I need to do?” I grit my teeth, hating having to ask him. But pride is one thing. Naïveté is another. “What do I have to do to shift?”
“You’ve already got the answer to that.”
“Yeah, but I can’t remember the answer! So will you please help me out instead of just standing there voicing platitudes in my head?” I throw my hands wide in the air.
For long seconds, he looks torn. Like he doesn’t know how much to say. But eventually his need to get the hell out of my head must supersede everything else, because he says, “You told me once that being a gargoyle was the most natural thing in the world for you. Like, you couldn’t imagine how you’d spent seventeen years of your life not feeling it, because it felt like home.”
I roll his words around in my mind, weighing them against everything that I’m feeling now, and they make no sense. “I really said that?”
“You really did.”
How did I go from that to feeling like being a gargoyle is the most unnatural thing in the world for me? Could I really forget that much, I wonder, even as I stand in the middle of the room with my eyes closed and try to look inside myself.
But there’s nothing to see, except the yawning emptiness that has been there all along. “This is hopeless.”
Hudson shakes his head and reaches down to pick up my hands. “You’re trying too hard.” Our gazes meet, and I get lost in the tumultuous blue waves in his eyes. “You don’t have to learn how to be a gargoyle. You are one. It’s a part of you, of who you are. And no matter what—no one can take that from you.”
I feel like he’s talking about more than just my being a gargoyle. “What does that—”
He stops me. “Not now,” he says. “For now, close your eyes.” He waits until I do before continuing. “Take a deep breath, let it out. And reach for that part of yourself that’s hidden. The part you keep a secret from everyone else.”
When I do, I can’t help but see all the different threads inside me, each one a string that leads to a different piece of me, a different person or thing that makes me.
On the plus side, all I have to do is lay hands on the individual strings to realize what I’m dealing with. Bright orange for my love of reading. Soft blue for the ocean. Turquoise for my mother’s laugh. Hot pink for Macy. Black for Jaxon, along with a single two-toned thread that starts as a medium green and keeps getting darker and darker until it fades into black. One look and I’m nearly positive that this is our mating bond, though I don’t know how I know that. Red for my art. Brown for Saturday-morning walks with my father. There’s even a brilliant emerald-green string, almost shimmering, it’s so iridescent. I start to reach for that one, but a voice warns me to stay away from that string. Before I can really give it more thought, I get distracted by a gorgeous cerulean string, which I instinctively know is my mother. A deep russet string, my father. Even an aquamarine string for La Jolla.
The list goes on and on, and so do the colored strings, and I sort through them all—even ones I don’t recognize yet—until I finally find a shiny platinum one buried deep in the middle of all the others.
Instinctively, I know this one is it. My gargoyle.
Not going to lie, I’m a little scared of it and what it can do. But being afraid never got me anywhere, and it’s definitely not going to solve this problem, so I just reach for it, breath held and heart beating way too fast.
The moment I touch it, I feel something resonate deep inside me, kind of like I did with Hudson’s magic earlier. But this is deeper, stronger—a tidal wave where that was just a drop—and I can feel it sweeping over me. Roiling around me. Burying me in its power and its presence.
There’s a part of me that wants to pull back, that wants to protect myself more than it wants anything else. But it’s too late. Everything is crashing in on me now, and all I can do is hang on and wait to see what happens.
It doesn’t take long, maybe a second or two, though it feels like an eternity. It starts in my hands