Guardian of the Abyss (6 page)

But the roaring in the back of her mind seemed to intensify and after a time, she could no longer ignore it. The voices battered her with questions:

"Who are you?"

"Where did you come from?"

"Where are you?"

"Are you real?"

The questions seemed to come a mile a minute and from a multitude of sources. So Sarah did the only thing she could do... she ignored them all. After all, it wasn't sane to hear hundreds of voices in your head. It was bizarre enough to hear Abaddon's voice in her head.

When the darkness began to fall, Abaddon picked her up and carried her inside. He sat her down carefully and then shifted beside her.

"I'm a statue, aren't I?" she asked him.

"Yes," came the soft answer.

"Can I turn back into myself?"

"To a degree. You will be... changed."

She thought about it for a long time. She had sensed, in her rare lucid moments, that she was dying. Now she felt better. She wasn't hungry, the cold didn't bother her, and most of all, her mind felt clearer than it had since this had all begun.

"You saved my life?" she finally asked. There was silence for so long that she became fearful. "Abaddon?" she demanded.

"I may have saved your life. As a human, you would have definitely died, and soon. But I fear I cannot be certain that you will survive as a gargoyle."

She became aware of a deep sense of loneliness and soul-deep misery. For a moment, she nearly drowned in it before she grasped that they weren't her emotions. She realized that if she took her mind off of her vision, she could sense him accurately, even to his position relative to her on the floor, and what he was feeling.

Dimly, awareness of those other presences filtered into her, as well. They were like pinpricks of light, most of them a vast distance away and gathered in one area. If she focused on any one of them, she could sense emotions, even vague thoughts.

Wrenching her mind back to Abaddon and the many questions she had, she focused in on him again. She spent a long moment just evaluating him. She sensed his overwhelming feeling of failure, and his penitence for what he had done to her.

How had she ever thought that this noble creature was a demon?

A powerful tenderness rose in her and spilled over. Reaching out to him, she did the only thing she could think to do. She imagined laying her hand on his cheek, and whispered to him, "Thank you." Feeling his pain and his shame, and knowing that no matter how she might feel about it, he felt he had wronged her terribly, she told him, "I forgive you."

Chapter 8

Redemption. It came in the form of five little words, "Thank you, I forgive you". It came in a feeling of overwhelming tenderness that flowed through him and touched the deepest sorrows of his very soul. It whispered around him on butterfly wings and the gentlest touch of a porcelain hand on his stone form's cheek.

Unaware that she had shifted to her humanoid form, Sarah spoke to him through the gargoyle bond as her hand touched his weathered cheek. He couldn't help himself, he shifted back to his humanoid form and pulled her into his arms. He was amazed he could still hear her while she was in humanoid form and touching him. Once he shifted, though, the connection was dimmed to a conversational level. He cradled her in his lap, letting her presence sink into his mind.

And for the second time, he cried. He wept for her, and he wept because he didn't deserve redemption, but it had been given to him. In five words she had liberated him from the crippling pain of changing her.

He pulled back to look at her. She was breathtaking. Her skin was fine porcelain, shimmering slightly as if dusted with powder. Her hair was, unbelievably, still brown, though now it had the unmistakable sheen of stone. It was unbelievable that she could already form hair. Unprecedented. Yet she had it... and not only on her head.

The hair on her legs and arms was gone, but he noticed that it wasn't gone from between her legs. He stared, not realizing he was doing so. Her clothing had been shredded in the translation from human to gargoyle, and now a small patch of brown hair sprouted just above her...

"Ahem," came as the object of his fascination made a throat-clearing sound. He lifted his head, startled.

She raised one perfect, brown eyebrow. The completely black eyes of a gargoyle stared at him from between perfectly formed brown eyelashes. Her regal stare reminded him of his manners, and he looked away. He would need to teach her how to make clothing form from her skin.

She was truly glorious. He had never seen anything more beautiful in his life, and never before had he seen a gargoyle that could change the color of his or her skin. Even Lilith hadn't been able to do so, so it was clearly something unique to Sarah, not to female gargoyles.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the shimmer of her change back into a statue. Relieved, he followed suit.

"Am I a statue again?"

"Yes, as am I."

"Can I ever control that?"

"I believe so, although you seem to be doing it effortlessly, so I can't be certain you'll learn to control it. It seems it is easier to learn to do it, rather than how to stop it."

"This is kind of cool, you know."

Uncomfortable, Abaddon finally told her, "I believe that factor will wear off once you realize that your life as you knew it is over. You will never know your friends again. It will be as if you actually died. Only you will ever know better. Humans will not accept you."

"That's for sure," came the surprising reply. "They almost wiped all of you guys out the last time. I'm not going to show myself. But we don't need to worry about that down here."

Before he could think better of it, Abaddon had already sent the thought to her. "I had hoped we might find a way out of here before we both die down here."  With her thought had come understanding of 'the first time'. He now knew that gargoyles had introduced themselves to the human world and been killed for doing so. There was a distinct possibility that he was the last of his kind--he and Sarah. They had been fools to try it, but he didn't say so.

His concern was slightly abated when she didn't realize the seriousness of their situation and said, "In what, a thousand years?"

"Maybe somewhat less," he admitted.

"So what are my superpowers?" she demanded unexpectedly, and he felt amusement well up in him. Ideas came underlying the question that he found to be a bit absurd. Men in strange outfits pretending to save the world and other oddities.

"You can change the look of your skin."

"Oh my god, your loincloth is just skin?"

With that came ideas and understandings that stirred his libido to fascinated interest. Fortunately he was a statue, or one part of his anatomy would have been just as hard as one. "Yes, but it is skin from my thighs. It's not pleasant to reshape the skin from where you're thinking. So no, you were not sitting directly on my penis."

“
How do you do that?” He sensed the fullness of the question. She was asking how to make clothes from her skin.

“
Use your imagination. Imagine the clothing you’d like to be wearing.”

He returned his attention to his vision as she shimmered to her humanoid form. She crossed her legs and closed her eyes. Abaddon didn’t want to be ill-mannered and stare at the curious bit of hair between her legs, so he watched her face with devoted focus.

A moment later, she opened her eyes. Nothing had changed. Scowling, she closed them and focused again. The process repeated several times until she shifted back to stone form. After a few moments, she looked down to watch as the hair between her legs grew and shorted. She laughed, doing it several more times as Abaddon promised himself he'd quit looking... any second now. After a while, though, she grew bored with that and tried again for clothing.

“
What am I doing wrong?” she demanded.

“
Show me what you’re imagining,” he instructed her.

He saw a pair of men’s britches and what appeared to be breast bindings like she had worn when she first arrived underneath the strange skin-like thing he’d taken off of her.  He understood intellectually that those were now considered appropriate attire for women, and was astounded.

After several frustrating hours, he finally realized what she was doing wrong. She had tried various articles of clothing, but he realized she was just picturing them, not seeing them on her body.

“
Imagine them on your body. How they feel, how they look, everything.”

She sat frowning, and he found his gaze wandering inappropriately. She had rendered herself into an amazing humanoid form. Even her breasts were tipped with color. Her nipples were rosettes of satiny pink that he wanted to touch with an urgency that surprised him.

Recognizing that he was behaving without even a trace of honor, he deliberately turned to his humanoid form and leaped into the water. Some manners weren't memories as much as they were ingrained into him. One did not sit ogling a woman, even if he hadn't seen one for longer than he could remember.

*  *  *  *

Sarah's frustration was increasing by the moment. She truly hated not at least getting the upper hand on something right away, and she generally preferred to master things right away over even that. A flaw left over from her childhood was that she tended to quit when she didn't get it on the first try.

But how did one just give up on having clothes on? Especially stuck in a cave at the bottom of the ocean with the single sexiest man she'd ever laid eyes on in her entire life? She was torn between insecurity and the feeling that maybe walking around naked would be a good thing--perhaps he would find her attractive and make a move.

Of course, she could do it, herself, but she was stymied by a high-level insecurity that she wasn't used to. She could not give in to her overwhelming desire to just jump in his lap and sexually assault the poor man, because there was the possibility of him refusing to allow it. Since he was roughly four times her size, she supposed she'd have to come up with a more subtle approach. Not that she did subtle, because she usually didn't. But she'd make an exception this time.

He was attracted to her... or at least she thought so... but he was profoundly afraid of his own feelings for her. She'd sensed that much when she'd brushed her mind against his and read his personality and past. His overweening sense of honor precluded him from making any attempt to seduce her, however minor. He'd been raised in a time so vastly different from the modern day that it was mind-boggling on a vast scale. He already loathed himself for kissing her back when she had kissed him, so there would be no further expression of desire from him.

'Generation gap' in this case became 'generation grand canyon' and stayed firmly lodged there. It would take a miracle to get the man over his antiquated ideas of propriety, especially the fact that he was a gargoyle. To him, he was an abomination, and he would not respect any woman who wanted to 'lay with him'.

But Sarah now had an advantage, and she intended to push it. She was still a woman, certainly, but she wasn't human anymore. She was now his own kind. Sadly, from the glimpses of memory she'd seen in his mind, his first encounter with a woman of his own kind had been terrible. There were multitudes of images in his mind of the woman doing everything she could to provoke him to rage. She had wanted him to strike her, she had pushed and manipulated and done everything she could in order to break that iron self-control he had.

An admirable trait, that self-control. Yet it was not a factor in her favor. So long as he held the belief that she was above him and inaccessible to him despite their circumstances, he would employ that iron will to keep her properly 'untainted' by his touch--a notion that was at best, imbecilic.

Inherently, Sarah recognized the seeming inconsistency in her behavior. At first, while under the influence of whatever illness that had plagued her mind when she first arrived, she had thought him to be the epitome of evil. Yet now that she had unintentionally trespassed into his mind and past, she knew him to be a noble, even regal being. She'd never been entirely convinced he was evil, but she threw herself fully into her acceptance of him as a pure soul now that she had seen his innate nobility of character.

It was just the way that Sarah Holt did things. She was all or nothing, sink or swim, live or die, black or white. She was as subtle as a barn door and as likely to change her mind as a leopard to change its spots. That was why she generally researched herself to death's threshold before deciding on something. This time was an exception. She'd changed her mind. He wasn't a demon, he was a good, decent man whom life had done its best to destroy.

She sat and stared at the water where Abaddon had disappeared. He had changed her. He had reformed her body, certainly, but he had changed her on more fundamental levels, as well.

Yet she was still as stubborn as she had always been. She sat down and began to plan the next steps of her life. She knew that he thought she was unaware that she was still dying, but she had sensed that in his mind, as well. It had been weighing so heavily on him that she'd have had to be blind not to see it. So that meant that, if his calculations were correct, she only had a few short weeks left--months if she survived far longer than he thought she could.  She would spend the last weeks of her life in his arms, or she would die trying.