Dare (A Greystone Novel #2)

By Taylor Longford

Think you know about gargoyles? The beautiful winged race disappeared eight hundred years ago. When they last walked the earth, they traveled in close-knit packs, their throats marked with ancient runes. Their greatest enemies were the ugly and brutal harpies that people today mistake for gargoyles.

The victim of a harpy attack at seventeen, Dare lost his wings along with his poisonous barbs. When he meets Mim, he doesn't consider himself much of a catch. But Mim is the only power that can make the broken gargoyle whole again. And when she's abducted by a harpy, he's willing to sacrifice himself for her freedom.

Which might have worked, if Mim hadn't been willing to do the same thing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Taylor Longford
• Release date: Apr 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9780983707875

Taylor Longford

Hi! I'm Taylor Longford and I live with my family in Colorado. When it comes to books, I love fantasy, sword and sorcery, vintage comics and graphic novels. I drive an old Jeep Cherokee with 310,000 miles and almost as many dents. I've rolled it once and it looks like crap but it still goes fast! If I can make a living as a writer, I’ll buy something a bit nicer and write some more stories.

Book preview

Dare

A Greystone Novel

Book Two

by Taylor Longford

Smashwords Edition

ISBN 9780983707875

ALL RIGHT RESERVED

Dare Copyright 2011 @ Taylor Longford

www.taylorlongford.com

Electronic Book Publication April 2013

This book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the publisher, Taylor Longford.

Warning: Any unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the publisher's permission.

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination and used fictitiously.

Books in the Greystone Series:

Valor

Dare

Reason

Defiance

DARE

A GREYSTONE NOVEL

Book Two

by

Taylor Longford

Table of Contents

Title Page

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Epilogue

About the Author

Prologue

My brother, Valor, will tell you that gargoyles are extremely patient. That might be true for him. Me, not so much. For eight hundred years we were trapped between the walls of an old house in England and those years crawled by for me.

When we came to life again in the twenty-first century, we were surprised to learn that gargoyles are almost universally considered ugly. And when we found out why people think gargoyles are ugly, we were pretty disgusted. Because our name and our heritage had been hijacked by our worst enemies, the harpies.

The word gargoyle comes from the French word for throat and our kind were called gargoyles because of the runes we wear tattooed on our necks. But the stone carvings that drain rainwater from buildings were also called gargoyles because they appeared to pour water from their throats. And it wasn't uncommon for harpies to hide on the walls of old buildings, pretending to be one of the manmade carvings. So over the centuries, the horrible creatures came to be known as gargoyles, while our kind died out and the human race forgot we ever existed.

Valor will also tell you it was Havoc's fault that we ended up stuck between those walls for eight hundred years but if you want to know the truth, I was to blame.

Back in our time, harpies hunted in gangs and singled out lone gargoyles for attack. As a survival strategy, we stuck together and traveled in packs. Safety in numbers, and all that. But one afternoon, my pack cleared me to travel across town so I could help a friend. A gargoyle can easily pass for a human with his wings wrapped around his chest, underneath his clothing. In my case, I'd lost my wings a few years earlier, and only my leather-clad spines crossed my upper body beneath my linen jerkin. My barbs were destroyed at the same time that I lost my wings, so any harpies in the area would have a hard time scenting the venom locked in my veins.

Like all gargoyles, I was born with a set of eight barbs—sharp claws that are hidden beneath the thick hackles on our knuckles. When we're threatened, our hackles pull back and expose inch-long poisonous spikes. The barbs aren't all that effective against harpies or even other gargoyles but they can be a game breaker when fighting humans or large animals. A few well-placed blows can turn our enemies to stone forever.

But since I had no barbs, the harpies couldn't easily track me down. They'd have to get right on top of me before they picked up my scent. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened.

The sun had just reached the town's ramparts as I jogged along the main road that cut across York. The streets were relatively deserted since it was the dinner hour, but up ahead a young lad stacked wood against a smithy wall. Ewan was the blacksmith's bonded boy. His master wasn't the nicest man in town and the boy didn't have an easy time of it so we helped out whenever we could. I stopped and gave him a hand with some of the larger pieces of wood.

I could sense the smith lurking inside the house like a force of evil. Unfortunately, his malevolent presence overloaded my radar and masked the arrival of a much more dangerous threat. As I carried another armful of wood from the yard behind the forge, a gang of harpies turned off the main road and ran right into me.

The townsfolk tolerated harpies but not very happily. The creatures were routinely blamed for the loss of livestock though it was hard to catch them red-handed since they hunted at night. Young shepherds who tried to drive the monsters away from their flocks generally disappeared with their sheep. And when a lone traveler went missing on the road outside of town, harpies were blamed for that as well.

Some humans thought they were terrible angels sent from god to punish man for his sins. Others argued that they were winged demons from Satan's bailiwick. But everyone agreed that they sucked. And that they were too big to argue with. These ones were draped in monks' robes, the deep cowls shadowing their faces. I cursed my luck. If it hadn't been for the blacksmith, I'd have sensed them long before I saw them. At such close range, the harpies knew immediately what I was.

I took off running, dodging through narrow alleys and clambering over low rooftops but it wasn't long before they had me trapped against the old Roman walls that surrounded the town. I still don't know how the pack found out I was in trouble. Maybe Ewan reached them and told them I'd been attacked by a gang of insanely tall monks. Or maybe my kin decided I'd been gone too long and they'd already set out to look for me. At any rate, they raced to my side.

Even with nine of us, we were outnumbered. I told the pack to clear off but they wouldn't listen. Valor told me to save my breath; he planned to stay and fight. Defiance and his brothers agreed. Two of them could have flown me out of there but my weight would have slowed them down, making all three of us easy prey. So in the end, my entire pack ended up grounded with me, unable to take to the air because I couldn't fly and they wouldn't leave me behind.

Most of the sun had fallen behind the town's walls when Havoc suggested we take on our stone forms; that way, the harpies couldn't harm us. But gargoyles can only change to stone—and back again—with the help of direct sunlight. We need the extra boost of energy we get from the sun's rays. That meant we only had a few seconds to make a decision before the sun dropped below the horizon.

Valor sent a troubled glance in my direction then shared a look with Victor and the others. Together, they reached a silent agreement; my cousins and brothers decided to make the change for my sake. Gargoyles are protective by nature. They couldn't abandon a cripple like me.

With Havoc leading the way, we raced into a stone croft built against the town's walls just as the afternoon's last rays of sunlight angled through the windows. One by one, Havoc and most of my cousins made the change. But Victor and Valor waited and made sure that I'd changed to stone before they did the same.

Thinking they had us cornered, the harpies rushed into the hut. They were good and truly pissed when they found we'd changed to stone. I have to admit it was funny to see the looks on their faces. There's nothing as entertaining as a harpy going ballistic. Their anger management is an epic fail.

We expected the harpies to take off after an hour or so of screeching and figured we could change back to our living forms in the morning. But before they left, the ugly creatures decided to teach us a lesson. They walled us in at the back of the croft, using heavy slabs of stone to block out the sun's light forever. Or almost forever.

And for almost as long, I felt like it was pretty much my fault.

Eight hundred years dragged by before we were freed. Fortunately, gargoyles have exceptional hearing so we were able to keep up with the times by eavesdropping on the talk around town, then later on by listening to the radio and, more recently, the television. A few months ago, we were unearthed by MacKenzie's stepfather, who's an international treasure-hunter of sorts. And when he found us between the walls of that old house in York, he packed us up in wooden crates and shipped them to his home in Colorado.

If MacKenzie Campbell hadn't been a curious lass, we might have spent several more months stuck in her dark garage, waiting for her stepdad to find buyers for us before we were eventually sold off and separated forever. Lucky for us, Mac opened the first box that was delivered to her place and found Valor inside. Normally, he'd have hidden the fact that he was a gargoyle from a human he didn't know, but a toolbox fell on MacKenzie and pinned her to the garage floor. Val had no choice but to help her. He tried to cover things up and hide the truth from her but our MacKenzie's no halfwit. She figured things out pretty quick.

A day after Valor was delivered to MacKenzie's home, Havoc and Reason arrived. I came in the next shipment along with Victor and Defiance. The last consignment containing Chaos, Courage and Force went missing somewhere between England and Colorado but MacKenzie contacted the shipping company every day, demanding news about the lost crates.

Let me say right now, we love everything about the twenty-first century. Especially the girls. Not too long after we landed in America, we met some of MacKenzie's friends. One of them is especially nice. Her name's Mim. The first time I met her, I acted cool and hung out in front of the television. Afterward, MacKenzie accused me of ignoring her friend. She couldn't have been more wrong. I hadn't missed a single one of Mim's soft-spoken words. But I didn't think she'd be interested in me.

As the next few weeks passed by, I had a chance to spend more time with her. She even kissed me once. Okay, it was only after a game where the winner could claim a kiss from one of the losers—and her only other choice was Havoc—but after her kiss I began to hope she might actually like me.

Right when things were looking good between Mim and me, MacKenzie was attacked by a harpy. We thought we'd left the monsters behind us in the thirteenth century but evidently there are still a few around. It wouldn't have been all that surprising to find some lifeless old relics still attached to buildings in England, but we never thought we'd run into them in the United States. We hadn't expected them to turn up in museums or private collections.

That was a mistake.

While we were shopping in Denver one day, one of the monsters picked up our scent. She smashed through a large, plate glass window in a collector's mansion and followed us to our new home in the mountains. She captured Valor while he was in his stone form and came back to the house for MacKenzie. Val managed to kill the harpy with the help of MacKenzie's big wolfhound but Mac got a little beat up during the process and when Mim saw her injuries, she demanded an explanation.

We couldn't explain the harpy attack without telling Mim we were gargoyles. And we felt that the fewer people who knew about us, the better. To make a long story short, Mim thought we were responsible for MacKenzie's injuries.

That hurt.

I mean, I know humans don't have great instincts. I know they can't sense the good and bad in people like we can. But, really. How unperceptive can humans be? It would be impossible for one of us to harm MacKenzie. Our very nature commands that we protect the people we care about. We would have fricking died before we let anything happen to Mac or her friends.

As far as insults go, it was right up there with the worst modern curse you could think of. I can't even begin to tell you how much it hurt.

And I know something about pain.

Chapter One

I stood at the living room window and watched the cold, winter skies. The clouds were banked across the horizon like dirty gray cotton, blotting out the sun. An inch of crusty snow clung to the branches of the evergreen trees that surrounded MacKenzie's home and a smattering of white flakes made their way toward the ground but they didn't seem too serious about getting where they were going. The overcast skies reminded me of Scotland and the years I spent trapped in the dark shadows of a harpy's aerie. Fortunately, cloudy days are rare in Colorado.

As I tilted a cup of hot chocolate to my lips, my reflection caught my eye. It might sound bizarre, but I couldn't get used to how old I looked. I was born a year before my cousin, Defiance, so I should have been about nineteen. But before the harpies trapped us between those walls in York, I'd already spent two years in my stone form. And since gargoyles don't age when they're stone, that made me about seventeen.

I looked about thirty.

Okay, that was probably an exaggeration but I definitely looked older than the rest of the pack. Maybe it was the two inches of white that tipped the ends of my shoulder-length black hair. Maybe it was the hard lines that carved either side of my mouth. Maybe it was just the worn color in my green eyes. Even the gold flecks that floated on my irises failed to add any spark to my features.

My life hadn't exactly been easy.

I didn't like the direction my thoughts were taking so I refocused my attention on the scene outside the window. A foot of snow had fallen on Christmas Eve and I'd volunteered to shovel the driveway along with the rest of my family, but MacKenzie called a guy with a plow on the front of his truck and he had the driveway cleared in no time. You can't beat the twenty-first century for getting things done.

I took another sip from the heavy cup. Chocolate was another great thing about the modern world. It almost made our eight-hundred-year dormancy worthwhile. Cocoa hadn't reached Europe in our time and we'd never tasted it before. Things were pretty rustic back in the thirteenth century.

Despite the hot drink and the bulky gray hoodie I wore, a shiver gripped my spine. Normally, a gargoyle doesn't get cold. Our wings, wrapped around our upper bodies like a black leather vest, keep us warm in the winter without getting too hot in the summer. Unfortunately, I'd lost my wings when I was about sixteen.

Turning away from the window, I glanced at the decorated tree standing in the corner. We'd celebrated Christmas three days earlier and the tree looked a little lonely without the colorful presents stacked beneath its branches. Like it had suddenly lost all its friends. I was wearing my new powder blue belt with a pair of black jeans. The belt was a gift from MacKenzie, along with a hardback copy of Great Expectations. As well as these treasures, each of us had received a gift card from MacKenzie's mother on Christmas day.

Most of my cousins and brothers planned to use their cards to buy more clothes. I presently owned three new pairs of jeans and a hand-me-down pair that had belonged to Mac's brother before he left for college. I also had five T-shirts folded up in my drawer. To me, this seemed like plenty of clothing so I was saving my money for a guitar.

But kids these days have closets full of clothes. And Havoc was doing his best to catch up. My brother had invested in a lot more clothing than the rest of us and usually picked out bright colors the likes of which we'd never seen in the thirteenth century.

I flicked my gaze at him. His bronze hair spilled over his shoulders and half way down his back in long, twisting coils. MacKenzie called them dreadlocks. I called them a tangled mess. Havoc's hair had a lot of curl in it but it didn't look like the modern dreads I'd seen on teenagers in Denver. His hair had a metallic glint that made it much shinier.

As I watched Havoc in the dark leather chair, he turned a lump of pine in his hands, his knife peeling away small curls of wood. Sadly, the ungainly block looked unlikely to ever become a hunting bow or anything else we could sell to support ourselves. What are you making? I asked before taking another sip of chocolate.

Clogs, he answered without looking at me.

A low burst of laughter echoed in my chest. What are you gonna do with clogs?

Dance, he answered simply, but there was a glint of humor in his pale green eyes when he lifted his gaze to mine.

Are you sure you remember how? Victor chuckled from the couch, where he was working on a slender piece of wood with a lot more hunting-bow potential.

Aye, Havoc grunted. I'm a clogging fiend. You don't forget things like that. It's like riding a bicycle.

But you can't ride a bicycle, I pointed out on a snicker. There was an old bike leaning against the wall in MacKenzie's garage but none of us had tried it out yet. The narrow, two-wheeled contraption didn't look like it would work very well in the snow.

I'll have to work on that, he admitted, and flashed a grin up at me.

And do you think your talent for clogging will help you fit into the twenty-first century? Defiance challenged my younger brother as he stepped from the entry and leaned his shoulder against the wall.

I doubt Havoc will ever fit in anywhere, Victor teased, his hair glinting different shades of gold in the light that spilled from the tall lamp in the corner.

Not in those red jeans, I agreed.

They're not red. They're burgundy, Havoc informed us as he glanced down at his knees. And it turns out there are some clogging clubs in the Denver area. I found some online with MacKenzie's help.

And do the members actually dance with huge wooden boats on their feet? Defiance snorted. His pale blond hair was pulled back at the nape and not a single strand moved when he shook his head.

Havoc shrugged. Not yet, he admitted. But when they see my clogs I'm sure they'll all want a pair.

Good luck with that, Defiance snickered, his chipped tooth