Page 10 of Fated to the Gargoyle

I cross to the side window of the dining room and press close enough to fog the glass, and I see her for the first time with my own eyes.

A brown-skinned woman stands at a corner booth, running a rag over the table, her back half-turned to me. Her hair is braided up off her neck in a crown, little wisps loose at her temples. The kitchen light catches the side of her face, and the curve of her cheekbone alone is something I’ll be thinking about for the rest of whatever life I have left. My claws have closed on the windowsill and left deep grooves in the wood. I make myself let go.

She turns, and I get the whole face instead of the edge of it. She wears a small frown over her work, careful with a table no one will thank her for, and I stand out in the dark memorizing her. The word rolls through me again, heavier now that I can see what it’s claiming.

Mine.

Andy comes in from the back with his keys in his hand, and my eyes go to him. Through the glass I catch half of what he says and all of what his body is doing. He points a finger and leans into her space. I’ll know if you turned someone away, he says, and she answers, I hear you, in a voice pressed thin from years of swallowing worse.

My mate is tired, and she’s standing in this diner wiping down booths for a man who doesn’t deserve to breathe her air. My hand goes flat against the glass.

I could break this window and step through it. One arm under her knees, one across her back, and she’d never wipe down another booth in her life. Part of me is already measuring the glass. Then I look at the hand I have pressed against it, black-skinned and clawed, a hand that has never once belonged on a woman’s shoulder, and the measuring stops. I take my hand off the glass and leave the window whole.

“Jesus Christ.”

The voice comes from behind me, and I turn my head, the rest of me still crouched against the diner wall. A human woman stands on the sidewalk a few steps away, a grocery bag in one hand, the other flat over her heart. I wait for the drop, the scream, the running. She shifts the bag onto her hip and squints at me.

“What the hell kind of shifter are you?”

I blink at her. No one in my whole existence has ever sorted me into that category.

“I’m new,” I tell her.

She looks me over again, slower this time, then nods once and backs up a step.

“All right then. Welcome to Shadow Wolf Creek, I guess. Don’t eat nobody.”

She walks on up the sidewalk, and I watch her until she’s past the hardware store. I have a long education in what humans do when they catch one of us in the dark, and none of it covers a woman with groceries telling me to behave and walking home to her dinner.

Wait until Sable hears about this one. Maybe the rumors were true after all.

Heavy footsteps cross toward the front door, Andy’s keys jangling with them. That man has spent all day yelling about shifters, and a gargoyle crouched against his wall would put him on the floor of his own diner. I push off the pavement, and one beat of my wings puts me back on the roof, where I fold flat against the far side of the chimney, out of sight of the lot and the door.

The bell sounds, and Andy comes out. He stops in the lot to zip his jacket and check his phone while I keep statue-still against the brick. Then he gets in his car, and the taillights disappear up the mountain road.

By now Sable is awake on whatever roof he picked, expecting me to find him and compare notes on this strange, unbothered town. My brother doesn’t worry small. He’ll pace a while, build a story out of my silence, and by the darkest part of the night he’ll have the humans finding me asleep, and he’ll come tearing across the valley to collect my remains.

I should go find him. He’s the only family I have left on this continent.

I don’t move. She’s still inside, and Sable has survived worse than worry.

The cold comes down off the mountain and gets nothing from me. The town shuts itself down around the diner one storefront at a time, until its windows are the last light on the block and the only sound is the two of them closing up inside.

Sable can pace, and the town can sleep. Until that bell jingles her back out that door, this chimney is where I live.

She is coming out.

6

SOREN

The bell jingles below me, and my mate walks out into the night with the cook at her side.

I stay where I am even with Andy gone, flat behind the chimney, and track the two of them by sound. The cook says something in that big easy voice and she laughs. I am jealous of a man in an apron.

Then her steps stop, halfway to her car.

“Lamar.” Her voice is careful. “Was there a statue on the roof when you got here this morning?”