Reive
Jess's cry of alarm snapped Reive back to reality just as his grip on consciousness began to fade again.
Our mate needs us.
His dragon's voice once again sounded stronger than it had in days, surging back with the need to protect Jess.
Reive tried to struggle upright in her arms just as there was a sound like a thunderclap. A great crack appeared in the cliffside above Mace and the altar.
"Oh no you don't," Mace snarled. He slapped a hand against the rock. His claws sank into the stone, and the entire cliffside shuddered. The crack stopped expanding.
The magician, framed against the sky, crouched to do something to the rock at his feet.
Stoneskins began tearing free of the cliff in showers of pebbles. Most of them had wings that they beat ponderously, somehow staying aloft despite looking too heavy to fly. In moments the sky was full of them.
"Mace!" Jess shouted.
"Keep going!" Mace called back, his voice sounding strained. "We have to continue the ritual."
Reive, staring up in dazed shock, realized there were different factions among the stoneskins. Some of them were lumpy and ill-formed, others more detailed, lifelike sculptures. And they were fighting with each other. With some controlled by Mace, others by the magician, they clashed overhead. Cascades of gravel rained down into the pool.
A piece of stone underneath the magician's feet cracked away—Mace again, presumably, because the magician gave a yell of surprise. Then fire flared from his fingertips. Rather than falling, the stone began to glide down the cliffside like a child's toboggan. It landed with a thump against a cleft in the rock above them.
"I'm sorry, Reive," Jess said. "Stay here! I have to go help."
"No!" Mace shouted over his shoulder. His great muscles bunched as he pressed both hands against the wall. "Stay in the water! We can't interrupt the ceremony halfway through."
The magician's robe smoked and his hands moved in a complex dance as he guided the stoneskins. Lumpy and crude, they were more suited to this kind of brute-force fighting than Mace's more carefully sculpted creations. One of them broke through the line of defensive stoneskins and splashed into the water near them.
Jess growled, low in her throat. The sound vibrated through Reive, echoed in an inner growl from his dragon. Despite the desperation of their situation, he couldn't help thinking, with an abrupt surge of inappropriate arousal, I wonder if I could get her to do that during sex?
But there was nothing of play in Jess right now. She snarled, opening her stone jaws to reveal sturdy fangs, and pushed Reive behind her.
Losing her support in the water, he floundered for a moment, half-wild with frustration; he couldn't just tread water here while his mate put herself in danger! He reached inwardly for his dragon, struggling to shift, and found the transformation elusively out of reach. His body felt leaden and half-dead. It was all he could do not to sink in the water and drown.
"Stay away from us!" Jess roared. She tore into the stoneskin with her claws. Each stroke bit through the rock of the stoneskin's body as if she was tearing up a sofa cushion. Pebbles and small stones flew wildly, plopping into the water.
Our mate—in danger—
Well, it would help if you'd let me shift! Reive roared back at his dragon. He thrashed in the water, finally managing to flounder his way a little closer to shore, where his feet could touch bottom. In her shifted form, Jess was considerably taller than he was.
Can't ... His dragon's mental voice was growing weak again. Everything feels wrong. Can't get hold of our body ...
That was what he was afraid of. His entire body felt wrong—heavy and stiff, barely responding to his orders to move.
Reive gave up on trying to transform. His right arm was fully petrified, even if the rest of him wasn't. If Jess could tear her way through the stoneskins with her stone claws, maybe he could too.
Another stoneskin was wading into the water. This one didn't even have the glowing eyes; it was misshapen and horrific, a lumpy monstrosity with no head and one shoulder higher than the other. No wonder Jess had believed herself a monster, if these were the only other gargoyles she'd ever seen.
It was no use, though. His flesh-and-blood fist bounced off, bruising his knuckles, and he couldn't even move his other arm. Just that small amount of effort made him gasp for air he couldn't get. His body was turning to a stone prison, trapping him inside.
But Jess was magnificent. She tore her way through every stoneskin that came in reach, fierce and beautiful.
"Just give me the damn book!" the magician yelled down from his perch on the cliffside.
Jess grabbed a rocky chunk of what used to be a stoneskin, big enough that it took both her hands to lift it, and lobbed it at him. With her gargoyle strength, it arched through the air, much higher than any human could have thrown it. The magician had to dodge, and the stone crunched into the cliffside next to his head.
Another stoneskin lurched toward Jess's back. Reive threw his good arm around its knob of a head, but there was no way to slow it down when he was unable to hurt it.
"Jess, look out," he gasped, dropping off its back into the water. Jess spun around and tore into it with her claws.
There had to be more he could do than just shout warnings to her. He floundered out of the water onto the beach near Mace. On land, he was even more acutely aware of his body's stiff heaviness. He hadn't realized how much the water had been doing to support him. He nearly fell over, barely able to keep his feet.
Damn it! We can't do anything like this! We have to shift!
"Mace!" he panted. "Why aren't you fighting?"
"I am," the older gargoyle ground out. He still had one hand on the cliffside, and more stoneskins boiled out of it, popping out of the rock with cracking, tearing sounds to confront the magician's stoneskin army. "You need to get back in the water. All of this is for nothing if you die."
"Just take Jess and get her out of here."
"The hell I will!" Jess yelled, hearing him.
"And do what, drag her off kicking and screaming?" Mace said dryly. "You need to get back in the pool. Stopping the transformation halfway through could kill you."
"I'm already dying," Reive said bluntly. He lowered his voice so Jess couldn't hear him. "You and I both know it's true. Is there any way you could—I don't know, juice me up so I can take out that bastard once and for all?"
Mace shook his head. He looked tired. "I have no control over the stone parts of your body. Neither does he, fortunately for you."
Reive had a brief, awful mental flash of being attacked by his own arm. "Okay, fine, but is there anything else you can do? Like get me up there to where he is, say?"
"That, I could do." Mace gave him a brief, intense look. "Is that really what you want?"
"If I have to go out saving her, I'm willing to do it."
Mace gave him a terse nod, and abruptly a pair of massive, cold stone arms closed around his body. Reive started to struggle before realizing this was exactly what he'd asked for. One of Mace's stoneskins lifted him off the ground.
"Reive!" Jess shouted from below.
The air was chaos, with Mace's stoneskins locked in pitched battle with the magicians' creations. It was like flying through the middle of an aerial dogfight where all of the shrapnel and flak was chunks of stone. Reive covered his face with his arm as stinging gravel and stone slivers pelted him.