Page 70 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“For tonight,” she said.

It was a costume. A gargoyle costume, because she’d listened when Toby mentioned it, but a gargoyle costume the way the Charleston opera did costumes. Tailored charcoal wool with sculpted wings on a hidden frame and stretched silk that caught the light for the membranes. Tiny molded horns that no gargoyle in the world had ever grown. It had probably cost more than her mortgage payment and it was, objectively, beautiful.

Toby looked at it for a long moment. Then he looked at his cardboard wings on the potting bench, grey paint still tacky at one edge where he’d fixed a spot that morning.

She said nothing. She had learned, at great cost, to say nothing in these moments and let her son choose his own path.

“Thank you, Grandmother,” Toby said politely. He was always so polite, because they had praised him into it. “It’s really nice.”

“You’ll be the handsomest little boy in the whole town.”

“But I made these.” He put one hand gently on the cardboard, the same way Garrick touched stone. “I’ve been working on them for a really long time. So I’m going to wear these.”

Cornelia’s smile didn’t move. That was the frightening thing about Cornelia—the smile never moved. “Of course, darling. Whatever you like.”

The entire five years, laid out on a potting bench. A boy who wanted to be something he had made himself, and a woman who had driven four hours with something better.

Then the bell over the nursery door went again, and the light changed the way it changed when he came into a room. Toby said, “Mr. Garrick!” Both grandparents turned round, and she watched the balance of the afternoon shift.

Garrick filled the doorway. He filled most doorways, nearly seven feet of grey stone and folded wing, ducking under the lintel out of habit. A boy’s oversized hard hat was in one enormous clawed hand, because he had promised to bring it. He wore dark pants and a plain fitted shirt, and his posture had the cautious stillness he got around strangers.

Lawton Pinckney straightened up as though somebody had called his name.

“Lawton, Cornelia,” Maris said, because someone had to, “this is Garrick Stonehaven. I’m doing the grounds at his place. Garrick, these are Toby’s grandparents, Lawton and Cornelia Pinckney.”

“Stonehaven,” Lawton repeated slowly, and she saw the moment the name penetrated. “Garrick Stonehaven. Of Stonehaven Construction?”

“Yes.” Garrick offered a hand. It swallowed Lawton’s whole.

“Well.” Lawton pumped it anyway, recalibrating in real time. A gargoyle from the mountains, which was a thing you were polite about in Charleston and did not seat at your table. A gargoyle who owned one of the largest construction companies in the southeast was a different matter. “Well, this is a surprise. I’ve heard of your work, of course. That resort outside Savannah, was that⁠—”

“Ours. Yes.”

“Extraordinary.” Lawton turned to Cornelia, who had produced a second, warmer smile from somewhere. “Cornelia. Toby’s been playing in the Stonehaven gardens.”

“How lucky for him,” Cornelia said, and looked at Garrick with new eyes, eyes that had reclassified him, in the space of one handshake, from unsuitable to advantageous. A gargoyle was a thing you were gracious about. A gargoyle who owned a historic mansion and a firm you had read about in the business pages was a connection. “Mr. Stonehaven. What a lovely surprise. You must tell me all about the house.”

Toby, meanwhile, had wormed his hand into Garrick’s. “Mr. Garrick, look, I finished the wings. Look at the dark bits, I did the dark bits.”

Garrick bent down and looked at the cardboard wings with the same grave attention he gave a load-bearing wall.

“You got the membranes just right,” he said. “Most people miss that.”

Toby glowed. Cornelia watched her grandson glow at a gargoyle, and her perfect smile held. Only Maris, who had spent six years learning to read it, saw something else behind it. The male was acceptable, now. But the fact that the boy had chosen…

By dusk the town square had stopped being a town square and become something out of a fever dream, and Maris loved it beyond all reason.

Hundreds of tourists came by bus for it, the way they came every year, because there was nothing else like it within four hundred miles. They knew exactly what they were coming to see. Fifty-one weeks of the year Fairhaven was a small town that happened to be mostly Others and would rather you didn’t stare. On the thirty-first of October it hung the square with orange lights and let you stare as much as you wanted.

Rona stood behind the River Café’s outdoor counter, doling out food and laughter with equal skill. Houston stood a head above the crowd near the bandstand, the mayor’s sash absurd across a minotaur’s shoulders, quietly making sure the strangers had a good time and got home safely. Grondar and Elara sold out of baked goods in the first hour, but the coffee lasted longer. Nichola was selling cider. Posy was losing an argument with a caramel apple, watched over protectively by her huge, silent mate. Gladys had come as herself, in the cardigan and the pearls, with the witch’s hat.

“It’s like this every year?” Lawton kept saying. He had a cider in one hand and the dazed smile of a man whose worldview was being gently rearranged. “Every year?”

Cornelia said less. She walked through the chaos with her spine very straight, and Maris watched her navigate the crowd the way you’d navigate a party thrown by people you’d never met before. Polite, poised, and profoundly uncomfortable. She flinched once, slightly, when Sylvie swept up with a wine cup and the start of a dirty joke, noticed the strangers, and reeled it back in with a grin.

“Maris! And company. Hello. Toby, you magnificent little monster, those wings⁠—”

“I did the dark bits,” Toby said.