"I'm sorry," she said, and then she turned on the magician, and her lips drew back from her stony fangs. "You!"
She lunged.
The magician yelped and flung up a visibly glowing net that wrapped around her. Jess was held for a brief instant, stopped in mid-leap, and then ripped free. She sprang at the shocked magician with her claws slashing downward.
She hit the invisible shield. Red sparks erupted in runic patterns, and there was a sudden bright flash around the magician's body, like a soap bubble suddenly appearing and then popping as the shield died under her onslaught. Black Robe flung himself wildly out of the way, and Jess buried her claws in a bookcase instead, splintering the wood.
"Get the book!" Jess yelled. Her voice was rougher like this, and slightly slurred from the fangs, but still recognizably Jess's voice.
She was right. Reive curled the fingers of his good hand around the book and threw everything he had into his shift.
"No!" the magician yelled. He whirled around and flung out his hands.
Reive was already shifting. It was much harder than it had ever been, especially like this, trying to take an object with him. Pain spiked through his temples.
But it was working.
The magician had no way to stop him. Instead, the invisible ropes wrenched at a bookcase behind Reive, pulling it forward as Reive managed to fling himself into the shift.
The book vanished as he went into the shift. His dragon's coils sprawled into the real world, just in time to connect solidly with the edge of the bookcase. It drove into his side with a crash that broke ribs and tore muscles. The taste of blood flooded his mouth, and Reive collapsed into darkness.
Jess
"Reive!"
The scream tore out of her throat, coming out as a hoarse bellow. There was nothing delicate about her in this form.
It looked from here like the magician had forced the bookcase through Reive's chest.
Jess attacked in a grief-filled rage. She snarled wordlessly and slashed out. The magician hastily flung up another shield to try to deflect her—she could see it faintly through her gargoyle eyes, where she hadn't been able to in her human form. Her claws ripped through the shield like paper.
"Look, let's talk about this," the magician said, backing hastily away.
"You killed him!" she roared.
The magician slid a bookcase into her way. She ripped through it, leaving splinters and pieces of books in her wake. Some tiny librarian part of her brain shrieked at the books' destruction and was ruthlessly silenced. Nailing this asshole's butt to the wall was the only important thing.
"He's not dead!" the magician yelped, flinging himself behind another bookcase. Jess grabbed it, her arm muscles bulging, and wrenched it to the side. "Listen, you want the book, I want the book—we just need to get him to shift back and retrieve it—"
"We! There is no we! You used me for a human shield and tried to kill Reive! I'm going to rip you apart!"
He had retreated deeper into the stacks of Gio's astonishingly huge subterranean library. She dug in her claws and scrambled to the top of the nearest bookcase, crouching to clear the ceiling with her wings, just as she had done in a very different library half a world away in Indiana. Aha, there he was. She leaped from bookcase to bookcase, and dropped in front of him.
"Gotcha," the magician said smugly, and the carpet rose up to wrap around her, binding her in coarse jute weave from the neck down. The gently glowing lines of force wound around the top of the rug, holding it in place.
Those magic ropes didn't work on her. They just slid off. But he had figured out quickly how to make them work instead. He couldn't hold her, but he could hold something on her.
Or at least he thought he could.
She shifted, collapsing down to her smaller, weaker human form. The magician smiled in triumph, but the smile dropped off his face an instant later when Jess shifted back, erupting out of the bindings, shredding them around her as her body expanded.
"You're not really a gargoyle, are you?" she demanded. "You're just someone who figured out how to make those fake gargoyles, the ones you've been attacking us with. But you don't know how the whole thing works. That's why you want the book. Well, let me tell you something." Jess stalked toward him. Her gargoyle feet were more like a wolf's hind legs; they weren't hinged like human legs, and they were kind of difficult to walk on, but they did produce a nicely eerie effect when she wanted to intimidate someone. She leaned close, and through her fangs, she snarled, "I'm the real deal, asshole."
The magician paled. He reached behind him and drew a sigil in the air. It glowed faintly, and abruptly the air seemed to tear behind him, lined with fire along the edges. There was a sudden sharp smell of blood in the air, a flash of pain across his face—there and gone, like he was used to it—as cuts sprang open all over his arms. A chilly breeze blew through the hole in the air, and Jess glimpsed someplace high and lonely, with boulders and fallen stone columns. It was dusk there.
"Wait—!" she began, but the magician threw himself backward through the rift in midair. Her claws closed on empty air. She lost the tips of two claws when the portal snapped shut. She was left standing alone in the library, breathing hard, with the scent of mountain heather hanging in the air.
"Reive," she murmured, and she turned and ran back. She shifted human-shaped as she ran, to move more effectively through the aisles between the bookcases. Her gargoyle form was really too big for this, and also not well suited to running; it was meant for climbing and flying. Her fingertips were bleeding where the door in the air had closed on them. She hardly noticed.
Reive was still a dragon when she got there, and Mace and Gio were working to get the bookcase off him. Mace was still in his gargoyle form, and despite her worry for Reive, Jess panted to a stop and stepped back for a moment and watched him.
She had never seen one of her own kind from the outside before. She had never even dared look closely at herself in a mirror. And what truly shocked her was that Mace, as a gargoyle, wasn't ugly. Not in the slightest. And he was still recognizably Mace. Some things had changed; his face was wider and heavier, his muscles considerably more defined. In human form he had been appealing in a rugged kind of way; now he was best described as craggy. But he was still good looking, just different. Even the fangs didn't really look bad. They seemed to fit the rest of him.
Of course, it's easier for a guy, she thought. Craggy is a good look on a guy. Women aren't so lucky.
But still ... she didn't look at Mace and see a monster, any more than she did when Reive turned into a dragon.
"Ah, there you are," Mace said. His deep voice was even deeper in his gargoyle form, rumbling like rocks grinding together deep in the earth, and like her own voice as a gargoyle, it was slightly slurred because of the fangs jutting from his lower jaw. "Shift and give us a hand, would you?"
He said it so matter-of-factly, like it was a perfectly normal thing. Jess swallowed and shifted into her gargoyle body. Mace was still wearing his clothes; they'd gone to stone along with the rest of his body. She wondered if it was possible to learn how to do the same. It would certainly save wear and tear on her wardrobe.
Between the two of them, she and Mace easily moved the bookcase. Reive lay unconscious, breathing shallowly. His side, under the bookcase, was bloody and visibly deformed. He'd broken some ribs at the very least.