Page 87 of The Stone Curse
Derek clenched his teeth, then let out a drawn-out roar. His body expanded, rippling and morphing into something twice its size with claws, wings, and huge, curved horns. Chimeras were supposed to be a mishmash of different creatures, but this didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen.
Behind me, the mirror flared bright, then dimmed. “This is…is…this is…is…” A sharp cracking sound resounded, and the mirror shattered.
I twisted away, holding up my arm to shield myself from the shards shooting off its surface, stone skin activating, but my chimera stepped forward, one wing flaring out to shield me from the glass, leaving me with no need for my stone skin.
Soft clinks followed as the fragments hit the ground, and I slowly lowered my arm to look up into this new monster’s face. I’d seen pictures of demons in old graphic novels, and this thing…it looked just like that. Hooved with large muscle-rounded shoulders, it exhaled mist from its nostrils with each breath, but its eyes…its eyes were bright like diamonds.
Derek’s eyes.
“Derek?”
“Yes,” he said. “It is me, my Cameron.”
I reached out to touch his wing, leathery but smooth. “How…Does it hurt?”
“No. I feel…whole.” He lifted his huge head. “Something is wrong.”
The ground trembled a moment later, and a band wrapped around the top of my arm, squeezing painfully. “Ouch.” The lights began to flicker, and heat bloomed across my cheek as if…as if I’d been slapped. “Something’s wrong. Derek, something is?—”
I sat up gasping for breath with Adaline leaning over me. “Oh, thank the earth.”
The ground rumbled. Someone screamed.
Adaline’s head whipped toward the window. “Levi!”
I was back. On the floor. Awake. “What’s happening?” My gaze went to the window as something dark hurtled toward it, then smashed through, hitting the ground and sliding across the floor.
A goyle.
“Curi!” I scrambled up. “What the fuck is going on?”
Derek materialized by the window, back in his usual shadow form. “We’re under graynite attack!”
CHAPTER 41
“Three graynites,” Derek said. “More on the horizon. We have to go.”
I helped Curi to his feet, and he shook his head to clear it. “Fucking bastards.” His voice was a bestial rumble in goyle form. “We fight them. Kill them.” His tone deepened, body expanding.
Adaline grabbed my arm and pulled me back in time to avoid getting trampled on as Curi barreled forward, shifting into his chimera as he went—head morphing into a pantherine form, body leonine so that he was all muscle and bulk when he leapt out of the smashed window and into the night.
Adaline grabbed my shoulders. “This is bad. This is an ambush. They must know how vulnerable you are right now.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It takes several days for an elite to adjust to their chimera. Several days for full assimilation; until then, the chimera form is unpredictable. It takes and it drains. You’ll fight hard, but you’ll fall harder. You must stop your friends. Tell them to subdue their chimeras and get back inside here. I can put up a barrier with Levi’s help and hold it until the port reappears in fifteen minutes.”
Fifteen minutes didn’t sound long, but it would be an eternity when fighting off graynites. “I’m on it.”
She grabbed my arm. “Don’t let your chimera out. It’ll want to break free when surrounded by the graynites, but you must subdue it.”
But Derekwasmy chimera. “Derek, you’d best stay in here.”
“I’m not letting you go out there alone,” Derek said.
“You’ve got to. We can’t risk the chimera emerging.”
He clenched his jaw, clearly conflicted, but there was no time. “I’ve got this. Trust me.”
