Stone Guardian(36)

So what did he know, and how did he know it? If he knew she was at the park, where were the drawn weapons, and where were the other brothers and dad? And why wasn’t he asking about the gargoyle sighted in the park? And if he was here only because there was an orc attack in the city, why wasn’t he ushering her out of the apartment and straight to dad’s?

Nothing was adding up. This needed to be played casual, at least until she had a better idea of what her brother knew. “Michael, what are you doing here?”

“You went to the park today?” It was question and statement mixed together, a tactic used by cops where they are asking you a question, but in the words it’s implied they already know what’s going on, so you better not lie.

Keep up the confusion act. “Actually I did. I went running this morning.”

His voice was curt, not letting her sentence die before he asked the next question. “Did you see anything while there?”

“Yeah, lots of trees and two men ogling this one woman who was wearing red running lingerie.”

“Anything else?”

In their usual conversations, now would be the time she would get annoyed with her big brother and start acting huffy. Crossing her arms and cocking her hip to one side, she added a touch of annoyance into her tone. “What’s this about?”

Michael’s eyes were cold and calculating. In that gaze, he was weighing whatever he knew in his head against what he had seen from her today.

Her brother was deciding if he could trust her. He was deciding if she was his baby sister, or if she was responsible for a wrong he needed to set right.

Damn, this hurt. And the worst of it was, he was right. He was right to question her and act like she was some bum he grabbed from the street, because right now, right this minute, for the first time in her life, she was lying to him. Not a fib, not a stall for more time, but a lie.

A big lie. A lie over something that mattered.

End this now.

Maybe that would be best. This situation was spiraling out of control. If today proved anything, it proved the zombie incident was not a mistake. Something was hunting her for whatever reason. What were the choices? Have a gargoyle sleeping under her bed all her life?

End this now. Confess everything and throw herself on Dad’s mercy, then come up with a plan on where to go from here. He’d be mad as hell, no doubt about it, but that didn’t change the fact they would do anything to protect her.

And Terak?

What would they do to Terak?

What would they do to the gargoyle who had been protecting her all this time, the being she had begun to call her friend? He fought and bled for her. He laughed with her. He snarked at her.

He called her brave and she knew, to the center of her soul she knew, he meant it.

Even if they didn’t do anything to him, coming clean to Michael would mean the end of her relationship with Terak.

They would force her to let him go.

Michael’s eyes were still indecisive.

Larissa raised her eyebrows at him. “Well Michael, I’m waiting. What has you coming over here in such a snit? Couldn’t you at least call me first and warn me you have attitude to spare?

Michael relaxed, the signal that he had put his suspicions aside. He put his hand out to her, something between his fingers that he was giving her. It was her driver’s license. “Did I leave this at Dad’s?”

“It was found today at the park. There was an incident and I happened to notice it near the scene.”

So that’s what had started this. “What happened at the park?” No, I’m not going to move back and live with dad. No, I don’t care if there was an orc attack…

He shook his head. “Sorry, I can’t give any details of an ongoing inves… Ris, you alright?”

It was a good thing she tripped and fell to the floor, otherwise Michael couldn’t have missed the shock that had streaked through her body and had to be evident on her face, and he would have known she’d been lying earlier.

The zombies had disintegrated – at least, that’s what she assumed was the reason the earlier attack was undetected. But the orcs? That was destruction on a large scale, and their bodies didn’t disintegrate. They were in large heaps, blood and broken bodies littering a little used section of a public park. That couldn’t be hidden.

Could it?

And if someone did have the ability to hide it? Who? And why would they?

What the hell was Michael part of?

She needed answers, but right now Michael needed to leave. There was still a large male she had to take care of. She picked herself off the floor and used her palms to dust off her legs. “One of these days I’ll become graceful, you’ll see,” she said, picking the threads of a long running family joke.