In Stone by Louise D. Gornall Read Free Book Online Page A

to twist as impatience bubbles. The tension is thick. It burns my eyes, and then, with a sigh, Jack says, “Come on Beau. You know the cops can’t help.”
    I didn’t know that, but I should have the second Gray said ‘knife’ back in the alley. I should have known a giant mess of craziness was coming my way when Gray grew horns. I throw the pieces of porcelain still in my hands to the floor and turn sharply to face him. I meet with Jack’s eyes. My lips are parted and ready to fire off a round of questions. But the words get caught in my throat. Jack’s eyes have changed color. I see the moon again, an icy moon. They shimmer the way a silver coin does when you tip it toward the light. He’s one of them. They’re everywhere. I fall back on my hands and start scuttling backwards across the carpet.
    “Stay away from me,” I warn. Now I don’t care what I’m picking up. If it’s not bolted down it’s flying in his general direction as I make like a crab across the room. Ornaments, magazines, a paperweight smash and crash to the floor as he deflects them with his hands and knees.
    “Hey. Wait a second …would you just ...” He bats away a plastic figurine before it meets with his forehead, but he doesn’t manage to evade the clay penholder that I made for Mom in seventh grade. It connects with his cheekbone and splits his skin. Several drops of blood seep from the wound and roll down his face.
    “Are you insane?” he growls.
    “Get the fuck out of my house.”
    He keeps coming, wading toward me through the shower of objects as if it were nothing more than a light drizzle. Snatching my wrist, he hauls me to my feet. I try to slap him with my free hand, but he grabs that one too.
    “Relax!”
    I struggle until my back is pushed up against the wall.
    “Relax!” he repeats, pinning my wrists at either side of my head. “Calm down. I’m not going to hurt you.” I’m panting out breaths like a dusty, old porch dog and glaring at him through a curtain of hair that’s fallen over my eyes.
    “Then leave me alone.” I crane my neck forward until my nose almost touches his.
    “I can’t.”
    “Sure you can. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
    “I know that.”
    “Then what are you doing here? What do you want?” I ask, almost screaming.
    “Believe it or not, I came here to make sure you were all right.”
    I say nothing. He says nothing. The silence is only stifled by the soundtrack of us both huffing and puffing. Our eyes are locked; his are so beautiful. I am afraid of them almost as much as I want to frame them. I only look away when something long, grey, and scaly snakes up from behind his back. It’s barbed at the end. It bends around the left side of his body, slithers over to me, up toward my pinned hand, drawing a trail of invisible S shapes in the air. It coils itself around my wrist, replacing his hand, holding me in place. My eyes might fall out on to the floor. I’m reduced to a radio silence, not even breathing. He dabs at the cut on his cheek with his fingertips, casually, carefree.
    “You made me bleed,” he says.
    “You have a tail,” I reply.
    His lips pull up at one side into a smirk. And then because shit isn’t weird enough, the cut on the side of his face starts to glue itself back together.
    He’s healing.
    The slice in his skin is sealing. The slightly raised scar it leaves sits on his cheek like a slug trail for a nanosecond, before it sinks and blends in with his natural skin color -- a warm honey. In seconds his face is left looking exactly as it did before the penholder clipped it.
    “So, what’s the verdict -- are you okay?” He asks cautiously.
    “You. Have. A. Tail,” I repeat. “And how did you do that thing with your face?”
    “The face thing, that’s a gift,” he says. Discomfort shapes his jaw into a rigid square.
    “Some gift,” I muse.
    “It was.” He frowns, and a crevice as deep as space forms in between his eyebrows.
    “And the tail?” I