The Glass Gargoyle (The Lost Ancients Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

still standing there or Garbage would have been an orange splat on the wood. I got the door open a second before she hit it.
    “Thanks, Harlan.”
    He chortled and gave me a chuck under the chin as he followed the three blurs of color out. “Not a problem, my girl. And don’t you worry, something will come up. It always does.”
    I hoped he was right.

 
    Chapter 3
     
     
    I let myself slide against the back of the door after the girls and Harlan left. There had been too much action for this early in the morning. And way too many damn people in my house. All I wanted to do was crawl back into bed and stay there until nightfall. I even let myself entertain that lovely thought for a few minutes before reality crept back in.
    I needed a job. I needed a patron. I needed to find out what was going on at the ruins that had stopped all the digging. Despite what I told Harlan, I did think it sounded suspicious, but admitting that would have launched a full-scale chataling attack. He’d spend hours planning, bugging people to join him, then finally annoying folks to death. And he probably wouldn’t find anything. There was a chance I could find something, being more naturally prone to legally questionable activities than the far more forthright Harlan.
    Last, but not least, I needed to find out what Alric had been up to. Okay I didn’t need to, but I did want to know what he’d used on my faeries. I’d never seen anything like it, and that made me curious. If there was something interesting that I didn’t know, I needed to find out. Besides, Alric was annoying, but he was interesting. I could almost hear my father chuckling about falling to my doom because of my curiosity. It had been an ongoing thing when I was growing up.
    With a heavy sigh, I pushed myself away from the wall and shuffled off to my bedroom. I needed to be logical and sensible. Out of all the things I needed to do today, finding out about Alric’s mystery goo was positively the last on the list.
    So of course that’s where I was going to start.
    Dark clouds hung over the city like a drunkard’s belly and a chill wind sliced through everything. I pulled up the hood on my cloak with a sigh. As a general rule I wasn’t fond of cloaks and this heavy tapestry one least of all. They always smacked a bit too much of desperate pretentiousness. But it was cold, there might be rain, and I didn’t have anything else, having ended up with goo from the faeries’ wings all over my jacket. I kept my head down as I made my way to the university. The way my luck was going today I didn’t want to be recognized by anyone.
    Garean University was only a few blocks from my house. It was built eighty years ago during the first “ruins” craze. Those had been small ruins compared to the monster we were working on now. The ones of eighty years ago were an outpost of some kind, enough to start the trend of elven collections, but not enough to keep it going. The university came in at the height of the craze, academics having the ability to drag out interest in a subject long after normal folks have moved on. They’d managed to ride the residuals from those early findings until five years ago when the larger ruins were found. The original find was a few houses—the monster one was an entire city. All completely swallowed up and buried by the gargantuan jungle that covered the land to the south. Trees around the ruins were wider around than entire houses in the city, and their roots were thick and crawled above ground as if waiting for an unwitting passerby to stumble on them.
    One of the few folks I called friend was a happy beneficiary of the university’s ability to milk the ruins for funding. Covey was a trellian, but usually kept her slightly reptilian appearance and abilities hidden. Aside from her height and strength anyway—modern trellians were descended from some very strong and war-like giant reptiles that almost destroyed themselves hundreds of years ago.
    She