Authors: Christine Warren
And that was in addition to the seven-foot headache who alternated between pacing her apartment and decorating the fire escape and roof of her building.
She’d given up worrying that someone would see him and cause trouble. As he’d pointed out on the night-that-was-not-to-be-mentioned, most humans would look at him and see the statue he had been, not the living creature of myth and legend. While Ella had learned over the course of her lessons that gargoyles could not cast spells the way he was teaching her, as a mage-in-training, to do, the magic that had created them offered them certain advantages, and the ability to go mostly unnoticed in the human world was one of those.
With a noisy exhalation—she was much too mature to consider blowing a raspberry at the world, no matter how much it sucked right now—Ella dragged her attention back to her computer screen and continued reading. A couple of paragraphs later her gaze caught on a juicy tidbit, and within minutes her fingers were flying over the keyboard and scrolling through links and pages with the speed of a hyped-up greyhound.
Hot damn! She was finally on to something.
A little over an hour later she picked up a pen and scribbled down a few lines on the back of a torn envelope. She was too excited to look for the notebook she had supposedly been using to organize her information, organization not being her strong suit.
Grabbing the envelope, she raced through the bedroom, scrambled through the open window with more urgency than grace, and dashed up the last level of fire stairs to the roof of the old building. She found Kees right where she’d expected him to be, crouched on the elevated roof edge, staring out into the night like an unblinking sentry in the darkness.
“Kees.”
Her voice remained quiet, but carried a low note of urgency that actually caught the Guardian’s attention. He turned to look at her, but his face remained expressionless. It always did these days.
Ella bit back a sigh. “I found something. There’s a man in Seattle, Washington. His name is Alan Parsons, and he’s the bunch-of-times-great-grandson of Josiah Jameson. The Internet doesn’t tell me if he or his parents and grandparents were Wardens, of course, but he’s the most direct descendant of any of those five men that I was able to find. I think he’s worth checking out.”
Kees rose to his feet and stepped away from the edge of the roof, his tail twitching restlessly behind him. “How far are we from Seattle?”
“Well, it’s like a two-and-a-half-, maybe three-hour drive,” she noted, wrinkling her nose, “but we have to cross the border. That usually adds a few minutes these days.”
“We should leave immediately.”
Ella raised an eyebrow. “Hold your horses, big guy. It’s not quite that easy. First of all, showing up on a stranger’s doorstep at—” She checked her watch. “—one o’clock in the morning is not normally the best way to endear yourself to him. Second, we can’t go until I have a day off, because the last thing I can manage right now is time off, not with the museum still buzzing over your disappearance. And lastly, we have to rent another car, and my bank account is not going to like that.”
Kees scowled. “You are worried about money? That is no problem. Once we make contact with the Guild, they will reimburse you for any expense.”
She goggled. “The Guild has money? I didn’t know the magic business paid well.”
“No organization remains alive and active for hundreds upon hundreds of years without funds. The notion that money makes the world go round is not a modern invention.”
“Huh, good to know. But that’s still not the big problem.”
“Then what is the problem?”
“The border.” When he continued to frown at her, Ella sighed. “Right, sometimes I forget you’ve missed some stuff about the modern world. To get to Seattle, which is in the State of Washington, we have to cross the Canada–U.S. border. That would be a bigger deal if the countries weren’t longtime allies, but it still requires a passport be shown at the entry point.
“Paperwork that proves what country you have citizenship with,” she explained when he remained silent.
“Do you not have this passport?”
“Of course I have a passport,” she said, pursing her lips. “But somehow I doubt you’ve got one stashed in that skirt of yours.”
Kees didn’t react to the taunt about his clothing, but he looked thoughtful. “So you believe I will not be allowed to cross the border unless I have one of these passports you speak of.”
“I know you won’t be allowed to.”
The gargoyle shrugged and started to walk toward the fire escape stairs. “Then I will just have to make certain these border officials do not see me cross.”
Ella glared at his back. “What? You think you have the ability to make yourself invisible while we drive into the U.S.?”
“Of course not. But I do think that I have wings. If I cannot go through the border, I will simply go over it.”
* * *
The gargoyle had no intention of listening to reason. He insisted that they could not afford to waste more time in reaching the possible Warden in Seattle. Since Ella had absolutely no notion of how a person went about obtaining a fake passport, she didn’t fight too hard on how he planned to get over the border, but she did fight him about almost everything else.
Kees originally proposed that he go to Seattle alone, just fly there immediately and return with whatever information he could gather before dawn. Ella called that idea idiotic. First she reminded him that the middle of the night was not the best time to ring a human’s doorbell, Warden or not, and second, she told him it was stupid to risk the sun rising before he made it back, since it increased his chances of being spotted by humans. As likely as the average person might be to chalk up seeing a huge gargoyle-shaped thing sitting on a roof to someone’s weird taste in statuary, it would be a lot more difficult for one to ignore seeing that same gargoyle flying through the sky on enormous bat wings. It just wasn’t worth the risk.
Besides, though Ella didn’t point this out, now that she’d invested so much time into this whole experience, she had absolutely no intention of being left behind.
Ella countered with an alternate proposal. Since the chances of a man deciding to move in the next twenty-four hours seemed small, the two of them would wait until tomorrow afternoon. She was already scheduled to have the next two days off, so she could spare the time. They would rent a car and begin the drive to Seattle with the intention of hitting the border shortly after dark. If they timed matters properly, Ella could stop a few miles north of the border in an unpopulated area and let Kees out of the car. He could then fly across the border and meet Ella, who would drive through the checkpoint normally. Once they rendezvoused in Washington, Kees would return to the car, and they would complete the drive to Parsons’s house together, arriving late, but still at a reasonable hour of the night.
And just to be sure Kees didn’t decide to forget waiting for her and fly straight to Parsons’s house without her, Ella made certain he didn’t catch so much as a glimpse of the man’s address. So there, Mr. Take-Charge-Alpha-Gargoyle-Man.
Kees agreed bad-naturedly, but for the first time in days, Ella went to bed with a sense of anticipation that actually outweighed the heaviness of her heart. Her bed might still be big and lonely and too filled with recent memories of the best sex of her life, but at least tonight she had something to look forward to that wasn’t seeing her Guardian’s grumpy, beloved face.
* * *
In the end, getting a few minutes in the car without Kees turned out to be a positive thing. First off, she didn’t have to worry about anyone questioning the guy’s species and thus winding up in Guantánamo Bay for the next eighty years; and second, the break allowed her to calm down after the steady buildup of irritation caused by the first forty minutes of the trip. Sure, Kees had been avoiding her for the past five days, but she didn’t know he would manage to continue that little feat while trapped inside a car with her. Talk about hidden talents; the man was full of them.
Well, he was full of something.
Ella passed through the Peace Arch border crossing without incident and continued south along I-5 to the designated meeting point at the rest area in Custer, just south of Blaine. By the time Kees emerged—in human form—from the tree-lined darkness to the west of the parking area, she had schooled herself to appear just as detached and remote as her traveling companion. It would serve him right.
They completed the rest of the trip in silence, Ella using the rental car’s built-in GPS to navigate around the unfamiliar city. Alan Parsons, it turned out, lived in an outlying suburb of a city called Newcastle, and Ella had to maneuver off the busy highway and onto I-90 to reach the smaller community.
By the time the computerized voice of the GPS advised her to turn onto Parsons’s street, Ella felt stiff and weary from the stress of driving. She’d done more of the miserable task in the week since she met Kees than she had in the last year, and she hated every second of it. Maybe next time he pestered her, she’d actually let him get behind the wheel.
As she slowed the car close to their destination, Ella risked a glance at her silent, brooding companion. “So. Do we have a plan?”
Kees actually looked at her for a change, though she wouldn’t call his expression exactly encouraging. More like, “dour.”
“Why would we need a plan? We meet this Warden and gather what information we can.”
Ella parked the car at the curb, across the street and about fifty yards down from their target address. Trees lined the road here, but she preferred not to pull into the man’s drive or park right out front. No other cars lined the street here, and she got the feeling that if she parked in front of a house, every neighbor in the area would be peering out their windows wondering what was going on. An audience was the last thing they needed.
“But we’re only hoping the guy is a Warden,” she said, stilling the engine. “They don’t exactly publish a roster on Facebook, you know. I can tell you his buttload-of-greats-granddad was a Warden, but that’s hardly conclusive proof that he’s one, too.”
“Then the best way to find out is to ask.” He stepped out of the car and slammed the door without another word.
“Wow, he’s a charmer,” Ella muttered under her breath, hurrying to follow. God only knew what he would do when he got to the guy’s house. She wouldn’t put it past him to just kick down the door and invite himself the hell inside.
Not that she could stop him, physically or magically, but she could at least keep a wary eye out for the cops.
His long strides ate up the distance from the curb to Alan Parsons’s front door. It was a little after nine thirty at this point, but the lights at the front of the house burned brightly, and Ella could see evidence of more glowing through and around the curtains on several windows. At least at this hour she could reasonably hope they weren’t about to drag some poor soul out of his comfy bed.
The house where Parsons lived couldn’t compete with Gregory Lascaux’s mountaintop estate, but Ella couldn’t immediately bring to mind a house that could. Versailles, maybe. With that said, the potential Warden appeared to live a very comfortable life.
The house occupied an enormous lot at the dead end of a street filled with other enormous lots. It rose two stories amid a semicircle of tall pines and leafy trees with the carefully manicured appearance of wealth. Judging by a quick once-over, the occupant of the building, which had to measure a minimum of five thousand square feet, wasn’t hurting for money. Maybe this Warden gig paid better than Ella had assumed.
A neat brick pathway curved gracefully from the sidewalk to the house’s front door. It seemed to demand better than the awkward scurry Ella had to use not to be left in Kees’s dust, but the gargoyle moved with the speed and determination of a bull toward a red cape. It was all she could do to keep up.
She actually found herself panting when they finally stepped onto the small front porch—more of a portico, really. She reached for Kees’s arm, hoping to stall him long enough to ask that he let her do the talking, but he’d already banged his big fist on the slate blue door.
Ella sighed and dropped her hand. “You realize there’s a doorbell, right?”
He ignored her.
The sound of movement inside the house distracted her, pulling her attention away from the uncooperative gargoyle. She could hear footsteps pause on the other side of the entry, and a moment passed before the knob began a slow turn.
Ella fixed a smile on her face, aiming for harmless and pleasant. Maybe it would counteract Kees’s look of menace and power.
The door opened, and a man stood in the entry. Of average height and build, he possessed a thick head of gray hair and bright blue eyes framed by
GQ
-fashionable glasses. He looked to be in his late sixties, still fit but beginning to show the signs of his age in his softening jawline and liver-spotted hands.
“Can I help you?” he asked, his voice calm and polite.
Giving herself a little test, Ella allowed her vision to blur and then refocus on an entirely different level. Her heart jumped and raced when the bright blue-white of strong magical wards appeared around the door of the home.
She turned to tell Kees, which was why she witnessed the split second of power and shimmer that accompanied not a shift, but a momentary glimpse of the true shape behind his human disguise.
Ella heard the old man gasp and quickly glanced his way, hoping she hadn’t misjudged him. She opened her mouth, reassurances dancing on the tip of her tongue, but she never spoke them. She didn’t get the chance.
The man closed his eyes and seemed to sag in the open doorway. “You’ve come,” he nearly sobbed, the words filled with relief and joy and fear and frustration. “Thank the Fates. You’ve finally come.”
Chapter Ten
Fifteen minutes later, Ella found herself seated at a rustic wooden table in an enormous gourmet kitchen with her hands curled gratefully around a mug of steaming English tea. Alan Parsons, she had discovered, had been born in Kent, southeast of London. And yes, he was a Warden. For what that was now worth.