Death's Excellent Vacation - By Charlaine Harris & Toni L. P. Kelner Page 0,110

After I brought the Heart its candidate, I would stay at the Sanctum and become one of the Inners, keepers of the Mystery and honored servants of the Heart. Any gargoyle in his right mind wants to be part of the Sanctum. From the moment we’re hatched or brought in, we’re told it’s the place to be.

The phone died with a gurgle. Quarters spilled out, and the LED screen on the debit-card reader up top flashed wildly twice.

That’s the trouble with the world. It isn’t built strong enough to withstand anything.

I turned on my heel. My sneakers were squeaking, since my feet were spreading, toes fusing together and the hind claw jabbing at cheap material. When you shred your shoes all the time, you learn not to buy anything high-end.

When I had everything all back together and human-sized again, I trudged back up the block toward home. I suppose I should’ve been ready for what happened next.

When I got back into my cell, it was empty. Maybe I should’ve locked the door. Or thought the stone panel would obey a candidate as well as a Heartkin.

Her car was already hauled out of the EvilMart parking lot. I guess they don’t believe in waiting around. There were stars and glittering cascades of pebbly broken safety glass, the damp noxious perfume of the Big Bad, and a lighter gray smell of rain and daylight.

The broken purse had already been swept up and taken away somewhere, too. Midday shoppers didn’t glance at me—I was too far out in the lot. After a few moments of standing with my eyes closed, sniffing a little, I found what I was after.

The thin thread of gold necklace almost burned my fingers. My nose twitched as I turned its supple length over and over. Waiting for the little tingle.

A nose for metal is a nose for tracking, that’s what the older gargoyles say. Me, I just wait for the tingle. Often as not—even oftener than that—it leads me right to what I’m looking for.

This time it ran along my nerves like burning gasoline and almost pulled me out of my human skin. It was hard work, keeping my shambling shape in some modicum of normalcy as I whipped around, the pull hard and close.

That’s when the cop cars arrived, and the smell of the Big Bad wasn’t being rubbed out by the rain. It was fresh and fuming from the EvilMart.

“Shit,” I whispered, and lunged into a clumsy run.

The cops had their guns out. A SWAT van pulled up, and people started screaming and running because there was a pocka-pocka-pocka of automatic fire from inside the building.

Somebody was taking their shopping a little too personally. Or they were trying to kill my Heart candidate.

They kill them wherever they find them, and I’d made a lot of noise and fuss last night alerting them to the fact that there was a stoneskin around and a Heart candidate to kill.

Stupid me.

I leapt on two cars because of the clots of people spilling out in the parking lot. They crunched under my feet, sloping away as I jumped. It was chaos. The cars crumpled because I had blurred out into trueform. Who cared what they saw? The screaming inside was taking on a more panicked, desperate quality, and for once I was glad I’m not imaginative. Imagination just gets in the way when you have a job to do.

The automatic doors didn’t open, so I busted through. Glass tinkled, shattered, and flew. I was moving almost too fast for human eyes to track, and all that mass moving so quickly means it’s hard to slow down or stop. My claws dug huge furrows in the flooring as I bounded into the store and had to twist to avoid smooshing some of the pinks who were running around.

Oh, great. Just great.

Harpies.

There were four of them. EvilMarts are built so warehouse- high, the feathered bitches could even skim the tops of aisles. They were circling, looking for something. And there were a bunch of little gray gneevil-gnomes with AK-47s.

Heart have mercy, it’s an invasion! I squashed one gneevil by landing on him, spun and leapt, and my nose tingled. Good luck finding Kate in all this—but I had to find her, and the Heart inside me told me she was here.

Well, best way is the most direct way. The Heart in me pulled, and I followed it, building up every iota of speed I could. One of the nice things about being