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Set in Stone 
by Loren Rhoads

Alondra pulled the cashmere hat down over her ears, but the gemstone studs in her earlobes still burned in the cold. The wind whining through the old buildings had teeth tonight. She hadn’t expected to be out after dark, but the sun set so early on these winter days. It hadn’t even been four o’clock and the solstice was still almost a week away.

This was a part of Oxford she didn’t know well, a one of the newer colleges cobbled into the antique buildings. Reuben College focused on computer science and machine intelligence, two subjects that she knew very little about. She was supposed to meet Rhys van Ryn, a friend – or maybe rival – of her mentor’s at the nearby Natural History Museum, where he was an emeritus.

Somehow, the maze of footpaths had gotten her turned around. Streetlights seemed few and far between.

A low, eerie moan split the night. Alondra told herself that it must be the wind across the mouth of a downspout or something. She looked up toward the nearest roofline, trying to place the sound.

Something shadowy shifted amongst the grotesques standing at watch along the roof. Alondra stared, but whatever it had been now froze in place. Only blind stone stared back at her.

She didn’t like things that chose to hide when they knew they were being watched. She picked up her pace, hurrying toward the next light along the path.

Something very large soared by overhead. She heard the wind pass over it. She glanced upward, but saw only blackness below the clouds.

The snow compressed beneath her boots did not make firm footing from which to take a stand. She wasn’t even sure she could run without slipping, but she leaned forward and hustled.

The moan she’d heard before drew nearer. Whatever it was had circled around, coming up behind her again: gliding with the wind, not against it. This time is passed so close overhead that the gust of its passage almost shoved her off her feet. Alondra let the momentum take her off the path. She stumbled through the deeper snow and spun beside the building, whatever it was, so she could fit her back against its wall.

This time she saw it – the creature – as it flew over the light farther up the path. It seemed human, humanoid anyway, but larger and powerfully built, held aloft by enormous wings. It banked into a turn and passed out of view for a moment, before she heard it coming back around again.

Alondra pulled off her gloves with her teeth, dropping into the snow at her feet. She sucked in the deepest breath she could, clenching her fists as she did so.  She had to time this correctly. She pushed the breath out, raising her fists over her head. Another inhale, shorter now. Exhale hard. The gargoyle was closing fast. A third sharp inhalation. She dropped her arms, breath trapped in her chest, and silence fell around her.

The wind dropped as if cut off. The snowflakes that had been swirling in the air plummeted to the ground.

The gargoyle came at her like a stone flung from a slingshot, in a race between momentum and gravity.

Gravity won.

Alondra flung both hands away, palms outward, and got a barrier up just in time to keep the broken stone monster from crushing her legs against the building. It landed in a twisted heap, one wing snapped off, its head wrenched over its shoulder at an impossible angle. Its stone eyes had gone blank again.

She shuddered, stepping over its outflung arm. Were there others overhead, she wondered.

 

Fiction © Copyright Loren Rhoads
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from Author Loren Rhoads:

Unsafe Words: Stories by Loren Rhoads

In the first full-length collection of her edgy, award-winning short stories, Loren Rhoads punctures the boundaries between horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction in a maelstrom of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. Ghosts, succubi, naiads, vampires, the Wild Hunt, and the worst predator in the woods stalk these pages, alongside human monsters who follow their cravings past sanity or sense.

The stories have come from the pages of the magazines Cemetery Dance, City Slab, Instant City, and Space & Time, the Wily Writers podcast, and the books Sins of the Sirens, Demon Lovers, The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two, Tales for the Camp Fire, and more.

Available on Amazon!