"It's the medallion that they're homing in on, I'm pretty sure. Other than that ..." He shrugged. "Magic. The amount of time it takes is variable, usually a few days, but it can be much faster. I can't count on having that much of a grace period."
"How do you sleep?" Max asked, the question torn out of her in a surge of unexpected sympathy.
"I mostly don't," Gio said. His smile was brief, barely touching his mouth and his beautiful, liquid eyes. "Anyway, as we don't know how much time we have, I will focus on the—what is the American phrase? The Cliffs Notes."
"I'm technically Argentinian, but please continue."
Gio blew out a breath.
"While I was never a user of magic myself, I spent many years collecting interesting, rare, and arcane books," he began. "It was my hobby and my pleasure. At my villa in Italy, I have a library filled with rare and priceless books, some of them one of a kind. Due to this, I acquired a great deal of esoteric knowledge, and also made some interesting friends. I was helping one of these friends perform a ritual when it misfired, struck me, and caused me to become trapped in the body of a life-sized stone lion statue on my estate."
"I hate it when that happens," Max said.
This, as hoped, got a brief smile. "It was no pleasure of mine, believe me. I have only strange and vague memories of this. My friend, a true friend if there ever was one, tracked down the medallion in the hopes that it would help me."
"Maybe if you hadn'teaten it—"
"We were being attacked at the time, and I wasn't thinking clearly. It seemed the best way to remove it from the cultists' grasp."
"I would ask how that worked out for you, but ..."
Gio smiled again, and Max became all too aware that she wished she could continue making jokes forever to make him smile.
He doesn't want you!she reminded herself.
Inside, her jaguar shifted uncomfortably.
"To continue," Gio said. "I've been fleeing them ever since. Combining the medallion with my body seems to have activated its powers in some way, allowing them to track me. I didn't want to risk them staking out your office."
"Valid," Max conceded. "Okay, you'll notice I'm taking all of this on faith so far—and that being said, who arethey? What do they want, how many of them are there, what—heaven help me—powers do they have, and so forth. I need to know what we're up against."
"I don't know the answer to all of this. They are the modern-day remains of a group of alchemists from the Middle Ages who attempted to create an army of gargoyles using technology like this." He tapped his chest. "The one I've mainly had to tangle with is a magician who calls himself Javic. I think he's the only one who has powers to speak of, maybe at all. He can open portals, raise crude gargoyle-like servants to attack on his behalf, and manipulate fire. Of the others, I've only seen them acting as backup for him."
"Is he their leader?" Max asked.
"More like a flunky with a lot of magic, I think."
"So what if we takehimout? It sounds like he's your main problem, if the rest of them can't really do much."
"He's also extremely powerful and can escape through a portal at any time," Gio pointed out.
"He can't be immune to a bullet. Or is he?"
Gio's blank reaction was answer enough.
"You haven't even tried," she said. "Oh, comeon."
"I'm not a killer!" Gio protested. "I'm a rare book collector."
In truth, Max's core self rebelled against the idea of luring someone into a trap just to kill them. But there had been times in her life when she had been forced to make trade-offs just as cruel.
"Good thing you came to an expert, then," she said.
Gio's mouth compressed into a somehow still sexy line. "I don't think he's a bad person. He's never actually tried to—well—"
"Kill you? From everything you're saying here, I'm going to assume he has in fact tried to do that."
"I think it's mostly incidental," Gio argued. "He and the others are mainly trying to capture and study us."
