“No? I thought you wanted to find all the gargoyles.”

“I just did, right? That was the last one.”

His lips twitched in a smile, pale blue eyes warming. “No, I don’t believe it is. You asked to see one more, for your Solstice gift.”

“Yours. You’re actually going to show me— Where—” I jumped up so fast, I nearly tumbled off the roof.

Gabriel grabbed me as he chuckled. “Slow down.”

“Uh-uh. If I wait, the rest of that mulled cider will wear off, and you’ll never show me. Where is it?”

“I said you’d need to find it.”

“No, don’t you dare—”

“But, being your last one, you are entitled to a hint.”

He caught my chin in his bare hand, fingers warm against my cold skin as he turned me to face the rear of the building. Toward the park.

I started scrambling toward the ledge, and he grabbed me again, murmuring, “Slow down.”

I did. Kind of. I was off the roof a good five minutes before him, already scouring the park when he came up beside me.

“Clue?” I said.

He smiled and said, “It’s there all the time.”

“So it’s hidden. Well hidden.”

I surveyed my options. Beyond the park fence there were a few trees, but none wide enough to hide a gargoyle. Which left one option.

I raced to the fence surrounding the play area. Along it were bushes tangled with ivy that wound over the wrought-iron fence. I went around back and pushed aside branches, checking each spot until—

I found it.

Gabriel’s gargoyle, hidden by branches and so much ivy that I had to untangle vines to see it, and when I did, I couldn’t stop smiling.

It was Gabriel as a very young boy, not more than a preschooler. He crouched in that tangle of bush and vine and looked straight at me, one hand extended, a baby rabbit on his palm.

“Yes, I have no idea why they put me in that pose,” he said. “It looks nothing like me.”

I saw that statue, and I remembered my vision of Gwynn, crouched beside a hole, showing Matilda a baby rabbit. My eyes filled with tears and I managed to say, “I think it’s a perfect likeness.” Then I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him.

About the Author

KELLEY ARMSTRONG is the internationally bestselling author of the thirteen-book Women of the Otherworld series, the Nadia Stafford crime novels and this series set in the fictional town of Cainsville, Illinois, which also includes the novels Omens, Visions, Deceptions and Betrayals. She is also the author of the hit crime novels City of the Lost and A Darkness Absolute, three bestselling young adult trilogies, and the stand-alone YA suspense thriller, The Masked Truth. Her Otherworld characters also inspired the hit TV series Bitten. She lives in rural Ontario.