Page 12 of Fated to the Gargoyle

The no makes it halfway up my throat before I remember she thinks she’s alone. I swallow it whole.

She laughs at herself. “Delusional, yes. Desperate, no.”

The phone goes dark, and she pulls the blanket higher, her voice going soft with sleep.

“I don’t even care what he is,” she murmurs. “He could be a bear shifter. A wolf shifter. Even a lion shifter⁠⁠—”

Every species out of her mouth is another male with his hands on my mate, and the want comes up my back the way the stone comes at dawn, fast and impossible to stop.

Mine. Mine. MINE.

My wings snap open, and I’m one push off this wall from coming through her window and telling her the position is filled. She has belonged to me since her scent climbed that diner wall and picked me out of the dark. I get a grip on the brick instead and hold on till it passes.

What’s the plan here, exactly? Come through that window and introduce myself, claws first, as the monster fate chose for her? And the window would be the easy part. If she completes the bond with me, she stops aging for as long as I stand. Her time starts moving again the day I fall. The gift I bring her is forever, and my own body is the collateral.

She’d scream this building down, and she’d be right to.

I press my forehead to the brick and breathe. Still my wings keep pulling open, like they mean to go through that window without me. What is happening to me. I have held still under hammers. I cannot hold still outside this woman’s window.

Then she sighs one more time, snuggles down into her pillow, and hums a few more bars of the shower song.

“Honestly, I’d even be happy if that statue happened to be a real gargoyle,” she says, and giggles into her pillow. “A gargoyle for a fated mate? That’s even better.”

My claws go through the brick beside her window.

The crack is loud enough to wake the whole street, and she sits up with the sheets clutched against her chest.

“Hello?” she calls, and I can hear her heart going like a rabbit’s. “Is someone there?”

I push off her wall and go straight up until the whole street is nothing but porch lights. She hoped for a gargoyle and called it even better. I laugh out loud for the first time in a century and scare a cat off someone’s fence.

Her name is Treasure. The cook kept thanking her by name through the diner floor, and I thought the boards were garbling it until I heard it plain. Whoever named her knew what they had. I have stood whole centuries over rubies men killed each other for. Guarding is the only trade I know, and no one ever let me hold what I guarded. Her, I mean to hold.

“So,” my brother says, level at my wingtip.

I flinch so hard I drop ten feet. Sable came up on me out of a wide-open sky, and I never caught one whiff of him. Six blocks of night air hadn’t cleared her strawberries out of my nose.

Some guard I am.

“Why were you watching that human girl?” he asks.

“How long have you been following me?” I ask him right back.

“Long enough to notice you were too entranced to notice,” he says, mild as ever.

I bank for the shopping center instead of answering, and he follows me down onto the diner roof. The shingles creak under us. Sable folds his wings and waits.

“What did you find?” I ask him instead.

“A town that might actually have room for us.” He says it slowly, like he doesn’t quite believe it yet. “Shifters marked me from three rooftops and none raised an alarm. We walk it tomorrow night, openly, and see how it answers.”

I have the town’s answer. A woman hauling groceries caught me in the open, told me not to eat anyone, and walked on home. But everything I know about this town is filed under her now, and I’m not opening that drawer for anyone, my brother included.

“That’s a good idea,” is all I give him.

“You haven’t eaten.” He tips his head at the far ridge. “There’s a lake past that shoulder. The fish are fat and slow and practically apologizing.”

I nod, and at the roof’s edge he looks at me sideways.