The Angel Stone: A Novel (31 page)

We passed Fraser Hall and entered the quad. The grassy rectangle—where students sunned and tossed Frisbees in good weather or hurried across to their classes in bad—was deserted. Neon-hued scraps of paper—all the flyers posted by the nephilim administration—blew across the empty space like fallout from a nuclear holocaust. Stately Main Hall stood at the far end of the quad, looking as forbidding and unassailable
as Castle Coldclough, with its gray Gothic exterior and gruesome gargoyles.

Gargoyles?

“Holy Hunchback of Notre Dame,” Frank swore. “Where did those ugly bastards come from?”

Crouched on every window ledge and cornice were hundreds of vile creatures. They looked nothing like the beautiful, angelic Duncan Laird. Their skin was gray and leathery, their batlike wings veined in black, their faces pinched and shriveled, with pointy ears. At the sight of us, they opened their mouths as one, revealing long yellow fangs. They cawed like crows, a sound that, along with the leathery rustling of their wings, made my skin crawl.

“What are they?” I asked.

“The first generation,” Soheila answered. “When the elves first bred with humans, this is what they produced. These are the monsters rejected by their fathers and reviled by their sons, who have grown more human-looking with each successive generation. We believed these creatures had been banished to an underground tomb, but Duncan Laird must have summoned them to defend him. I wonder if he was keeping them nearby.”

“In the tunnels.” Anton Volkov had stepped up next to me. “Remember I said there were creatures slaughtering animals and draining their blood? I can smell the blood on them.” His nostrils flared.

“There must be hundreds of them,” I said. “Too many for me to pick off with the angel stone. Do you think it’s possible we can reason with them and convince them to hand over Duncan?”

“We can try,” Soheila said. “If Duncan’s been holding them as prisoners underground, their loyalty to him might not be as strong as he thinks. I know a bit of their language.”

“I don’t like you getting that close to those monsters,” Frank said.

Soheila smiled at him. “Those
monsters
aren’t so different from my own ancestors. And, besides, I won’t have to get that close. The wind will carry my voice to them. It’s worth a try. Callie’s right. She’d never be able to kill them all at once.”

“Yeah, but if they do attack, I’m going after them.” Frank patted the sword at his side.

“I, too, will join in the attack,” Volkov said. “While we hold them off, Cailleach should make a run for it and endeavor to reach Duncan Laird’s office.”

“Yeah, get that bastard Laird.” Frank seconded Volkov by slapping him on the back.

“Happily,” I said.

Stepping a few feet in front of the crowd, Soheila flexed her wings, spreading them out in a brilliant fan that caught the rays of the early-morning sun. I’d never seen her winged before—never imagined that our beautiful and elegant Middle-Eastern Studies professor had the ability to become this otherworldly creature. Her wings comprised every color of the desert, from pale sand to burnt umber to deep violet, and when they moved they released a warm breeze redolent of spices and night-blooming jasmine. That wind carried a song on it. Although I couldn’t understand its words—I wasn’t even sure it had words—it conjured up windswept dunes and sand-scoured rocks carved into graven images. I envisioned great temples where people worshipped the old gods—gods with wings and claws and fangs and tails, gods as grotesque, yet awesome, as the gargoyles, who rustled their bat wings and perked their pointy ears as they listened to Soheila’s song.
We were once gods
, she told them,
as you were, too, and we, too, were overthrown for newer gods
. The song changed, and the images in my head were replaced with ones of violence
and chaos—statues torn down, cave paintings defaced, women with Soheila’s particular beauty reviled and stoned to death.

Unsurprisingly, the gargoyles became agitated at these horrific scenes. They beat their wings and raised a great raucous howl that tore away the fabric of Soheila’s vision like claws shredding silk, replacing her desert scenes with a wintry waste where gargoyles wandered cold and naked, expelled by their beautiful fathers.
This is what
we
have suffered
, their cries told us. I felt the angel stone pulsing at my throat in sympathy with their grief. I touched the stone, wanting to communicate to them that I heard their cries and felt their suffering, but as soon as my hand was on the stone, I plunged deeper into their twisted psyches, finding myself in a wasteland colder and bleaker than the arctic tundra. The gargoyles were insane, their minds rent by centuries of captivity in dark caves with only hatred for company—hatred for their fathers for turning their backs on them, hatred for their sons for sealing them beneath the earth, but, most of all, hatred for humans, whose DNA had turned them into monsters. Our smell was inciting them now into a lather of bloodlust. Amid that seething maelstrom was a calm voice directing their rage: Duncan’s voice. He had tapped into the gargoyles’ minds and was controlling them, funneling their inchoate rage into a pungent stream.

“They’re going to attack,” I told Frank the second before a hundred pairs of talons pushed off their stone perches and a hundred pairs of leathery wings beat the air.

“Go!” Frank screamed. “We’ll hold them back. Get Duncan.”

Silver flashed in the air as Frank unsheathed his sword, and he leapt to attack the flying gargoyle heading for Soheila. A trow got it first with his club. I aimed the angel stone at another winged beast headed for Frank. It exploded in a shower
of ash that rained down over me. Then I was running toward Main Hall under a swarm of gargoyles sweeping through the air like huge bats. Whenever one came close to me, I shot it with the angel stone. When I reached the front door of Main, I hesitated. Should I stay and fight with my friends? But Frank was right. If Duncan was controlling the gargoyles, I had to get to him.

I pulled at the door … and found it locked.
“Sprengja ianuam!”
I hissed the spell under my breath, and the door swung open. As I crossed the threshold, though, I felt a sizzle of energy that made my hair stand on end. A ward. I passed through the electric shock, wondering if this was how dogs felt when they hit an invisible fence. The jolt fried my nerve endings and made my heart miss a beat, but I made it through into the empty lobby, where I stood panting, heart palpitating. I swept my eyes over the marble floor, worn from the tread of generations of students. I scanned the walls, with their portraits of past deans and bulletin boards announcing student events. Looking for guards, I was overcome by the ordinariness of the academic setting and a longing for that world, where students walked these halls on their way to class to discuss literature and art. Instead, my students were outside, battling gargoyles. A surge of anger swept over me and I strode across the marble floor toward the stairs—and into a second ward.

This one knocked me off my feet. Sprawled on the hard floor, I looked up at a shimmering wall. Runes and sigils flashed in the air and then melted in a shower of sparks, like fireworks fading in a night sky. The wards were hastily created. Duncan must have hurriedly put them up as he retreated to the dean’s office. I just needed to see the runes and sigils again. I searched the floor for something I could toss at the field, but other than a crumpled Cheetos bag and scraps of
paper, which were too light, there was nothing. All I had was the angel stone. I held it up to the field and the sigils and runes lit up like a computer screen. I scanned the symbols, looking for one that glowed brighter—a trick Duncan himself had taught me, to unlock wards—and saw it just before the field melted into a shower of sparks: a sigil shaped like a half-moon with a squiggle on top, located in the lower left-hand corner of the ward field. I crouched low on the floor, positioned my left hand in front of where I thought it had been, and, with my right hand, held the angel stone against the ward. When the sigil flared, I placed my hand on it. Electric bolts shot up my arm, but I kept my hand on the sigil and turned. The ward field vanished and I rolled through where it had been. I scrambled to my feet and charged up the stairs. Two more wards were at the top of the stairs and one was midway down the hall. I figured out how to disarm each one using the angel stone, but the process was wearying. By the time I reached the dean’s office, I felt like a drained battery.

The office door was open. And Duncan sat behind the desk, leaning back in the sleek ergonomic chair, his feet up on Dean Book’s lovely Louis XVI desk.

“Ah, Callie,” he said, smiling at me as if I’d come to discuss my tenure review. “I’m so glad you made it. It’s always gratifying to see a student using the skills you’ve taught them. But, then, I always suspected you would be good at disarming wards. You are a doorkeeper, after all. Please have a seat. As you can see, I’ve made a fire. Winter comes early to these mountains.”

I glanced at the fireplace and saw a roaring fire in the hearth. A thick manila envelope succumbed to the flames.

“So you’re destroying all evidence of your plans?” I said. “Do you imagine that will save you?”

“I was hoping it would save the nests of gargoyles and
nephilim that remain. That way, you won’t know where I’ve gone.”

“What makes you think I’m going to let you leave?” I asked, stepping closer to the desk and holding up the angel stone. “You’d only come back again—or victimize humans and witches somewhere else.”

“The latter, actually. We can usually find some war-torn corner of your world where women are so victimized that we can continue our breeding program unnoticed.” His eyes sparkled as he saw me wince. “I don’t think I’ll try for Fairwick again so soon. Not while you’re still here. But in a couple hundred years when we’ve built up our strength again …” He shrugged, one shoulder lifting higher than the other. “Who knows? And as for why you will let me go …” He took his feet off the desk and leaned forward. I saw now that, where his wing had been torn from his back, a new one was growing. I gripped the angel stone in my hand and extended my right arm, using my left to steady it. “You’ll let me go because you no longer have the power to stop me.”

I directed my power through the stone and aimed for the middle of his chest. Nothing happened. I looked down at the stone, which lay cold and inert in my hand.

Duncan laughed. “The wards,” he said, almost gently. “They drained the stone. It’s only temporary, but”—he looked down at the gleaming gold Rolex on his wrist—“it should give me enough time to get far away from here.”

He stepped over to the window, his wings unfurling. Outside, the sun was climbing higher over the eastern mountains. The light touched the tips of the feathers and limned his wings with gold, like the gilding on a Renaissance painting. He
was
as beautiful as an angel. A few more generations and, who knew, perhaps the nephilim would create a race of exquisite creatures—but they would subjugate human women to do it,
and the race would be as heartless as it was beautiful. I couldn’t let him go. I bowed my head … and felt a tug at the nape of my neck. My hair, twisted hurriedly into a knot when I’d left the croft, pulled at my scalp. I touched my hand to the back of my head and felt among the tangles. There, still clinging despite all the battles I’d fought in the last twenty-four hours, was one of the knitting needles William had made for me.

I drew the needle from my hair, a thread of glowing red wool still clinging to it, and leapt over Dean Book’s Louis XVI desk and plunged it into Duncan’s back, just below his left rib cage. He wheeled around to face me, his fingers flailing to grab the knitting needle. He pulled it out, trailing a long red thread.

His lip curled in a sneer. “Did you really think you could kill me with a knitting needle?”

“No, but I thought this might work.” I touched my hand to his chest and pulled the thread lodged beneath his ribs up and forward. Straight through his heart. His eyes widened and his mouth fell open. I yanked harder and he gasped, black gore rising from his throat and dribbling over his lips. He fell to one knee, his wings sagging behind him. He would have fallen flat on his face if I hadn’t held him up by the thread. His eyes rolled back in his head, staring up at me.

“That’s for killing Bill,” I said, tying the knot that cut off his heart.

Frank told me later that as soon as I killed Duncan, it was as if the strings holding the gargoyles up in the air were cut. The monstrous creatures tumbled out of the air, slack and dead-eyed. A few were killed in this passive state, but once Soheila realized what had happened, she ordered a cease-fire, organizing the trows to form a cordon around the gargoyles. A few, coming to their senses, took wing and escaped, flying into the Catskills, but the rest seemed resigned to being prisoners. From the window above, I stood watching Duncan’s ashes scatter in the wind until the last speck of him vanished. By then the sun had risen high over the mountains and bathed the village of Fairwick in a rose-gold glow. Smoke still wafted from Main Street and the woods, but the fires had all been extinguished, and already the townspeople were out putting the town to rights and helping one another. Fairwick and Fairwick College would survive and, with the nephilim banished, prosper again. As long as I lived, I could serve as the door between Faerie and Fairwick and so the fey would be free to come and go, bringing the balm of Aelvesgold into this world to heal the wounds we had suffered.

But not all wounds. As I walked out of Main Hall, I felt a tug in my chest. It was as if I’d wrapped the magic thread around my own heart and pulled until I cut off the flow of blood, leaving a lifeless stone in my chest instead of a living, pumping organ. That weight grew heavier as I saw the devastation wrought by the battle. The trows, spurred by the death of their comrade, had rushed headlong into battle and suffered the worst casualties. The survivors stood around their fallen comrades, singing haunting dirges. Brownies and witches, gnomes and Fairwick students sang with them. Scott Wilder stood arm in arm with two trows, swaying as they sang. I searched the crowds for the rest of my students: I spotted Nicky and Flonia administering first aid to a wounded gnome, and Ruby Day and two other girls I recognized from the fairy-tales class were helping Ann and Jessica Chase set up a triage center. I felt a lightening of the weight in my chest when I saw that all my students had survived, and I began to look for my friends. I spotted Frank, Soheila, and Diana crouching on the ground beneath the four red maples that marked the center of the quad. As I approached, I saw that Liz was there, too, as well as Brock, Dory, Phoenix, and Jen. I put my hand over my heart and told myself that all these people were alive because William had sacrificed himself. I was lucky, I told myself, but then Soheila lifted her head and met my gaze and I felt a sirocco of grief pour off her. I hurried toward the four maples, scared to see who was at the center of the circle.