Secret of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 3) (14 page)

“Marcus.” His eyes moved behind his eyelids, and he mouthed mumbled words. I prodded his arm, and when he didn’t respond, I added more force to the next poke. He twitched and moaned but didn’t wake. His sword protruded from the baetyl wall a few feet away; he’d managed to wedge the tip of it between two crystals. The scabbard was still strapped to his back, but his fall had broken the rigid bamboo, and splinters of it dusted the crystals below him.

“He’s trapped in the nightmare.” I reached for magic—maybe a jolt to his senses would wake him—but it was as if I were in the nightmare again. The elements slid from my grasp, all but earth. Its jagged edges vibrated against my skull until I tuned it to quartz; then the element stabilized and smoothed out. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do anything with quartz to wake Marcus. Growing alarmed, I lightly slapped his cheek. He swung a halfhearted punch without opening his eyes. I danced out of reach. “Marcus, wake up!”

“What nightmare?” Oliver asked.

As if his confusion summoned them, gargoyles seethed from the baetyl’s geode-like walls. They swarmed over the crystals and rushed us. An enormous green aventurine bear with delicate dragonfly wings led the charge, a half ton of rock galloping on clawed feet to demolish me. I widened my stance and threw a quartz shield around Marcus, Oliver, Celeste, and myself, bracing myself for impact.

“What are you doing? Mika, what do you see?” Oliver stood on his hind legs, flaring his wings for balance, and squinted in the direction of the charging bear.

My legs trembled. If not for Marcus, I would have run, but I couldn’t abandon him and I couldn’t carry him.

The bear skidded to a stop just beyond my shield and reared up on her hind legs, releasing a soundless roar. I frowned. A mute gargoyle? My brain tried to make sense of it but was too distracted by her massive paws. They were larger than my head and tipped with finger-length claws; with one blow, she could kill me, yet she only waved her paws in front of her as if testing the air.

If she had been a real bear, I would have been scrambling for Marcus’s sword and making as much noise as possible to drive her off. But she was a gargoyle, a reasoning creature.

“I’m here to help,” I said.

She shook her head, denying my words.

“Who are you talking to?” Celeste asked. The gryphon perched on a wide tigereye crystal behind me, her sharp eyes scouring the shadowy baetyl.

“Her.”

“Who?” Oliver asked, squinting at the massive gargoyle.

“You don’t see her?” Frowning, I flicked my glance to Oliver and back to the bear. She hadn’t moved, and next to Oliver she looked . . . less. Less substantial. Weak.

“See who?”

“The bear? The other gargoyles?” Only there weren’t other gargoyles now, just the bear, Oliver, and Celeste.

“I don’t see anything,” Oliver said.

Confusion muffled my fear, helping me pick out details I’d overlooked in my panic—like the fact that I could see the geometric shapes of the baetyl
through
the bear gargoyle. Her paws also made no sound on the crystals—none of the gargoyles’ feet had. Frowning, I settled back on my heels, relaxing enough to unclench my fists, but I didn’t lower the shield.

The bear dropped to all fours, nose snuffling the air around my shield; then she turned and faded from sight. Trapped air gusted from my lungs. I dropped my shield without releasing my grasp of quartz magic and rubbed my hands together, wincing when I roughed up cuts on my palms.

“It was an apparition,” I said. I explained the gargoyles pouring out of the baetyl and the hippo swallowing me and sending me into a nightmare. I didn’t describe the nightmare.

“I think Marcus is trapped in a nightmare, too. I got out by using quartz magic.” If that was the only key to escaping the trap, Marcus wasn’t going to wake from his nightmare any time soon. He was a big, bad FPD fire elemental. He had oodles of training for all kinds of dangerous situations, but he’d never think to use something as simple as quartz-tuned earth magic to escape whatever madness he was likely seeing right now.

“The baetyl must be trying to protect itself,” Celeste said. “Humans aren’t meant to be here. If it were whole, you wouldn’t have made it this far. So it’s fighting back the only way it can.”

“The baetyl is sentient?” I glanced around, imagining all the crystals sprouting eyes and watching me. The thought chased a shudder down my spine.

“It is magic unto itself,” Celeste said with a shrug that whispered the rock feathers of her shoulders together.

I’d had plenty of time to think about the nature of the baetyl on the way up Reaper’s Ridge. I’d abandoned my earlier hope that it might resemble gargoyle magic on an immense, advanced level. A gargoyle, no matter how enraged or injured, could never create magic storms. The apparitions and nightmares only confirmed it: I was dealing with very foreign, very dangerous magic like no other I’d encountered before. Even if it wasn’t sentient, it had some level of awareness—enough to tell when it had been invaded and to deploy honed defenses.

I rolled my shoulders against the urge to hunch, as if I could hide myself by making myself smaller.

“Why didn’t it attack me the second time? Why did the bear walk away?”

“Maybe it recognizes you as a guardian,” Oliver said.

I doubted it; otherwise it wouldn’t have attacked me in the first place. If I could trust any part of an apparition, I’d say the bear gargoyle had been confused by the shield. Not many humans could manipulate the earth element through only quartz. It’d taken me years of practice to make it feel natural.

I remembered something Anya, Oliver’s sister, had told me when we first met. She’d said my magic smelled like a gargoyle. Could holding a quartz shield have been enough to confuse the baetyl into thinking I might be a gargoyle?

“Do I . . . Does my magic smell like a gargoyle?” I asked, half afraid the question would offend my companions.

Oliver shrugged. “You are a guardian.”

I looked askance at Celeste. She padded closer and pressed her beak to my chest, inhaling deeply.

“Your magic smells like a healer, but there are notes of a baetyl in it.” She backed away, eyeing me with fresh wonder. “My sense of smell is not good, otherwise . . . I waited so long out of fear . . .”

When I interpreted her wondrous expression, a zing of shock jolted through me. Up until this moment, she hadn’t fully believed I was a guardian, but there was no mistaking the certitude in her eyes now. Celeste rolled her shoulders and fluffed her feathers, and when she settled, she looked as if someone had lifted a heavy load from her back.

Oliver saw the change in her and smiled smugly.

“Your magic is a bit like a baetyl’s and it’s what makes you a guardian,” Oliver said. “Or maybe because you’re a guardian, it’s why your magic smells so good.”

“Just mine? Not Marcus’s?”

“Just you, Mika. Only you.”

A seed of hope sprouted in my chest, nurtured by the thought that maybe, just maybe, having magic even remotely similar to the baetyl would enable me to fix it.

I took a deep breath, tasting the quartz air as I watched Marcus’s hands clench into fists and feebly box at nothing. He looked helpless and vulnerable. Even his scowl was weak. No amount of prodding had stirred him, either.

“The baetyl’s not going to let me help Marcus until we fix it, is it?”

Celeste shrugged. “He might be beyond help. But Rourke is not, and we are wasting time.”

My stomach twisted. She was right, but it didn’t make her words more palatable.

Celeste and Oliver helped me move Marcus, shifting him until he lay as flat as possible on the bed of sharp crystals. His leather pants and spelled shirt did a much better job protecting him than my clothing had. It was his head I was worried most about. I didn’t have a spare piece of cloth to put between him and the bladelike tips of the crystals, so I removed one of his leather boots and used the leg of it to cushion his head. He might get some cuts on his exposed foot, since I doubted his socks were spelled, too, but it was a fair trade-off.

I tried folding his arms over his stomach, but he flailed and fought me, smacking his hands into the crystals around us. I gave up and backed away, and he calmed. Blood oozed from nicks and cuts on his hands and wrists, and I let them bleed. If I knew more about healing people
and
could grasp more elements than quartz, I would have healed him, but quartz wasn’t going to do him any good.

Instead, I did the only thing I could: I turned my back on him and walked away. He’d been a true friend, helping me when there was no incentive for him, risking his life to get me this far, and I abandoned him.

11

From the shadows of overhanging crystals, the gargoyles swarmed, but when they drew close, they turned, parted, and let me pass. A braver person would have been able to walk confidently through the bombarding apparitions, but my steps faltered and shook, and I flinched when the gargoyles darted out of the shadows, mouths agape and faces contorted with killing rage. The baetyl might be temporarily confused by the flavor of my magic, but once it realized I wasn’t a gargoyle, it’d crush me.

Behind me, Marcus wasn’t as lucky. I turned, watching helplessly as the apparitions dove into his body, their ghostly forms disappearing when they touched his flesh. He thrashed and moaned, feebly slapping the air. I almost ran back to him, but I knew it would be pointless. I could stand over him and guard his body or I could fix the baetyl and save his mind.

I wasn’t stupid enough to test the baetyl’s crystals with so much as a grain of quartz element, but the deeper I crawled and climbed through the maze of crystals, the more heavily its magic pressed against my skin. Its jagged disharmony set my teeth on edge. A headache unfurled across my skull, the pain a dull pound compared to the sharp sting of the cuts on my arms.

I examined my wounds in the glow of an especially bright, clear crystal. Blood oozed through my shirt at my left bicep, caking the rip in the fabric. I didn’t think peeling the cloth from the cut would help at this point, so I ignored the gash. A series of nicks spiraled down my forearms, with one long scratch on the underside of my right arm. Most had stopped bleeding already, and my shirt was doing a decent job soaking up the rest of the blood. My hands hurt the worst. Lacerations crisscrossed my palms, oozing blood.

Oliver and Celeste walked across the crystals without being cut, but the tension in them reminded me of their first steps. Not only was this baetyl broken, but it also wasn’t their cynosure baetyl. The magic in here was not theirs, and every step hurt them in a different way. I picked up my pace.

Celeste led us to the cave-in. Amid all the flat planes and jewel tones of the crystals, the mound of soil and rocks lay like a physical insult on the otherwise pristine floor. High above us, a jagged dark patch marred the lines of the ceiling.

It wasn’t a natural collapse. The sturdy beams of enormous crystals spanning the breadth of the baetyl should have prevented any part of the cavern from caving in, but if the structural integrity had been destroyed from above by the Hidden Cache miners, it wouldn’t have mattered how strong the crystals inside the baetyl were.

We paused as I assessed the ugly gap in the crystals and waited for inspiration. I had hoped that when I encountered the problem, I’d see the solution. Obviously, the cave-in needed to be mended, but the scope of it worried me. Even from a hundred feet below it, the hole looked large enough to drive two trains through side by side. Enhanced by Oliver and Celeste, I could probably do it—if I had a few days
and
control of all the elements.

Which meant I needed to get started right away. For Marcus and for the dormant gargoyles waiting outside, none of whom had time to spare. Except . . .

I couldn’t focus on the cave-in. I peered into the gloom of the baetyl, straining to see . . . to hear . . . something.

“What’s that way?”

“The heart,” Celeste said.

Yes, the heart.
“Take me there.”

The crystals grew denser the deeper we traveled, and their internal light increased until a dozen different shades of soft twilight lit the cavern. Celeste was forced to find her own way, not fitting through the same spaces as Oliver and me. I spent more time crawling through gaps than walking, with Oliver helping me over the larger crystals. The blood from my palms blended into his carnelian sides when he let me use him for handholds rather than the sharp edges of the quartz.

We passed two other cave-ins, both smaller than the first but not by much. I examined them without really seeing them. The baetyl’s magic had grown stronger, the broken and pure notes shredding my senses like a cheese grater, disrupting my ability to concentrate on anything else.

I lost track of time. My sense of direction narrowed to the painful-sweet siren song of the heart. If I’d thought about it, I wouldn’t have been able to find the exit, but leaving had lost all sense of importance. The heart was all that mattered.

I slid down the slope of a citrine crystal as wide as my shoulders and landed softly on a bed of onyx peaks, then paused in surprise. The network of crystals opened, creating a gap that stretched to the ceiling. Another twenty feet in front of me, a massive wall of interlocking crystals wove from the ceiling to the floor. I scanned the surface, hunting for an opening in what looked like an impenetrable maze of quartz.