And once again their burgeoning camaraderie crashed into a wall. “I—didn’t shift much, growing up,” Luke said.
“Oh.” Inga sounded as if something had become clear to her.
“I’d rather not talk about my past, if you don’t mind.” He immediately wanted to kick himself for shutting her down, and hesitated to look at Inga, not wanting to see her lovely, open face shut down.
But when she spoke, there was nothing but sympathy. “Yes, of course.”
Clearly she thought she’d figured out something about him. Luke decided to let her think that, whatever it was.
She doesn’t know who I am. She doesn’t know who I’m running from.
And she’s better off that way.
But it was too nice a day, in too nice a company, to keep entirely to himself for long. He ventured a question. “ThisWesterly Cove sounds like a nice place. I’d love to see it someday.”
And she was off and running again, talking happily about her hometown, the fishing boats and the way that the collapse of the cod fishing industry had led some people to leave and others to find different things to do for a living. The town was on the road system, and although the shifters obviously had mixed feelings about it, Inga reported matter-of-factly, they were trying to do more to encourage tourism.
“We hope people will come for the gargoyles, at least. They’re unique and photogenic and interesting.”
“Gargoyles?” He thought of that moment at the spring, looking up and seeing it. “I saw the one at the spring.”
“Oh yeah, we brought that out with us a few years ago, to bless the place,” Inga said without any apparent irony. She said it just like someone might talk casually about setting up a shrine or getting a priest’s blessing.
Luke began to wonder if this lovely, vivacious woman was in a cult.
“What do you mean, bless it?”
“Oh ... well ...” Inga looked a little embarrassed. “We don’t talk about this much with outsiders—but you’re a shifter, so you’re fine.”
Luke tried not to squirm.
“The gargoyles in our town are all made by one person,” Inga said. “His name is Mace MacKay, and his family has lived there since—well—forever, just about as long as the town has been there. They have a big stone house that looks like something out of another century. And he carves gargoyle statues out of stone. His family does, I mean. They’re all over the town.”
“A family of sculptors?”
“Yeesssss,” Inga said slowly, drawing it out, with a sudden evasiveness that was unlike her. “Anyway ... so Mace’s familymakes gargoyles, and we place them around the town, in parks and gardens, on roofs. There is a belief, and I’ve been hearing about it ever since I was a little kid, that they protect us. There are old stories that say the gargoyles keep anything dangerous out of the town, and they’ll come to life and protect us if we’re ever in danger.”
What a lovely fairy tale, Luke thought. “That’s nice,” he said, and immediately hoped he hadn’t sounded insincere. “I mean, really. It’s nice.”
“I know what it sounds like. And to be honest, I don’t know if I believe it myself. But it’s wonderful to think about, don’t you think?”
That your town is special, and protected from all danger by good magic? Yeah, Luke thought, that’d be great.
He wondered how much better his own life would have been if he’d had magic to protect him.
Their route seemed meandering,but Inga had strong legs and made good time, and Luke found his own body settling easily into the hike. He had always been in good shape with a strong outdoorsy streak, but he could tell that his body behaved differently as a shifter. He was stronger, more durable, less likely to get winded.
Every now and then, they saw boats out on the water—fishing boats, larger ships, occasionally a small sport boat skipping along. None of them were that close, and after the first few times, Luke stopped experiencing the urge to dive for cover. From the ocean, if anyone did see them, all they’d see was a pair of hikers out for a ramble in the lovely spring weather.
Inga pointed out a couple of old shipwrecks, bits and pieces of wreckage visible on the shore. None of them were the boat she was looking for, however.
“I think it’s simply gone,” she said. “It’s probably halfway to Iceland by now, retracing the Viking route across the Atlantic. We may as well plan to get by without it—and along those lines, around here somewhere is where I stashed the extra gear from the boat, so let’s pick that up. There’s some more food I wasn’t able to bring with me. We might need it.”
“What’s the plan, exactly?” Luke asked as they turned inland on a narrow path that Inga seemed to know. “If we can’t find the boat, how much trouble are we in?”
“None,” Inga said promptly. “We’re bears, remember? We can live off the land all summer if we have to. But it won’t come to that. My family knows where I am, and if I don’t show up after a few days, someone’s going to come looking for me.” She pointed inland. “If we have to, we can walk that way for a while and we’ll eventually get to a road and can hitchhike. Technically wecouldeven walk overland to Westerly Cove as bears, but I’d really rather not.”
They found her gear stashed in a hole in the rocks. There was a cooler, which she decided to leave as it was too much trouble to carry, but she parceled out the remaining items between the two of them: some freeze-dried and otherwise packaged food, emergency flares, a tent.
