In Stone (25 page)

“Let me get this straight,” Mom chimes in. “You leave us because you’re worried that your presence will destroy our daughter’s shot at normality and bring possible enemies to our door, yet you shout about her existence to anything that will listen?” My mom questions with a tremor in her voice. She’s close to tears. I want to repeat what she’s said, reinforce her words. Better them by peppering them with insults and a few choice profanities to make them sound more damming, make them hurt more. Unfortunately, my throat’s constricted, and I’m feeling about as ferocious as a butterfly.

“I was lonely. Heartbroken at having left you. He was a Gargoyle. I thought I could trust him. I made a mistake ...”

“Damn right you did,” Mom snarls. Mom is fierce! My dark and dangerous gene is envisioning her jumping across the table and tearing out his throat. I twist my fingers together,  pick at a hangnail, try to take my mind to a place full of rainbows and sunshine.

“How does it work, her blood?” Jack asks before fists have a chance to fly. Moms, not mine.

“We don’t know.” Mom beats the half-breed to a response. “We didn’t know what to expect. We were relieved when she was born with brown eyes. You have to understand that we didn’t even know that a baby was a possibility.”

“I assumed that because I was so new to the toxin certain parts of my human self were still alive.”

“Makes sense,” Jack says. Does it? What about my Mom, doing it with a demon, makes sense?

“Everything was normal right up until the accident,” Mom says.

“Accident?” Jack questions me. I shrug. I have no idea what she’s talking about. Didn’t he get the memo? My life makes no sense anymore. Breathe. Note to self; this is not Jack’s fault.

“She was four years old, playing out front. This car came out of nowhere. Next thing I knew my baby was laying on the ground. She was covered in blood, not breathing.” Her voice breaks, and she pauses to compose herself. I too feel the force of this story. It shakes my core so violently my legs start to wobble. I reach out and clutch hold of the table before I keel over. I do recognize this part of my life; I’ve dreamt about it a thousand times.

“We thought she was dead. Even if she had inherited the half-breed off her father, the rule is you live for as long as you can stay alive, right? I couldn’t believe it when she opened her eyes. Initially, I was shocked by the color change. The brown was gone and they were…” she flicks her head to the half-breed. “Like her father’s. But after a split second they dissolved right back, and she was just my little Beau again. The bump on her head erased the memory, but my baby was alive.” My mom sniffs back fresh tears, and her tone toughens “Her father decided to leave after that. He decided...”

“We decided, Kate. We decided,” the half-breed interjects sternly.

“We decided that it was dangerous for him to stay here. Beau was different, new. Not a half-breed, not a pure blood. Something hybrid. A threat maybe. As long as her father belonged to a demon there was always a chance something would come looking for him and find her as well. He left. We carried on like normal. She drank her tea, and I haven’t seen the eyes or anything remotely unusual since…”

“Since you came along and dragged our daughter halfway around the world,” the half-breed growls. Jack tries to keep his eyes trained on me, but shame pulls his chin to his chest. I spin sharply and bare my teeth at this loathsome stranger.

“I wasn’t dragged. How dare you come in here, dump all this crap on me, and then try to shift the blame. Jack is my friend, thanks to this mess, he’s quite possibly the only one I have left.”

“Beau, it doesn’t matter,” Jack soothes.

“Yes, it does!” I twist back around to face him. “Yes, it does.”

“Beau?” The half-breed puts his hand on my shoulder. I go from angry to radioactive.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Jack warns. The half-breed ignores him and keeps his hand firmly planted on me. “When it comes over her she’s extremely strong,” he continues.

“Beau. You have to understand that the gargoyle and your kind aren’t compatible. You can’t be friends.”

“Bullshit. You said yourself that you were friends with Nicholas. And Jack, he’s already friends with a half-breed named Rachael.”

“But you’re a different kind of half-breed, Beau. You…you’re something different entirely. You can’t trust anyone from our world. It’s not safe for you.” I hear Jack huff frustration. The half-breed’s hand glides down my arm. He rubs me. It’s affection that I don’t want. I feel smothered. My palms are clamming up. This time, I’m expecting it. The fever hits me like a hundred red hot pokers. But I don’t stay to throw punches or squeeze throats. I don’t want to fight. I just want to breathe.

I run miles before something slams into me and knocks me on my back. A cold compress of iced grass cushions my fall. I look up at the face staring down on me, pinning my arms above my head. I don’t struggle. I don’t have the energy.

“Can I let you go?” Jack asks. I nod. He releases my arms but stays seated on my pelvis. He’s looking at my eyes, looking at the color. The curious expression on his face tells me they’re black not brown.

“I’m losing it,” I confess. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t breathe.”

“No, you’re not. Yes, you do. Yes, you can.” He leans forward and brushes the sticky sweat-drenched strands of hair off my face.

“You’re wrong. I’m beyond broken,” I whimper.

“I’m never wrong.”

“This time you are.”

“What’s this, you’re disagreeing with me? I’m shocked.” I force a smile. After a few moments of thought his chest rolls with a heavy sigh.

“Truth?”

“Yes, please,” I nod. My bottom lip starts to quiver.

“You are somewhat of a mystery, and that can be a very dangerous thing. You don’t heal as well as me, but you do heal, and half-breeds aren’t supposed to heal at all. You didn’t feel the pull of the knife like we did. You switch in and out without any control. Your appearance changes accordingly like camouflage. You’re definitely unique.” Unique in this context doesn’t quite flatter like perfect had. “Your parents did what they thought was best...and the best, in this case, is what they did.”

That does it. That lifts the latch on my emotions. My body starts convulsing, and I start bawling, uncontrollably. Ugly tears are running down the side of my face and collecting in my ears. My world is caving in. I haven’t felt this depressed since I took a walk in the Underworld.

“Okay, come on.” Jack climbs off me and scoops me up. Knotting my arms around his neck, I sob on his shoulder. He takes a short stroll before sitting down on a bench. He pulls me tightly against his chest. I continue crying until I’m suffocating on snot and saltwater. When the chokes stop bursting out of my throat I tell him about assaulting Mark. I tell him about the car dreams and the confrontation that Rachael and I had back in Bulgaria. He says nothing, and I sob some more.

When my eyes are as dry as crackers and his shirt can’t possibly absorb any more of my nose and eye goo, I lean back from his chest.

“I don’t know who I am anymore.”

“Did you ever consider just being the who that you were before all this began?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Maybe,” he hesitates. “Maybe you don’t need to know this part of you. Think about it. You went seventeen years without stirring this element in your blood. Maybe you could go another seventy without running into it again.”

“How’s that possible? I seem to have been on two settings since I got back. Aggressive or silent. There’s no grey area.”

“If taking the trip roused it, maybe stepping away from the trip and...everything associated with the trip, will lull it back to sleep.”

He can’t be serious. He can’t honestly be agreeing with the half-breed and telling me he’s going to leave. Can he? The fall of my face must alert him to my drawn conclusion. His eyes drop, and his iron grip loosens from around my shoulders. He is. He wants to leave. I remember his promise as the acid rain fell in the Underworld. He’d promised me he wouldn’t leave me again.

“Fine, go!” I dismiss standing up.

“Just hear me out.”

“What’s to hear?”

“Don’t get mad.”

“Why? In case I morph into the monster that you introduced me to?” I throw my words at him like a knife, an immortal-slaying, white knife. It’s all me. There’s not a trace of demon in the question. I’m not fevered. “You promised me that you wouldn’t leave me again.”

“You’re right, I did. The only defense I have is that I didn’t know, and if had known...” He breaks off, gives it a second. “I would never have asked you to do this with me, and I would have never made a promise I knew I couldn’t keep.”

“But you did, and now you’re abandoning me...”

“Not abandoning you. It wouldn’t be a permanent arrangement just a temporary experiment. I know you may hate your father for leaving, but he’s right. You’re safer this way.”

“What did he say to you in the garden?”

“Nothing.” He shakes his head. He’s lying.

“I’m demon, not dense.”

“He asked me what happens when my kind find out about you.” He talks to the grass.

“Is this because I punched you? Because that wasn’t you. I mean it was you, but the Underworld was messing with me so it doesn’t count.”

“It’s got nothing to do with you punching me, Beau.” He shakes his head and smiles softly.

“We went all that way -- I never once attacked you for being a gargoyle.”

“But you thought about it, didn’t you?” That’s true, even before we’d set off to Bulgaria. I’ve got nothing.

“People think about doing things all the time. That doesn’t mean they’ll act on them.” I scratch at a callus on the side of my thumb until it stings.

“You’re not people, Beau. You’re...” He breaks off, annoyed because he doesn’t know how to label my species. “But you could be just you again. You can bury the dark blood.”

“With fruit tea?”

“Yes.” He laughs and takes my cheeks in his hands. “If a mood suppressor and isolation from my world was all it took, then you should grab that, hold on to it. Be who you were. Be human.”

“What about my friends, the people at school. Anybody that rubs me the wrong way. Do they just have to endure it?” Thump, the feel of Mark’s ribs under my palms replays in my mind.

“The gargoyle will protect anyone they perceive to be in danger. But it won’t come to that. I’ll leave. You’ll take a vacation with your mom and drink your tea. You won’t need to worry about me. You can forget all of this. The poison will starve without attention, and you can carry on as you were.”

“In theory.”

He smiles. “It’s a good theory.” The backs of his fingers glide down my cheek. “It’s worth a try.” He looks at the floor, and I remember our conversation in Rachael’s room about him being sent to Purgatory.

“What do you do with the demons you catch?” I say. “If you can’t kill them they have to go somewhere, right?”

“I think you already know the answer to that.”

“So then how much of this is about me being human, and you not wanting to throw me in Purgatory?” He looks at me. His eyes are damp. I wonder if it might be his turn to cry. But he’s stronger than that, and the tears soon evaporate.

“I don’t think for a second that you’ll lose who you are, but I can’t be around for the just in case.”

I close my eyes, rest my forehead against his. He closes his eyes, too. “I need your help,” I tell him in a whisper. His forehead wrinkles under mine. “Forget about theories and species and all that. Just stay with me because I need your help.”

A cold breeze charges over us. It’s bitter, loaded with ice. I think it’s a harbinger; the sort of breeze that bad news follows.  

“Your dad will kill me if I stick around.”

“He is not my dad, and you can’t be killed.” He laughs; it’s forced. But there’s a flicker of resignation.

His eyes pop open. His silver stare blinds me, makes my heart run at a million miles per hour.

“How about now?” he says. “Do you want to kill me?” I shake my head. I want to kiss him. But I won’t. Things are different. His touch his harder. His body in a permanent state of brace. Trekking across Europe with him seems like a lifetime ago. I rest my head on his shoulder.

The sun climbs across the horizon. The frost on the grass thaws. He sits there as still as a statue. I find myself listening for the sound of him breathing several times. Finally, he moves to pull my slipped jacket back onto my shoulder. The sky is bruised purple.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll stay. I’ll help you figure this out.”

Louise D. Gornall is a graduate of Garstang Community Academy, currently studying for a BA (Hons) in English language and literature with special emphasis on creative writing.