Page 64 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

Garrick nodded. Serious, then, but not insurmountable. Just expensive.

He looked down the ridge, then out across the view that had drawn Palisade to the site in the first place. He’d come up here expecting to find a problem he could build around. He hadn’t. He’d found a place they shouldn’t build on, which should have simplified things. It didn’t.

Stonehaven Construction could walk away. They could eat the loss, withdraw the bid, and tell Palisade to find another contractor. And Palisade would. Someone else would build it, and the lilies would be just as dead. He was sure there must be a solution, but for once, he couldn’t find the place to begin.

“I have to think,” he said.

Maris looked up at him from the moss, and she was smiling. “Think, or go to stone and think?”

She’d asked it the way she’d have asked whether he wanted coffee, but he saw the relief on her face.

He went to stone in the conservatory that afternoon. It wasn’t a decision so much as a need. When a problem was too big to take apart awake, he went to stone and let the still cold part of him turn it over. His father had done it in the entrance hall, in a chair that had held four generations of Stonehavens. He preferred the conservatory, with the warm southern light and the potted lemon trees, and a granite plinth he’d set there on footings he poured himself.

Maris came with him.

She didn’t ask him. She simply followed him in, curled into the wide wicker chair he’d brought down, and pulled a book out of her bag. She settled in like it was the most ordinary thing in the world to keep a male company while he turned to rock. He stopped next to the plinth and looked at her. Looked at the sunlight in her hair, the dirt still on her knees, and the small line between her brows. His chest felt so full and quiet that he had to look away.

Toby had once asked him who woke him up. He hadn’t answered. Now he had an answer.

“You don’t have to stay,” he said.

“I know.” She didn’t look up. “I have to get Toby at three. Other than that, I’ll be right here.”

So he climbed onto the plinth and folded his wings around himself the way he’d done thousands of times, and let the change come. The slow cold spread up from the base of his spine, the world going soft and far away, sound thickening to a low tidal hush, and his heartbeat stretched out longer and longer between the beats until it was barely a heartbeat at all. The last thing he was aware of, before the male went down into the stone, was the small whisper of a page turning, and the sound of her breathing.

Then the stone had him, and the problem opened out in the dark—easements and watersheds, a ruined bid and a hillside of red lilies. He sat with it, certain that given enough time the answer would show itself.

He didn’t know exactly how many hours passed. A small distant part of him was aware of the angle of the light changing, of Maris going out and coming back, of a second, lighter set of footsteps arriving with her. But he was rock, and rock doesn’t count the hours.

He was still deep under, the answer just beginning to surface, when a sound reached him from very far away. The slow, dry creak of a door opening. Not the conservatory door. Down the west corridor, where a certain door had been shut since the one time he’d opened it, and had no business opening now.

CHAPTER 21

Maris had expected it to feel strange, sitting in a room with a male who’d turned to stone. Instead it felt like sitting in an empty church. That same waiting quiet, the sense of something vast and patient in the room with her. Garrick had crouched on the plinth and the change had moved over him like an evening turning to dusk, the warm grey of his skin going hard and matte, the gold winking out of his eyes. His wings settled into a curve that no longer breathed. Then he was rock, and the conservatory went quiet, and she turned a page.

She read for an hour. Maybe more. The sunlight swung its long amber rays across the ferns and the lemon trees. Once she looked up and caught herself half expecting him to be watching her, but the stone face gazed at nothing, serene and far away, and she went back to her book.

When her legs got restless she gave up on reading.

There was a planting bed along the south wall she’d been eyeing for a week, a long raised trough of good soil gone weedy and sour with neglect. She fetched her gloves from her bag, knelt at the near end, and started pulling. Chickweed came up in whole satisfying mats. A volunteer maple seedling fought her and lost. She worked the soil loose with her fingers and found it black and sweet under the crust, and started planning without meaning to. Ferns down the shaded end. Maybe the maidenhair, if she could coax it. Something with scent near the door so you’d catch it coming in.

“I’m going to fill this,” she told the stone Garrick, because it seemed rude not to. “You’ll thank me. Right now it’s growing exactly one thing and that thing is regret.”

The statue didn’t argue.

She lost track of time in the good way, the dirt-under-the-nails way, until the light changed and she glanced at her phone and swore.

School.

She peeled off her gloves, crossed to the plinth, and stood in front of him. It felt foolish and it felt necessary in equal measure.

“I have to get Toby,” she said. “I’ll be forty minutes. I’m bringing him back, if that’s all right. I don’t know if you can really hear any of this.” She hesitated, then reached out and put her hand on his chest, over the place where his heart went so slow it was almost nothing. The stone was cool but not dead-cool. Cool like a river rock in shade. “Don’t go anywhere.”

She could have sworn the corner of his mouth was different when she took her hand away. It wasn’t. She left anyway, after smiling like an idiot at a statue.

Doris coughed all the way to Fairhaven Falls Elementary and back, and Toby chattered nearly as much as the engine. A boy named Barclay who had eaten a crayon. The letter G. Whether spiders had knees. She let it wash over her, one hand on the wheel, the other reaching over now and then to squeeze his sneaker.

“We’re going to Mr. Garrick’s,” she said, turning up the mansion’s long drive, the great house rising from the gardens like a ship out of the fog. “But he’s resting, so we have to be gentle. Snack first. Deal?”