? She didn't remember her parents; she only knew that she had been abandoned as a baby. The first time her claws had come out, she was very young. She barely remembered it; she'd accidentally torn a doll in half, in a group care home. They had punished her harshly for it, thinking she'd done it on purpose; she hastily turned her mind away from the painful memory. Anyway, she had been like that ever since she could remember, so she'd just assumed she was born that way.
But what if she had been born a normal baby, and was poisoned as an infant?
Did that make it more or less likely that there was a cure for her?
What if I could do this to anyone I touch, hurt them terribly, just by scratching them ...
"I'm sure that I'm fine," she said to cover her inner turmoil. "I just changed clothes, and I would have noticed if there were any scratches or scrapes."
She turned away before he could see her face. There were tears trying to well up. She blinked them fiercely back.
"Are you packing?" Reive said, having finally noticed the suitcase.
"I ..." There was no way she could explain why she needed to suddenly flee town without also explaining the gargoyle thing. "I ... I was thinking they might also be going after the other half of the book." Which she now realized was actually quite likely. They really did seem to want that book. What if they had located both parts of it?