“Please don’t hurt me!” the voice cried out, that of a woman, and I faltered in my downward swing, stopping myself.
“You serve Kejetan Ruthenia, do you not?”
“Yes,” the grotesque shouted, but the voice was an unfamiliar one.
I had known most of the people who had served my father in his human life, the ones who had earned a place as Servants of Ruthenia, but I could not place this one.
“You are not of my father’s kind,” I said, unable to hide the surprise and curiosity in my voice.
The grotesque looked up at me with fear and confusion on its face. “I—I don’t understand,” she said.
“You serve him,” I said, “but yet you are not one of them, not of the Servants of Ruthenia.”
“Please!” she pleaded. “I don’t understand any of this. They told me they’d take me in, that they’d care for me. I don’t understand what has happened to me!” The creature looked at the sharp claws at the tips of her fingers. “Why do I look like this?”
I lowered my arms but did not release her. “Who are you, then?”
The creature’s face struggled as she thought, but her body relaxed. “Emily Hoffert,” she said. “My name is Emily Hoffert.”
“Listen to me, Emily,” I said. “The men who made these promises to you are liars.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head in earnest. “They’ve taken many of us in already.”
I cocked my head. “Us . . . ?”
She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “There are others like me. Lost, confused . . .”
Of course, I thought, remembering the night Kejetan and his men had come to claim their new forms on top of the Belarus Building. There had been far more statues than necessary for the Servants of Ruthenia to occupy.
“How old are you, Emily?” I asked.
Again, she paused in thought. “Twenty-three.”
“And what year is this?”
“It’s 1963,” she said with no hesitation.
“I do not understand how it happened, Emily,” I said, “but it would seem your spirit found this form as its new home.” I stood, freeing her and offering her my hand. She took it and rose, her wings fluttering behind her, but I held her eye, and they calmed after a moment.
“We are going to have to have a long discussion about a few things, Emily,” I said. “But first you must tell me: What did Kejetan promise you when you found yourself in this form the other night?”
“It wasn’t him exactly,” she said. “It was the one called Devon. He offered me safety. He said they had a ship where I would be safe.”
I cringed at hearing the name of Alexandra’s brother. “The Servants of Ruthenia do not make promises lightly.”
“Who are the Servants of Ruthenia?” she asked. “I had not even heard of them until I awoke in this form the other night, when they offered their protection.”
“What price did Devon set for such protection?”
“There was no price,” she said. “He only asked one favor.”
My wings fell against my back, a sinking sensation overwhelming me. “And what was that favor?”
“He told me all I had to do was look for the building on Gramercy Park with all the broken statues on it and if another grotesque should try to talk to me there, I should fly as fast as I could away from it.”
“That,” I said with growing dread, “is what we call a diversion tactic.”
I spread my wings and leapt into the sky.
“Wait!” she cried out. “Don’t leave me here!”
“We will meet again, Emily Hoffert,” I said, already shooting straight up into the night sky. “Seek me out where we met at a later time. Let us hope then, however, I am not as foolish as I was just now.”
Twenty-five
Alexandra
Our building on Gramercy Park was close enough to the subway that I was used to feeling its rumblings, so with my focus entirely on the clay sculpture I was working, that was what I took the initial shaking for.
When it persisted and grew in intensity, my mind shifted to only the most paranoid New Yorker’s fear—the fault lines under Manhattan were finally giving. Books fell from the half-broken shelves of the library as the light fixtures swayed and smashed up against the ceiling.
I didn’t wait to see what else would happen. I scooped up Bricksley and shoved him in my bag with my other belongings and ran for the back of the art studio as my ears erupted with a cacophony of sound.
I spun around in time to catch much of the terrace outside the French doors fall away, followed by the entire exterior wall on the front of the building. My favorite sofa over in the library tilted and slid out of sight as the wood of the flooring twisted and snapped apart, looking like a nightmarish set of wooden teeth.
I turned to the stairs, ready to run, but I could do nothing more than watch as more and more of the art studio got eaten away by a great cloud of dust rising from the crumbling building. The area of the studio just over my old bedroom crumbled away and disappeared down into the cloud. I wished that the old sympathetic connection between Stanis and me still existed in the hopes that he’d fly in to rescue me, but alas, that had died the night I granted him his freedom.
The shaking lessened, dying down, a good third of the art studio/library gone. Coughing, I covered my mouth with the sleeve of my sweater as the cloud rolled over me. The earthquake was over, but as I moved toward a still-intact set of windows to my left, something strange struck me.
All the rest of the buildings surrounding Gramercy Park seemed fine, the only damage being to my family’s building. The dust was already settling, and as I stepped to the edge of the damage, the cloud before me parted with a mighty gust of air as the shadowy form of a gargoyle came through it.
To my shock, it was not Stanis, as I had hoped, but one I knew nonetheless.
“Dear sister,” Devon said as he landed in what remained of the room.
The shapes of other winged creatures off in the distance danced through the dusty cloud behind him, but none of them came into the building.
Angry tears ran down my face, making tiny rivers in the dust already caked there. “Where’s your master?” I asked, shock filling me.
“Not here,” he said, closing his wings. “Oh no. This is family business.”
“This was your home,” I said. “You grew up here. How . . . Why would you do this?”
“Any sentimentality I had died with my human form,” he said, then he folded his wings and stepped forward. “While the old mad lord has been willing to wait for what he seeks, I am not. Kejetan is weak. He’s willing to take his time waiting for his monster-son to reveal Alexander’s Spellmason secrets. As if somehow the boy he killed forever ago would somehow forgive him. Dude’s got issues. He’s thinking Stanis might see the light and join Kejetan at his side. The way I see it, Kejetan’s wasted months while that idiot potion maker of his kept promising he can make Stanis give up the secrets of the Spellmasons and rule by his side. Me? I’m not tied so much to all that family sentimentality.”
“Then that makes you worse than your master,” I said, shaking with rage.
“Kejetan is a fool,” he said.
“This coming from you . . .”
“He’s wasting his time trying to control every last one of these gargoyles,” he said. “His Servants of Ruthenia and the rest that were created. Rather than simply enjoy our new forms! He wants to lead, but I say why lead when you can just live by your own rule, doing what pleases you? Want something? Take it. Someone tries to stop you? End them.”