Page 18 of Hearts of Stone

I approached a large porcelain vessel that sat over the mantlepiece, ready to touch it before jerking my fingers back.It’s your vase,I told myself, as if that would make it more real. Butif it was mine, I didn’t want to accidentally break it, so I pulled my hand away, but as I did, I saw that it was not the only thing sitting on the shelf above the fireplace. A small round pebble sat there.

Have you ever seen perfectly smooth rocks on the beach or by a riverside and just had to pick them up? My thumb rubbed against the smooth surface, feeling the slight pitting. It felt curiously heavy and… warm, like someone had just been running a fire in this room, though all evidence said otherwise.

“What’s that?” Daniel appeared at my shoulder and peered at the stone. My fingers went to close around it, as if to shield it from his gaze, and why would I do that? “All this fancy shit and you pick up a pebble?” He went to pluck it from my grip, but I held it hard. “Is that your liddle pet rock?” He pulled a face, speaking to me like I was a small child. “Do you want me to draw a cute liddle face on with texta?”

“No.” He was being an idiot, I was being weird, but my reply came out so definitely. I shoved the rock into my pocket, feeling the loss of it as soon as I did and then made for the door. “C’mon, let’s see some of the other rooms.

But of course, Daniel couldn’t let it go.

“Are you gonna get all weird and eccentric now that you’re rich?” he asked me as we strolled down the hall. “Because if you start bottling your own urine, I’m out, just so you know.”

He burbled something else about a Howard Hughes documentary he’d seen and right when I was about to point out that the man obviously suffered from an extreme case of OCD, we heard a crash. Our eyes jerked up.

“What was—?” I started to ask.

“Let’s find out!” Danny grabbed my arm and pulled me towards another set of stairs.

I’d always thought that if Danny was a character in a horror movie, he’d be that idiot that blundered into the darkened roomor creepy basement, easy pickings for the monster to tear apart. And I was about to have my theory proven correct. He hauled me upstairs, and we found ourselves not on yet another floor of rooms, but heading toward the tall central tower I’d noticed when we’d arrived last night. It was situated in the middle of the house and as we walked up the spiral staircase inside it, I saw glimpses of the grounds below, the sunlight, the bright green grass, the pretty flowers going someway to reassuring me that we weren’t walking towards our imminent doom. Then Daniel flung a small door open.

“Holy crap!”

I stumbled out after him and that’s when I saw what he meant.

We were on the massive roof of the house. A gangway had been built along the top, ringed by a wrought iron fence and while the breeze whipped at my hair up here, it wasn’t what drew us further. We’d seen their shadowy shapes before the night we came for the ghost tour, but that was just a hint of what was to come. Massive gargoyles sat on the roof, glaring down at the grounds below, which should’ve kept us back, but instead Daniel hoisted himself over the fence.

“Danny!” I yelped.

“OK, just hear me out.” He straddled the broad back of the nearest gargoyle and I wondered why that felt wrong as well as bloody dangerous. “But did you get a weird feeling in your private parts as a kid, when you watched Disney’sGargoyles?” He caressed the cheek of the stone sculpture. “Because I did.” He ran his hands over the chest of the beast. “Massive, super strong, ready to do anything to protect me. I wanted to be Detective Maza so freaking bad.”

“I really don’t want to have to have real detectives here investigating why you became a bloody smear on the concretebelow,” I ground out between gritted teeth. “Get your arse over that fence.”

“Honestly, this is my only chance to get my hands on something this big,” he said, stroking the gargoyle’s arms. “Because this boy is jacked.”

“Danny, for fuck’s sake!”

“Like could you imagine? Riding something this big up into the sky.” He held out his arms as he wrapped his thighs around the beast’s waist, as if he was on the prow of the Titanic or something. “Then riding him a whole other way.”

My friend was being a bloody idiot, again. He was the kind of person you had to tug out of the path of dangerous animals, because otherwise he’d try to go and pat them. But as his hips flexed in a sinuous movement, my mind stuttered between last night and now. An ache deep inside me, left by my dream, connected to a cruel smile and a cold, hard body. The scream that had built up inside me last night was matched by another right now, and they twined around each other in a weird mix of arousal and panic, until I heard Danny let out a sharp yip of fear and I focused back on him.

“Jesus, Danny!”

I was forced to lunge across the fence, the sharp points pressing hard into my abdomen, as I grabbed the back of his shirt, because the bloody idiot had slipped. Not far, but enough to put a scare into both him and me. I hauled him backwards, listening to the sound of the seams groaning.

And that of pebbles showering the concrete below.

It wasn’t until I had my friend over the fence and standing shaking beside me, both of us sucking in breaths, that I was able to look more closely at them.

“Fuck!” I punched him in the arm. “Fuck, Danny, what if you fell off the roof?”

“Live fast, die young, leave a pretty corpse?” he said, smiling weakly.

“Pretty?” I stared over the edge of the house and felt a dizzying sway of vertigo, forcing me back. “You wouldn’t be real pretty after being smashed to a million pieces. We’re going inside, somewhere with four walls and—”

“Looks like your pet rock has some friends.”

He crouched down and pushed his fingers through the railing, scraping a pebble towards him before showing it to me. It was the same bluish grey rock, that same slightly pitted texture, though the warmth could be explained by the sun overheard. I tossed it around and around in my hand and then shoved it in my pocket.

“If we go inside now, I’ll let you draw faces on them,” I said.

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