Chapter 105

"Marc hasn't told me much about your home. What's it like?" Aldara asked. Etienne had proven to be surprisingly easy to talk to.
"The compound?" He gave her an understanding smile. "It's really a village based around the idea of a medieval walled city with the chateau in the center and all kinds of homes and businesses around it. For obvious reasons, our clan has purchased a lot of the surrounding land, so while we're only about thirty minutes from Montreal on the highway, it's really very isolated."
"Sounds imposing."
"It can be, at first. When I first saw it, right before my wedding to Marc's mother, I was a little overwhelmed. After a while, though, it just becomes home."
"So you weren't originally a gargoyle?" Aldara had heard Marc's friends mention converting their mates but she didn't understand the process.
"No, I started life as a very normal human being," Etienne told her. "My father was a physician in Quebec City. I met Genevieve at a nightclub in 1928, when I was a student in Montreal. We spent several evenings together before she explained why I could never meet her during daylight. By that time I'd already proposed. When she explained the process, I agreed, though we waited until I'd completed law school."
"Was it worth it? To give up your family and friends? To have to hide all day until after you had children?" Not that it mattered to her, she told herself. Still, the fact that the current matriarch had married outside the clan gave her a little spark of foolish hope.
"Worth every bit of it, my dear. And there was a good bit of time when I couldn't enter a courtroom by day. We spent the first twenty years together before she conceived."
"So Marc has an older sibling?" He hadn't mentioned one but maybe he wasn't the heir - that was even more heartening.
"No. Unfortunately, miscarriages became common after the artifacts were lost. There were two before Marc was born." The older man's voice was filled with regret even though the losses had been more than half a century earlier since Marc was over fifty.
"I'm sorry." The words were inadequate but she didn't know what else to say.
"Don't be. Every life has its trials, dear, and on the whole, mine has been a very good one. And you..."
There was a loud thud from the compartment behind them, she whirled to see a slate-gray, winged gargoyle turn his gun from Beau, who was already down on the floor, to shoot both Damien and Remy in quick succession.
"Marc!" Aldara screamed. Yves' gargoyle shape was big and bulky, with protruding horns emerging from his forehead, long, vicious claws on his massive hands and black scaly wings. As he picked up a fire ax in his free hand then stepped up the aisle between the fallen gargoyles, she hurriedly slammed the door to the cockpit shut. "Etienne, we're in trouble." She fought down a wave of nausea when she realized Marc hadn't returned from the galley.
"So I gathered," he said calmly, though there was a quaver to his voice. He did something to the controls then turned to her. "There's a pistol in that compartment under your seat."
Yves reached the cockpit door and pressed the intercom button. "Where is the crown, Aldara?"
"Yves, what are you doing?" She scrambled to retrieve the pistol from under her seat.
Before she'd found it, the intercom switched on again. "Either turn it over or these gargoyles die. They're probably not dead yet but I have an axe. Even we don't recover from having our heads severed from our necks."
"She doesn't have it." Lord Etienne pressed the intercom button and spoke calmly. "She shipped it ahead to our compound. It's already there in the safe."
"I don't believe you," Yves replied. "My father would have never trusted the post. He trusted you, though, you little whore. Now come out here and get it for me or your friends start to die. And we'll start with the one back in the cargo hold."
If she'd been standing, her knees would have given out at the news that Marc wasn't yet dead. She could see Beau's slumped figure behind her, saw that he'd shifted into his gargoyle form and turned to stone - the way their species healed injuries.
"Or maybe I'll open the hatch and throw them out one by one," Yves continued. "You know if a gargoyle is destroyed in stone shape, they can't come back."
Yes, Geraint had mentioned that. And the ground was a long, long way down.
"Get the gun," Etienne whispered.
"And when he takes me back to the trunks, I can look for a moment to shoot him." She fumbled under the seat, grabbed the gun and stuffed it into her purse.
"Five, four, three..."
"I'm coming," she yelled when Etienne pressed the intercom button. Unclipping her seat belt, she stood and stepped toward the door. She took a deep breath then cracked it open. "I can show you where it is. Don't shoot me."
"Not yet anyway. First I have other plans for that hot little body of yours. Daddy isn't here to protect you now."
"Fine. Just don't shoot." She opened the door wider and stepped out of the cockpit just as a shot whistled past her side.
Aldara screamed and fell to her knees as Etienne slumped in his seat and began turning to stone.
"Sorry, love," Yves said with a wicked smirk. "I didn't say anything about not shooting him. Now get up. You're getting all bloody." He grabbed her arm in a painful grip and hauled her to her feet. At least, she thought, he'd had to set down the axe to do it.
She looked at her legs and realized she'd fallen into a pool of blood next to the jasper boulder that was Beau DuMont. He'd lost so much - would he really be able to recover? From here she could see the lumps of marble and granite that were Remy and Damien as well. Both were petrified but both had also taken devastating wounds. They'd all been hurt because of her and she was very afraid that none of them were going to get out of this alive - especially since now nobody was flying the plane. Clutching her purse tightly to her side, she allowed him to pull her back toward the rear of the plane, praying to every god she'd ever heard of that Marc was still alive and that somehow she'd be able to get them out of this.
"Where's the crown?" Yves asked again as he pushed her ahead of him toward the hold.