Stonecast by Anton Strout

Author:Anton Strout [Strout, Anton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9781101625705
Publisher: Ace
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

Alexandra

The next morning, my knees were sore from landing hard on the stone terrace during our flight testing, so I slept in before hobbling downtown to the Libra Concordia in the old, abandoned church across from Trinity Church in the hopes of finding more information on either Kimiya production or this splitting of the mind Caleb was so keen on talking about.

Pleased with the angel-specific distractions I fed him, Desmond Locke had made good on his promise and granted Marshall and Rory access to the research room at the Libra Concordia. My friends’ help in sorting through the books made the going much quicker, even despite their constant questioning. If there was information on how to master the production of Kimiya in what the Libra Concordia had on hand in their archives, we would find it. That was, if I could concentrate, what with Desmond Locke poking his head into the research room every half hour or so.

“You can’t dodge him forever,” Rory said, organizing her books where she sat across from me, with Marshall off to her left.

“I don’t need to,” I said, scribbling in my notebook. “I just need to stay on his good side until we can find what I’m looking for.”

“Eventually, he’ll want to know about Stanis,” Marshall said in a low whisper, his eyes on the door, “and what will you tell him?”

“I’m not going to tell him anything,” I said. “He doesn’t need to know about my family’s secret legacy beyond whatever he’s gleaned through his association with the Libra Concordia. And he certainly doesn’t need to know what Stanis has been up to, gathering all those statues on top of the Belarus Building.”

“It’s creepy,” Rory said. “It’s like he’s developing hoarder tendencies.”

“I don’t know what the purpose of it all is,” I said. “But my best guess is he’s amassing an army for Kejetan and his men. He’s actually done us a favor, though.”

“He has?” Marshall asked.

I nodded.

“Caleb and I have made progress on reverse engineering the formula,” I said. “But it would help us perfect what we need if we can find my great-great-grandfather’s ‘recipe’ spell book for it. I was working to build a statue to test it on, but now we’ve got plenty of Belarus-made test subjects gathered in one place.”

Rory yawned. “I miss sleep,” she said. “Dance classes by day, research and gargoyle experimentation by night.”

“So much regular-world stuff to do during the day, fighting evil at night,” Marshall said. “I don’t know how Batman does it.”

I took the conversation’s turning to comics as my cue to get back to work and fell silent, thankful when Rory and Marshall did the same.

Looking through the histories of the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds for clues to my great-great-grandfather’s work was a slow and laborious chore, but if there was anything to be found outside of my family’s library on the man, the Libra Concordia was the most likely of places for it.

“You’re doing it again,” Rory said, smacking me with one of the books from her side of the table.

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