Secret of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 3) (7 page)

“Bring it on,” Marcus said, not commenting on my sloppy work.

I lobbed the water inside my thin barrier, hoping it’d break apart and drench him. Instead, Marcus caught it, combined it with a separate perfect sphere of water I hadn’t noticed him collect, and tossed it back to me as I released the air ball toward him. I caught the water, wrapping it in thicker elemental bands to stabilize it.

In between throws, I sent tiny probes of magic into the dormant gargoyles, checking their health levels. They hadn’t gained much strength, but they were no longer weakening. Celeste had relaxed, too, and the worry had eased from her expression. She’d curled up on the open threshold, but her head remained high and she watched Rourke like, well, an eagle.

“Why do you feel more comfortable with water than air?” Marcus asked, breaking the silence and startling me into almost dropping the air ball.

I’d half resolved not to speak to him again, but his tone had lost its bickering edge, so I responded. “My parents are both water elementals.”

“Really?”

“Pretty strong, too. They spent a lot of time working with me to help me perfect my limited ability.”

“Where’d you get your knack for earth?”

“I don’t know. No one in the family had an affinity for quartz like I do.”

“Add in some earth. No. Make it quartz. I should get some practice.”

As easily as thinking, I’d collected earth element and tuned it to quartz. For reasons I’d never been able to explain, I was stronger with quartz than I was with untuned earth. I used to assume it was because I’d practiced with the element so much, but lately I’d been considering I might have been born with a specialized strength. Quartz had always been easier for me and more accessible. It was only as an adult that I’d thought to use it to make a living. Then I’d met Oliver and his siblings, and my life had been completely changed.

For the fun of it, I wrapped the quartz-tuned earth around three seed crystals, then tossed them to Marcus. He caught it and fumbled, the crystals clattering against each other like castanets, but recovered quickly. I took petty delight in his lack of perfection.

“Wood, too,” he said.

I dutifully wove pure wood into a knot and bounced it to him. Marcus added a cotton rag from his bag to give the element weight. If not for the gargoyles’ extra magic, I would have had a hard time holding all the separate elements together with air, but with their help, keeping four elemental balls alight wasn’t even tough.

“Now fire,” Marcus said.

I made a glowball. Marcus returned it with a two-inch flame fluttering at the heart of the light. I caught it delicately, looping it back to the fire elemental from a safe distance. Schools forbade playing with real flames. Losing control of a bucket of water was messy but easy enough to clean; losing control of naked fire could cause permanent harm. That didn’t mean I hadn’t tried—and walked away with singed eyebrows.

“It won’t bite,” he said.

“I’m rather partial to my hair,” I muttered.

Marcus chuckled. The warm light of the lanterns and the bouncing flame softened the hard planes of his face, and his mirth held a hint of The Smile. I pulled my gaze away before he caught me staring and focused on the arcs of elements between us.

For a while we let the muted
clack-clack
of the metal wheels across the seams of the rail fill the silence. Outside, the sky had darkened, and the scenery through the gap of the missing door had become lost in the shadows. Reaper’s Ridge and all the dangers it presented were still a day away, and for the moment, no urgency pushed against my thoughts. In this warm environment so far removed from the real world, it seemed perfectly natural to strike up a conversation with Marcus. We skirted around discussing tomorrow and the dangers awaiting us, sticking to innocuous topics like our pasts—my rather ordinary upbringing in Terra Haven, his adventurous military experiences and exciting missions with the FPD—our favorite places to eat in the city, and the best temple for the summer solstice.

While we talked, we tossed the elements back and forth until our moves were so synchronous I didn’t have to think about them, which was probably Marcus’s intent. The whole game was likely a strategic plan designed to familiarize me with working with him and vice versa. I didn’t care. I enjoyed the moment of comfortable normalcy—something I’d lacked during the frantic months I’d searched for a cure. I also monitored the dormant gargoyles. When their life signs had been stable for over an hour and Celeste had fully relaxed, I reluctantly ended our game.

“You should get some sleep. You’ll want to be rested for whatever we face tomorrow,” Marcus said, tossing the water out the open door and resealing the air barrier. He let the other elemental bundles dissipate, and the cotton cloth fluttered to his hand. I caught the seed crystals with a scoop of air and dropped them into my bag.

Oliver had fallen asleep tight around me, and I had to wake him to free myself from his stony embrace before hobbling on stiff legs to my cot. Stretching out, I toed off my boots and pulled the scratchy wool blanket over myself. Marcus dimmed the lanterns and settled on his cot. The cozy atmosphere morphed, turning the friendly energy into something intimate and awkward as I listened to him arrange his covers. Tension crept back into my muscles, and I thought it would keep me awake, but the rocking of the train lulled me to sleep minutes later.

* * *

I woke looking into Celeste’s glowing amethyst eyes. Marcus breathed softly on his cot, asleep, and Oliver lay stretched out and sleeping on the floor beside me. I couldn’t tell how long I’d been asleep, but I guessed it’d been a few hours. Softly, I reached for the dormant gargoyles, testing them. They’d weakened. Not as much as before, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

Rolling quietly to my feet, I tiptoed into the middle of the gargoyles, where I’d left my bag of seed crystals. I sat and wriggled my chilled toes into my boots, then opened myself to the gargoyles’ boost. After carefully heating the air in a weak version of Marcus’s spell, I decided to do what I did best: work with quartz.

Before I’d become a gargoyle healer, I’d had ambitions of being Terra Haven’s preeminent quartz artisan. Now the goal felt juvenile and shallow. Nothing compared to the joyful rush of healing a sick or injured gargoyle, and the most prestigious artistic accomplishment couldn’t compete with saving a life. However, I still enjoyed creating beautiful objects with quartz and it kept my skills sharp, and the money I made selling quartz jewelry and figurines at a gallery in the city augmented my sporadic healer income.

Drawing as much as I could hold of all the elements to help feed the dormant gargoyles, I separated delicate strands of earth, fire, and air to combine several seeds into a blob. With practiced ease, I twisted the lump and stretched it into the most popular figurine I sold: a replica of Oliver. Normally I used carnelian to match his distinctive body, but the clear quartz did a good job of catching the light and refracting it through the small details of his eyes, ears, and folded wings.

As soon as I finished, I started the next figurine, making one for each of the dormant gargoyles, then a few of Celeste. I strung together ten crystals and created the train, complete with miniature people on the inside and the khalkotauroi in the engine car, clear hay strands scattered around his feet, clear flame breathing from his nostrils to heat the water. I left out Conductor Naomi.

Sleep weighted my eyelids, and after a while, I reclined on my side with my head propped on the curled fox. I planned to doze for only a few minutes, but when I woke, indigo sky was visible through the open door and the glow of the sun lit the edge of the horizon.

Today was the day—either I was a guardian, capable of fixing a baetyl and saving the comatose gargoyles, or I wasn’t, and everyone in our party could die for my hubris. I prayed I wasn’t handing Reaper’s Ridge its next victims.

6

“Naomi agreed to let us use her private bathroom, but you’ll need to be quick to make it through the train without disturbing the passengers,” Marcus said when he noticed I was awake.

I grimaced, not needing the reminder of the gorgeous conductor before I’d fully woken; thinking of Reaper’s Ridge had made me queasy enough already. But refusing the offer out of spite would cause only me to suffer. Besides, my bladder didn’t care how Marcus had convinced Naomi to give us access to her quarters. I grabbed my bag and scurried through the open door. When I returned in fresh clothes and as clean as a sponge bath could get me, Celeste was perched atop the freight car once more. She nodded her head to me but didn’t talk, and I didn’t linger in the chilly morning air.

Marcus knelt in front of the figurines I’d created last night, holding up a clear replica of Oliver to examine it in the light of a glowball he’d formed.

“The detail in this is amazing,” he said without turning toward me.

“You can have it, if you want.” Caught off guard by his praise, I tried to sound dismissive, as if it wasn’t one of my finer pieces.

The glowball winked out and he closed his long fingers around the figurine. “Thanks.” He grabbed his bag and squeezed past me on his way to the bathroom.

“He’s smart,” Oliver said after Marcus had left.

“Because he picked the one that looked like you?”

“Yes.”

Chuckling, I checked on the dormant gargoyles. They were all weak but stable. It pleased me to see the fox’s injuries were healing nicely, and when I checked Oliver, his new patch of clear ruff had striations of red carnelian stretching to the surface. By the time we returned to Terra Haven, all signs of his injury would be healed.

I glanced around at the dormant gargoyles and tried to picture the return trip. Would they be with me? Would they remain in their baetyl? Would they all live through the trip?

Would I?

Marcus returned wearing brown leather pants, thick leather boots, and a lightweight fitted gray cotton shirt with a tiny flame stitched at the high collar. The shirt was regulation FPD attire and woven with protective magic, but the leather pants were new. They hugged his long legs and creaked when he sat on his cot. I glanced down at my unspelled jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt. The comparison between us said more obviously than words how unprepared I was for traversing Reaper’s Ridge.

Marcus’s attitude had changed to match his clothes, the camaraderie of last night chased away by the sunrise and his familiar scowl back in place. He silently handed me an apple stabbed with a paring knife, half a loaf of bread, and a hunk of soft white cheese. I jerked the knife from the apple and ate the fruit, then concentrated on cutting slices of cheese for each bite of bread. Across from me, Marcus methodically consumed his identical breakfast, seemingly unaffected by the heavy silence choking the air and making it hard to swallow.

“Repairing the baetyl is your job. For everything else, you’ll do what I say, when I say it.”

I lifted my eyebrows at his high-handed order. Marcus gave me a hard stare, no emotion behind his eyes.

“Is that clear?”

I stuffed a bite of bread into my mouth to choke off a dozen flippant responses and made myself nod. Marcus had experience, training, and more magic than me. It made sense for him to be in charge, especially in the wild magic of Reaper’s Ridge. Besides, telling him I’d follow his orders only if I agreed with them wouldn’t appease him, and I couldn’t afford to have him back out of helping me now.

I’d barely finished eating when the train began to slow.

“Are we there?” Oliver asked.

“Almost.”

My stomach tightened around my half-digested breakfast and I ran damp palms down my thighs. I tried to push my fear aside, but it wasn’t as easy as last night, when the danger was still a distant prospect. Oliver didn’t share my trepidation. The young gargoyle undulated out of the freight car with an excited trill and leapt to the roof. The metal popped under the combined weight of two gargoyles but didn’t dent.

Trying to calm myself, I focused on mundane tasks. I tucked my bag up against the larger loading door, folded my blanket on my cot, and laced my boots. The boots were the only part of my outfit that I was sure met Marcus’s approval. After our last adventure together, during which a spear of granite had skewered the bottom of my foot straight through my boot, I’d purchased the most heavy-duty pair I could find. They’d been advertised as guard boots and I wore them daily. I hadn’t expected to need them, having bought them mainly to counter the remembered pain of the wound, but they’d come in handy twice so far when injured gargoyles had been in too much pain to heed where they stepped.

By the time I’d adjusted the laces from the toe up to the calf on both boots, the train’s brakes were squealing and we’d slowed to a crawl. Marcus dropped the air barrier across the broken door, letting in a gentle breeze and the train’s perpetual burning-grass odor. I followed him out to the railing, my gaze lifting immediately to the mountains.

Lightning split the clear sky in the distance and thunder rumbled overhead a few seconds later. The tracks ran through a valley filled with sparse, dead weeds and scraggly brush, but a few hundred feet to the west, a dense pine forest blanketed the steep landscape. A gorge dipped into the hillside, revealing a barren ridge of quartz beyond it, the ragged white peaks glowing in the early-morning light. A thick shaft of fire belched from the hill, charring the rocks in its path and extinguishing in a bright explosion made soundless by the distance. Then the train rolled past the gap, and the tree line obstructed the view again.