Page 135 of The Stone Secret
He gulped it down. “Thank you. Oh…” He pressed his fist to the wound at his chest. “He thought I was dead. I faked…but then…the blood loss. I slowed it down, but…” He groaned again.
“You’re healing?” I wanted to pull his hand away to examine the wounds.
“Hey!” Waxen waved his hands in the air, turning this way and that. “Hey, we need to stop the test.”
“He’s communicating with the cameras,” Hawke said.
“They won’t get here in time,” Willowman said. “We’re two hundred miles south of the academy. Prasan shut down the warp to this place. I need to open it again.”
He was too weak, though. “You’re hurt.”
His mouth flattened. “One more of your tinctures should do the trick.”
I gave him another vial.
“We have incoming!” someone shouted.
A dark mass was on the horizon, getting larger by the minute.
“Help me up!” Willowman said. “We don’t have much time.” He grabbed my shoulders. “This is about you. He wants you dead, and he doesn’t care who he takes down with you.”
I wanted to ask why. Why would Prasan want me dead? But the threat was getting closer. “What is it? What’s coming?”
“Graynites!” Hawke bellowed.
“Keep her safe!” Willowman shoved me at Curi and Touron, then broke into a loping jog toward the tree line.
I didn’t need to ask why he wasn’t taking me with him. I was a target, and having me with him would make him one too, making it impossible to fix the warp.
“They’re after Cameron!” Palia said.
“Close in!” Curi ordered.
The gargoyles closed in around me, hiding me with their huge frames.
“Wait!” Palia said. “I have an idea to buy us some time.”
“Spill it,” Touron said. “These fuckers are coming in fast.”
Palia shifted to her human form. “They can’t possibly know what Cameron looks like, right?” Murmurs of assent echoed around me. “But they might know she can’t shift. So Ginia, Shar, and I, we need to shift to human form.”
“They won’t know which female to target,” Shar said. “Genius.”
But they’d target them all. “No. I won’t have you put yourself at risk like that.”
“If you die, we’re all fucked,” Hawke growled. “Protect the females!”
I was shoved into a circle of male gargoyles with Shar and the twins.
They were defenseless—no weapons, no partial shift.
I handed them each a dagger.
The graynites landed, and the ground shook with the impact. The goyle cadets closed ranks, creating a barrier between us and them, but I caught a glimpse anyway, and my heart dropped into my stomach.
The fuckers were huge—uglier and meaner-looking than in the pictures Mirrowind had shown us. Spikes jutted up from their backs and shoulders, and their chins were pointed, eyes as black as night fixed on us.
Moonlight rippled over their gray, bumpy skin, highlighting every lethal, muscular dip and plane. They weren’t hunched over like in the pictures we’d been shown. They stood tall, broad, and thick-waisted with lashing barbed tails and powerful thighs. I had no doubt that any one of them could crush me without any effort at all.
