Two competing urges tore at her.
One: find Reive and make sure he was okay. He was only a human; he didn't know what he was getting into.
Two: stay far away from Reive so that he would be safe.
Loud crashing from up front decided her. Whatever was going on, if Reive was involved, she couldn't stay away.
Reive
When Reive left Jess, he went at a mad run, spurred by the rhythmic crash of gargoyle feet pounding along behind him.
Well, he wanted them after him, and he got it, all right.
He had learned in his earlier encounters with gargoyles that there were two different kinds. There were gargoyle shifters, who were just like any other kind of shifter, human-looking in their regular bodies, with a stony winged form they shifted into.
But these were the other kind, called stoneskins.
They weren't alive as such. They were constructs made out of stone and animated by the gargoyle who created them. Because of their mindlessly obedient nature, they usually weren't dispatched on long-distance missions alone; they had little independent decision-making ability. They just followed orders. Therefore, their creators usually stayed close to them.
Which meant their gargoyle master was somewhere nearby.
There was little room to shift here, even if Reive had been confident that he could shift on command. Also, he didn't want to destroy even more of Jess's library. The thought of her upset face when she saw the gargoyles destroying bookshelves kept coming back to haunt him.
There was more room in the lobby, where the circulation desk was. He could try to shift there.
He sprinted in the direction of the lobby, and nearly ran into another gargoyle coming the other way. He was now trapped between them, outnumbered three to one.
Or—wait—two to one? There was only one of them behind him. Was the other one going after Jess? Pure fury surged through him, and suddenly the most important thing was taking out both of these creatures so he could go find out what had happened to her.
Still reluctant to shift, he caught hold of the nearest bookshelf and used shifter strength to pull down on the top shelf, tilting it ponderously inward toward the aisle. He felt it start to go on its own, and ducked hastily. Books rained down on him as the shelf tipped forward, and then accelerated, and crashed into the one next to it.
The two stoneskins, coming toward him from opposite ends of the aisle, could easily have ducked if they'd had the ability to think on their own, although their relatively large and ponderous size put them at a disadvantage. But instead, they didn't seem to notice the tilting bookshelf until it hit them, smashing their heads and torsos into the shelf on the other side of the aisle.
Reive didn't have a chance to get a good look because he was too busy shielding his head from a bruising rain of books, but he caught a glimpse of the shelves pulverizing the stoneskins' massive but relatively brittle bodies. They weren't fragile, exactly, but as glommed-together constructs of stone, they could be easily broken.
And maybe it was just a trick of his eyes, but they seemed to flash red all over before disintegrating into a shower of rock chunks.
That was new. But then again, gargoyles were different. The stoneskins he'd fought before didn't have glowing eyes, either.
When books and pieces of rock stopped falling, Reive pushed on the bookcase and tilted it upright again. He straightened up and looked around him at the wreckage. The air was full of rock dust, and the gargoyles had done as much damage to the bookshelves as the shelves had done to them. The entire aisle was knee-deep in books and pieces of gargoyle. Both sets of legs still stood, like an ancient sculpture shattered from the knees up.
He desperately wanted to go find Jess and make sure she was all right. But he had no idea where she was now, whereas he did know where the book was. If she had run for the emergency exit, she would even now be clear of the building and safely away from everything happening here. He had to trust that she had done that. If they really were after the book—and he couldn't think what else it could be, since they didn't seem to be after him, specifically—he could use it to lead them away from the library, and Jess.
He scrambled past the macabre gargoyle legs and sprinted for the storeroom with the book in it, only to come to a skidding halt in the lobby. The sight that greeted him was so bizarre that all he could do for a minute was stare.
There were a few more stoneskins, just standing around. The focus of their attention was a figure in a long black robe. The robe even had a hood, fallen forward to hide its owner's face. The person looked like they had stepped out of a B-movie about demon-summoning cultists.
And the black-robed cultist was perched in a cheap plastic chair, sitting at a library terminal, typing and muttering under his or her breath.
Reive shook himself out of his incredulous staring. He crept closer, using the stacks for cover. His arm burned and itched. He fought to keep from scratching it.
As he got closer, Reive was able to decipher the annoyed muttering. The black-robed cultist's voice was male.
"Come on, what the hell is it filed under? This is insane. It's got to be in one of the architectural categories ... 'Landscape design of cemeteries'—why are there so many of these? Couldn't there just be a 'gargoyles' category?" More annoyed typing and muttering. "Did it have to be Dewey Decimal?"
He was definitely looking for the book. And he hadn't found it yet. If Reive could just slip around him and get to the storeroom, he could grab it and make it out the back.
Then the stranger grunted and looked up, straight at the shadowed corner behind the circulation desk that Reive had just ducked into. His face was still shaded by the hood, but Reive caught the flash of paler skin.
"Who's there?" Black Robe said sharply.
Reive hissed out a quiet breath through his teeth. His arm hurt sharply, tingling all the way up to the shoulder. It felt like a thousand bees were stinging him. Was it possible gargoyles could now sense him, the same way he seemed to be alert to their presence?
Great. That's all I need.
Black Robe turned to the stoneskin standing at attention beside his chair and reached out. His hand was ungloved, with long pale fingers. He touched the lumpy stone body and stroked two fingers across its rough surface.
It seemed to Reive that he saw a glowing trail in the wake of those fingers. The cultist, or whatever he was, swiftly traced an odd, complex sigil, visible briefly as a dull red glow, as if the stone had been heated, before fading back to the dull gray of ordinary rock. The creature's eyes flashed a brighter red and then returned to their previous banked-coal glow.
What the heck was that? Reive had never seen a stoneskin being created, so he wasn't sure if that was a normal part of the process of animating them, but he'd also never seen anything like it with any of the others that he'd fought before.
And yet ... there was something oddly familiar about that symbol, like he'd seen it before, recently.
Black Robe turned and repeated the process on another one. Since he was watching for it now, Reive got a better look at it—the fiery sigil, the flash of its eyes. And this time he recognized the symbol, not specifically, but its general style.
It was like the alchemical symbols in Jess's book.
"Find whoever is hiding over there, and bring them to me," Black Robe said, and the stoneskins lurched forward, directly toward Reive's hiding place.