And the discoloration of the stone transformation was far worse than it had been before. Jess shifted back to human—she was still far more comfortable that way—and crouched next to him. His right foreleg was stone all the way past the shoulder; it continued on to consume part of his wing. There were great patches of it all along his uninjured side. She laid a hand on his leg. It was chilly to the touch, and completely unyielding.
"Can you help him?" she asked, looking up at Mace.
"Not here," Mace said, in his deep, rumbling voice. "Perhaps back at Stonegarden—my family estate. We will have to take him there."
"Is it nearby?" she asked hopefully.
"It's in Canada," Gio said behind her.
Jess choked out a half-hysterical laugh, even though it wasn't really funny. "How can you get a dragon from Italy to Canada? Do we take him as cargo?"
"There is a much faster way." Mace knelt beside her, gracefully folding his backward-hinged legs; she couldn't help staring at seeing, once again, her own physical differences in someone else. "I apologize, my friend," he said to Gio, "for leaving you with a mess to clean up. I need to get these two away from here. I doubt if anyone will bother you again, if the book is what they want, but you can always leave for a while if you feel safer that way."
"Oh, I'll be fine, don't worry about me," Gio said. "Your visits are always interesting, I will certainly grant you that."
"What are you going to do?" Jess asked. Right now she wouldn't have been surprised if Mace turned around and drew a sigil in the air that opened up a portal to somewhere else just like the wizard had done. Her entire mental model for what was possible and impossible had been thoroughly recalibrated in the last couple of days.
"Do you know how to phase through stone?"
Okay, maybe she hadn't understood the level of weirdness she was dealing with here.
"Do I what?" Jess asked, staring at him.
"Ah. Apparently not. This will only a take a moment. Don't be afraid."
He put his arm around her, and laid a hand on Reive. Jess tried to pull away.
"Wait, what—"
She had no chance to say anything else. The ground swallowed them whole.
There was darkness and cold, seemingly without end. The only real things were the hard, cool pressure of Mace's arm and the warmth of Reive's scales under her hands.
And yet, she had no trouble breathing, and she wasn't cold enough to be uncomfortable. It was almost like dreaming, the way that you could do things that would be impossibly dangerous in the real world, and yet you knew in the dream that they couldn't hurt you.
Maybe I am asleep.
But it didn't feel like it.
She tried to turn to ask Mace what was happening, but her body responded sluggishly—and that was like a dream too, the floating feeling and inability to fully control her own movements. That did make her start to panic, and Mace, feeling her stiffen, tightened his arm around her.
And then the darkness was washed away by clear golden light.
Jess staggered and almost fell. She was on solid ground, somewhere outdoors.
A cool breeze blew over her, raising goosebumps through the rags of her torn clothes. The air smelled of salt and the sea. It was late afternoon, the sun low in a cloud-flecked sky.
Astonished, she looked around.
She was on a hill, surrounded by boulders and the sprawling coils of Reive's injured dragon. The rugged gray wall of a large stone house towered nearby. It was a rambling structure, split-level and complex, looking like it had been built piecemeal, addition by addition, over many years.
Below the house, a rugged hillside dotted with trees and blazing with autumn colors sloped down to a narrow strip of rocky beach and some cliffs. She could glimpse the tops of houses in a small village, and there was a lighthouse on a headland, looking like something out of a postcard of Maine.
"Where are we?" she asked.
Mace smiled slightly. Even in gargoyle form, he looked exhausted. "Newfoundland."
"Newfoundland?"
"This is where I live. Welcome to Stonegarden, my home."
"It ... I ..." Words deserted her. She rested a hand on Reive's scales. "Newfoundland?" she said again, faintly. "It ... it was night just a minute ago ..."
"It's four and a half hours earlier here. Well, somewhat later than that now. Stonewalking takes a little time." Mace rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache, and grimaced. "See if you can get your friend to shift back. It would be much easier to move him as a man."
Jess tried to shake off the dazed feeling of dislocation—Newfoundland?!—and hugged Reive's massive head with her human arms. "Come back," she whispered. "Shift back. Reive, can you hear me?"
He didn't respond at first, or even twitch, but it seemed that on some level he did hear her. After a moment, his entire body rippled, and then abruptly she had Reive's very human head in her lap. He was deeply unconscious, his skin pale under its tan tones.
The book thumped to the ground, but Jess hardly paid it any attention. Reive was more important.
Mace, still gargoyle-shaped, went down to one knee beside them. Jess tried not to stare too openly as Mace's big, capable hands, with their pebbly gray skin and claws, opened Reive's jacket. Then she was distracted by the blood all over Reive's side and T-shirt.
"Is he going to die?" she asked in a small voice.
"From wounds such as these? Not at all." Mace shook his head. "Shifters are swift healers—as you probably know firsthand," he added. "He'll just need rest."
"But the stone," Jess said. It had expanded further when he'd shifted; she could see some patches on his neck now. His breathing was labored and shallow.
"I know," Mace said, his voice gentle. "Let me take him inside, and we'll see what we can do. Bring the book."
Unsure what else to do, she relinquished him to Mace, who lifted him gently. Jess picked up the book and tucked it under her arm.
They crossed a patio of flagged stones toward the house. It was astonishingly quiet here. The distant cries of seagulls and an engine, perhaps a boat or a car, were the only sounds to break the silence.
She hesitated at the door, looking up the hillside. She couldn't tell if they were on an island or the mainland—oh wait, Newfoundland was an island, wasn't it? She still couldn't believe they had crossed an entire ocean in that timeless darkness. The stone had swallowed them in Italy and spit them back out at the eastern tip of North America.
How had he done that? Could the magician do it too, and follow them here?
She tapped a flagstone with her bare toe; her gargoyle feet had ripped apart her hiking shoes. It seemed perfectly solid.
"Jess?" Mace said through the open door.
"Coming! Sorry!" She hurried to follow him inside.
The house was echoing and vast, with high ceilings and wide corridors. To accommodate gargoyles, she thought in amazement, watching Mace carry Reive without his horns or wings brushing the ceiling or walls. This house was built by and for gargoyles. It felt old, though she knew it couldn't possibly have been that old. New World settlers in Canada went back, what, a few hundred years at most? But the house felt like it had been transported from somewhere medieval. The walls were buttressed with heavy wooden beams and draped in tapestries, something she had read about in books, but had never seen in real life before. They might have stepped through into an earlier century, except for the electric lights that came on automatically as Mace proceeded onward with his burden in his arms.