When Lillian finds herself facing off against vampires and other mythological impossibilities, help comes from an unlikely source -- the stone gargoyle who has been sleeping in her garden for the last twelve years. After the battle, Lillian finds out that she is something more than human -- a Sorceress and Avatar to the gods -- and that the gargoyle Gregory has been her protector for many lifetimes.
When she was still a child, troubles in their homeland forced him to flee with her to the human world. Now Gregory fears something from her childhood has followed them to this world. Extra complications arise when she realizes she’s concealing a forbidden love for her guardian. While she might be able to defeat the Riven with Gregory’s help, she does not know if her fragile new love can survive the evil growing in her own soul...
~ EXCERPT ~
Lillian smoothed the oiled rag down the length of her grandmother’s broadsword and frowned at the newly polished blade.
“He’s stone. Just a damned statue,” she muttered to the empty kitchen. “Stone, nothing more.”
The microwave’s clock glowed pale green in the dim light. Not really wanting to know the exact time, she avoided focusing on the digits and returned to sweeping the rag across the blade in a rhythmic motion. “I don’t…”
Love him?
Was I really going to say that?
Oh God, yes.
The scent of rich, warm coffee reached her a few seconds before the sound of gurgling announced the coffeemaker was finished. Lillian welcomed the distraction.
Polishing her grandmother’s entire sword collection had seemed like a suitable task when she’d jerked awake from a nightmare at some ungodly hour before dawn and couldn’t get back to sleep. Normally nightmares and insomnia didn’t plague her, but there was something new—a restlessness which reared its head every night just as the stars faded and the first pink tinted the sky with a hint of dawn. Only one thing calmed the restlessness—sitting with him, her stone gargoyle.
Mechanically, she wandered over to the coffee pot and filled the largest mug she could find.
Sipping her coffee, she scooped up her cell phone and headed out the back door.
Outside, gravel crunched under her shoes as she walked the twisting garden path. A cedar maze with twelve-foot-tall walls stretched out before her.
Reaching the maze’s middle, she came to a small clearing ringed by upright, waist-high stones. At its center, a juvenile redwood grew strong and proud, dwarfing its surroundings. Ten feet from the tree’s trunk, a stone statue lurked, partially concealed by dense shadows.
He crouched over his stone perch with a knee resting on the pedestal and his wings mantled around him like a vast cloak. While his one hand rested on his raised knee, his other arm gripped his side in a rather odd position for a sculpture. It saddened her a little, for there was a narrowness about his squinted eyes and a crease in his brow that hinted at pain. Interestingly, he didn’t look beaten. His shoulders were broad, head proud, legs corded with muscle, strength and majesty in his every line.
“Hello, old friend.” She looked up into his face, with its burly muzzle and curving fangs. His muzzle merged flawlessly into wide cheekbones. Large eyes were hooded by a broad forehead. Crowning his head were two massive horns that curved back and up like an African waterbuck’s. A thick mane of hair flowed in a stony river midway down his back.
The gargoyle was one of her first childhood memories. At the age of eight, after a near-drowning accident stole her memories, she’d been drawn to the stone statue as if he was pivotal to her survival. She’d always assumed her strange need to be near him was a result of her childhood trauma. Now she wasn’t so sure.
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