Free Forever by Jacquelyn Frank

air.
    *    *    *
    Jackson couldn’t keep himself from looking for Marissa, checking on her in a costly distraction as he looked over his shoulder at her. It allowed the Gargoyle the opportunity it needed to launch away from him and into the night sky. Gargoyles could fly at blinding speeds, despite the weighty stone of their bodies, and the creature was out of his reach within instants.
    Later
, Menes ground out in his mind.
In the future we will grow strong enough where they cannot escape us so easily
.
    He was drawing hard for breath, in desperate need of a moment to pull himself together, but knowing he couldn’t risk the luxury. Sargent was whining, a little put out that Jackson had pulled his leash, in a manner of speaking. But the dog couldn’t possibly have stood up in a battle with these supernatural and powerful enemies. Jackson had tried to protect him just as he had tried to protect Marissa.
    How had they found him? How had they known?
    It was a trivial point of interest. They had their way of discovering things just as his people did. He had thought himself well hidden, safe in his anonymity, and it had been a foolish way to behave. Menes had allowed it in order to help Jackson’s spiritual transition as well as the Blending process. There was comfort in the familiar, and he hadn’t wanted to throw 180 degrees of change at him all at once. The Blending process was overwhelming enough as it was …
    And he had lingered for other reasons. One of which, he confessed to himself, was sitting right behind him. But one step at a time. He couldn’t guarantee that the Gargoyle wouldn’t try another run at him or that they didn’t have reserves out there somewhere.
    Slowly, he turned to face the wide, wild blue eyes of Marissa Anderson.
    Marissa was panting for air, the world swimming around her as she stared with wholehearted disbelief at Jackson. He took a slow breath, steam lifting from his bare skin and into the cold morning air. She didn’t know that not all of it was from his exertions of the moment. What she didn’t realize was the coming sun was lightening the sky, and when it finally began to touch his skin she would watch him slowly go numb, one second at a time, the obvious signs of life bleeding away from him until he was little more than a paralyzed husk, his consciousness trapped within and unable to do anything but scream and scream and scream for freedom. Because, even though he knew logically it was temporary, even though he knew that night must always follow day and that, with the darkness would come release and succor; that poisonous, deep paralysis and that long stretch of helplessness ripped at everything that Menes and Jackson were. Men of strength. Beings of power both physical and mental. Men of action. They were the men who others hid behind, taking comfort in the protection they could deliver. To be so exposed and vulnerable was the very worst of all things to men like them.
    Marissa watched Sargent sit, his tail wagging in a
swish-swish
that kicked up old pine needles underneath a nearby tree, little cries eking out of him as he inched closer and closer to Jackson in an effort to win his attention. Sweat rolled down Jackson’s sk seemed to think on that for a momentn when in, wending rivulets that tracked around thick, beautiful muscles and the veins and vessels that roped all along them. He was not overbuilt by any stretch of the imagination, but he was formidable just the same. And beneath a solid six pack of abs, was a tattoo. A dagger, pointing down toward a whole different sort of dagger, and two entwined snakes wrapped tightly around it—each snake devouring the tail of the snake before it in a never-endingcircuit. There was something so primal about that emblem, and something so intimate about being able to see it like she was. See him. All of him.
    And standing utterly naked as he was, there was nothing … absolutely
nothing
she needed her imagination for any