"So about that shower ..."
Reive stood up and pulled her with him.
Later, loose-limbed and happy, they got dressed and wandered out into the garden.
"These are my actual clothes," Jess said, plucking at the sleeve of her blouse.
"Yeah, Gio had them overnighted from Italy. Mace also had his housekeeper buy us some things in town."
Jess looked down the serene sweep of the hillside. It seemed impossible to believe that a week ago, she had gone to work at the library just like any normal day, with no idea of how her life would change.
And now here she was, in some kind of gothic castle in Newfoundland of all places. She had learned of the existence of dragons and magic, she was in love, and she was slowly learning to embrace the gargoyle side of herself.
Her feet were still bare; she wasn't cold, and she had wanted to leave them that way, feeling somehow better when she was a little bit grounded without shoes in the way. Now she wriggled her toes in the smooth stones of the garden path.
Sandstone. Siltstone. Granite.
There was still a lot to figure out. She had the place back in Indiana, and probably a job if Marion hadn't fired her, and her car. She was going to need to go back and deal with all of that.
But there was time.
"And you're well now, right?" she asked Reive. "No stone on you or anything?"
"Better than well. Better than ever. Although it's not quite right to say there's no stone on me at all." Reive grinned brilliantly. "I've been dying to show you. I couldn't do it inside, but now that we're out here where there's space, look what I can do."
And without any further ado, he shifted into a stone dragon.
She had seen him briefly at the pool, but in the darkness, with everything else going on, she hadn't fully appreciated what had happened.
Where Reive had been gleaming copper, now he was flexing, living stone. Jess reached out a hesitant hand to touch his flexing stone scales. He was amazingly variegated, not just gray, as if every one of the many diverse kinds of rocks in the Atlantic pebbles at the bottom of the tidal pool had translated to his new body. There were a million colors in him, and he glistened under the sun like wet, polished rock.
He was the most gorgeous thing she had ever seen.
"Our cultist magician friend's magic doesn't seem to work directly on gargoyles," Reive explained. His voice as a dragon was different, deeper, with a gravelly, grinding quality. "So it doesn't affect me now, either. And I'm much heavier than a normal dragon. I can crush his stoneskins like so much gravel."
"Are you a gargoyle now, do you think?" Jess asked, looking up at him.
"I don't know. I think I'm something new. And there's something else too."
He shifted, collapsing effortlessly back to his normal human shape, and knelt on the gravel. Jess crouched to see what he was looking at. She couldn't figure it out until he picked up a polished pebble, swirled with red and white.
"So here's something interesting," Reive said, rubbing his thumb across the surface of the pebble. "I know what my hoard is now."
"Rocks?" She laughed aloud, in surprise more than anything. "I didn't know you were interested in rocks!"
Reive grinned. "I wasn't, until I met you. Now suddenly I can't get enough of them. It's weird. Everybody always told me that I wouldn't have any doubt about what to hoard, just like they told me that I'd know my mate immediately as soon as our eyes met. They were wrong about both of those things, but right about one part of it. Once you're sure, you're sure." He switched the pebble to his other hand, and reached out to run his thumb down her jaw. "I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Jess. And I'm going to collect every rock on the Atlantic coast, if I can get my hands on them."
"Between my books and your rocks, I guess we're going to need a big house," she said, laughing. And it wasn't until the words were out of her mouth that she realized what she'd said.
A house. Their house. An entire future together. Kids. A home. The sheer size and scope of it staggered her.
"You're welcome to stay here for as long as you like," said a voice behind her.
They both jumped like teenagers caught necking. Mace had just come out in the garden. He was in his human form, moving slowly and carefully. His torso was swathed in bandages, easily visible because he wore only a dressing gown thrown over the top of it and a pair of loose sweat pants.
Jess ran over to fetch a chair from the patio table. Mace smiled at her and settled into it carefully.
"Nice to see you up and about," he said. "I don't know if Reive told you, but we've been having some pleasant discussions while you were asleep. And truly, it's nice to have the company. I've been alone in this house for a long time. Speaking of which ..." He reached into a pocket of his dressing gown and took out a folded handful of papers. "A fax came in that I've been waiting for. It's about you, Jess."
Her heart lurched all the way up into her throat. Reive moved forward to fold his fingers through hers.
"Is it about my mother?" Jess asked, her voice a choked whisper.
Mace's habitual slight, sardonic smile turned sadder. "It is. I've been having a private detective look into what happened to her, and having found out where you're from finally gave me something to work with." He hesitated, holding the papers in both hands. "Are you sure you want to see this?"
Jess nodded without speaking. Mace handed them over and she unfolded them.
It was a death certificate and a set of typed notes. "Margery MacKay," Jess whispered. "My mother."
"And she is your mother," Mace said. "Of that I've no doubt. She died in Georgia in a car accident, a few weeks after you were born. There's also a marriage certificate."
Jess's hands shook. She flipped to the next page.
"Harrison Scott. Also dead," she read aloud. Her voice cracked.
"I believe he's human. There are no Scotts that I know of among the gargoyle families. If that's so, then it would explain why she never tried to contact us. My parents would never have accepted it." He swallowed heavily. "And so they ended up losing not only their daughter, but also the son-in-law and granddaughter they might have known. Such is the way of old feuds. I hope your generation is wiser."
Jess felt the comforting warmth of Reive's hip pressed against hers. "I think we are," she said quietly, flipping pages. "Is this all we need to prove it?"
"We still need to get your birth certificate. A DNA test might be necessary. However, if at least one of your parents was Canadian, you have Canadian citizenship automatically, which means you can live here forever, if you like." Mace shrugged slightly, and winced as he rolled his injured shoulder. "If you want to. I understand that living in a remote place like this isn't everyone's choice."
"It's ... it's just so much, all at once." She looked up at Reive, met the warmth and support in his eyes. "I don't even know what you want to do. We ... we talked about it a little, but everything was so uncertain then."
"I don't care where I am as long as it's with you," Reive said. "I know I'll always have a place with my clan, but I no longer feel that I fit in there." He turned his head and kissed Jess's cheek, just below her eye. "We'll make our own clan. I feel like ... do gargoyles have alphas?"