In Stone (6 page)

“Okay, let’s cut the crap. You didn’t follow me back here to help me clean house.”

“No, I didn’t.” His head bows. “I was tracking Gray when I found you both in the alley.”

“Tracking him?” I question. “Did you see him do this to my house?” He nods. My eyes dust over all the mess. “Why didn’t you call the cops?”

A silence falls. It’s the sort of silence that’s begging me to look up and over at Jack, but I don’t. My stare fixes on the cracked, morose face of a porcelain cat. My lips start to twist as impatience bubbles. The tension is thick. It burns my eyes, and then, with a sigh, Jack says, “Come on Beau. You know the cops can’t help.”

I didn’t know that, but I should have the second Gray said ‘knife’ back in the alley. I should have known a giant mess of craziness was coming my way when Gray grew horns. I throw the pieces of porcelain still in my hands to the floor and turn sharply to face him. I meet with Jack’s eyes. My lips are parted and ready to fire off a round of questions. But the words get caught in my throat. Jack’s eyes have changed color. I see the moon again, an icy moon. They shimmer the way a silver coin does when you tip it toward the light. He’s one of them. They’re everywhere. I fall back on my hands and start scuttling backwards across the carpet.

“Stay away from me,” I warn. Now I don’t care what I’m picking up. If it’s not bolted down it’s flying in his general direction as I make like a crab across the room. Ornaments, magazines, a paperweight smash and crash to the floor as he deflects them with his hands and knees.

“Hey. Wait a second …would you just ...” He bats away a plastic figurine before it meets with his forehead, but he doesn’t manage to evade the clay penholder that I made for Mom in seventh grade. It connects with his cheekbone and splits his skin. Several drops of blood seep from the wound and roll down his face.

“Are you insane?” he growls.

“Get the fuck out of my house.”

He keeps coming, wading toward me through the shower of objects as if it were nothing more than a light drizzle. Snatching my wrist, he hauls me to my feet. I try to slap him with my free hand, but he grabs that one too.

“Relax!”

I struggle until my back is pushed up against the wall.

“Relax!” he repeats, pinning my wrists at either side of my head. “Calm down. I’m not going to hurt you.” I’m panting out breaths like a dusty, old porch dog and glaring at him through a curtain of hair that’s fallen over my eyes.

“Then leave me alone.” I crane my neck forward until my nose almost touches his.

“I can’t.”

“Sure you can. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“I know that.”

“Then what are you doing here? What do you want?” I ask, almost screaming.

“Believe it or not, I came here to make sure you were all right.”

I say nothing. He says nothing. The silence is only stifled by the soundtrack of us both huffing and puffing. Our eyes are locked; his are so beautiful. I am afraid of them almost as much as I want to frame them. I only look away when something long, grey, and scaly snakes up from behind his back. It’s barbed at the end. It bends around the left side of his body, slithers over to me, up toward my pinned hand, drawing a trail of invisible S shapes in the air. It coils itself around my wrist, replacing his hand, holding me in place. My eyes might fall out on to the floor. I’m reduced to a radio silence, not even breathing. He dabs at the cut on his cheek with his fingertips, casually, carefree.

“You made me bleed,” he says.

“You have a tail,” I reply.

His lips pull up at one side into a smirk. And then because shit isn’t weird enough, the cut on the side of his face starts to glue itself back together.

He’s healing.

The slice in his skin is sealing. The slightly raised scar it leaves sits on his cheek like a slug trail for a nanosecond, before it sinks and blends in with his natural skin color -- a warm honey. In seconds his face is left looking exactly as it did before the penholder clipped it.

“So, what’s the verdict -- are you okay?” He asks cautiously.

“You. Have. A. Tail,” I repeat. “And how did you do that thing with your face?”

“The face thing, that’s a gift,” he says. Discomfort shapes his jaw into a rigid square.

“Some gift,” I muse.

“It was.” He frowns, and a crevice as deep as space forms in between his eyebrows.

“And the tail?” I flick my eyes toward the thick tentacle strangling my wrist.

“That? That’s a curse.”

“Some curse.”

“Can I let you go?” I shrug sharply because…because I’m being petulant. He doesn’t indulge me in debate, but he does roll his eyes. His fingers loosen; his tail unwinds itself, and my hands are free.

“Let’s talk.”

I’m free. But I don’t want to run. I want to hear what he has to say. I want to know who he is. I want to know about the knife. I want to know why I was almost killed tonight. I want to know…where his tail has disappeared to. I tilt as far right as I can without toppling over and scan the scene behind him.

It’s gone.

He laughs, catching my arm before I hit the deck because my tilt has turned into a full on timber! I shake him off me, stand up straight, clear my throat; and feign disinterest in the evaporation of his tail.

“Go ahead,” I say, sweeping a sarcastic hand through the air. “Talk.” His cheeks swell, and he exhales a deep breath.

“Do you have it, the knife?” Oh no! No way am I giving that little slice of information away. My knowledge of the knife’s whereabouts is leverage. For all I know it’s the only reason I’m still alive. I intend to tell him this, prove that I know how to play the game, but my eyes have popped, and a sort of whinnying sound is coming out of my mouth. He’s got the message before I can sound out a single syllable.

“Okay. Fair enough. Why don’t you tell me what you know about the knife.”

“That’s easy. Nothing. Some crumbling guy falls out of the sky…”

“Nicholas,” he interrupts.

“What?”

“His name was Nicholas. And he was not some crumbling guy. He was a Gargoyle.”

I think I’ve offended him, but he’ll have to deal. My blood is still boiling; my throat is still being crushed in the Switch. My house is still a shit hole.

“He’s dead,” I say. Now that was tactless. I don’t mean to be so blunt. The words taste like poison as they skate over my tongue. Jack’s head dips. He already knows he’s dead; he’d referred to him in the past tense. He didn’t need me to reiterate. I feel pride, or empathy, or some nice, wholesome part of my soul curl up in the pit of my stomach and disown me.

“When you say gargoyle, you mean like…stone?” He nods and then clearly doesn’t feel the need to expand on that.

“Nicholas wasn’t supposed to die. We’re immortal. We can’t die…”

“Immortal?” I laugh. The look on his face tells me there’s nothing funny about this situation. “But Nicholas did die; I saw it.”

“Yes. Thank you. I got that. You really don’t have to keep saying it.” Jack turns and slowly strolls back into the center of the room. His back is to me. My eyes zero in on his butt. I’m looking for a tail, not checking him out. Granted, he has a great ass. And sturdy shoulder blades that sit like rocks under his shirt. But I’m not checking him out. There is no sign of the snaky appendage.

“I’m sorry,” I say, snarling at him, snarling at myself -- I’m not quite sure. “I’m just trying to make sense of this.”

“It was the knife that killed him. It’s poisonous. It has the power to shut down our defenses, to smother whatever it is that makes us immortal.”

A load of images flash through my mind. Nicholas’s cracking skin, his strange luminous eyes, his body exploding into a shower of glitter. And then I see Jack. His tail, his face healing over like that. It makes sense. I wish it didn’t, but it does. I pinch my arm; it sings all the way down to my elbow.

“That’s what we are -- what we were,” he corrects, turning to face me.

“You’re telling me this knife is some kind of otherworldly immortal slayer?” Logic has packed its bags, left my brain, and there’s a good chance that I’ll never see it again.

“Pretty much,” he says with a weak smile. “Beau, I’m going to need that knife back.”

“You can’t have it.”

“Weren’t you listening to me?”

“I was listening.”

“Then you don’t understand the situation,” he scoffs. “That knife has power. It’s killing my kind. We don’t die, Beau; we can’t die. We’re designed to live forever.”

“It’s not here. I got rid of it.” The words rush out of my mouth.

His eyes scan my face furiously. “You got rid of it?” A vein in his neck starts pulsing as he heads back over to me. “You-you got rid of it?” A deep shade of scarlet colors his cheeks. He’s angry, really angry. In response, my shoulders stand up. I put my hands on my hips and tip my chin back.

“I gave it to the cops at City Hall to incinerate.” I’m trying to sound nonchalant, but the shadow growing on Jack’s face makes my voice tremble and my feet shift.

“You gave it to the police? You gave it to the police?”

I wonder if he thinks repeating himself is going to make what I’m saying any less true.

“You didn’t think to question who was carrying it, or wonder as to its origins? You didn’t think that handing it over to the police was perhaps a little brash, a little ignorant?” His voice descends to a threatening growl. He starts pacing in front of me. A cocktail of anger and irritation rumble around in his chest. I suddenly feel very small, like he’s growing, or the room’s expanding, and I’m shrinking. I’ve made a mistake, obviously. In my defense, it’s not like I was given an instruction manual, a how-to on handling strange weaponry. I had a problem; I fixed it. Period. He continues to plod back and forth. His scowl growing thick and murderous.

“What is your problem?” I question before he wears a hole in the shag, or has a brain hemorrhage, or turns around and takes my tiny head off. “How was I supposed to know what I was doing? Nicholas said I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about it, and I figured no knife, nothing to tell. It sounds to me like I did you a favor.”

“You don’t understand. You can’t just get rid of it.”

“What part of incineration don’t you understand? The knife is charcoal, melted down into non-existence. It’s already done,” I reply pointedly. I realize I’m pushing my luck. I realize my tone is berating instead of placating, but I can’t get a hold on myself.

“You can’t destroy it with mortal fire. It needs to be retrieved. We need to find it before it ends up in the wrong hands,” he decides indirectly. He’s thinking out loud, but I can’t help notice that he said ‘we’. I’m instantly curious as to whom said ‘we’ refers.

“We’ll go tonight. We can track it from City Hall,” he concludes then stands and looks expectantly at me. “Are you ready?” I point to myself, a little stunned by the audacity of his assumption. He rolls his eyes impatiently and nods once. “I’m going to need your help.”

“Forget it,” I say, cutting through the air with a swipe of my palms. “Look, I’m sorry that your immortality is under threat…”

“What about your mortality? Your mom’s mortality or the mortality of your friends? Tell me what you know about Gargoyles.”

“I know that they’re ugly,” I say, mostly because I’m seeking some clarity. Nicholas wasn’t ugly, and he certainly isn’t.

“It’s the stone shell that’s ugly,” he says. “Do you know why?”

“No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

“To frighten demons away. We keep the monsters away from your world.”

Big black clouds roll in -- which is impossible because we’re inside and there is no sky in here. But the room is suddenly ten shades darker than what it was. Jack takes a deep breath. He takes it all, the air, leaving me none.

“The knife is what they need to take this world.”

“But Gray, he was a gargoyle…”

“Supremacy belongs to whoever owns the knife. Gray wants it because he cannot stand the idea of no longer being indestructible. He doesn’t want to be vulnerable.

“Beau, as long as the knife exists there will be immortals fighting to get their hands on it. They’ll tear this world apart to track it down.”

My ears cloud over like I’m at altitude. Maybe I am at altitude; I can’t feel the ground beneath my feet anymore. 

“I think you need to leave,” I say because I’m frightened. Because I’m confused. Because if he’s not here this conversation doesn’t exist. None of this exists.

“That’s it?”

My lips stay tightly locked.

“Beau, that’s it? That’s all you have to say?” His eyes bulge. At his sides, his hands ball up into fists. He wants to hit something. I must be having some sort of mini stroke or seizure because I can’t make my mouth move. Words and thoughts are crashing around inside my head like a tumultuous sea, but none of them are willing to break past the barrier of my lips.

“I need your help.” His voice is strained, desperate.

I want to ask him why? Why does he need my help? What could I possibly bring to the table in all of this? I’m nobody. I charge into situations without thinking. My brain rarely engages before I talk. Mom won’t even let me into the cooler when she’s got a body out, just in case I break it. I mean, you know you’re irresponsible when people can’t trust you not to damage the already dead. He should get someone else to help. Someone older, wiser at least. I want to say all these things but all I manage is, “I’m sorry.”