Secret of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 3) (17 page)

The flaws in the baetyl’s perfection stood out as if on fire. Once the heart was healed, I dove toward the first problem. Dead baby gargoyle skeletons inside powdery eggs were not part of the grand design. I tore apart the lifeless rock and scattered the grains across the crystal-studded floor, then pulled the fine granules through a thousand tiny gaps I created between the crystals, sweeping the remains into the soil below.

The cave-in rubble went with it, pulverized and scattered into the mountain. Growing the quartz in the gap in the ceiling took time, but I accelerated the process by flinging the elemental pattern of the heart into the gap. The ridge leapt to obey my command, shaking around us. I didn’t let up until crystals glittered across the ceiling, lit with the internal glow of the pattern. The crystals were small, but given another few centuries of growth, they’d match the rest. In the meantime, they completed the arc of the roof, connecting the broken magic again.

A wash of power swept through the heart, bringing pain and taking it away again. The baetyl breathed around me, more than a pattern now. I could feel the crystals in my bones, the three remaining gaps in the roof like wounds in my own flesh. I turned to examine them, only to stare, befuddled, at the wall of crystals blocking my way.

Walking took all my attention. I watched my feet lift and clop across the crystal floor, confused by the texture of my boots. When I reached the wall, I looked away from the flat brown leather with relief and pushed a hand flat against an amethyst crystal. My limb was pink and
squishy
. That wouldn’t do. I pulled quartz from the amethyst and spread it across my hand, growing little crystals to coat the doughy flesh.

The quartz looked right, but it
hurt
.

Movement in the heart spun me around. Gargoyles! I reached for them but pulled my magic back before it touched their bodies. They weren’t
my
gargoyles. They beat their wings, gaining altitude, then dove out of sight into the crystal wall high above me. The sinuous movement of the smaller gargoyle was familiar, but I’d never created a gargoyle in that shape.

I’ve never created a gargoyle at all.

I plucked at the thought, examining it. It felt important, yet it made about as much sense as the pain in my hands.

I’d figure it out after the baetyl was whole.

Facing the wall again, I shifted the crystals and walked unimpeded along the floor, bending the crystals back into place behind me without looking. Outside the heart, the remaining wounds pulsed with insistent urgency. Walking was taking too long; I unfurled my—

Where were my wings? A frantic pat down my back revealed smooth flesh and no wings. How had I become this loathsome malformation?

I quested into my body with the elements, tuning them to match the foreign liquid and meat materials. When I encountered the earth, water, and wood blend of my shoulder blades, I grafted my elements to them, converting them to quartz as I grew them.

My body spasmed, and I screamed when two blades formed beneath my skin and burst out my back. The baetyl screamed in unison, every crystal shrieking. The sound terrified me, bringing me back to myself.

I lay across a waist-high crop of variegated onyx, the sharp tips gouging into my stomach and armpit. The fingertips of my left hand hung a few inches above the baetyl floor, and I watched blood drip from my ring finger onto the prasiolite below.

Breathing hurt, but as my vision darkened, I forced myself to take sips of air. Or maybe it was the baetyl that powered my lungs. It pulsed inside me more intimately than any gargoyle’s boost and sweet with possibility. I’d just moved twenty feet and untold tons of crisscrossing quartz as easily as I might push aside a gauze curtain. Stitching it back together should have taken the strength of every FSPP in Terra Haven working all day, and I’d done it without thinking.

I’d modified my body’s blood and bones and skin to grow quartz as easily as I’d reshaped the heart crystal. And it’d been easy.

I’d have grown myself wings if it hadn’t hurt too much.

I whimpered when I realized I wanted to do it again. The power swelled inside me, waiting to be used, waiting for me. With the baetyl backing me, I could do anything. Fusing human and gargoyle physiology was only the start. I could level this mountain and build a new one. I could reshape the world in the design of the baetyl, making it all a perfect place for gargoyles. I could cure any disease. It wouldn’t have to be only gargoyles, either. With the baetyl sitting in my head, the complexity of my own body became remarkably simple. I could be a healer of all creatures—the greatest healer who ever lived. I could perform the kind of magic people would talk about generations from now. No one would match me. I’d be more powerful than any FSPP in the world—than
all
of them linked.

In doing so, I’d destroy the baetyl. It wasn’t a gargoyle that would boost me until tired, then cut me off. The baetyl would feed me magic until it ran out.

Would that be so bad? I could cure a thousand ailments before the baetyl was tapped out. It wasn’t as if this was an active baetyl. Only seven gargoyles who’d been born here remained alive. Seven lives against the hundreds, thousands, I could save. The gargoyles would approve. They’d lived out their time, and their deaths could mean something. Their deaths could help me and the world become better.

All I had to do was reach for the baetyl’s magic again. It sang inside my head, offering itself. I had healed its heart. It would give me whatever I asked.

If I accepted and used all that power, I’d be no better than Walter or Elsa. Even with my head swimming with pain and addled by the baetyl’s magic, I knew it was wrong to throw away the dormant gargoyles’ lives in the name of using the power to save others. It was a palatable excuse to embrace the almost limitless power of the baetyl, but it wasn’t morally sound. Letting the gargoyles die wasn’t saving anyone. It was murder in the name of a nebulous greater good.

On the heels of that thought, my argument with Marcus flashed through my mind, followed by a zing of understanding. Marcus had been right; I’d been flinging myself into danger to save others, more than willing to sacrifice myself to save the gargoyles. With blood pooling beneath me and my body broken and weak, the irony of the timing of my epiphany wasn’t lost on me.

My actions might have been noble if I’d been at all discriminating. I’d been so focused on rescuing gargoyles, I’d forgotten to treat myself with the same reverence. Worse, I’d been ignoring my own value. Just as the baetyl’s power was needed here to heal the dormant gargoyles and give life to generations of new gargoyles, my life and magic was needed to heal all gargoyles, not just the ones in front of me.

I weighed my logic against my conscience. Was I being egotistical to claim my life was more valuable than any one gargoyle’s? Than the lives of the seven gargoyles? The answer came quickly: Sacrificing myself to save a life or seven lives was shortsighted and foolish. I deserved better. The gargoyles deserved more of their guardian.

Just as clearly, I knew the same logic couldn’t be applied to healing the baetyl. If my death was necessary to repair the baetyl, my sacrifice wouldn’t be a shortsighted waste of life; I’d be saving generations of future gargoyles.

Envisioning the baetyl filled with gargoyles, healthy eggs hatching in the heart once more, I found the courage to open myself to the baetyl’s magic again. It roared inside me, buffeting me with its eagerness, filling my head with its knowledge. Gritting my teeth, I severed the crystals from my back and mended my flesh. Shards of bloody quartz rained down around me, and I helped the baetyl absorb them, burying all traces of my hopeless wings. Then I rolled my fragile human body off the onyx crystals and straightened.

Oliver perched twenty feet away on a bright citrine crystal hardly larger than him but glowing twice as bright as it had before we’d entered the heart. The baetyl examined him through my eyes and gathered itself. He wasn’t a gargoyle who belonged here, but together, with a few tweaks, we could make him one of ours.

It wouldn’t be hard to alter him to resonate with us. The baetyl played images through my head, showing me the process. Altering his pattern would kill him, but then we’d bring him back and he’d be better than before. And bringing him back . . .

For a breathless moment, a pattern more intricate than anything I’d yet encountered lay before my inner eye, thousands upon thousands of glowing elemental strands laid
just so
and compressed into a single spark. It was the pattern of life itself and the root of every living creature. Tears of awe dripped down my chin, and I blinked to clear my vision. To have the chance to use the baetyl’s power to create
life—

I forced myself to look away from Oliver. To make him a gargoyle of this baetyl, I’d have to kill him first, and I wasn’t going to do that.

Denied, the baetyl’s power receded, taking with it the knowledge of how to shape life from the elements. Gasping, I scrambled for the memory, but it slipped from my mind. I lifted my gaze back to Oliver, seeing only the gargoyle and not the elemental design of his life inside him. My chest ached, and telling myself I’d made the right decision didn’t make me feel any better. I’d had
life
in my hands, and now I couldn’t remember more than a fragment of the pattern.

“Don’t come near me, Oliver.” I didn’t trust myself; if he came closer and the baetyl offered me the chance to create life again, I didn’t think I could say no twice.

Swiping tears from my cheeks with shaky fingertips, I crawled over a large jasper crystal. It would have been simple enough to move the quartz out of my way using the baetyl’s power, but the more I held the power, the more I wanted to use it. If I gave in just to shift crystals out of my path, it wouldn’t take much to convince me I really did need wings. Or that Oliver would be better off sharing this baetyl with me. Or that the power in my hands was worth more than the lives of the gargoyles I’d come here to save.

So I climbed over and through the crystals and up the sloping floor back to Marcus, telling myself I wanted to be human and to heal the baetyl and leave. I didn’t want wings or to fly. Flying was scary because it meant leaving the ground. Heights were scary.

I didn’t believe any of it, and that alarmed me. I was scared of heights, but the baetyl wasn’t. Fear wasn’t a concept it understood.

I scrambled down the glowing side of a tigereye crystal that wouldn’t reach its full potential for another three centuries and spotted Marcus. He stood, sword in hand, gaze assessing and steady, and relief made me stumble. He rushed to my side before I fully caught my balance, but he didn’t reach out to steady me. Up close, I could see the worry in his lapis lazuli eyes, and behind them, I caught hints of the pattern of elements that made him, him.

“So you’re scared of heights,” Marcus said.

“What?” I squinted, trying to map his pattern, unexpectedly warmed by his voice.

“It’s a good fear. It’ll keep you safe. Fear is good.” He used a soothing tone, as if he expected me to bolt.

“What are you talking about?” I demanded. The nightmares had twisted a few thread-thin strands of elements out of place inside him, making snarls.

“You’ve been chanting about being scared of heights,” he said.

I blinked. “I have?” Damn it, I lost the snarls. I let the magic I’d kindled in my fingertips flow back into the baetyl.

“Come on, let’s get out of here.” Marcus gestured for me to precede him toward the exit. Blood soaked through his shirt at the shoulder. Sweat beaded and rolled down his face.

“Are you hurt? I can heal you,” I offered.

“You can heal me? Since when?”

I opened my mouth and realized I couldn’t explain eternity in words. It didn’t even make sense to me, at least not when I tried to define it. But I could feel it in the silence in my mind and in the baetyl’s strength.

“I need to finish healing the baetyl,” I said instead.

“Finish?”

I turned unerringly to face the closest cave-in. Marcus inhaled sharply, and in the periphery of my vision I saw him stretch a hand toward my back, but he dropped it before he touched me.

“Mika?”

“Hang on.”

“Oliver said you’d healed the heart,” he said, using that soothing tone again, but I barely heard him. The quartz that had hummed inside me while I’d been in the heart grated here near the giant gaps in the roof. Magic pulsed from the heart, perfect and pure, then fractured over the broken ceiling and misshaped crystals. That had to be fixed or the discordant magic reverberating back to the heart would eventually damage it and the entire baetyl again.

“It’s still flawed. Can’t you hear the disharmony?” I asked, reaching for the baetyl’s magic.

Marcus swung back in front of me. “You’re not repairing the ceiling by yourself.” The tip of his sword etched a short scratch into an aventurine crystal with his exuberant gesture. I wrapped the blade in air, yanked it from Marcus, opened a fissure in the ground, and threw the sword into the depths before I remembered embracing the baetyl’s magic. Contemplating the shadowy hole barely large enough to fit the broadsword, I tried to remember the elements I’d just used, but couldn’t. Had I been in control of the magic or had the baetyl? Deliberately, I stitched the floor back together, sealing the sword in the earth. The satisfaction of eliminating the threat to the crystals wasn’t mine, but the fear that chased it was.