The Warrior King (Inferno Rising) by Owen, Abigail (online e book reading txt) 📗

but she hurried to her feet and put a hand on his forearm. Again. This touching-him business needed to stop, or he’d be compelled to return the favor. A betrayal of the man they should be focused on finding.

He went to shake her hand off only to find she wasn’t restraining him but imploring. “Whatever happens next, do not attack, do not fight. Please?”

Attack? The goat wasn’t what was coming earlier? Years of training and instinct had him tensing, ready to fight. “You need to tell me what the fuck is going on.”

Her reticence was turning into a hazard he wasn’t sure he could afford. Her need to protect others with her silence or her help, no matter the cost to her, could also cost him.

She gave him a little shake he’d lay odds she never would have dared before today. “Promise me,” she insisted.

Vincent heaved a sigh.

Samael gazed into Meira’s eyes, which were already starting to darken around the edges, making the whiter centers appear to glow slightly. Her hand did not tremble. Neither did her voice.

She was not afraid.

Samael frowned as realization penetrated his frustration. She was protecting someone. Before he could ask, a large creature burst into the room through the window and grabbed Meira by the shoulders, hefting her off the ground as it flew her across the room.

Samael lurched forward, but he only got a few steps before Meira shook her head at him and he pulled up sharply, despite his dragon going wild inside him. Instinct had taken over, and it took him a full, painful minute to calm the rage. Hands still in hard fists, he finally managed to focus enough to get a closer look at the creature—the back of a winged man, one made of gray stone.

Literally stone. Gargoyle.

He’d heard of them, of course, but he’d never seen one in the flesh, so to speak. Why did Meira bring them to a creature notoriously shy and reportedly of a nasty disposition?

The creature set down, folding his wings behind him with the sound like a stone and pestle, rock grinding on smoother rock.

Vincent gave a happy little bleat and started to prance over, but one look from the creature and he stopped, cocking his head like a dog.

“You brought a stranger to my house?” In the same way dragons sounded of smoke and fire when riled, the gargoyle’s voice sounded like gravel and sand.

Meira grasped the creature’s wrists, less to pry his grip away and more to beseech the thing. At least Samael hoped that was the case. “I’m so sorry, but I had no choice. He’s my bodyguard, Carrick. I need him.”

The word “need” forming on her lips, when talking of him, sent a fire through Samael’s veins. Inappropriate, for too many reasons to count. He shoved it back down deep, his dragon growling low. A sound Samael couldn’t hold on to as it came up his own throat.

The creature didn’t move, and Samael couldn’t see his face. “Something happened?” it asked Meira, ignoring him.

Meira nodded, then her lips twisted. “Do you…mind changing forms?”

Was she afraid of this Carrick in this form? Samael took a step forward, but the gargoyle turned his head to the side, almost owl-like in the movement, eyeing him sideways. Samael stopped, holding up both hands in a gesture of temporary surrender.

The gargoyle had yet to be violent—its grabbing Meira that way clearly a means to protect her from a potential threat. She trusted it, though with her soft heart, maybe trusting her instincts wasn’t his best move. Still, Samael wouldn’t provoke him.

With his first decent view of the creature from the front, he could see why Meira was nervous. Grotesque didn’t cover it. Carrick appeared to be made from the carvings of many different beasts—the mane of a lion, head of a water buffalo, brow of a gorilla, tusks of a wild boar, legs and tail of a wolf, ears of a bat, and body of a bear. The strangest part was his eyes. Human eyes surrounded by delicate, purple-bruised skin that faded underneath the cracked rock that surrounded those eyes.

Like a being possessed.

Carrick left his head turned so he could watch Samael and Meira at the same time. “Does anyone else know where you are?”

“No one saw us leave to come to this place,” Meira assured him.

“Then you don’t need a bodyguard.”

Try to make me leave and see what happens. Samael deliberately remained loose, nonthreatening in appearance, hands hanging at his side, feet set wide, but he was ready to go if Carrick made a move.

“He’s… It’s important,” Meira insisted. “We have to find Gorgon. He’s been taken. We won’t stay long but needed to hole up for a day or two and figure out a plan.”

The gargoyle remained silent.

“Please, Carrick,” Meira whispered, begged.

His back still facing Samael, though head turned to keep an eye on him, Carrick released her and appeared to shift. Unlike dragons, or wolf shifters, or any other type of shifter Samael was familiar with, who all completed the act in silence—except maybe werewolves, who were a different breed altogether—a gargoyle sounded like rock being gouged out of a mountain by force. More than that, the process appeared painful.

With what Samael could see of his face contorted, Carrick jerked his body in violent movements, and again that grinding sound filled the room as his wings absorbed back into his body and his face changed to that of a man, though his features remained both broad and sharply angled. Skin turned from solid rock to something more human, though it still had a gray undertone to it.

Like other shifters, clothes formed over his body during the transition. Medieval garb of trousers, belted tunic, fur-lined cloak, boots, and gloves. He could’ve passed for human royalty in the fifth or sixth century dressed like that.

Clothes like the dress Meira had been wearing that day he saw her reflection. This was where she’d been hiding.

“We must take this in front of the chimera,” Carrick said.