“I mean, your entire body was made completely of stone,” my uncle answers.
“Like I turned into a statue? That kind of stone?”
“Not a statue,” my uncle quickly reassures me, even as he eyes me warily, like he’s trying to decide how much more information I can take. Which a part of me can understand, even as it annoys the hell out of me.
“Please just tell me,” I finally say. “Believe me, it’s worse to be trapped in my head trying to figure this out than to just know. So if I wasn’t a statue, I was…what?” I cast my mind around for some ideas, any ideas, but nothing comes.
And still my uncle hesitates, which makes me think that whatever the answer is, it’s really, really bad.
“A gargoyle, Grace.” Jaxon is the one who finally tells me the truth, just like always. “You’re a gargoyle.”
“A gargoyle?” I can’t keep the incredulity from my voice.
My uncle shoots Jaxon a frustrated look but finally nods reluctantly. “A gargoyle.”
“A gargoyle?” They can’t be serious. They absolutely, positively, cannot be serious. “Like the things on the sides of churches?”
“Yes.” Jaxon grins now, just a little, like he realizes how ridiculous all this is. “You’re a gar—”
I hold up a hand. “Please don’t say it again. The first two times were hard enough to hear. Just shhhh for a second.”
I turn and walk toward the back wall of Uncle Finn’s office. “I need a minute,” I tell the two of them. “Just a minute to…” Absorb it? Deny it? Cry about it? Scream?
Screaming sounds really good about now, but I’m pretty sure it’ll just freak out Jaxon and Uncle Finn more, so…
I breathe. I just need to breathe. Because I don’t have a clue what to say or do next.
I mean, there’s a side of me that wants to call them on the joke—so funny, ha-ha—but another, bigger part knows they aren’t lying. Not about this. Partly because neither my uncle nor Jaxon would do that to me and partly because there’s something deep inside me, something small and scared and tightly furled that just…let go the minute they said the word. Like it had known all along and was just waiting for me to notice.
For me to understand.
For me to believe.
So. Gargoyle. Okay. That’s not too bad, right? I mean, it could be worse. I shudder. The sword could have chopped off my head.
I take a deep breath, rest my forehead against the cool gray paint of my uncle’s office wall, and turn the word “gargoyle” over and over again in my head as I try to figure out how I feel about it.
Gargoyle. As in huge stone creature with wings and snarling fangs and…horns? Surreptitiously, I run a hand over my head, just to see if I’ve somehow grown horns and don’t know about it.
Turns out I haven’t. All I feel is my usual curly brown hair. Just as long, just as unruly, just as annoying as ever, but definitely no horns. Or fangs, I realize as I run my tongue over my front teeth. In fact, everything about me feels completely the same as it always has. Thank God.
“Hey.” Jaxon comes up behind me, and it’s his turn to rest a gentle hand on my back. “You know it’s going to be okay, right?”
Sure. Of course. Totally no big deal. I mean, gargoyles are all the rage, right? Somehow, I don’t think he’ll appreciate my sarcasm, so in the end I bite it back and simply nod.
“I’m serious,” he continues. “We’ll figure this out. And on the plus side, gargoyles are totally kick-ass.”
Absolutely. Giant, hulking pieces of stone. Totally kick-ass. Not.
I whisper, “I know.”
“You sure about that?” He scoots closer, ducking a little so that his face is really close to the side of mine. “Because you don’t look like you know. And you definitely don’t sound like it.”
He’s so close, I can feel his breath against my cheek, and for a few precious seconds I close my eyes and pretend it’s four months ago, when Jaxon and I were alone in his room, making plans and making out, thinking we finally had everything under control.
What a joke that was. I’ve never felt more out of control in my life, even compared to those first days after my parents died. At least then, I was still human…or at least I thought I was. Now, I’m a gargoyle, and I don’t have a clue what that even means, let alone how it happened. Or how I managed to lose nearly four months of my life encased in rock.
Why would I do that, anyway? I mean, I get why I changed to stone—I’m assuming some latent impulse deep inside me came forward in an effort to stop me from dying. Is it really so far-fetched, considering I recently learned my dad was a warlock? But why did I stay stone for so long? Why didn’t I come back to Jaxon the first chance I got?
I rack my brain, trying to come up with the answer, but there’s still nothing there but a blank and empty chasm where my memories should be.
It’s my turn to clench my fists, and as I do, my battered fingers start to throb. I glance down at them and wonder how I made such a mess of myself. It looks like I clawed my way through stone to get here. Then again, maybe I did. Or maybe I did something even worse. I don’t know. That’s the problem: I just don’t know. Anything.
I don’t know what I did for the last four months.
I don’t know how it was possible for me to change into a gargoyle—or how it was possible for me to change back into a human.
And, I realize with a dawning horror that chills my very soul, I don’t know the answer to the most important question of all.
I swing around to stare at my uncle. “What happened to Hudson?”
6
Vampire Roulette
Isn’t the Same
Without the Blood
Uncle Finn seems to age right in front of me, eyes going dim and shoulders slumping in what looks an awful lot like defeat. “We really don’t know,” he says. “One second, Hudson was trying to kill Jaxon, and the next—”
“He was gone. And so were you.” Jaxon’s hand tightens reflexively on mine.
“She wasn’t gone,” Uncle Finn corrects. “She was just out of reach for a while.”
Once again, Jaxon looks unimpressed with his summation of events, but he doesn’t argue. Instead, he just looks at me and asks, “Do you really not remember any of it?”
I shrug. “I really don’t.”
“That’s so strange.” My uncle shakes his head. “We brought in every expert we could find on gargoyles. Every single one of them had conflicting stories and advice, but none of them even hinted that when you finally made it back, you wouldn’t remember where you’d been. Or what you’d become.” My uncle’s voice is low and, I’m sure, meant to be soothing, but every word he says just makes me more nervous.