"You're right," Gio said quietly. He looked her in the eyes. "I should have told you everything a long time ago."
Max smiled a little, and he saw her relax, some of the tension flowing out of her. "Tell me."
"Stop me if you have questions, all right?"
Max nodded.
Gio took a breath and cast his mind back, all those years, to when he had been a gangly kid and had met for the first time the child of his parents' friends, a strange, scowling boy named Mace.
"My parents were scholars and students of the unusual," he said. "They were friends with a couple who had a son about my age and no other children. His name was Mace, and naturally we became friends. But Mace and his family had a secret, and eventually, when I was old enough to keep it, my parents and Mace's parents let me in on it. They were gargoyles."
"Like those stone things ..."
She looked skeptical. Gio shook his head.
"No, those are only stoneskins, a feeble imitation. Mace's family were the true thing. Very different."
He recalled his fascination and wonder as he had watched Mace stonewalk for the first time, the other boy sinking into a rocky outcrop behind the family house and disappearing entirely.
"Our parents didn't know this, but Mace had already showed me some of what he could do. We had been playing like that for months. But once they finally let me in on the secret, they could also tell me about the true history of gargoyles. I grew up as one of the few humans who knew that entire story.
"Gargoyles were created back in the Middle Ages from volunteers who allowed themselves to be transformed using alchemy into shifters who can go back and forth between their stone and human forms. They were originally created to be protectors and defenders, then their purpose was warped by their creators to try to use them as an army of conquest instead. From the sound of things, Javic's bunch, the ones who call themselves the Brotherhood of Fire and Stone, are either descendants of those people, or a group of latter-day wannabes who are trying to recreate the alchemists' original success.
"In any case, the gargoyles back in the old days rebelled, fought back, and eventually escaped. There have only ever been small numbers of them, like Mace's family, existing in secret and protecting the towns where they live."
Max was listening in fascination. "That's amazing. Mace is the friend you keep talking about, right? The one with the family?"
"That's right. He lives with his mate and niece, and just became a great-uncle when his niece had a son."
Talking about them made him feel a sudden, desperate surge of homesickness. Without other close family of his own, Mace's family had come to feel like his. He hadn't even met Jess's baby yet.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to bring up anything painful," Max said quietly.
She looked sad, too. "What's wrong?" Gio asked. "Did I say something that upset you?"
Max shook her head. "It doesn't matter."
"It does. I didn't mean to—"
"It was the talk of mates, all right?" she said shortly. "You know, my family told me once that I'd never have a mate of my own because of—" She broke off sharply. "Anyway, I wish I had one, and sometimes I—but I don't. Just leave it."
"Who told you you'll never have a mate?" Gio asked, abruptly furious on her behalf. He wasn't fully versed in the ins and outs of shifter etiquette, but that sounded like an awful thing to do to someone. It was essentially the same thing as telling a person they'd always be alone.
"My alpha," Max said. "But it doesn't matter."
"It does matter. You didn't deserve that kind of cruelty—"
"Nacio wasn't being cruel, he was just being honest." Max looked sharply away. "Anyway, you're the last person who can—" She broke off as if biting the words off at their source.
But Gio could finish that sentence for her.The last person who could comfort her about that.Well, he probably was: a fake shifter who was going to lose his shift animal as soon as he was able to figure out what to do about his unwanted fusion with the medallion. She had a point there.
"Maybe you just don't know," he began awkwardly. "Humans don't know, not the same way shifters do, but even they—"
"I do know," she interrupted. "That's the worst thing about it. Can we just move on with your story, please?"
Gio faltered, completely derailed by the resigned sadness on her face. He had to struggle to remember what they had been talking about.
"There's not really a lot else that I haven't told you," he went on finally. "The important thing is that getting Javic's cultists out of my life forever will also remove them as a threat to the rest of my—" He paused briefly, but there was no denying the truth of it. "—my family."
