Page 65 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“Is he on the roof?”

“Not today. Somewhere else. I’ll show you later.”

She parked, hauled him and his backpack inside, and set him up at the kitchen table with apple slices, a juice box and a fistful of the cheese crackers he liked. His short legs swung a foot above the floor. He looked very small in the huge kitchen and entirely at home, and she understood that completely.

“Five minutes,” she told him. “I’m going to check on Mr. Garrick and I’ll be right back. Eat.”

He nodded, cheeks already full, and she went down the hall to the conservatory.

Garrick was still stone, still folded on his plinth with his wings curved and his face turned towards the failing light. Whatever he was working out down there in the stone, he hadn’t surfaced yet. She stood in the doorway a moment—she liked looking at him, sue her—then turned back towards the kitchen.

The stool at the island stood empty, a cracker abandoned mid-bite. Her stomach dropped the six inches it only dropped for him.

“Toby?”

She heard a small voice coming from the wrong direction, and followed the sound. Out of the kitchen, and through the wide central hall to the west corridor. She’d never been down it. The finished house stopped here, and beyond it were closed doors and drop cloths and rooms nobody used.

One of the doors stood open.

“Tobias Calder, you do not run off in someone else’s⁠—”

She came through the doorway and stopped.

It was a small room, or had been made small by what it held. Dust-sheets over a chair, a shrouded shape that might have been a desk. And in the center, on the bare boards where a carpet had once been and the ghost of it still showed, a gargoyle sat in stone.

Not Garrick, but astonishingly like Garrick. The same calm brow, the same pointed ears, the same great furled wings, on an older face, the way Garrick would look in thirty years. The figure sat with his hands loose on his knees and his head bowed a little. There was something in the set of the shoulders that made her throat tighten. For the first time she realized grief had a posture, and this was it, carved permanently into stone.

Toby sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him, entirely unbothered, holding a cheese cracker up like an offering.

“—and then Barclay ate the crayon and Miss Sara said we don’t eat crayons but he said it was green apple which is a joke because crayons don’t taste like—do you want a cracker? You can’t eat it because you’re stone but you can hold it.”

“Toby.” She kept her voice soft. Not because she was frightened, but because the room had the same hushed stillness she’d felt in the conservatory. “Baby. Who are you talking to?”

“The other one.” He said it like it was obvious. He patted the stone foot gently, the way she’d taught him to pet a strange dog. “He’s like Mr. Garrick but older. I don’t think he minds me. He hasn’t said.”

She crossed the room and crouched beside her son, and up close the resemblance stole what was left of her breath. It was Garrick’s face. It was Garrick’s future cast in stone and set aside in a closed room, and he had never said a word. She looked at the bowed head and the open hands, and something cold went down her spine that had nothing to do with fear.

Statues didn’t sit like that. Statues didn’t grieve.

“Toby,” she said carefully, “I don’t think this is a⁠—”

Garrick filled the doorway.

She hadn’t heard him come, but then she never did. The gold had come back into his eyes, but it was low and banked, and he was looking at the seated statue the way a male looks at something he has spent years learning not to look at.

Toby craned his head around, unsurprised, apple juice on his chin. “Is this your dad?”

“Yes.”

The word came out level, but she could see the effort it had taken in the stiffness of his posture. Toby considered the seated gargoyle again, then turned back to Garrick.

“Does he mind us being in here?” he asked.

Garrick stood in the doorway, looking past her at the stone that had been his father. For a long moment he didn’t say anything at all. She watched him look at the bowed head and saw something on his face that she had no name for.

Then he shook his head slowly.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think he would have minded.”