Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(4)

She struck him with the back of her hand, as if shooing a fly, and he flew into a wall. Gabby heard several loud cracks. He lay limp and twisted as a tossed banana peel.

The other two tried to run.

The gargoyle’s wings flared. She moved like a cloud across the moon to cut off their retreat. Claws flashed, caught throats, and lifted with the gentleness of strength. The men had seemed enormous as they chased Gabby and hit her; they were kittens in the gargoyle’s hands. Gabby pressed herself up off the ground, and for all the pain in her side she felt a moment’s compassion. Who were these men? What brought them here?

The gargoyle drew the muggers close to her mouth. Gabby heard her voice clear as snapping stone.

“You have done wrong,” the gargoyle said. “I set the Lady’s mark on you.”

She tightened her grip, just until the blood flowed. The man on the left screamed; the man on the right did not. Where her claws bit their necks, they left tracks of silver light. She let the men fall, and they hit the ground hard and heavy. She knelt between them. “Your friend needs a doctor. Bring him to Consecration and they will care for him, and you. The Lady watches all. We will know if you fail yourself again.”

She touched each one on his upper arm. To the gargoyle it seemed no more consequential than a touch: a tightening of thumb and forefinger as if plucking a flower petal. The sound of breaking bone was loud and clean, and no less sickening for that.

They both screamed, this time, and after—rolling on the pavement filth, cradling their arms.

The gargoyle stood. “Bear him with the arms you still have whole. The Lady is merciful, and I am her servant.” She delivered the last sentence flat, which hinted what she might have done to them if not for the Lady’s mercy and her own obedience. “Go.”

They went, limping, lurching, bearing their broken friend between them. His head lolled from side to side. Silver glimmered from the wounds on their necks.

And, too, from scars on the alley walls. Not every mark there glowed—only the deep clean grooves that ran from rooftops to paving stones, crosshatch furrows merging to elegant long lines, flanked here by a diacritical mark and there by a claw’s flourish.

Poetry burned on the brick.

The gargoyle approached. Her steps resounded through the paving stones. She bent and extended a heavy clawed hand. Gabby’s fingers fit inside the gargoyle’s palm, and she remembered a childhood fall into the surf back out west, how her mother’s hand swallowed hers as she helped her stand. The gargoyle steadied Gabby as she rose. At full height, Gabby’s forehead was level with the gargoyle’s carved collarbone. The gargoyle was naked, though that word was wrong. Things naked were exposed: the naked truth in the morning news, the naked body under a surgeon’s lights, the naked blossom before the frost. The gargoyle was bare as the ocean’s skin or a mountainside.

Gabby looked into the green stone eyes. “Thank you,” she said, and prayed too, addressing the will that sent the being before her: Thank you. “The stories are true, then. You’re back.”

“I know you,” the gargoyle replied. “Gavriel Jones. You are a journalist. I have heard you sing.”

She felt an answer, too, from that distant will, a feeling rather than a voice: a full moon over the lake of her soul, the breath of the mother her mother had been before she took to drink. “You know who I am and saved me anyway.”

“I am Aev,” she said, “and because I am, I was offered a choice. I thought to let you pay for your presumption. But that is not why we were made.”

“I know.” The pain in her chest had nothing to do with the broken rib. She turned away from the mass of Aev. “You want my loyalty, I guess. A promise I won’t report this. That I’ll protect and serve you, like a serial hero’s sidekick.”

Aev did not answer.

“Say something, dammit.” Gabby’s hands shook. She drew a pack of cigarettes from her inside pocket, lit one. Her fingers slipped on the lighter’s cheap toothed wheel. She breathed tar into the pain in her side.

When she’d drawn a quarter of the cigarette to ash, she turned back to find the alley empty. The poems afterglowed down to darkness, like tired fireflies. A shadow crossed the moon. She did not look up.

The light died and the words once more seemed damaged.

She limped from the alley to the street. A wiry-haired man fanned a tin box of coals topped by a grill on which lay skewers of seasoned lamb.

Gabby paid him a few thaums of her soul for a fistful of skewers she ate one at a time as she walked down the well-lit street past porn shop windows and never-shut convenience stores. The air smelled sweeter here, enriched by cigarette smoke and the sharp, broad spices of the lamb. After she ate, even she could barely notice the tremor in her hands. The drumbeat of blood through her body faded.

She tossed the skewers in a trash can and lit a second cigarette, number two of the five she’d allow herself today. Words danced inside her skull. She had promised nothing.

She realized she was humming, a slow, sad melody she’d never heard before that meandered through the C-minor pentatonic scale, some god’s or muse’s gift. She followed it.

Her watch chimed one. Still time to file for matins, if she kept the patter simple.





3

Tara was buying eggs in the Paupers’ Quarter market when she heard the dreaded song.