Secret of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 3) (6 page)

When I opened my eyes, Marcus’s unreadable gaze lingered on me. Self-conscious, and reminding myself how out of my league Marcus was and how mortified I’d be if he ever found out I had a crush on him, I stood up and squeezed into the middle of the dormant gargoyles. I knelt beside the tigereye fox from the park. Hardly the size of a bear cub, she lay curled into a circle, all her feet and her nose hidden under her fluffy stone tail.

I gathered a soft mix of elements to test her health—

Something heavy slammed into the front door, denting it inward with an explosive thunderclap of sound.

5

Marcus launched to his feet, a coil of magic swirling against his hand as he shoved the door open.

Celeste stuck her head in, but her wide shoulders caught on the door frame, halting her forward momentum with a shriek of protesting metal. Cool evening wind whistled through the open door, blowing my hair into my eyes.

“Rourke needs magic! He’s fading!” she yelled, grabbing the frame with her massive eagle feet and wrenching. The metal screamed but held.

“Calm down!” Marcus barked. His authoritative posture was ruined a moment later when Oliver catapulted from Celeste’s back through the door above her head. Marcus ducked and threw himself against the wall with a curse. Oliver’s slender body fit easily through the narrow doorway once he tucked his wings tight, which meant he plummeted like a rock to the floor, shattering our dinnerware. Immediately, he unfurled his wings and launched over the gargoyles straight for me.

I flung myself to the ground, covering my head with my hands. Oliver clipped the side of the freight car with a wing, deafening us all with the metallic reverberation. He landed heavily on the back of the black and white onyx wolf next to me, scrambling to maintain his perch on the gargoyle’s slick fish-scale sides and smooth flying-fish wings. His long tail struck me in the shoulder, knocking me sideways, and I scrambled to a safer location under the large tiger.

“Mika! They need help!” Oliver shouted.

“Everyone,
CALM DOWN
!” Marcus bellowed. “Celeste, let go of the door. Oliver, get your snaky butt over here.” He pointed to the empty floor space between our cots, kicking the dented silver platter out of the way and scooping the broken porcelain of our dishes into a net of air before tossing them out the open door. Oliver tried to take off, slipped, and crashed onto the fox. The impact shook the floor of the freight car and made my ears ring. Before I could check to make sure he was okay, he squirmed to his feet and wriggled to the location Marcus indicated. I crawled out from under the tiger and checked the fox. Bits of her tail had flaked off and a dull pain radiated through her body, but it was the weakness of her life signs that alarmed me.

“What’s the problem?” Marcus demanded.

“We’re too far from the city. Damn it! I’m an idiot.” Celeste had told me the only thing keeping these seven gargoyles alive had been their location in prominent, magic-laden places of Terra Haven. We’d removed them from the only thing sustaining them. I explained as much to Marcus even as I opened myself to the magic boost all the dormant gargoyles offered so they could feed off my magic. Compared to the magical enhancement of a normal, healthy gargoyle, their boosts were a mere trickle, but the amount of magic they offered wasn’t important.

“We have to use magic for them,” I said. “They need to feed on it. They’ve basically been starving for decades, surviving on the scraps they could consume indirectly from people who used them for magical boosts. If they don’t get more magic, and quickly, they’ll waste away.”

I hooked my heavy bag with a band of air and tugged. It wiggled in place, but I couldn’t lift it toward me. Then fresh magic gushed into me, and I felt Oliver in the enhancement—his eager energy and the coil of excitement that never dimmed inside him. A moment later, even more magic poured into me from Celeste, but I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish the signature of her enhancement the same way I could Oliver’s. Months of working closely together had tuned me to him in a way I hadn’t known was possible.

Filled with magic, I wove cables of air and levitated my forty-pound bag more effortlessly than if I’d lifted it with my hands. As soon as it was in reach, I removed a seed crystal and began reshaping it to patch the fox’s wounds. Fortunately, they were minor enough that I could knit her tigereye flesh into the new quartz, closing a half dozen nicks without overtaxing her delicate system.

“What can I do?” Marcus asked.

“Use the elements—and use their boost to let them feed off you.”

A few seconds later, the pummeling wind abated and the car quieted as Marcus coated the opening with a solid sheet of air, wrapping it around Celeste’s head when she refused to back up. A glow of fire element swept through the freight car, countering the cold air with a gentle heat. I stepped among the dormant gargoyles, checking each of them. The flicker of their lives stabilized, but they were all frighteningly weak.

“We can’t keep this up indefinitely,” Marcus said.

“I don’t think we’ll have to. As long as we make sure they get regular doses of magic, they should be okay.”

“How regular?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never done this before.” I wasn’t even sure I was right, but I hoped I was. Neither of us could sustain a steady volley of magic from now until we reached the baetyl, not even Marcus and not even if we took turns.

Once I was sure no other dormant gargoyles had been injured, I squeezed through them to Oliver’s side.

“I’m sorry. I got scared. I didn’t mean to hurt her,” he said, head drooping. “I wanted to help.”

“It’s okay. She’s fine, but you’re not.” A ragged patch had chipped from the ruff around his square face like a bad haircut, and the orange carnelian wound was sandpaper rough.

“It’s no big deal,” he said, despite flinching away from my delicate touch.

“Nothing we can’t fix in a few seconds,” I agreed. “And you’re always an incredible help.”

Oliver didn’t say anything, but his wings relaxed and he lost his hangdog expression.

I floated a seed crystal to my hand and reshaped it as I knit it into Oliver’s injury. At one time, it would have taken all my concentration to mold the crystal and weave the complex elements to mesh the inert quartz with Oliver’s living carnelian body. Now I could do it almost without looking.

“Can you feel how much stronger the others are already?” I asked when I finished.

“No.”

“You can’t?”

“He is not mated,” Celeste said. She no longer looked ready to rip apart the freight car, so she must have been able to feel Rourke’s increasing stabilization.

Marcus floated the abused silver platter in the air in front of him, rotating it over an intense blue-white cone of flame. While I patched Oliver, he reshaped the softened metal, removing the claw-foot dents Oliver had embossed in it. Then Marcus meticulously re-etched the swirling leaf design through the cooling silver until the platter looked better than when I’d taken it from the dining car.

He glanced my way, and I snapped my mouth shut. Of course Marcus could do the precise work of an artisan. Just because he looked like he was built to run through granite walls, had the elemental strength to match, and spent his time fighting the worst magical creatures and problems in the city didn’t mean he couldn’t do delicate work with his magic, too.

“How much longer do we need to keep this up?” he asked.

I looked to Celeste. The gryphon stared over my head at her mate, worry sitting strangely on her eagle face.

“Awhile longer,” I finally said.

“Are you done there?” he asked.

“Yep. But we need to keep using magic.” I gave Oliver a pat and he snuggled against my legs. The clear quartz I’d used to rebuild his chipped ruff to its previous shape looked peculiar among his orange-red rock fur, but in a few days, his body would absorb the crystal and replace it with carnelian.

“It doesn’t matter what we do with the elements?”

I shook my head, hunting for ideas. I could blow wind around the freight car and maybe pull a few drops of moisture from the air, but neither would keep much magic moving for the dormant gargoyles to passively feed from.

“How about a game of Elemental’s Apprentice?” Marcus asked.

“The kid’s game?”

“Got a better idea?”

I sighed. “No.”

Elemental’s Apprentice was a game of humiliation. The premise was simple: Using only magic, two people tossed raw elements back and forth, sometimes with physical items included. The person who dropped the elements first lost. The easiest way to win was to toss your opponent more element than they could handle. Since I’d always been only a midlevel earth elemental with even weaker skills with air and water, I’d almost always lost, usually getting drenched with water in the process. Against an FSPP, I didn’t stand a chance.

“Let’s start with air,” Marcus said. He sat on his cot, his back to the wall with the broken door and his legs stretched out. Everything about his posture said he was relaxed and expected an easy victory.

“Sure.” I shifted to sit cross-legged on the floor and Oliver curled around me, eyes glowing in anticipation. Pulling on my connection with the gargoyles, I collected a massive bundle of air, weaving the element into a tight vortex and plucking a few strands loose so it’d unravel the moment Marcus caught it. I wasn’t going to make this easy on him.

“Whoa. Hang on,” he said. “I didn’t mean a battle to the death, and I see what you’re doing there with that trap. It wouldn’t work, but that’s not the point. We just need to keep magic circulating, right? Let’s keep this friendly.”

I shifted the vortex to the side so I could study him. He looked sincere—and amused.

“For the gargoyles,” he added.

Still not trusting him, I dispersed my wind-funnel trap and made a small fist-size bundle of air, then wrapped and tied it off so it would hold its form once I threw it. I tossed it to Marcus and immediately prepared a wall of earth magic in front of me in case he hurled it back five times as big and too fast for me to catch. Instead, he lobbed it back, scoffing when I had to drop my barrier to catch it.

“Not a fan of the game?” he asked.

“I’ve played with a few poor sports.”

“The kind who set traps in their first throw?”

I didn’t appreciate the implication. “The kind who enjoy humiliating the weaker woman. You know, typical FSPP superiority crap.” I threw the air back to him with more force than necessary.

Oliver tilted his head against my thigh as he tracked the air ball’s flight back to me in the heavy silence. I rested a hand on his side and let out a long breath.

“Sorry, that was uncalled for,” I said, reminding myself Marcus had never done anything but help me.

We threw the element back and forth a few times before Marcus asked, “Do you know a lot of full-spectrum elementals?”

“Personally? Just you. And Grant and the rest of the squad,” I added quickly. “But as a kid, there were a few in my school. I wasn’t sad when they got transferred.” Some of my friends had been jealous of the more talented students and the special school they’d been whisked away to in their early teens. I’d been relieved to see them go.

“You’re lucky. I know a lot of full-spectrum pricks.”

My gaze snapped to Marcus’s, and he winked.

“I was one of them for a while. I could teach you some dastardly tricks some other time. Beef up the air, then add water.”

“Are you testing my control over the elements I’m weakest with?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because tomorrow we’re going to Reaper’s Ridge, and I want to see what you’ve got.”

I frowned. “You know what I’ve got. This isn’t the first time we’ve worked together.” Even if he’d forgotten when we’d fought together in Focal Park, we’d spent today linked. The intimate combining of our magic would have left Marcus with no questions about how weak I was in every element.

“Which is why I didn’t agree to come with you just because you gave me puppy-dog eyes. I know you’re not going to flip out, but you’re handicapped by that whole everyone-else-first healer thing.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Puppy-dog eyes?

“Tomorrow will be about more than throwing yourself in front of every threatened gargoyle. You’ll actually have to try to survive.” His scowl was back in full force.

“That’s the plan,” I said, confused by the turn in his mood.

His mouth flattened. “Grab some water and let me judge if you’re capable of two things at once.”

“And here I thought it was just a friendly game.” He’d seen me do far more complex divisions of magic than handling two elements at once. I’d hoped having a little food in his stomach would offset his sour mood, but it’d been too much to ask of a single meal, even one as spectacular as the potpies.

I wound together a bundle of water element strands and prepared to throw it to Marcus.

“No. With water.”

“What water?” I asked, looking around. Oliver had smashed the teapot.

“Gather it up.”

I examined the spray of moisture staining the floor, then Marcus. He raised a challenging eyebrow. Gritting my teeth, I got to work. Pulling the droplets together took more of my concentration than I would have liked. I fumbled the air ball, dropped it once, and had to shave it in half to keep it under control before I finally wrapped strands of water element around a collected handful of water, encased it in a bubble of air, and floated the wobbling blob off the floor.