Hard as a Rock, page 8
part #3 of Gargoyles Series
If she hadn’t been gritting her teeth against the pain the jarring caused her, Wynn might have laughed at Knox’s griping even as she marveled at the speed with which he had mastered the skill of driving. There had been no way she could have operated the brake and gas with her injured ankles, so she’d been forced to hand Knox the keys to her Toyota. He’d listened carefully to her instructions, then proceeded to guide the small car through the midday traffic with efficiency if not much aplomb. She could tell that if he were to take on the task very often, he’d work himself up to an epic case of road rage in record time.
“Right there.” She raised her arm and pointed to the small house with the white porch and the brown shingles on the far side of the street. “You can pull into the driveway, just keep to the left.”
Knox complied, parking the car, then coming around to lift her from the passenger seat without a word. He didn’t even breathe hard as he toted her across the postage-stamp front lawn and up the brief set of steps to the door. Instead he held her snugly and nodded at the bell. “Alert your uncle that we are here. Your wound must be seen to quickly.”
She had to lean forward to reach, but she’d barely lifted her finger from the button before she heard the shuffling of slippered feet on the floorboards in the hall. An instant later the front door opened and her uncle peered around the edge, his gray-streaked auburn hair disheveled and his dark-rimmed glasses balanced crookedly on his nose.
“I was wondering when you’d get here, young lady.” He frowned and stepped back to swing the door wide. “Come in, come in. Onto the couch with you, so I can get a good look at this little mess you’ve gotten yourself into. Hurry up. Let’s go.”
He waved Knox inside and into the living room to the left of the entry. The Guardian appeared more curious than shocked by the man’s rumpled appearance and odd behavior, and Wynn found herself grateful for that. For the last few years, a lot of people had started to shy away from Uncle Griffin, even people who had known him for years, and that bugged Wynn. He was the same sweet, loving man he’d always been, after all. It was just that these days his … eccentricities didn’t do quite as good a job at blending into the background. They tended to stare people right in the face, and that made some of them nervous. Knox barely even blinked.
At the moment, Griffin looked like a cross between an absentminded professor and an escapee from a hospital ward. In addition to his disheveled hair and crooked glasses, he sported at least three or four days’ worth of stubble on his ruddy cheeks. He had dressed, if you could call it that, in a pair of worn flannel pajama pants in a scarlet plaid pattern, topped with a faded University of Chicago T-shirt that had probably started off in the college’s customary maroon but now looked more like a pale dusty-brick color. Over that he wore a knee-length bathrobe in a clashing plaid of cream, green, and gray. On his feet, shearling scuffs that had seen better days (probably during the Reagan administration) mostly covered up a pair of wool socks in the shade of muddy gray only achieved by failing to properly sort laundry.
Knox appeared not even to notice. He followed the man’s instructions, gently depositing Wynn onto the center of a battered sofa with tweedy brown cushions and a brightly colored, hand-knitted Afghan draped haphazardly over the back. Wynn couldn’t quite bite back the hiss as her sprained ankle bumped against the edge of the coffee table, and Knox mumbled another curse.
“Are you all right, little witch? Did I cause you some further injury with my clumsiness?”
“No, it’s fine.” She tried to reassure him, but her uncle shooed him away—literally made shooing motions with his hands at the hulking warrior—and took a seat on the coffee table in front of Wynn.
“Well, let’s take a look at this, hm?” Griffin reached for his niece’s left foot and lifted it gently into his lap. “This is the right one, isn’t it? I mean the correct one.” He chuckled. “I do still know my right from my left, I promise. No matter what anyone says.”
Wynn frowned. It was the correct foot, the one wounded by the hhissih, but she hadn’t expected her uncle to know that. She hadn’t even expected him to know she was hurt, but when he’d answered the door, he’d already seemed like he’d been expecting them to show up. Which was weird, since she hadn’t spoken to him in weeks, definitely not since she’d arrived back in Chicago.
“That’s the one,” she confirmed, smiling at him despite the frown she couldn’t quite smooth away from her brow. “How did you know, Uncle Griff? How did you know we were even coming here today?”
Griffin had eased back the hem of her jeans and angled her foot toward the light so he could examine the blackened gash. He made soothing noises when she tensed, ignoring the way the hovering Guardian stiffened every time Wynn expressed even the slightest discomfort.
“I saw you, of course,” the older man explained. “I was in my workroom trying to fix that problem I’ve been having with my cuneiform translation spell when I felt that trap zap you. I saw the hhissih. Nasty little varmints, and I saw your friend here disappear.” Griffin looked up to glare at Knox over his glasses. “I’m assuming you had a good reason for leaving my niece alone with three angry demon spawn, young man.”
Despite Wynn’s own reaction to that earlier, she felt her face heat at her uncle’s behavior. “Uncle Griff, I was fine, but Knox isn’t a young man. He’s a—”
“A Guardian, I know,” Griffin finished, turning back to her leg. “But he’s still young to me. Heck, he’s young to you, too. I’m surprised he’s not still casting off granite dust, he’s so new.”
Wynn blinked at her uncle. “How did you know that?”
“Well, I saw that, too, didn’t I? I see a few interesting things these days whenever I’m not looking.” He set her foot down on the edge of the coffee table and patted her knee. “I need to get some supplies from my workroom if I’m going to tackle that. You and your pet rock can wait right here.”
He bustled out of the room without sparing either of them so much as a backward glance.
“Pet rock?” Knox repeated, his tone suspiciously bland.
Wynn shrugged and rubbed one hand nervously against the rough weave of the sofa cushions. “Uncle Griffin is … a little different.”
“I can see that. It perhaps explains why he is no longer a Warden, but it does not explain how he became one in the first place.”
She sighed. “He wasn’t always like this, and trust me, if the Guild had let him stay, he’d still be a Warden today. When I say he retired, I should have said it was a forced retirement. They booted him out, gave him no choice. He was devastated.”
Knox frowned. “I have no recollection of such a thing having ever happened in all the centuries of the Guild’s existence.”
“Yeah? Well, how would you know? You’re like a day old.”
“I might be newly summoned, but I have access to the collective memory of our kind. I know all of the history of the Guild of Wardens, as well as of the Guardians ourselves, and I know that never before has a Warden been relieved of his duties for anything less than the betrayal of his oaths. Is that what your uncle did?”
“Of course not.” Wynn glared up at him, furious that he would even imply such a thing. “How dare you! My uncle has an enormous sense of honor, and being a Warden was a family legacy he took a lot of pride in. He loved his job. He just—”
“I just made a really stupid mistake.”
Griffin reappeared in the entrance to the living room with an armful of bottles, tins, and other assorted items. Sighing, he dropped them all onto the coffee table and looked at his guests with an expression of sadness and regret pulling at his features.
“It’s sweet of you to defend me, Wynn-ding, but I know better than anyone else that I got myself into this mess.” The man resumed his seat on the tabletop and reached again for his niece’s foot. “I made the wrong choices, and it’s up to me to live with the consequences.”
Griffin drew a soft white cloth and a corked bottle of what looked like water from the things on the table. He wet the fabric and began to clean Wynn’s wound as he spoke.
“You’re not blind, and I don’t think the Light would send us a stupid Guardian, so I’m sure you’ve noticed that my niece is a witch. If you’ve met her mother, you’ll have seen that her mother is one, too.”
Knox grunted. “I have. They share a similar energy profile, though I would guess they each possess different strengths.”
Griffin nodded. “Like I said, not dumb. All the women in our family are witches. That’s the way it’s always been, and I imagine that’s the way it’ll always be. I’ve heard stories of the occasional girl baby born without much more than a streak of particularly good luck, but they’re always the exception, and always the result of a bad match between the parents. The Llewellyn women breed true.”
Wynn listened to her uncle’s story and tried not to whimper as the blessed water began to burn while it washed over her injury. It felt almost like acid being poured onto her skin. She looked down, expecting to see it bubble and froth like some chemical experiment gone wrong, but she saw nothing unusual. Damn it, if she was going to suffer, she should at least get some visible proof to point to when people asked how she felt.
Knox took a good look at her face and shifted, stepping forward to stand beside her right shoulder. Reaching down, he lifted her hand in his and pried open her clenched fist. Pressing their palms together, he squeezed gently and gave her a small nod. She hoped he meant that she could squeeze back, because that’s exactly what she did. Every time the blessed water scorched across the wound, she squeezed the Guardian’s hand tighter until if he’d been human, she’d have feared she was hurting him. Luckily, he was a quite a long way from human. She figured he could take it.
She knew her uncle saw their hands link, but he didn’t look up, just set aside the water and reached for another bottle. She hoped to the Goddess this one contained something that wouldn’t make her feel as if she were being sliced open all over again.
“So, I grew up surrounded by witches, powerful women, but I never had even a fraction of the magic they had,” Griffin continued. “I mean, I had enough for the Guild to accept me as a trainee, don’t get me wrong, and I made a pretty quick study when it came to learning how to use what I had. The Guild helped me out, taught me how to tap into the power of the Light so that I could perform whatever spells were necessary for me to do my job. But I just kept thinking back to my mother and my sister and my aunts and my grandmother, and I couldn’t help but remember how easy they all made it look. All of these women around me didn’t just do magic, they were magic.”
“Uncle Griff, why didn’t you ever tell us you felt that way?” Wynn reached out with her free hand and squeezed her uncle’s shoulder.
“Heavens no, I couldn’t do that. Explain that I spent my life eaten up with jealousy for the people I loved most in the world?” He shuddered and made a face. “No one wants to shed that kind of light on themselves, sweetheart. We all want to look like we’re good people, even when we’re consumed by bad thoughts.”
Wynn squeezed harder and gave him a stern look. “None of that makes you a bad person, Uncle Griffin. It makes you human. Don’t you think I’ve spent my life jealous of Bran because he got to be a Warden instead of me? I wanted to join the Guild so badly, but they never let me in. Does that make me a lousy person?”
“Of course not, but it doesn’t make me look any better in comparison.” Griffin set aside the second bottle and reached for a bowl, into which he poured regular water from a small pitcher and the contents of several small plastic bags. “I knew you wished you could use your talents for the sake of the Guild, and I knew there had to have been other women in our family who felt the same way, but it didn’t stop me from wishing I had what they did. So I tried to get that power for myself.”
Wynn frowned as she watched her uncle mix the contents of the bowl into a thick paste that he began spreading over a length of gauzy fabric. “What do you mean, you tried to get it for yourself?”
His mouth quirked in a wry half smile. “Don’t worry, pumpkin, I was never so far gone that I actually tried to steal anyone’s power. I was jealous, but not evil. I figured that the secret to the Llewellyn women’s power had to be encoded into their DNA, specifically in the pairing of the double X chromosomes. Having two copies must somehow unlock the magical potential in the genes. I figured if I could just understand how that worked, I would be able to find a way to unlock it in my own X chromosome. Like tapping into an underground water source—I knew it had to be there, so all I needed to do was figure out how and where to sink the well.”
Knox made that unhappy rumbling noise in his throat, like a dog growling, and scowled down at Griffin. “What did you do, human?”
The older man sighed and laid the poultice he’d created over the wound in Wynn’s leg, securing it with more gauze to bind it in place.
“I came up with a spell,” he admitted after a long, uncomfortable pause. “I thought I could break down the barriers that held the magical potential in place and let it out. Into me. But I made a mistake.”
Wynn shook her head. “Why didn’t you ever tell us this? We thought the Guild had betrayed you, kicked you out because your magic started to become … unreliable.”
“That’s exactly what happened, pumpkin. And I didn’t tell you for the same reason I already mentioned—I didn’t want you and your mother to know how jealous and shallow and selfish I’d been. I couldn’t stand to have you look at me with pity or, even worse, with anger.”
He took a deep breath and wiped his hands clean on a scrap of cloth. “The spell backfired. Instead of breaking down the barriers keeping the magic contained in the X chromosome, it erected all sorts of new barriers against tapping into the magic of the Light, the way the Guild had trained me to do. It’s like every time I try to cast a spell now, the magic has to go through a maze to get to me. Sometimes it makes its way through without a problem, but sometimes it gets lost and nothing happens. And sometimes it smacks up hard into a dead end, and whatever I was trying to do goes haywire. And for a really fun twist, every once in a while the spell doesn’t work but I get a vision instead, like I had of you two. No matter how you look at it, magically, I’m completely unreliable. Useless.”
The words penetrated only a little at a time, like tea leaves cast on top of water—they absorbed the liquid slowly before gradually sinking to the bottom. Wynn thought back to the first time her uncle had told her about leaving the Guild. He had lied, obviously, but she couldn’t hold on to anger. Instead she just felt sad and a bit disappointed.
“You told us you were forced into retirement after an assignment went wrong,” she finally said, speaking softly as she tried to keep any hint of accusation from tainting her tone. “We thought they were being so unfair to you.”
“I know, Wynn-ding, and I’m sorry.” Griffin bent his head and busied his hands gathering together his supplies. “It was always my fault that they set me aside. I brought it on myself.”
“You are wrong.”
Knox’s voice dropped like a stone into the awkward atmosphere. Both humans turned to him with surprise in their expressions. Wynn thought her uncle had almost forgotten the Guardian was there, but Wynn had simply not expected an opinion from him that didn’t support the Guild’s position.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
Knox kept his focus on her uncle. “I do not debate your responsibility for your own predicament, human. Clearly you did start in motion the events that led to the damage your abilities have incurred, but you are not to blame for the actions of the Guild toward you. Those were wrong, and the Guild alone must bear responsibility.”
“The Guild was wrong?”
Griffin sounded as surprised by that pronouncement as Wynn felt. From everything she had ever read or heard or assumed, the Guardians and the Guild had always moved in lockstep, each providing the other with unconditional support. It had seemed necessary for the entire operation. They needed to maintain a solid front against the machinations of their enemies. But now a Guardian, regardless of how long he had existed, had voiced an opinion of dissent? How weird was that?
“Of course they were,” Knox affirmed with impatience. “It might be true that certain functions within the Guild require the reliable use of magic to perform—serving one of my brothers, for instance; magic is required to oversee their waking, sleeping, and summoning. But many other duties exist that would not suffer for the lack of spell-casting skills. Wardens are scholars, the keepers of the knowledge of our kind. This requires many, many hours of record keeping, organization, research, and other mundane tasks.”
He fixed his attention on Griffin. “You swore an oath to serve the Guild for the remainder of your life, and they should honor that oath by valuing your service, no matter what form it takes. You should simply have been assigned to duties more suited to your change in abilities, not tossed out of the Guild as if you no longer served any purpose whatsoever in their ranks.”
Wonder began to tug at the corners of Wynn’s mouth. “That’s almost exactly what I said when Uncle Griff told us he’d been retired. Only, you know, a little less formally.”
Knox nodded at her. “You have a surprisingly logical mind, for a human. And a female. And a witch.”
The smile faded before it ever emerged. “Gee, I’m flattered,” she snapped.
The Guardian ignored her. “Wynn has told me that the Guild headquarters were destroyed and most of the Wardens gone into hiding. What can you tell me of this? Why have you not disappeared as well?”
Griffin shrugged. “Why bother? The Wardens who have gone underground are in fear for their lives. They believe the nocturnis are attempting to exterminate them in order to get them out of the way for some huge strike against the Guardians. Since my powers have become so unreliable, no one perceives me as a threat anymore. I have no reason to hide. No one is coming after a crazy old man who can’t even maintain a simple illumination spell, when he can cast one at all.”
