Etched in Stone

  Etched in Stone

  Khargals of Duras

  Abigail Myst

  Etched in Stone: Khargals of Duras, Book 5

  Copyright Abigail Myst

  Cover Design by Nancey Cummings

  Published February 2019

  Digital Edition

  All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the original purchaser of this book only. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printer or electronic form without prior written person from the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Author’s Note: This is a work of fiction and all people, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. All characters depicted in this work of fiction are eighteen years of age or older.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Etched in Stone

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  More Khargals of Duras

  Also by Abigail Myst

  About Abigail

  Introduction

  A thousand years ago, a Khargal scouting party left Duras, only to crash on a planet called Earth.

  Injured and outnumbered, the stranded Khargals hid among stone effigies and observed the slow evolution of the planet’s primitive inhabitants. With no means of returning to Duras, they watched from their shadowy perches and faded into legend, becoming the mythical gargoyles.

  Until today. Long after any hope for rescue had died, the distress signal has finally been answered.

  It's time to go home.

  Etched in Stone

  Frelinray knows duty. He’s been protecting the same family for over 80 years. Now the call home has finally arrived. He must choose between serving his people, the Khargals, or the human woman he desires above all others. Which promise should he break?

  Jesse has the hots for a stone statue. Ridiculous, but true. She is an artist, and he’s her muse, but a girl has to draw a line somewhere. Or so she thinks, until he swoops in to rescue her. Can a relationship between a girl and a gargoyle really work, especially when forces beyond their control are finally calling him home?

  Prologue

  Frelinray

  London, 1940

  Felinray never thought he’d be glad of the Nazis. They were usually on his list of the worst of the worst. Slimy, racist bastards who would rather shoot something than actually solve the problems in their own lives.

  But now, as they dropped bombs by the plane load, he was almost grateful. The men that held Frelinray and his closest friend Tas were either too cheap or too stupid to invest in proper bomb shelters. Perhaps they just thought their prizes were not worth the price of carting deep down into the ground. Either that, or too dangerous. But he was not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, as the human expression went.

  They’d been taken, nearly six months before when Tas had insisted on attending that grakking weekly concert. Even with their hats and overcoats, they had been easily distinguishable from the crowd for someone who had been trained in recognizing a Khargyl. There was only so much you could do to disguise horns and a tail.

  “Come on, Tas,” he said, pulling at the chains that had secured him to the wall. That wall was no longer intact. In fact, it had fallen down and conveniently left a hole just big enough for him to squeeze through.

  “You go,” Tas said through the dust. Both of them hunkered down as another shell whistled by and hit a nearby building.

  “We’ve been through this before. I’m not leaving without you.”

  “Yeah, and we’ve been through this before. You’ve got rocks for brains.” Tas coughed and some of the dust settled. Felinray got a better view of the damage. Yes, half the wall was down, but only his half. Tas’s chains were still firmly imbedded in the wall that was still standing. Felinray now cursed the Nazis and their shoddy aim. He scrambled over the debris to see what he could do. Grabbing a hold on the ancient iron chains that bound them, he yanked. His came away from the wall with ease, free except for the three foot length of chain. He gave a yank on Tas’s chain. It held steady in the wall.

  “Leave me,” Tas said.

  Felinray gave the chain another hard pull. Dust and gravel flew as it lifted off the ground.

  “I’m sure another few of those bombs will let it loose. It’s almost coming now,” Felinray replied.

  Felinray tugged again, bracing his feet and taking a deep breath, trying to center himself in all the chaos around him. He had to free Tas before the bombing stopped. Otherwise, The Rose Syndicate would come back and they’d both be caught. There’d probably never be another chance like this again.

  If Rose came out from their own shelter deep beneath the building to find their two prisoners had nearly escaped, they would never make the same mistake again. It was a rare window of opportunity and Frelinray was determined to use it. He pulled harder on the chain. The wall made an eerie moan and he was encouraged.

  “Frelinray, cease. This is futile. Listen. The bombs are stopping. It’s too late for me.”

  “No. I will not leave you!”

  “Open your eyes, stupid.”

  Tas unfolded his wing. It was clearly snapped along the joint. He grimaced in pain. “I’d hit the river and sink like a rock.”

  Frelinray’s heart sank as he digested the truth. They were in some warehouse-type building close to the Thames, that much they had figured out by the sounds of water traffic and the smell of fish. It would take a leap off the building and a glide across the river to escape. With a broken wing, they’d have to go along the streets where they were vulnerable to the thousands of spooked Londoners who were emerging from the shelters.

  “I can’t,” Felinray said defeated. “I won’t.”

  “Look. You have someone. You have your pretty female waiting for you. I have nothing. Nothing at all but my broken self. Go. Besides, I know you well enough to know you’ll come rescue me.” He grinned a toothy smile and took a deep breath. “Go,” Tas repeated.

  The noise of footsteps sounded below them. Their captors were coming out of the shelter and investigating. Soon, it would be too late.

  “I’ll hold them back. Go,” Tas said.

  Finally, Frelinrey nodded. He grasped the hand of his friend, his brother, and then scrambled over the rubble toward the open spot in the wall. He pulled himself up as he looked over the edge. Sure enough, they were in the third story of a building right on the waterfront. Frelinray grabbed the chains that trailed from the manacles on his wrist. He spread his wings wide and took a leap.

  There was that thrill of being suspended in air, wings stretched and open, catching the wind. With the chains weighing him down, it was only a strong draft that kept him aloft. He knew that he could not have carried Tas with his own chains and still kept the two of them above water.

  He noted the buildings, but it was dark, black out dark and there was little moonlight to assist him. The only light came from the fires that raged from the newly gutted buildings. Frelinray could see better than his human counterparts in the dark, but he hardly recognized the London he'd known maybe six months earlier. He had to guess at the time that had passed,
as he'd been kept in a box for a large portion of his capture.

  So much of London lay in rubble that it was hard to get his bearing. He opened his wings and gave one last push up to the top of a short building on the other side of the river. He had made it that far, but he had to push further. He was still too exposed, too noticeable and Rose had eyes and ears everywhere. It was best to find some old church and hide among the gravestones, preferably far from London and its Nazi bombs. But only after he found Jessenia. Only once he knew that she was safe from harm could he rest in stony silence.

  She lived nearly a mile from here, but with luck, he could hop from one rooftop to another unnoticed. The damn chains were nuisance. He couldn't just let them hang, but carrying them wasn't optimal either. They didn't leave his hands free and threw off his balance, even using his tail as a counterweight.

  Frelinray turned toward Jessenia's flat and scouted his route ahead. The sound blast from behind him nearly knocked him over and the flash of light blinded him for a long moment.

  When he could see again, he turned and squinted at the source of the explosion.

  The building he had just flown from across the river, was a smoldering shell. Rose must have been storing explosives alongside them in the warehouse. With the searing heat on his skin and the acrid smoke and crackle, it was more than just a Nazi bomb that had leveled the building. Men scrambled out of hiding and began to man the water cannons to stop the damage from spreading. He dare not go back to look.

  Even in durammna, the stone sleep of his kind, a Kargyl would have been blown apart by the force of such an explosion. Tas, his friend, his brother, was dead. There would be time for mourning, centuries even, but now he had no time.

  “Goodbye, old friend.”

  Frelinray gathered his chains once more and leaped to the next rooftop and then to the next, spreading his wings to glide across each span. Most were narrow, especially further away from the river. Many of them were half crumbled from a previous blitz, but he was able to make good time. It was near to daybreak when he finally reached the little cramped flat where he and Jessenia had fallen in love.

  She was too young for him, too young, too fragile, but all humans were, when it came to that. He was nearly two thousand Earth years old and yet, when she spoke to him, when she laughed, all he could think of was wanting to spend the rest of his days with her. And that was his plan, to take her away from the war, from the fighting. Some place quiet where the two of them could raise a family and he could let time continue on. He was ready for that now. More than he had ever been in the thousand or so years he'd spent marooned on this backward planet. He knew others of his race had found a match and had settled down, choosing to let their lives play out, but he had always thought they were crazy. Better to stay a stone and wait for rescue than to waste away your existence on this puny little rock.

  But then he had met Jessenia. And all his doubts had melted away. They were never going to get rescued. The sigil would never shine. So he would make the best of it here. Have a few sons and make a real life with her.

  Frelinray had no illusion that Jessenia would leave her two younger sisters and come away with him alone. Olivia was a precocious child that had grown up too fast, only sixteen, while Margaret was just ten years old. Their mother had died five years ago. All three sisters lived together in the small flat with their father, at least until he had shipped out to France and left Jessenia to take care of her younger sisters.

  Frelinray had long accepted that he would have a ready-made family and his children would grow up alongside their aunts as one large family unit. He had money. Lots of it. He could buy an estate out in the country and they could live there together in peace and harmony. Finding a husband for Olivia would be a daunting task, but with the proper dowry (and the right amount of frighteningly mysterious father-figure), he was sure he could get the job done.

  He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that their building and the two surrounding it were intact. One building a few down had caved in, but it must have been a few weeks ago, as the rubble had already been managed and the Londoners had routed around it like a colony of stubborn ants.

  They had that trait in common. He landed on the roof, tired and ready to stone sleep, but he would be uneasy until he found Jessenia, until he wrapped his arms and wings around her and felt her lips on his. The light came over the edge of the buildings and Frelinray tried the door. She had always left it unlocked for him, but this morning, it was locked shut, bolted from the inside. He probably had enough strength left to tear the thing off its hinges but that in itself would have been a bad way to announce himself after six months of unexplainable absence.

  He knocked, and then sat back on his haunches, and waited. Minutes ticked by and without really meaning to, Frelinray found himself edging toward his old habit, stone sleep. The sun began to warm his hardened skin and the relief of being free sunk into his bones. He nearly entered the second phase when the door opened. Olivia peered around the edge of it.

  She gave him a funny look, eyeing him from head to toe, and then closed the door back behind her.

  Twenty minutes later, Olivia returned, lugging the largest pair of bolt cutters he'd ever seen.

  “Think this will get the job done?” she said, gesturing towards his chains. Trust Olivia to be practical before even putting in the niceties. She put the bolt cutters up against one of the chain links and put all her weight into closing them but they didn't budge. If he weren't so anxious to get rid of them, he might have been amused.

  He took the cutters from her, and using the ground as a pivot point, he shoved them in the manacle lock, forcing it down with all the strength he could muster. It snapped with a loud clang and one hand was free. He quickly repeated the process for his other wrist and then threw down the chains with a sigh of relief examining the wrists he hadn't seen for six months.

  Olivia tried to pick up the chain. “How am I supposed to explain this to the scrappers? I was using it to hold my gorilla? But then the damn Nazis got him?”

  Frelinray didn't especially like being compared to a primate, but he was in no mood to take exception.

  “Where is Jessenia?” he inquired.

  “I haven't even had my tea yet. You're welcome, by the way,” Olivia replied, evading his question.

  “Hello, Olivia. Nice to see you. Where is your sister?” Frelinray repeated.

  “They sent Midge off to some farm in the country. She's at least trying to take all in stride, pretending she's some famous explorer off to the wilds of Africa.”

  “Not that sister,” Frelinray said, impatiently.

  “I know. We got news, by the way. Daddy didn't make it. Dunkirk. Got almost across the Channel.” She turned and sighed, staring at the ground. “At least we got a body.” As if that was some solace for losing her only parent.

  “I'm sorry,” he told her.

  “It's alright. Everyone leaves. Or dies. Or leaves and then dies. Honestly, you're the first one to come back.”

  “It wasn't my fault. I was captured, held prisoner. I wouldn’t have left Jessennia, you girls,” he said as he motioned to the chains. “But I got free. And I promise, we'll all go, the four of us, to where it's safe.”

  “Four?” There was something in her voice that made his skin crawl ominously. She was stalling, waiting, and in his heart, he knew, deep down that something was terribly wrong. He almost didn't have the breath to ask.

  “Olivia. What happened?”

  “She went looking for you. Every afternoon, the churchyards, the buildings, anywhere she could think to find a big statue or thing like you. She kept saying, you'd never just leave on purpose, without saying anything,” Olivia stammered, beginning to tear up.

  “I wouldn't. They took me,” he remind her.

  “I know. I even joked about it. That you'd gone secretly away to Germany, to kill Hitler and get this nonsense over with quickly so that Daddy would let you... though that was never going to happen. I mean, y
ou've got wings! Definitely not normal.”

  “Olivia.”

  “They say she got caught in a raid. Two weeks ago. She's gone. It's just me here now. I lied. Told them I was eighteen in order to stay here with her. But now, it's just me.”

  He collapsed onto the rooftop, wanted to crumble into a million pieces. Wanted go into a deep stone sleep and not emerge until the wind had worn away his features to nothing.

  “Please,” he heard Olivia cry. Her tears had truly erupted now. She'd probably not allowed herself to mourn either her sister or her father properly. “Please don't leave me alone.”

  He held out his arms and she stepped into his embrace. He folded his wings around them. It was not the embrace of love that he had longed for, that his bones ached for, but one of protection. He would not abandon Olivia.

  1

  Jesse

  Present Day

  The bathroom was trying to kill her. At first, it had been a simple toilet banshee, a high pitched whine in the old pipes every time she flushed the toilet. Then, an entire chunk of tile had crashed down near her toes while she had been showering. With just enough of a rinse to get the shampoo out of her hair, Jesse hopped out around the debris and toweled off. She grabbed the nearest clothing, a ratty t-shirt she normally painted in, and an equally spotted pair of jeans.