And then everything changed.
Reive
He floated in darkness. Peaceful. Still.
Wrong.
There was somewhere he needed to be. Someone he needed to be with.
And he wasn't dead, he began to realize, as some degree of awareness drifted back to him. He was just ... between.
Between what?
It was like being balanced on a pivot point. It felt as if he had to make a decision.
Dragon? Are you there?
He reached out in the darkness, trying to find his beast. He had a vague sense of its presence, but it kept slipping away.
This isn't right.
Growing urgency beat at him, and suddenly the reason for it burst over him with the shock of a tidal wave.
Jess!
Jess, with her soft cloud of curly brown hair and her long, strong limbs. Jess, with her gargoyle body that was no less beautiful than her human one.
Jess! he cried silently, and threw himself against the prison of his body. He had to get back to her. She was in danger. The longer he stayed here—
Wherever here was.
It was like learning to shift all over again, he realized all of a sudden. For every young shifter, there was a first shift, that magic instant when they managed to fit their human and animal selves together like a key turning in a lock.
For most of his life he had done it so naturally that he was hardly aware of the transition. It was only lately that it had stopped being automatic and become something he had to struggle and work at. But that had made him conscious of what it felt like, in a way that most shifters weren't.
And this was the same feeling, but a hundred times more so. He had to contort and twist, trying to find just the right angle of approach. He wished he could hear his dragon; that would make it so much easier.
Dragon? Am I doing the right thing?
He tried to reach out to that elusive part of his soul. And then suddenly his dragon was there with him in the darkness, as if he had opened up a door that had been shut.
Jess, it said clearly.
I know! We have to get back to her.
His dragon's desperation matched his own. Are you willing to do whatever it takes? it asked.
Whatever it takes, he answered firmly, and in that instant he and his dragon were united in pure clarity of purpose, as sharp and defined as a blade made of ice.
And—oh—it had been easy all along, after all.
He shifted.
It was a shift as easy and swift as any of his previous shifts had ever been, before the illness, before the stone. There was no pain. There was no separation between himself and his dragon. He was him again.
He burst out of the tidal pool in an explosion of salt spray. His forelegs thumped to the beach with a heft that drove his clawed feet into the rock itself, nearly up to his ankles.
Oh. That was new.
It was almost dark in the grotto, but dragons had keen night vision. He looked down at himself in surprise. He was himself ... but not.
He was made entirely out of stone.
And yet, everything else was the same. Every scale was as neatly formed as if sculpted with infinitely delicate chisels. Perhaps more important, he could feel every part of his body. Nothing was painful or insensate. He felt perfectly normal.
He was a dragon of living stone.
"Reive!"
Jess's glad cry rang across the tidal pool, and he forgot everything else in his need to get to her. He whipped around, and his lashing tail cut deep into a boulder and showered pebbles around him.
Okay, this was going to take some getting used to.
So was flying, he discovered a second later. He spread his wings to take to the air, but the weight and balance of his body were so different now that he crashed into the tidal pool instead, raising another great wave that washed along the beach.
"Reive!" Jess cried. "He's about to get away. Get him!"
"Gladly," Reive growled, and it rumbled out of his chest, deeper and louder, but still recognizably his voice.
All of this was him. He no longer felt strange or different. It felt as if he had become what he was always meant to be.
He flung himself at the magician. Stoneskins moved to block him, but he effortlessly smashed them. His new form was so much heavier than a normal dragon that they didn't stand a chance against him. He could crush them with ease.
The magician flung out his hands and Reive reared back, feeling, for an instant, those hot-wire tethers settling around him. But only for an instant. The bindings disintegrated almost immediately.
"Your powers don't work on gargoyles, do they?" Reive casually swatted aside another of the lumpy, malformed stoneskins, crushing it under one heavy stone paw. "That's why you never attacked Jess directly. You couldn't. All you could do was send stoneskins after her. Well, guess what." He grinned, showing off his new stone teeth, and then crunched down on another stoneskin, biting off its head and part of its torso. The gravel was strangely tasty. "Now it doesn't work on me either," he said through a mouthful of granite.
The magician yelped and flung a hand out, starting to trace fiery trails in the air in the shape of a portal.
"Oh no you don't." Reive lunged. The main problem with this new body was that it was slower than his old one, or at least he hadn't yet figured out how to compensate for the weight with his newly increased strength, but he swatted the magician before the portal could open fully.
The magician went sailing all the way across the pool. When he hit, his entire body flashed with a flare of campfire glow, the way a banked fire can flare up when a big stick is thrown on it. It appeared to be some kind of shield, because he was already picking himself up rather than lying there stunned, and starting to open another portal.
Reive leaped at him, but his claws closed on empty air.
Jess
While Reive kept the magician and his stoneskins occupied, Jess found herself free. The stoneskins had been called to help their master, and she stumbled on the sand, shaking her aching wrists. In the near-darkness, she groped her way to Mace. She wanted to help Reive, but if the magician really meant to use the book to destroy all gargoyles, he could not be allowed to have it.
"Mace?" she said anxiously, prodding at him. She felt for a pulse, not even really thinking about it until she felt the slow thumping of his heart through his neck. So their hearts still beat as gargoyles.
But then, she was a gargoyle; she ought to know. She breathed. Her heart beat. She still felt like herself. There was nothing alien about this body, and she was absolutely positive in that instant that she wanted to keep it. The magician could not be allowed to get his hands on that book.
"Mace, where is the book? What did you do with it?"
He stirred finally, lifting his head enough to groan out, "Rock ..."
Oh. Of course.
There was a terrific crash from across the pool. Trusting Reive to hold his own against the magician, she placed her hand on the cliff face.
Come on, she thought, focusing on the rock. Mace did this as naturally as breathing. The ability was inside her; she knew it was. Maybe it would never be as easy for her as it was for a full-blooded gargoyle, but she was positive she could do it.
Come on. Give it to me.
She pushed her awareness into the rock, trying to feel it as an extension of her body. And then suddenly she was aware of the foreign object embedded in it. She reached for it, and was almost entirely unsurprised when her arm sank into the rock up to the elbow. She closed her hand around the leather cover and pulled the book out.