Magical Midlife Dating (Leveling Up 2)

“Thanks,” I said, and wiped my arm across my forehead.

Branches cracked around us and leaves shivered down onto the ground. The other gargoyles landed, followed by Niamh, touching down in a rainstorm of leaves and branches.

I scrambled up and looked around, sensing Mr. Tom twenty or so feet away. He lay in a crowding of brambles, one wing torn along a vein and the other cinched in tightly to his body, embedded with hundreds of thorns, I was sure. A jagged cut slashed across his chest, and blood oozed from his forehead.

“Mr. Tom?” I stopped just outside the brambles and looked around, lifting my arms in that way people did when they were getting ready to wade into really cold water.

He grunted, the mouth and teeth of gargoyles not quite conducive to talking.

“Can you be moved, Mr. Tom? What do we—”

“Here, Earl…” Niamh came over in her birthday suit, wincing with each step but clearly not ready to give in and limp. Thick crimson rivulets ran down the milky skin of her leg. “Either change into stone so you can heal, or change into a man so we can see what’s wrong with ya.”

“His wing is torn, that’s what’s wrong with him,” I said, looking for a path into the middle of that patch of brambles. “He’s got a—”

“There’s some damage, yes, but we need to know if there is anything that will jeopardize his healing.”

A sound like boulders moving through a canyon caught my attention as Mr. Tom shifted into his solid form. I made sure to think about what I wanted—change into a man and be okay—so that we could get him out of there. This was another eccentricity of gargoyles. When in stone form, they awakened more quickly if they were called to do something. Hopefully Cedric hadn’t had any trouble with Edgar, but there was still Alek to find.

While Mr. Tom was doing that, I turned back to the enormous basalt-gray gargoyle, the tops of his arcing wings adding five feet of height to his already wide and brawny shoulders. A wicked claw protruded from the top of each wing, joined by a claw at the end of each vein, where the leathery material gathered when the wings were pulled in. His thick arms hung loose at his sides, ending in large, clawed hands that could rip my throat out in one swipe.

He was magnificent, huge and imposing, an obvious force to be reckoned with.

And I was somehow supposed to lead him. I nearly laughed.

You got him here, Jacinta, I reminded myself. You summoned him, and when he didn’t want to rescue Mr. Tom, you forced him to land. You got him here, which means you can lead him—you just need the confidence.

I wrapped my magic around me to ward off the cold and surveyed the gargoyles around him without really seeing them. It was a stalling tactic and something that looked really good in movies.

“Do you have all your men?” I asked the basalt gargoyle. “Did you lose any?”

“No,” he grunted, his speech a little clearer than Mr. Tom was usually capable of in gargoyle form.

“Right, okay. We have one—a little smaller than most of you—missing. Brown form. No idea where he could be. Send a few people to fly over the treetops and look.”

“That missing gargoyle is going to try to blend in. He won’t want to be seen if he’s hurt,” Niamh said, her hands on her hips, her leg bleeding freely. “He won’t know these are friendlies.”

The lead gargoyle grunted, and it felt like an affirmation.

“Crap,” I said, looking out through the trees. “Well, we can’t leave him.”

“Ah, sure, it’ll be grand,” Niamh said. “He’ll heal and come back, or he’ll not heal and he won’t come back.”

The large gargoyle grunted out another affirmation.

“That’s…” I shook my head at her. Magical people had a very different view of fallen soldiers than their non-magical counterparts.

A pulse of magic concussed the air before the idea even coalesced in my head. There was one guy who did understand the need to bring everyone home. A guy who wouldn’t blink if I asked him to hunt down a fallen man.

Austin, I need help. Please come.

I hoped he’d know the request was from me and not Ivy House. The more I thought about it, the more I knew he was the perfect person to help. Gargoyles couldn’t smell like shifters could. They couldn’t hunt or track. They weren’t good on the ground—not like Austin.

“Yes, miss, here I am. You wanted me?”

I turned back to the brambles, peering in to see Mr. Tom’s face. He lay still, making no move to crawl out.

“Mr. Tom, are you okay?”

I sent another pulse to Austin, pulling down the block on our connection to see if he was responding. Immediately his location hit me—he was headed my way and coming fast, probably halfway between where I stood and town. He’d somehow known I was in trouble and had left before receiving my summons.