Page 97 of The Stone Secret
“No shit,” Dayn muttered.
“Whatever it is, this is a test,” Palia reminded us. “So it has to be something we might come across as guardians.”
“Well, that narrows it down,” Hamlin said dryly.
“Shut up,” Hawke said. “Listen.”
Over the past two weeks, we’d learned about shifters, vamps, graynites, grotesques, and a host of minor tulpa, like boogeymen, the men in hats, shadowmen, and sandmen. But we’d also learned about creatures I hadn’t known existed, like wraiths and ghouls. Levi had gone over the properties of each and how they could be bested. The information scrolled through my mind now.
Another clatter above broke my concentration.
“How long till sunset?” Shar asked.
“Two hours,” Palia said.
They expected us to fight the threats here in human formnotgoyle. Not that it mattered to me.
All I had was my talons if needed, but flight would have been a bonus to our team right now. “We keep moving and stay alert. We can’t do anything while the threat is above us. It’ll have to come down for us to deal with it.”
“No shit,” Dayn sneered.
“Shut your mouth, Lowther,” Curi growled.
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll break your face,” Hawke said before Curi could reply.
Dayn snapped his mouth closed, his jaw so tight I was sure he would grind his teeth to powder.
“What’s your name?” Hawke asked Derek.
“Derek, and this is my Cameron,” he said proudly.
“Yeah, I’ve heard.” Hawke dropped his gaze to me. “Impressive.”
His eyes were like chips of ice, his demeanor not much better. “You’re on a special team with Farnell?”
He blinked sharply as if surprised by my direct question. “Yes.”
“What’s it for?”
Now he looked mildly amused. “Private things.”
My scalp tightened, gut twisting in warning a moment before dark gray shapes leapt off the buildings and landed on the street ahead of us.
I’d seen these creatures before, hunched and taloned with wings that looked too small to take them into the air but that, through some mystical power, could carry them anyway.
Grotesque, once our allies, now our enemies, growled and snapped, pawing at the ground. I caught the glint of metal on their ankles. Cuffs of some kind. And in the middle of their chest was a contact point—a diamond-shaped metallic plate. It covered the area where the stone would be soft enough to break through, the spot where their hearts could be torn from their chests.
We had to strike them there to disable them. Or evade. Whichever worked.
“Grotesque…” Touron said softly. “They have grotesque?”
He looked pale, his eyes darker than usual. Shit, his brother had been killed by one of these creatures.
“I count ten on the ground and maybe seven above,” Curi said.
“Agreed,” Hawke replied.
