Secret of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 3) (18 page)

Marcus watched me with wide eyes. He’d gathered a thimbleful of elements, and I wondered what he planned to do with that paltry amount of magic.

“Are the gargoyles boosting you?”

“There are no appropriate gargoyles. She—I—refused . . .” I blinked and looked around for the foreign, unwelcome gargoyles. There had been two in the heart.

“Oh, Mika, what did you find?” he whispered.

I refocused on Marcus, confused by the concern pinching his brow. “It’s broken,” I said. “I have to fix it. I have to.” If he was going to stand in my way, I could send him the same direction as the sword.

“Okay. Okay, we’ll fix it. That’s what we came here to do. Just link with me first.”

“I don’t need to.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I’m strong enough without you.” Magic trembled in my grip. It would be so easy to open the ground at his feet.

“I can see that. But you asked me to protect you. At least let me try.”

I sucked in a deep breath, grounding myself in the quartz-flavored air. “Okay. Link.”

Marcus thrust his pathetic amount of balanced elements toward me, and I accepted it, closing my magic around it. He groaned and fell to one knee, but he’d ceased trying to stop me, and that was all that mattered.

I strode around him to put him out of my sight. I’d spared him because . . . because . . . I shook my head and put him out of my mind, too. He didn’t matter.

We pulverized the fractured crystals beneath the broken roof and swept them and the rubble from the cave-ins into the mountain below the baetyl. A few layers of elements spread in the baetyl’s pattern laid the groundwork for new crystals along the floor before we turned our attention to the offending holes in the roof. Unnatural tunnels bisected the mountain above, and we collapsed them all. They were the reason we’d been weakened. They were the reason all our gargoyles had died and our magic had mutated. For good measure, we grew solid beams of quartz to bisect every previous tunnel. The mountain had plenty of quartz to work with, and it was a simple matter of encouraging it to grow solid and strong.

Crystals sprouted from the gaps in the ceiling under our careful guidance, brightening the cavern with their inner glow. When the last one burst into place, healthy magic swept through the baetyl, and we listened to it chime. Every time we encountered a sour note, we adjusted the crystals, mending a crack here, smoothing erosion there. The two unwelcome gargoyles sat like ugly deformities near the exit, vibrating at the wrong elemental frequency, and we scooped them up and tossed them out.

The baetyl hummed with perfection, and contentment spiraled through us until we felt a singular entity that didn’t belong. We turned to face it, scoop it up, toss it out—

It clung to us! It was inside us! Foreign magic pulsed within us, hot and unbalanced.

Panic flared, rumbling through the baetyl, setting the crystals rattling and squealing against each other.

“Mika, fight it. You’re strong. Let it go.”

It—
his
—voice rasped unnaturally in the hallowed air of the baetyl. He didn’t belong. He wasn’t a gargoyle. There was no quartz in him, not in his magic or his body. He was a nuisance.

And yet . . .

We looked down at his hand on our arm. None of it looked right, not the thick brown-pink bands of his fingers, not our curved and doughy forearm.

“Fight it. For me.”

We gathered ourselves to sever his connection with us and crush him before he poisoned our purity. Lapis lazuli eyes locked with ours and alarm spiked inside us. In me. The baetyl faltered, not comprehending. His presence was wrong. He didn’t belong. But the thought of crushing the life from him repulsed me.

Fear and revulsion widened the gap between me and the baetyl, helping me find and define myself. This was Marcus, a fellow human. The man I had a crush on—another emotion the baetyl couldn’t understand.

I seized upon the feelings, rolling fear and attraction in my mind to distance myself from the baetyl. I stopped trying to pull myself free of Marcus’s grip and really looked at him. Sweat ran freely down his face and soaked his clothing. He was on his knees in front of me, his face pinched with pain. I frowned. I wasn’t fighting him now, but he looked like he still struggled.

“Fight it,” he said through clenched teeth.

The baetyl surged back through me. He was an affront to its restored perfection. He must go.

No.

I grabbed for control, but it slipped from me. The baetyl’s magic roared inside me, filling my body and readying itself to bury Marcus. The amethyst crystals on the back of my hand lit up, singing in harmony with the rest of the baetyl. I belonged; he did not.

No.

I gritted my teeth. I couldn’t best the baetyl’s strength; nothing could. So I let it go.

It hurt. Loosening my connection with the transcendent power of the baetyl gave space for all my weaknesses: my fragile flesh split open in so many painful places; my frantic life beating away too fast; my tiny, mostly useless body gasping for oxygen in the muggy air.

Through tear-blurred eyes, I sought out Marcus, surprised to find him so close, still clinging to my arm. His features looked crude and misshapen where once I’d thought he was strikingly handsome. The crystals around us were the true beauty, so perfect and geometrical and glossy.

I caught my reflection in the side of a dark crystal. Bulbous. I was bulbous and hideous like Marcus. I didn’t belong here, no matter how much I wanted it.

Aching with the loss, I shattered the amethyst crystals on my hands and reknit my flimsy, inferior flesh, then released the last pieces of the baetyl. It receded from my consciousness, its magic pulling back to the heart and the walls and the crystals all around us. I clung to the knowledge of the baetyl’s pattern as long as I could, seeing it around me and in my mind’s eye stretching through the mountain, so perfect and gorgeous. When it faded, I crumpled, empty and small and so very alone. Hiccuping sobs rocked my body, suffocating me, and I couldn’t bring myself to care.

“Mika, we need to go,” Marcus said, his voice thick.

His magic burned inside me through our link—fire, too strong; earth, too generic. After the baetyl’s purity, his imperfect magic revolted me. Lashing out, I tried to sever the link between us. Elements so slender they may as well have been made of silk trickled from me. Marcus’s magic clamped down around the link, locking us together and seizing control. Panicked, I jerked my arm from his, stumbling to catch my balance when my wrist snapped free. The baetyl hummed at the edge of my awareness, an invitation to link extended as soft as a gargoyle’s offer of enhancement. All I had to do was open myself to the power, all that glorious power . . .

Marcus slumped to the side, eyes closed. “Fight, Mika,” he mumbled, his words slurred.

Confused, I sidled closer. Did he want me to fight him? I tentatively slid my awareness down the link between us, jerking back when I encountered the knot he’d made around our link. His usually sparking, fiery signature flickered, fuzzy around the edges despite how hard he held on.

I lifted my fingers and swiped sweat from my eyes.
When had it gotten so hot?
As if waiting for me to notice, the heat grew oppressive, the air thick with humidity. I sucked in a breath, my lungs laboring to pull oxygen from the moist air. Oliver had said the baetyl should have been warmer—

Oliver!

I spun toward the exit. It was barely visible through the weave of crystals, but I remembered sweeping Oliver up and Celeste with him. I’d helped the baetyl kick them out, and we hadn’t been gentle.

My body tilted and I crashed into the crystals next to Marcus. I managed to get my right forearm up to protect my head, but the impact jarred my brain, knocking my thoughts askew. When I refocused, I was staring at Marcus. He looked awful, but it was only my assessment this time, untainted by the baetyl’s perception of beauty. Pain pinched his mouth into a tight line, and his eyes were sunken, the skin around them tinged with gray and the rest of him flushed an unhealthy shade of magenta. The veins in his neck stood out with strain.

“We need to leave,” I croaked.

He dragged his gaze to mine, and the relief in his expression centered me. Then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell backward onto the sharp crystals.

13

I scrambled to his side, lifting his head to feel for cuts on his scalp, cursing when sticky blood coated my fingers. Fragments of how to heal human tissue floated through my memory, utterly useless, and the more intently I tried to remember, the more the pieces slipped away. I wouldn’t be able to heal him, and the closest healer was back in Terra Haven.

Oh, gods, we’d never make it.

“Wake up.” I tapped Marcus’s cheek. Heat weighted my already spent body, and I choked on each moist breath. I slapped him harder. “Wake up, lummox. I can’t haul you out by myself.”

The baetyl’s magic sang to me, welcoming me back into its embrace. I wouldn’t have to do it by myself. All I had to do was open myself to its tremendous power; then lifting Marcus’s puny body would be no problem.

I shook my head. There was nothing puny about Marcus. That was the baetyl whispering in my thoughts. If I let it back in . . . The thought of relinquishing all that power a second time dredged a sob from my chest. I didn’t think I could do it twice, and once I was reconnected with the baetyl, I couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t take over and bury Marcus in the mountain.

Struggling to ignore the baetyl’s siren song, I slapped Marcus, holding nothing back. His head rocked and his eyes fluttered. I leaned closer, hand raised for another strike. Sweat and tears dripped from my chin to his chest.

Marcus’s eyes snapped open and he lashed out, crushing my wrist in his fist while his eyes searched mine.

“We need to move,” I rasped.

He released me with a ragged breath.

It took us four tries before we both got our feet beneath us. Marcus’s eyes lost their focus and he sagged against me as we stumbled toward the exit, his breathing labored. I wrapped my arm around him and did my best to support him on quivering legs.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I babbled. “You’ve got to hang on. A few more steps. You’re too strong to give up now. I need you to stay with me. I want you to. You were right: I like you. You can’t give up on me now before I have a chance to get to know you. You can’t let me have blown my chance with you. Just keep going. I’m so sorry. A little farther.”

We were five feet from the exit of the baetyl when Marcus toppled again, taking me down with him. Blood trickled from his nose, and I couldn’t wake him. Whimpering, I pulled my leg out from under him, scraping my knee on the sharp crystal floor.

I rolled Marcus onto his back, then fell across his chest when my body gave out. With the tiny crystals packed together like so many teeth and the strangling, moist heat, I couldn’t shake the illusion that we were inside a monster’s mouth, waiting to be crushed. Waiting. Waiting . . .

Marcus’s ragged breathing finally prompted me back into action, and I crawled to crouch at his head, wedged my hands under his armpits, and heaved. He inched across the jagged floor. When his mangled sword sheath caught on the crystals, I used a knife from his boot to cut it free, then left both behind.

“Mika?”

I tugged Marcus another three inches and collapsed. My butt felt like it’d been beaten with a porcupine, but the pain was distant. The only thing that mattered was getting Marcus out of the baetyl.

“Is that you?”

I glanced down at Marcus. His eyes were closed but his mouth gaped open. I stared at his slack mouth, uncomprehending as the voice repeated, “Mika?”

Finally I thought to look up. Oliver hunched inside the tunnel at the edge of the crystals a few feet away, eyes so wide they looked like circles.

“Oliver!”

He flinched, and my heart fractured. I’d given him reason to fear me.

“It’s okay. I’m me,” I said, my voice raspy and foreign. “Are you okay? Where’s Celeste?”

“It’s you!” Tension lifted from his shoulders and his wings settled against his back. “Hang on.” Face set in firm lines of determination, he slunk across the intervening crystal floor, whimper-growling with each step. He leaned forward as if pressing against a great wind, and I wondered what sort of pressure the baetyl pushed back against him.

Shadows danced around my vision. The heat had increased to oven temperatures while Marcus and I had climbed toward the exit, and my swollen skin ached. I grabbed Marcus’s armpits again and hauled him a few more inches. Then Oliver was beside me, twisting to grip Marcus’s shirt with his back paw. Together we tugged, and the large man moved a foot. I would have cheered if I had the breath.

In a few more pulls, we cleared the crystals and the ground smoothed. Oliver stopped making pained sounds. I sagged against the tunnel wall, gulping humid air.

Light from the baetyl bathed us in the cool glow of golden citrine, mint prasiolite, sunset-orange carnelian, cerulean dumortierite, and shimmering combinations of so many other crystals. I swept my gaze over the glorious shapes, memorizing the deadly beauty of the baetyl. I’d never see another again, and I’d already forgotten so much; I didn’t want to forget this.