Heart of Stone (16 page)

Clearly something had gone on that Ella wasn’t aware of, because this was not how she’d been expecting things to go between them this morning. Awkwardness she could have dealt with. Hell, everyone felt a little off the first time they woke up next to a new person, but she did not appreciate being treated like a mistake.

A mistake. That was exactly how Kees was looking at her, and Ella felt her spine stiffen in response. Gathering up the resulting anger made it easier to ignore the hurt.

And there was a lot of hurt.

“Don’t do me any favors,” she bit out, squaring her shoulders and meeting him glare for glare. “Frankly, I’m not sure I’m up for any lessons at the moment. Particularly not if you’re teaching them.”

“We don’t have a choice.” His words stopped her as she made to turn back to the bathroom. Right now, she wanted to slam the door and get a bit of space to regroup, but Kees didn’t appear inclined to cooperate. “It doesn’t matter what either of us would prefer. Your magic is out of control, and that makes you vulnerable. The
nocturnis
have clearly made Wardens a target of attack for whatever reason, but we can’t assume that they wouldn’t also go after latent talents like you. You need to learn control, so that you can then learn to defend.”

Ella gritted her teeth. “Trust me, big guy, if I weren’t in control of my magic, you wouldn’t still be standing. Right now, I wouldn’t let you teach me to finger paint, much less cast spells or some shit. I think a better idea would be for you to get the hell out of my apartment and come back about half past kiss-my-ass, okay?”

He ignored her. “Finish dressing. I will wait in the other room.”

“Yeah, well, you can wait until hell freezes over.”

Ella swept around and stalked back into the bathroom, slamming the door hard behind her. No sound from Kees seeped through from the other side.

Sagging against the wooden panels, Ella let herself sink to the floor. What the hell had just happened? she asked herself, drawing her knees up to her chest and cupping her head in her hands. How the hell had they gone from lovers to opposing sides in a new cold war without her even being conscious for the opening skirmish?

Sometime while she slept, a bug of gigantic proportions had crawled up Kees Livingston’s ass. (Yeah, don’t think she’d forgotten about that little pun of his, but him having a last name—even one as obvious as that—made being mad at him a lot more comfortable. It was easier to mentally yell at someone with two names than with just one. Better scansion.) Ella really couldn’t think of a better explanation. After all, the last time they’d interacted with each other, she’d been too busy coming to somehow piss him off. And considering that he’d made her do it three times, somehow she didn’t think her orgasms were the root of his issues.

And boy, did that gargoyle have ’sues. Big floppy clown ’sues, as a matter of fact, but that didn’t give him the right to take those out on Ella. She was the only one helping him at the moment. The least he could do was treat her with a little human decency.

Of course, Kees wasn’t human, so what would he know about that? Maybe gargoyle decency was an entirely different sort of thing. Or maybe gargoyles didn’t have any decency to begin with.

She wanted to stick with that explanation, just to make it easier to hate the big, winged jerk, but she couldn’t do it. Kees had proved to be remarkably decent in the short—ridiculously short, considering what they’d done last night—time that she’d known him. He’d never hurt her, he’d defended her, tried to protect her from the police, and shown her appreciation for the help she’d given him, even if his impatience simmered at the lack of immediate answers to all his questions.

No, Kees was a decent guy, for a gargoyle.

Sighing, Ella pushed to her feet and reached for the hair dryer. Sitting on the bathroom floor brooding wasn’t going to get her anywhere. Whatever Kees’s problem was, she couldn’t figure it out from behind a closed door. For that, she’d need to be with him.

Which, on the bright side, would also give her the opportunity to gift him with a good, solid kick to the nuts, if he continued to act like an asshole.

Feeling the tiniest bit better, Ella turned on the noisy machine and set about preparing for the day. Whatever it turned out to hold, she would deal with it, even if that meant voluntarily taking instructions from the grumpy, bug-up-his-ass gargoyle in the other room. On top of everything else, Ella was just too damned proud to hide away just because the jerk had hurt her feelings. Oh, no, she was way better than that.

When she stepped out of the bedroom fifteen minutes later, she had her hair pulled back in a loose braid and her armor on, in the form of comfortable black yoga pants and a slim-fitting T-shirt in soft pink. She didn’t see any reason to dress up for magic lessons, and the yoga pants gave her lots of freedom of movement.

You know, for ball-kicking.

Drawing back her shoulders, she spoke clearly and without expression. “I’m ready.”

Kees looked up from where he’d been moving her furniture out of the center of the room and nodded. His face remained carved in harsh lines, but Ella ignored it. Let him enjoy his bad mood. She had better things to do than worry about him.

“Fine. Come here and sit.”

He pointed to a spot on the carpet, roughly in the center of the room. Ella walked forward and sank to the floor, folding her legs in front of her tailor-fashion.

“So, what now?” she asked flatly.

“Now we get to work.”

*   *   *

Two hours later, Ella appreciated why Kees called it work. A fine sheen of sweat covered her forehead, and she felt as if she’d just run a half marathon in really old sneakers.

The first thing he made her do was open the door, and frankly, it had been the hardest. She still cringed at the memories, expecting to lose all control and hear the screaming and the grinding and the explosive crash of metal on metal. She knew Kees must have seen her expression, but he said nothing, only told her to let the magic through until she gave in and allowed it to escape.

It rushed through her with force and momentum just as it had the other night when she tried to use it to drive away the monster at the museum, but just like last time, Kees stood firm and let the power flow around him. He might actually have been made of stone, standing like a boulder in the path of a rushing river. He remained solid and untouched by the current.

That helped to reassure Ella. For several minutes, he instructed her to do nothing, to just let the magic go and give up trying to hold it back. Keeping it all pent up just made it harder to handle, he told her, and she found that his words almost made sense. For instance, the flood didn’t last as long this time as it had the other night, when it had been years and years since she allowed much of the energy to escape. This time, it burst out at first, but then settled into a strong, steady but bearable stream.

Before the power could begin to thin and drain her as it had the last time, Kees’s voice cut through the electric hum and told her to ground the magic. She didn’t understand what he meant at first, but he talked her through it, his voice remarkably patient if still devoid of any emotion. He told her to picture her spine growing downward like the root of a great tree. He told her how it sank through the floor, through the building beneath her until it tapped into the rock and soil below.

His voice guided her as she imagined the root branching, spreading, burrowing through the earth until she felt truly anchored, more settled than she’d ever been in her life. It was glorious.

Ella could feel the power of the earth all around her. It all but vibrated with untapped energy of life. The potential in it shook her. Here, she realized, was a natural resource she’d never know existed, more infinite than any water or mineral known to man. Magic, she now knew, was what really powered the earth.

She gasped softly as she learned to hear the power, like a sweet song sung by a billion voices.

“That’s the Source.” She heard Kees’s voice, a low rumble that somehow provided the perfect bass note to the music filling her soul. “You can always draw on the Source for power, but right now you’re going to give power back. You have too much built up inside you, and it’s time to restore the balance.”

Ella could think of nothing she wanted more.

She listened intently and followed his instructions to the letter. Holding herself still, she just waited, listening to the earth’s song and feeling her own magic flowing through her. Slowly, she felt understanding flower, felt the rhythms whispering to her, and when Kees spoke again, she understood instinctively how to follow his commands.

Carefully, she reached out to gather the magic to her, not so much interrupting the flow as redirecting it. Rather than overwhelming her, this time the magic enveloped her and started to sing its own song. It shifted and formed until she could perceive it with her artist’s eye, now perceiving the layers and layers of color in the stream that had previously appeared an even bluish white. Now she could see red and orange and yellow and green and purple and brown and every color she could imagine all twining and blending together in masterful brushstrokes of power.

She wanted to weep at the beauty of it.

Instead, she followed Kees’s instructions, forming the magic to her will and directing it to the center of her, to the root she now had planted deep in the earth. The magic cooperated eagerly, feeling joyous as it anticipated returning to the Source of everything. Ella felt a sense of joy herself, knowing that for the first time, she could nourish the earth that had nourished mankind for so many hundreds of thousands of years.

When the stream of magic inside her ebbed, the last trickles sliding down into the earth, Ella realized she didn’t feel drained, but exhilarated. Somehow she knew that with her newfound connection to the earth, she could call upon the magic at any time and it would answer, because the magic was part of her.

God, she felt like dancing for joy.

“Open your eyes,” Kees said.

Ella obeyed and took a second to focus. Kees sat across from her, crouched as if on his pedestal, which considering his tail was probably the most comfortable position for him. It took her a minute to realize that he was glowing, and another minute to realize that the glow wasn’t actually coming from him. It encompassed the entire room, a warm white light sparkling with all the colors Ella had just seen. The beauty of it made her smile in wonder.

“What do you see?”

She described the radiance of the light covering almost every surface of her apartment, floor to ceiling, end to end, and Kees nodded.

“Good,” he grunted. “That’s what you’re supposed to see. All of that is magic that’s been leaking out of you for years. You might think you’ve been in control because it didn’t escape in a huge rush most of the time, but it has been escaping. It had to, or you would have exploded. There’s only so much power a human can contain at any one time without going insane. You’ve been lucky so far, but luck will last only so long. Now you have to learn to be good. Control the magic, or eventually it will take control of you.”

Ella nodded, her smile fading until she faced him with a look of pure determination. “Okay. So what do I need to learn?”

“Everything.”

Chapter Nine

From that moment on, Ella spent every spare second learning to control and use her magic. She practiced for hours a day, coming home from the museum and heading right into her training until she didn’t even have to think to ground herself, and she could call the magic forth as easily as she could sink it into the earth.

Gradually, Kees changed the focus of her lessons from simply learning to control the magic and see it in the space around her, to manipulating it into actual spells. Too bad he seemed so determined to stick with defensive magic to start with, because she had an intense desire to learn how to change him into a banana slug.

He hadn’t touched her in the four days since their one night together. Most of the time, he went out of his way not to look at her, and Ella had run the gauntlet of emotion from anger to hurt to confusion and back to anger. Usually, thinking about the dumb-ass gargoyle made her blood boil, but that didn’t make it any easier to ignore the way he turned her on just by existing, or the way he could make her laugh out of nowhere with one jab of his dry, sly wit. It would be so much easier if she could just settle into a nice consistent hate-on, but no—Kees had to go ruin it by being … Kees.

Ella hadn’t repeated her attempts to get the gargoyle to acknowledge his feelings, or the fact that he had feelings. Frankly, she was no longer certain he did. He treated her like a piece of furniture, or maybe more like a valuable vase, or something. He took care not to hurt her, physically, but he spent absolutely no time or attention on her that wasn’t required by their daily lessons.

Well, okay, that wasn’t quite true. He did exert himself enough to ask her each day how her search for the descendants of the Wardens he had named for her was going. Unfortunately, she hadn’t found much worth telling him.

As it turned out, two of the five men—all the Wardens Kees named had been male, and she was starting to detect a certain amount of sexism among the Guardians and their ancient Guild, which she should address later, if she ever became a member—had never had children at all. Of the other three, one had fathered a single son, but another had clearly had too much time of his hands, because the records Ella found listed eight sons, five daughters, and a total of five wives during his lifetime. Busy little beaver.

The fifth name was the one currently giving Ella fits. She’d uncovered the names of three daughters of a Warden called Josiah Jameson, who had lived in Brighton in the south of England during Kees’s escapade of 1703. Unfortunately, the parish records of the time had not all been uploaded onto the Internet, and what information she managed to dig up offered a far from complete picture of the Jameson family. Add to that the fact that a woman’s name changed when she married, and changed again if she was widowed or divorced and subsequently remarried, and the hours spent poring over Web pages had given Ella more than one vicious headache.