“Stone. You turned to stone, Grace, right the fuck in front of me,” Jaxon says. “And you’ve been stone every single one of the last one hundred and twenty-one days.”
“What do you mean by ‘stone’ exactly?” I ask again, still trying to get my head around something that sounds impossible.
“I mean, your entire body was made completely of stone,” my uncle answers.
“Like I turned into a statue? That kind of stone?”
“Not a statue,” my uncle quickly reassures me, even as he eyes me warily, like he’s trying to decide how much more information I can take. Which a part of me can understand, even as it annoys the hell out of me.
“Please just tell me,” I finally say. “Believe me, it’s worse to be trapped in my head trying to figure this out than to just know. So if I wasn’t a statue, I was…what?” I cast my mind around for some ideas, any ideas, but nothing comes.
And still my uncle hesitates, which makes me think that whatever the answer is, it’s really, really bad.
“A gargoyle, Grace.” Jaxon is the one who finally tells me the truth, just like always. “You’re a gargoyle.”
“A gargoyle?” I can’t keep the incredulity from my voice.
My uncle shoots Jaxon a frustrated look but finally nods reluctantly. “A gargoyle.”
“A gargoyle?” They can’t be serious. They absolutely, positively, cannot be serious. “Like the things on the sides of churches?”
“Yes.” Jaxon grins now, just a little, like he realizes how ridiculous all this is. “You’re a gar—”
I hold up a hand. “Please don’t say it again. The first two times were hard enough to hear. Just shhhh for a second.”
I turn and walk toward the back wall of Uncle Finn’s office. “I need a minute,” I tell the two of them. “Just a minute to…” Absorb it? Deny it? Cry about it? Scream?
Screaming sounds really good about now, but I’m pretty sure it’ll just freak out Jaxon and Uncle Finn more, so…
I breathe. I just need to breathe. Because I don’t have a clue what to say or do next.
I mean, there’s a side of me that wants to call them on the joke—so funny, ha-ha—but another, bigger part knows they aren’t lying. Not about this. Partly because neither my uncle nor Jaxon would do that to me and partly because there’s something deep inside me, something small and scared and tightly furled that just…let go the minute they said the word. Like it had known all along and was just waiting for me to notice.
For me to understand.
For me to believe.
So. Gargoyle. Okay. That’s not too bad, right? I mean, it could be worse. I shudder. The sword could have chopped off my head.
I take a deep breath, rest my forehead against the cool gray paint of my uncle’s office wall, and turn the word “gargoyle” over and over again in my head as I try to figure out how I feel about it.
Gargoyle. As in huge stone creature with wings and snarling fangs and…horns? Surreptitiously, I run a hand over my head, just to see if I’ve somehow grown horns and don’t know about it.
Turns out I haven’t. All I feel is my usual curly brown hair. Just as long, just as unruly, just as annoying as ever, but definitely no horns. Or fangs, I realize as I run my tongue over my front teeth. In fact, everything about me feels completely the same as it always has. Thank God.
“Hey.” Jaxon comes up behind me, and it’s his turn to rest a gentle hand on my back. “You know it’s going to be okay, right?”
Sure. Of course. Totally no big deal. I mean, gargoyles are all the rage, right? Somehow, I don’t think he’ll appreciate my sarcasm, so in the end I bite it back and simply nod.
“I’m serious,” he continues. “We’ll figure this out. And on the plus side, gargoyles are totally kick-ass.”
Absolutely. Giant, hulking pieces of stone. Totally kick-ass. Not.
I whisper, “I know.”
“You sure about that?” He scoots closer, ducking a little so that his face is really close to the side of mine. “Because you don’t look like you know. And you definitely don’t sound like it.”
He’s so close, I can feel his breath against my cheek, and for a few precious seconds I close my eyes and pretend it’s four months ago, when Jaxon and I were alone in his room, making plans and making out, thinking we finally had everything under control.
What a joke that was. I’ve never felt more out of control in my life, even compared to those first days after my parents died. At least then, I was still human…or at least I thought I was. Now, I’m a gargoyle, and I don’t have a clue what that even means, let alone how it happened. Or how I managed to lose nearly four months of my life encased in rock.