Page 73 of Hearts of Stone

Then my focus shifted back to my beautiful mate.

“Jade, you need to come away now,” Graven said, grabbing her arm, but she planted her feet defiantly. She was a queen amongst women, she would not bow to anyone.

“Jade, is it?” I rolled that name around in my mind, the word becoming more beautiful by the second. She nodded sharply. “I am Wulfstan,” I told her in my gentlest tones, pain clogging my throat. “And your mate is correct.”

It had to be why Graven walked again. A new mistress rather than a master, she awakened only the gargoyles that belonged to her, not all of them, because a gargoyle wouldn’t grab the arm of his mistress, but he might his fated mate’s. I’d screamed the night I was awoken, coming back to life with a pain that still reverberated through me, but it paled into insignificance in comparison to the pain I felt now.

“You should go.” The words came out far more gruffly than I intended and when she jerked back as if slapped, my resolve faltered. I sucked in a breath, an apology on my tongue, ready to be said, but instead I frowned. “There’s nothing here for you, lass, nothing but evil.”

“I will when you tell me who you are,” she said. I went to argue, but the command in her voice, in her gaze, it had my mouth opening anyway. “Tell me why you’re here, why you’re locked up in this place. Tell me why you scream. Then I’ll go.”

I didn’t want to. I knew why Graven still kept hold of her arm, because I would’ve done the same if our positions were reversed. Z Ward was a cesspool of muck that she should never get close enough to or it would taint her, but I could see that it was in her nature to persist in poking it with her toe.

“Just that?” I bargained, unable to keep the hope from my voice. I wanted more, so much more, but I refused to even entertain the idea. “Just that and you’ll go with Draven afterwards?”

“Just that,” she agreed and that’s when she pushed her hand through the gap in the gates.

It was so tiny, little more than a child’s hand and that had me drawing mine back. I’d hurt her if I touched her; I’d stain her with my muck. But I couldn’t deny the offer even as I heard a low hiss from each one of my stone brothers as I reached slowly, so slowly out to take it. I gripped her hand, feeling the sizzle of her power against my skin, before jerking it back.

“The deal is done…” My mate, I said silently. “Mistress.”

“Get Harry,” she said, looking behind her. “Open the gates.”

“Oh my god, yesss!” said a man with hair the colour of the sky, clapping his hands.

“No!” Seneca shoved himself forward, wings fluttering before catching himself. We didn’t order our fated mates around ever and Carrick looked like he was about to remind the boy of just that. “I’m sorry, Jade, but it isn’t safe…” He tossed a look behind him. “You don’t want to go in there, not ever.”

“Too late,” she said, crossing her arms. “I’ve already been inside the place on a ghost tour and lived to tell the tale. We need to find Harry—”

“Right here, love.”

The caretaker came forward and when I saw the big iron ring of keys, my muscles tensed and when I heard the clang of one of them being put into the lock, I took several involuntary steps backwards.

“No…” I said, over and over. “No, no, no…”

Because it wasn’t Harry’s hands I saw as he opened the gates, nor his voice I heard, but Luther’s.

“Hello, my splendid beast.” I saw his knife blade of a smile flash inside my mind. “What mayhem shall we wreak tonight?”

Chapter 42

Jade

What the hell…? My mind struggled to put two and two together. Or make that fifty-five plus two hundred and sixty-three thousand together. I’d woken from a dream, come running out, then heard someone screaming, only to find… My mind stuttered as I struggled to take in the dimensions of the massive gargoyle. Wulfstan, I corrected myself. As Harry moved forward, opening the gate, my eyes went up, up, up, trying to take all of the gargoyle in. He was just as massive as I remembered from when I saw him on the ghost tour.

When I’d stepped into the curl of his wings.

Something inside me had known that was the right thing to do, some hitherto undiscovered instinct rising, but when Harry had unlocked the gate and I’d walked through, Wulfstan jerked back. Back into the shadows, his eyes gleaming in the darkness, that handsome face twisted into a grimace.

One I was somehow familiar with.

But when I moved forward again towards this strange creature, wanting his answers, he cringed back once more.

“No…” I saw his lips move without a sound, only making out what he was saying after he’d made the word out again. “No, no, no…”

It was the sound a child might make, pleading with a cruel parent, or what a broken down man might say to his assailant. But whatever Wulfstan saw, it wasn’t us. His eyes were wide open, staring into a space that nothing occupied, until I started to believe the ghost stories told about this place. It wasn’t haunted by the gargoyles, but by something else. But the tone of the next declaration Wulfstan made had the others pushed closer.

“No!” The massive gargoyle rushed forward then, fangs bared, claws outstretched, only for Graven and the others to leap forward, so that when Wulfstan struck, it was them, not me, that he hit.

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