Valor (A Greystone Novel) by Taylor Longford
Excerpt from Dare
Book Two in the Greystone Series
Prologue
My brother, Valor, will tell you that gargoyles are extremely patient. That might be true for him. Me, not so much. For eight hundred years we were trapped between the walls of an old house in England and those years crawled by for me.
When we came to life again in the twenty-first century, we were surprised to learn that gargoyles are almost universally considered ugly. And when we found out why people think gargoyles are ugly, we were pretty disgusted. Because our name and our heritage had been hijacked by our worst enemies, the harpies.
The word gargoyle comes from the French word for throat and our kind were called gargoyles because of the runes we wear tattooed on our necks. But the stone carvings that drain rainwater from buildings were also called gargoyles because they appeared to pour water from their throats. And it wasn't uncommon for harpies to hide on the walls of old buildings, pretending to be one of the manmade carvings. So over the centuries, the horrible creatures came to be known as gargoyles, while our kind died out and the human race forgot we ever existed.
Valor will also tell you it was Havoc's fault that we ended up stuck between those walls for eight hundred years but if you want to know the truth, I was to blame.
Back in our time, harpies hunted in gangs and singled out lone gargoyles for attack. As a survival strategy, we stuck together and traveled in packs. Safety in numbers, and all that. But one afternoon, my pack cleared me to travel across town so I could help a friend. A gargoyle can easily pass for a human with his wings wrapped around his chest, underneath his clothing. In my case, I'd lost my wings a few years earlier, and only my leather-clad spines crossed my upper body beneath my linen jerkin. My barbs were destroyed at the same time that I lost my wings, so any harpies in the area would have a hard time scenting the venom locked in my veins.
Like all gargoyles, I was born with a set of eight barbs—sharp claws that are hidden beneath the thick hackles on our knuckles. When we're threatened, our hackles pull back and expose inch-long poisonous spikes. The barbs aren't all that effective against harpies or even other gargoyles but they can be a game breaker when fighting humans or large animals. A few well-placed blows can turn our enemies to stone forever.
But since I had no barbs, the harpies couldn't easily track me down. They'd have to get right on top of me before they picked up my scent. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened.
The sun had just reached the town's ramparts as I jogged along the main road that cut across York. The streets were relatively deserted since it was the dinner hour, but up ahead a young lad stacked wood against a smithy wall. Ewan was the blacksmith's bonded boy. His master wasn't the nicest man in town and the boy didn't have an easy time of it so we helped out whenever we could. I stopped and gave him a hand with some of the larger pieces of wood.
I could sense the smith lurking inside the house like a force of evil. Unfortunately, his malevolent presence overloaded my radar and masked the arrival of a much more dangerous threat. As I carried another armful of wood from the yard behind the forge, a gang of harpies turned off the main road and ran right into me.
The townsfolk tolerated harpies but not very happily. The creatures were routinely blamed for the loss of livestock though it was hard to catch them red-handed since they hunted at night. Young shepherds who tried to drive the monsters away from their flocks generally disappeared with their sheep. And when a lone traveler went missing on the road outside of town, harpies were blamed for that as well.
Some humans thought they were terrible angels sent from god to punish man for his sins. Others argued that they were winged demons from Satan's bailiwick. But everyone agreed that they sucked. And that they were too big to argue with. These ones were draped in monks' robes, the deep cowls shadowing their faces. I cursed my luck. If it hadn't been for the blacksmith, I'd have sensed them long before I saw them. At such close range, the harpies knew immediately what I was.
I took off running, dodging through narrow alleys and clambering over low rooftops but it wasn't long before they had me trapped against the old Roman walls that surrounded the town. I still don't know how the pack found out I was in trouble. Maybe Ewan reached them and told them I'd been attacked by a gang of insanely tall monks. Or maybe my kin decided I'd been gone too long and they'd already set out to look for me. At any rate, they raced to my side.
Even with nine of us, we were outnumbered. I told the pack to clear off but they wouldn't listen. Valor told me to save my breath; he planned to stay and fight. Defiance and his brothers agreed. Two of them could have flown me out of there but my weight would have slowed them down, making all three of us easy prey. So in the end, my entire pack ended up grounded with me, unable to take to the air because I couldn't fly and they wouldn't leave me behind.
Most of the sun had fallen behind the town's walls when Havoc suggested we take on our stone forms; that way, the harpies couldn't harm us. But gargoyles can only change to stone—and back again—with the help of direct sunlight. We need the extra boost of energy we get from the sun's rays. That meant we only had a few seconds to make a decision before the sun dropped below the horizon.
Valor sent a troubled glance in my direction then shared a look with Victor and the others. Together, they reached a silent agreement; my cousins and brothers decided to make the change for my sake. Gargoyles are protective by nature. They couldn't abandon a cripple like me.
With Havoc leading the way, we raced into a stone croft built against the town's walls just as the afternoon's last rays of sunlight angled through the windows. One by one, Havoc and most of my cousins made the change. But Victor and Valor waited and made sure that I'd changed to stone before they did the same.
Thinking they had us cornered, the harpies rushed into the hut. They were good and truly pissed when they found we'd changed to stone. I have to admit it was funny to see the looks on their faces. There's nothing as entertaining as a harpy going ballistic. Their anger management is an epic fail.
We expected the harpies to take off after an hour or so of screeching and figured we could change back to our living forms in the morning. But before they left, the ugly creatures decided to teach us a lesson. They walled us in at the back of the croft, using heavy slabs of stone to block out the sun's light forever. Or almost forever.
And for almost as long, I felt like it was pretty much my fault.
Eight hundred years dragged by before we were freed. Fortunately, gargoyles have exceptional hearing so we were able to keep up with the times by eavesdropping on the talk around town, then later on by listening to the radio and, more recently, the television. A few months ago, we were unearthed by MacKenzie's stepfather, who's an international treasure-hunter of sorts. And when he found us between the walls of that old house in York, he packed us up in wooden crates and shipped them to his home in Colorado.
If MacKenzie Campbell hadn't been a curious lass, we might have spent several more months stuck in her dark garage, waiting for her stepdad to find buyers for us before we were eventually sold off and separated forever. Lucky for us, Mac opened the first box that was delivered to her place and found Valor inside. Normally, he'd have hidden the fact that he was a gargoyle from a human he didn't know, but a toolbox fell on MacKenzie and pinned her to the garage floor. Val had no choice but to help her. He tried to cover things up and hide the truth from her but our MacKenzie's no halfwit. She figured things out pretty quick.
A day after Valor was delivered to MacKenzie's home, Havoc and Reason arrived. I came in the next shipment along with Victor and Defiance. The last consignment containing Chaos, Courage and Force went missing somewhere between England and Colorado but MacKenzie contacted the shipping company every day, demanding news about the lost crates.
Let me say right now, we love everything about the twenty-first century. Especially the girls. Not too long after we landed in America, we met some of MacKenzie's friends. One of them
As the next few weeks passed by, I had a chance to spend more time with her. She even kissed me once. Okay, it was only after a game where the winner could claim a kiss from one of the losers—and her only other choice was Havoc—but after her kiss I began to hope she might actually like me.
Right when things were looking good between Mim and me, MacKenzie was attacked by a harpy. We thought we'd left the monsters behind us in the thirteenth century but evidently there are still a few around. It wouldn't have been all that surprising to find some lifeless old relics still attached to buildings in England, but we never thought we'd run into them in the United States. We hadn't expected them to turn up in museums or private collections.
That was a mistake.
While we were shopping in Denver one day, one of the monsters picked up our scent. She smashed through a large, plate glass window in a collector's mansion and followed us to our new home in the mountains. She captured Valor while he was in his stone form and came back to the house for MacKenzie. Val managed to kill the harpy with the help of MacKenzie's big wolfhound but Mac got a little beat up during the process and when Mim saw her injuries, she demanded an explanation.
We couldn't explain the harpy attack without telling Mim we were gargoyles. And we felt that the fewer people who knew about us, the better. To make a long story short, Mim thought we were responsible for MacKenzie's injuries.
That hurt.
I mean, I know humans don't have great instincts. I know they can't sense the good and bad in people like we can. But, really. How unperceptive can humans be? It would be impossible for one of us to harm MacKenzie. Our very nature commands that we protect the people we care about. We would have fricking died before we let anything happen to Mac or her friends.
As far as insults go, it was right up there with the worst modern curse you could think of. I can't even begin to tell you how much it hurt.
And I know something about pain.