"Why is this place called Stonegarden?" Jess asked, hurrying to catch up; she kept getting distracted by interesting tapestries or doors opening onto more corridors and stairs.
"I'll show you later. Ah, this room will do. Most of the house is unused, but I keep a couple of bedrooms made up for guests."
He opened a door onto a room that was washed in the gold of the setting sun. Tall windows looked down the hillside onto the sea. Jess's legs nearly buckled with exhaustion at the sight of the king-sized bed, made up with pillows and a thick, warm coverlet.
Mace laid out Reive carefully on the bed. "If you want to clean up, there's a bathroom through there," he said, nodding toward a second door. The room also had a small table, a chair and a desk in front of the windows, and a low, comfortable-looking couch, as well as a densely stocked bookshelf that covered nearly an entire wall.
It was a measure of how tired and stressed Jess was that she didn't even feel the urge to check out the bookshelf, beyond a vague interest. She laid the leatherbound book from Gio's library on the desk.
"Reive—" she began.
"I'll take care of him. There's a robe in the bathroom you can change into."
Jess hesitated a moment longer, but she felt itchy and awful. She needed to get cleaned up, and also to make sure that she'd changed all the way back. Every time she shifted into her monster shape, she had a deep-rooted fear that her face would stay that way. She went quickly into the bathroom and closed the door.
To her relief, the bathroom wasn't an exhibit of lush excess like the one at Gio's. It was just a nice, normal bathroom with a tub and shower and soft, thick towels.
Jess looked at herself in the mirror. Good news: her face was normal and human again. She touched the bony sockets around her eyes and pulled back her lip to make sure that her teeth were blunt human teeth instead of fangs.
But her hair had come completely unpinned, and her clothes were an absolute wreck. At least her bra had stayed on, though it was stretched all out of shape.
She washed her face and hands with a large, soft cloth and a generous dollop of citrus-smelling hand soap from a ceramic dispenser. She found the bathrobe, actually bathrobes plural, hanging on a set of hooks on the inside of the door, and found one in her size. What she really wanted was a bath and about a year's nap, but she was too worried about Reive to indulge.
She was also feeling an increasing urgency to look at the book. What if this was their only chance? Now that she had seen the black-robed magician open a portal, she didn't dare trust that anywhere was safe, no matter how seemingly secure.
The bedroom was bathed in salmon-pink sunset light when she stepped out of the bathroom. Mace had stripped off Reive's jacket and T-shirt while she was in the bathroom, and Reive looked impossibly vulnerable, unmoving and bloody, with the gray patchwork of stone mottling his ribs and chest fully exposed. It was even worse than she had realized. Most of his torso was now stone.
Mace—still in his gargoyle form—was just sitting there, immobile as a statue, with one hand on Reive's shoulder and the other on Reive's chest. For one shocking, horrible moment she thought Reive must have died.
Her gasp made Mace turn his head. He smiled at her reassuringly. "It's all right. Don't panic. I'm only examining him."
"Can I help?" she asked quietly.
"Not at the moment." He nodded to the table, where there was a tray with a gently steaming coffeepot and a scattering of other things around it: buttery bread, muffins, a dish of jam. "Transforming takes energy, and so does healing. I'll have something more substantial brought up later, but this is what the kitchen had on hand."
Brought up. He said it casually, as if having people bring you things was perfectly normal. "Do you have ... servants?" she asked, breaking off a corner of a muffin. She could feel faint stirrings of hunger, but she was too worried to really feel like eating.
"I have employees. There aren't many jobs around the village, especially since the fishing industry has been struggling. I have things that need doing around the house, so some of the villagers work for me, yes."
"Oh." She ate a bite of the muffin, and, discovering that she actually was hungry, crammed the rest of it into her mouth. "Can you help Reive?" she asked as soon as her mouth was clear again.
"I don't know yet." Mace's voice was distant and distracted.
She was full of questions: about Mace, about gargoyles, about this place. But he was clearly deep in concentration and she didn't want to disturb him. She was full of a mix of jittery energy and exhaustion. What time did her body think it was right now, anyway? Early afternoon? The middle of the night? She was just starting to adjust to Italian time, and now here she was in yet another time zone.
She needed something to distract her. She licked the crumbs off her fingers, then got up and went into the bathroom to wash her hands again before handling the book. She poured herself a cup of coffee while she was at it, glanced at Mace one more time (eyes closed, looking like a statue again) and then opened the book that they had come so far and risked so much to retrieve.
She could see immediately that it had been re-bound relatively recently, which made sense if it was made up of loose pages like the other book. The leather cover was much newer than the fragile, yellowed pages within. This was good; it had helped protect the book from the abuse it had suffered while they were fighting over it.
Otherwise, the contents of the remaining part of the book were not too different from the rest. Jess flipped through the pages in growing frustration. She hadn't realized how much she had been pinning her hopes on being able to find a cure, for Reive and for herself.
But instead, it was the same semi-incoherent mix of legend and theory and whackadoodle nonsense on the origins of gargoyles as the other half of the book. For every bit of potentially useful information, there was page after page of stuff the writer had clearly made up on the spot, or collected from utterly batshit sources, much of it contradictory.
"I am going to assume that gargoyles were not created by dipping a statue in the baptismal font of a desecrated church after a black Mass," she muttered.
Mace laughed quietly, and opened his eyes. "No. But we were made."
"What do you mean?"
Mace took his hand off Reive's arm. He got up, swayed slightly, and then shifted human again. It was fascinating to be able to watch the process from the outside, a slow melting as his body contracted down to human proportions and colors bled back into his stone-gray clothing and skin. When the transformation was complete, he stretched and went over to pour himself a cup of coffee.
"Gargoyles are not like other shifters," he said quietly, buttering a piece of bread. "We were made, not born—the original ones, I mean, the first gargoyles. My parents were gargoyles like me. But at the start of it all, we were created. Some say from human stock, some say from stone statues given life."
"The book says both."
"I know. I've read it." Mace smiled. He had an oddly playful smile, unexpected on his slab-jawed, serious face. "This part of it, anyway. I should warn you that half the book is missing."
"Not exactly," Jess said. "I have the other half." She grimaced. "Had, I mean."
Mace leaned forward in surprise, tea and toast forgotten. "You do?"