The top half of Rafferty’s stick lay broken on the ground. The man himself had drawn back, hunched around his center, clutching the remnants of the cane. Sandy wasn’t bleeding. The girls were safe.

A Stone Man confronted Corbin Rafferty.

He did not resemble the monsters of Matt’s imagination or his father’s stories. The Stone Man was thinner than Matt expected, carved with lean muscle like a runner or dancer. His face was narrow and short muzzled with a bird’s quizzical expression, and his wings were slender and long. Maybe their kind came in as many shapes as people.

“Shale!” Ellen sounded happy for the first time in the years Matt had known her.

Rafferty recoiled. One crooked accusing finger stabbed toward the statue. “There! You see. They sneak around our city, taking what’s ours!”

The gargoyle’s—Shale’s—expression didn’t change like a normal person’s. It shifted, like windblown sand. “We take nothing,” he said. “We help.”

“We don’t need your help.”

“If someone asks,” the gargoyle said, gentle as a footfall in an empty church, “should I refuse?”

Rafferty spun from the gargoyle, to Matt, to Sandy, to Ellen. Whatever he sought from them he didn’t find, because he revolved on Shale again, still holding the broken cane.

Then he ran toward the gargoyle and stabbed his chest with the splintered end of his stick. Matt tensed, waiting for claws to wet with blood.

The gargoyle took Rafferty by the shoulders.

The moon came out.

Before, the moon had been a slender curve. No longer. An orb hung overhead, and there was a face within it Matt recognized from a distant past that never was, and since it never was, never passed. Shadows failed. Silver flame quickened within paving stones.

Alt Coulumb lived. There was a Lady in it, and She knew them.

Matt was not a religious man—he sacrificed on time and paid little heed to the rest—but this, he thought, must be how the faithful felt: seen all at once in timeless light.

There was no source to this light, but Corbin Rafferty stood at its center, transfixed, reflected on himself in that moonlit time.

The moon closed.

Corbin’s knees buckled and he fell.

Clocks started again, and hearts. Blood wept from the wound on Matt’s face.

Matt thought the gargoyle was as shocked as anyone, and awed, though he covered it fast. “Blacksuits are coming,” he said to them all but mostly to Ellen. “This is their place. I must go.”

He left in a wave of wings. Sandy limped to Matt and touched the skin around his wound; her fingers stung. The girls watched, quiet, still, as Corbin Rafferty wept.

The gargoyle was right. Soon the Blacksuits came.

And the Crier wrote the whole thing down.

17

17

Tara collapsed on her walk home.