When I got back into my cell, it was empty. Maybe I should’ve locked the door. Or thought the stone panel would obey a candidate as well as a Heartkin.

Her car was already hauled out of the EvilMart parking lot. I guess they don’t believe in waiting around. There were stars and glittering cascades of pebbly broken safety glass, the damp noxious perfume of the Big Bad, and a lighter gray smell of rain and daylight.

The broken purse had already been swept up and taken away somewhere, too. Midday shoppers didn’t glance at me—I was too far out in the lot. After a few moments of standing with my eyes closed, sniffing a little, I found what I was after.

The thin thread of gold necklace almost burned my fingers. My nose twitched as I turned its supple length over and over. Waiting for the little tingle.

A nose for metal is a nose for tracking, that’s what the older gargoyles say. Me, I just wait for the tingle. Often as not—even oftener than that—it leads me right to what I’m looking for.

This time it ran along my nerves like burning gasoline and almost pulled me out of my human skin. It was hard work, keeping my shambling shape in some modicum of normalcy as I whipped around, the pull hard and close.

That’s when the cop cars arrived, and the smell of the Big Bad wasn’t being rubbed out by the rain. It was fresh and fuming from the EvilMart.

“Shit,” I whispered, and lunged into a clumsy run.

The cops had their guns out. A SWAT van pulled up, and people started screaming and running because there was a pocka-pocka-pocka of automatic fire from inside the building.

Somebody was taking their shopping a little too personally. Or they were trying to kill my Heart candidate.

They kill them wherever they find them, and I’d made a lot of noise and fuss last night alerting them to the fact that there was a stoneskin around and a Heart candidate to kill.

Stupid me.

I leapt on two cars because of the clots of people spilling out in the parking lot. They crunched under my feet, sloping away as I jumped. It was chaos. The cars crumpled because I had blurred out into trueform. Who cared what they saw? The screaming inside was taking on a more panicked, desperate quality, and for once I was glad I’m not imaginative. Imagination just gets in the way when you have a job to do.

The automatic doors didn’t open, so I busted through. Glass tinkled, shattered, and flew. I was moving almost too fast for human eyes to track, and all that mass moving so quickly means it’s hard to slow down or stop. My claws dug huge furrows in the flooring as I bounded into the store and had to twist to avoid smooshing some of the pinks who were running around.

Oh, great. Just great.

Harpies.

There were four of them. EvilMarts are built so warehouse-high, the feathered bitches could even skim the tops of aisles. They were circling, looking for something. And there were a bunch of little gray gneevil-gnomes with AK-47s.

Heart have mercy, it’s an invasion! I squashed one gneevil by landing on him, spun and leapt, and my nose tingled. Good luck finding Kate in all this—but I had to find her, and the Heart inside me told me she was here.

Well, best way is the most direct way. The Heart in me pulled, and I followed it, building up every iota of speed I could. One of the nice things about being stoneskin: Walls don’t hold up to us. Stone we can whisper aside. Steel struts? They break. And drywall? Don’t make me laugh.

One of the harpies let out a chilling scream. It’d seen me. The sound shattered glass, and one of the aisles exploded. Dish soap, laundry soap, cleaning products spilled out in a tide. I was going fast enough it didn’t matter, claws ground into the flooring as I uncoiled and flew, wind whistling in my ears and bullets spattering behind me.

The wall crumpled like paper. I blew through it and landed in something that looked like a conference room, a long table and a wall with a whiteboard and sheets of fluttering paper tacked to it. Chairs spun as I cracked right through the cheap-ass table. I skidded through another wall and found a break room. The impact broke the coffeepot, hurling it across the room, and the Heart in me sent a ringing thrill through every inch of nerve and meat I owned.

There was a group of screaming pinks cowering in the break room. Drywall dust filled the air. I coughed, digging my hind claws in, and jolted to a stop.

Kate wasn’t screaming. She stood in the middle of them, mouth ajar and eyes wide, staring at me. She clutched her broken purse to her chest. She also wore one of my hooded sweatshirt jackets, zipped up to the very top and absurdly big on her. Her hair, long and loose, fluttered on the breeze from me busting through the wall. I opened my mouth to say something right before one of the harpies plowed through the hole I’d made and things got interesting.

I hate harpies. They smell horrible. When you rip ’em apart, they screech so bad it makes your ears want to bleed. They aren’t that bad if they’re grounded, though. And then there was just Kate to worry about—grabbing her and getting her away from the gnomes with guns.

THE packet was delivered—fake ID for both of us; I got the sensitized filmstrip on the picture ID to look like her with just a little rearranging. Plane tickets and a wad of cash for supplies I didn’t have enough time to buy. We just barely made the flight, and Kate was still in jeans and my sweatshirt jacket. We’d stopped for ten minutes we couldn’t afford in the airport; I bought a handful of clothes in a size that looked like it might fit her and stowed the bag in the overhead compartment. The flight attendant wanted to do it, but I mumbled something and Kate just dropped into the seat near the window. The attendant gave me a dark look and left.

Kate was still trying to process everything, and there was drywall dust in her hair. Air France has really nice first-class cabins.

They spare no expense when bringing in a Heart candidate.

So we had a space all to ourselves, and the attendants fussed over her right before takeoff. Me they just looked nervously at.

I buckled her seatbelt. “Bienvenue à Air France!” the intercom chirped brightly, and I didn’t let out a breath until the doors had closed and the plane started making its getting-ready-to-go sounds. The seat was wide and deep, and she wasn’t even scratched. Just that drywall, and glassy-eyed shock.

“Thank God,” I finally muttered. “You want a drink?”

Color flooded her cheeks again. She hunched her shoulders, darted me a mistrustful glance. “Christ, yes.”

“What’ll you have?”

“Vodka.” Her throat moved as she swallowed. The two little punctures were fully healed now. Gargoyle spit and garlic works wonders. She blinked at me like she was trying to get dust out of her eyes. “What the hell.”

“Got it.”

We didn’t have to wait long. The stews come around a lot in first class. She got a vodka with cranberry juice; I decided a Jack Daniels was in order. As soon as the attendant had finished pouring mine, Kate asked for another. The attendant gave her a weird look, but I palmed up a tenner and she ended up leaving us two vodka and cranberries, visibly hoping we weren’t going to be trouble.

“Just don’t get drunk,” I cautioned.

“Why the hell not?” She laughed, a bitter little sound. The seats around us were empty; I’d bet the Sanctum had bought them, too, just to give us some privacy. “What the hell is going on? What the fuck are you?”

I winced. “I’m a gargoyle. Stoneskin. We serve the Heart.”

“Gargoyle. Okay. Got that. What were those . . . those other things?” She took down another vodka with remarkable aplomb. I doubted she even tasted it, she tossed it so far back.