Unbound

Bis was too young to be on his own, and after having been kicked off the basilica for spitting on people, he’d found his way to the church, slipping Jenks’s sentry lines like a ghost. Bis slept all day like a proverbial stone, and he paid his rent by watching the grounds during the four hours around midnight when Jenks preferred to sleep. He ate pigeons. Feathers and all. Jenks was working on changing that. At least the feathers part. He was working on getting Bis to wear some clothes, too. Not that anything showed, but if Bis was wearing something, Jenks might catch him sneaking around on the ceiling. As it was, all he ever saw was claw marks.

“Thanks, Bis,” Jenks said, standing straighter and trying to look like he was in charge. “You grew up around stone. What’s your take on the statue? Is it haunted?”

It might have been a jest if anyone else had said it, but both of them knew there were such things as ghosts. Rachel’s latest catastrophe, Pierce, was proof of that, but he had been completely unnoticed when bound to his tombstone. Only when it had cracked had Pierce escaped to harass them. Get a body. Become demon-snagged. Confuse Rachel into a love/hate relationship. Something was wrong with the girl. But now that he thought about it, maybe that’s why Vincet’s daughter was trying to break the statue. Tink’s a Disney whore, not another ghost.

The gargoyle flicked his whiplike tail in a shrug. His powerful haunches bunched, and Vincet darted back with a flash of pixy dust when Bis landed atop the statue in question, his skin lightening to match the marble perfectly. Looking like part of the statue itself, he scraped a claw down a fold of chiseled hair. Bis brought it to his nose, sniffing, then tasting. “High-quality granite,” he said, his voice both high and rumbling. “From Argentina. It was first worked hundreds of years ago, but it’s only been here for a hundred and twenty.”

Impressed, Jenks raised his eyebrows. “You got all that from tasting it?”

Smirking to show his black teeth, the kid pointed a claw to a second sign. “Just the high-quality part. There’s a plaque.”

Vincet sighed, and Jenks’s wings went red.

Wheezing his version of laugher, the gargoyle hopped to the spot of light on the sidewalk. “Seriously, something is wrong. Both statues are on the ley line running through the park. No one puts two statues on a ley lines. It pins it down and weird stuff happens.”

“There’s a line?” Jenks asked, seeing Vincet looking understandably lost. “Where?”

Bis pointed at nothing Jenks could see, cocking his ugly, bald head first one way, then the other as he focused on the flower beds. “Lines don’t move, but they shift like the tide under the moon—unless they’re pinned down. Something is absorbing energy from the line—right between the statues where it’s not moving.”

“It’s the statue,” Vincet said, glancing at the shadowed hole beside the dogwood tree where his family lived. “It comes alive when the moon is high and the pull is the strongest. It’s possessing my daughter!”

“I don’t think it’s the statue,” Jenks murmured, hands on his hips again. “I think it’s something trapped in it.” Puzzled, he stared at nothing. His partner Rachel was a witch. She could see ley lines, pull energy off them, and use it to do magic. Bis could see ley lines, too, which made Jenks doubly glad he’d brought Bis with him. “You can see it, huh?” Jenks asked.

“It’s more like hear it,” Bis said, his big red eyes blinking apologetically.

“It’s almost time,” Vincet said, clearly scared as he glanced up at the nearly full moon with his fingers on the hilt of his sword. “See? As soon as the moon hits that branch, it will attack Vi. Jenks, I can’t move my family. We’ll lose the newlings. It will break Noel’s heart.”

“That’s why we’re here,” he said, putting a hand on Vincet’s shoulder, thinking it felt odd to give comfort to a pixy not of his kin. The pixy buck looked too young for this much grief, his smooth features creased in a pain that most lunkers didn’t feel until they were thirty or forty, but pixies lived only twenty years if they were lucky. “I won’t let any of your children die tonight,” he added.

Bis cleared his throat as he scraped his claws the sidewalk, silently pointing out the danger in making promises that he couldn’t guarantee. Vincet’s wings drooped, and Jenks took his hand from his shoulder. “Maybe I should go to sleep,” Jenks said softly. “If you kept all your children awake, it would have no choice but to attack me.”

“Too late.” Bis made a shuffling hop to land on the bench’s seat, wings spread slightly to look ominous. “The resonance of the line just shifted.”

“Sweet mother of Tink,” Vincet whispered, wings flashing red as he looked at his front door. “It’s coming. I have to wake them!”

“Wait!” Jenks flew after him and caught his arm. Their wings almost tangled, and Vincet yanked out of his grip.

“They’ll die!” he said angrily.