"No, you're just ..." Mace shook his head and went to put the trays on the table. Jess hastily swept in to move the other tray to the windowsill. "I thought my sister's clothes would fit you, and they do, but it's more than that. You're the spitting image of her."
Jess stared at Mace with wide, hopeful eyes. "Do you think there's any possibility we're related? Can we ask your sister, maybe?"
"She's gone. Dead. And I have no children. But ..." He hesitated, looking down at the tray, idly moving things around. "It's possible she might have had a child. I lost touch with her long ago."
"Is there any way to find out?" Jess asked. "I've had no family as long as I can remember. I'm an orphan, and I kept getting put in different group homes because I was ... trouble, they said."
Reive felt rage fill him at the sorrow in her voice. He couldn't imagine anyone like Jess being trouble to anyone, at least not to anyone who wasn't trying to hurt her and those she loved.
We will find them and destroy them, his dragon snarled.
He got up and put his good arm around her.
"There are people I can ask," Mace said, giving her another careful look. "I'll also find a picture of her for you to look at. There aren't very many gargoyles; it's not at all unbelievable that the two of us would be related, even if not that closely. Anyway ..." He whisked last night's tray off the table and replaced it with the new one. "As a Newfoundland gargoyle of Scottish and Irish heritage, it is my cultural duty to feed you a proper breakfast. And you both look like you could use it. Come over here and eat."
He didn't need to ask twice. The tray was loaded with an enormous country breakfast. There were massive heaps of eggs and slabs of thick-cut bacon, piles of beans and sautéed mushrooms, stacks of toast and sausages, pots of jam and honey, and a large number of what appeared to be biscuits drizzled in syrup.
"Toutons," Mace said, seeing Jess poking curiously at hers. "Fried bread with molasses. Think of it as a sort of donut, if you like. Dig in."
There was also both coffee and tea, a full pot of each, with cream and sugar. Mace poured himself a cup of coffee and cleared a space at the edge of the table, while Jess and Reive started eating.
Reive had to handle the utensils a bit clumsily, only able to use his left hand, but most of the food was easy enough to pick up with his fingers or scoop with a spoon.
"This is amazing," Jess said between bites, as she wolfed down sausage and eggs. "I don't know if my body thinks this is breakfast, dinner, or a midnight snack, but whatever it is, it's fantastic."
"Your body needs additional energy when it goes through a shift," Mace said. "At least, mine does, and most shifters I know are like that." He reached under his jacket and took out a sheaf of papers. "Do you mind if we talk while we eat?"
"Go for it," Jess said indistinctly through another huge bite of eggs. She was making a good effort at clearing the entire tray of food in front of her.
Mace spread the pages on the edge of the table. Reive glimpsed Jess's tidy handwriting. "These are the faxed pages that you were able to reconstruct from the other book. There's not much here to work with, but from what I've read so far I believe that my speculation was right. Between the two parts of the book, they contain a secret that was believed lost to the world long ago."
"What's that?" Reive asked.
Mace fixed each of them in turn with his clear, green gaze. "The secret of making gargoyles."
"Wait," Reive said. "Making?" Jess had said something about that, come to think of it, when she was telling him of yesterday's events. It had slipped past him because it was so impossible. You didn't make a shifter. At least not as far as he knew. The old legends about werewolves being able to bite people were just that—legends.
"That reminds me," Jess said, after clearing her mouth with a large gulp of coffee. "You said you'd tell me everything when Reive woke up, so you didn't have to tell it twice."
Mace sat back in the chair and regarded the two of them with his clear green eyes. "That's right. You deserve to know where you came from. What you are."
"I know what I am," Jess said. Her voice came out strong, with only a slight hitch in it. "I'm a monster. Fixing Reive is what I'm most worried about."
Reive slipped his good hand under the table to squeeze her fingers in his.
Mace shook his head slowly. "You are not a monster. We are protectors. We were made to guard."
"Made by whom?" Reive asked, seeing Jess hesitate. "To guard what?"
"The first gargoyles were protectors of towns, castles, and churches." Mace smiled slightly. "It was a fortunate town indeed that had a gargoyle protector. Our very presence was said to bring luck to the place under our protection. And even if that is only superstition, it's definitely true that anyone who attacked a town defended by a gargoyle could expect to find themselves in a fight they weren't likely to win."
"And who ..." Jess swallowed. Her fingers flexed in Reive's grasp, curling around to clutch his hand. "Who made us? How?"
"There are different tales of our origins," Mace said. "But the one I choose to go with, the one I believe has the most convincing evidence, is that we all started out human."
"I thought we used to be statues." Her voice was breathless.
"No, not at all. The ability to animate and manipulate stone is one of our powers; I can teach you. But that's how you get stoneskins, the mindless near-gargoyles that we fought at Gio's villa. Real gargoyles, those like us, are descended from human beings who volunteered to give up their normal human lives to become long-lived town guardians."
"That's actually not as bad as I thought." Jess gave Reive's hand a final squeeze and pulled her hand out from under the table to pour them both more coffee. She looked much less shaken and pale. "So we're not ... things."
"You were never a thing," Reive said fiercely.
"No, of course not." Mace looked mildly surprised at the idea. "We are people, no less than humans or shifters."
"So what happened?" Jess asked. "From what you're saying, we didn't used to live in the shadows like we do now. What changed?"
"And you still haven't answered the question about who made gargoyles in the first place," Reive added.
Mace inclined his head in a nod of acknowledgement. "The original secret of transmuting humans into gargoyles was discovered by a secret society of alchemists during the Middle Ages. What do you know of alchemists?"
"Jess mentioned them earlier," Reive said. "Those guys who used to try to turn lead into gold, right?"
"It's more complicated than that," Jess said promptly. "Alchemists were the scientists of the medieval period. It wasn't exactly what we'd recognize as science today, but they didn't understand the scientific method yet. Today we might call them chemists or physicists." She ducked her head with a blush. "Sorry. Please go on."
"I think you'll enjoy examining my library later," Mace said, and Jess looked bright-eyed with eagerness. "Yes, you're right, but they also dabbled in magic, and in the process, they made us. Some of us were chosen from the early alchemists. Others were volunteers. And then—this is where the story takes a dark turn, child. This is the hard part of our history. This is our fall."