I still didn’t agree with what she was doing with Al, but she was trying to live her life the best way she knew. Besides, I made far worse decisions than she did with a lot less power to back them up. And I wasn’t going to lose another friend because of stiff-necked pride and a lack of understanding caused by silence.

Ceri was currently looking for a ring of metal for a ley line charm she wanted to teach me, but until she returned, I had nothing to do but stare at Jenks’s gargoyle, still not awake but hiding high up in the rafters and out of the rain.

I had seen the quiet, unheated space last winter while avoiding Jenks’s brood—before that Ivy’s owls had been up here, briefly, but I’d avoided them, and thus the belfry—but it wasn’t until summer and the first rains that I found the beauty in it. Jenks had forbidden his kids from going near the gargoyle, so they wouldn’t bother me. Not that it was likely they would venture out of their stump and into the rain. Poor Matalina.

Looking away from the gravel-colored, foot-high critter hunched on a support beam, I quietly moved a folding chair to look out one of the long windows. They were slatted to keep the vermin from getting in and to let the bell’s music out. How the gargoyle got in was a mystery that was pissing Jenks off. Maybe he was like an octopus in that he could squeeze through anything.

Hunching to pillow my chin on my arms, which were folded on the sill, I tilted the blinds to see the shiny black night, breathing in the damp air tainted with the scent of roof shingles and wet pavement. I felt warm and secure, and I didn’t know why. It was peaceful, almost like a memory was wrapping itself around me. It might have been from the gargoyle—they were said to be guardians—but I didn’t think so. The feeling of peace had been there long before he showed up.

I’d moved the folding chair up here this past summer, but the shelf, the fainting couch, and the dresser had been here when I’d found it. The antique dresser had a green granite top and a beautiful, age-spotted mirror behind it. It would make a great spelling counter, easy to clean and durable. I couldn’t help but wonder if the space had been used for spelling before. There were absolutely no pipes or wires above or below the high room—which was why I was using candles to light the place—but even so, I was tempted to make this more than a temporary spot to store my spelling books and stir charms when I had to stay on hallowed ground. Dragging everything down to wash it would be tedious, though.