The Dark Portal (The Gryphon Chronicles, Book 3) (31 page)

Then Helena sprang to her feet, or rather,
her paws behind them. “There she is!” Emrys said with a broad grin as the leopard shook herself. “Right as rain. She’s all right!” the head dwarf yelled down to his followers.

The
warriors cheered.

“Nice work, Master Emrys,” Jake said.

“You, too, laddie.”

But Derek turned to stare at Helena and slowly shook his head, his rugged face etched with a
smitten look of relief. Helena reared up onto her hind legs and gave Derek’s cheek a tickle with her dainty whiskers.

The Guardian
scowled at her. “No, don’t try to be all sweet. You were bad.”

“She did save my life,” Jake pointed out.

“Then she got carried away. Typical! Shapeshifters,” Derek grumbled.

Helena nipped his arm for that remark.

“At least she’s got nine lives,” Jake said. “Can we get down from here, please?”

Emrys nodded. “Aye, we need to regroup and figure out where we go from here.”

They all headed off the rock ledge. Jake took the easy way down, riding on Red’s back, but Emrys preferred to climb down the ladder with Derek. Helena simply pounced off the rocky outcropping down the sloping cavern wall.

N
ot even she could cross the river in one jump, however. The three of them went in single file toward the footbridge, Emrys leading the way, and Derek bringing up the rear. Even in her leopard form, Derek let the lady go ahead of him. “After you.”

Jake had already made it to the other side of the river and was sliding off Red’s back over in the center of the cavern.

The dwarves were counting up their kills and congratulating each other, and when Jake joined them, they congratulated him, too.

“I think we’re getting good at this, I really do. How many
more do you reckon are creeping around down here?”

“No idea.”

Emrys crossed the spindly wooden footbridge and stepped off onto solid ground on their side of the river.

“All right, you lot, settle down. Somebody give me the map…”

Derek and Helena hung farther back on the bridge, having a private word before rejoining the others.

All of a sudden, Jake saw a hideous,
one-horned gargoyle leap off the very rock ledge they had vacated, launching one last sneak attack.

They didn’t even see it coming—
but Jake did.

“Petrificus!”
he shouted, bringing up the wand with a flourish.

Instantly, the beast
turned to stone, thank goodness, but then he gasped in horror as, too late, he realized his miscalculation.

T
he gargoyle turned into a statue and dropped out of midair like a boulder, landing on the footbridge and smashing it to splinters.

Derek and Helena were instantly throw
n into the rushing water, and before Jake’s eyes, were washed away.

“No!”

Horror-stricken, he took a few running steps to the water’s edge, trying to use his telekinesis to pull them back, but it all happened too fast.

Before he could even
summon up his powers, they were swept away under the low stone arch where the underground river descended deeper into the mountain.

Jake
pushed the Vampire Monocle up above his eye and stared at the churning, dark water in disbelief.

Just like that, t
hey were gone.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Black Wand

Jake felt as though the room was spinning.

Red swooped through the cavern with a furious roar, but not even he could do anything to help Derek and Helena.

The current had swept them away.

Sh
ocked to the marrow, he didn’t realize he was teetering on the edge of the river himself and might have fallen in and joined them if two of the dwarves had not rushed over and grabbed his arms.

Steadying him, they pulled him back.
One of them caught the Vampire Monocle when he nearly dropped it into the river in his state of shock.

“Easy, lad.”

“They’re going to drown!” Jake shouted.

“Now, now, you mustn’t say that—”

“It’s all my fault,” he choked out.

“Calm yourself, Lord
Griffon!” Emrys barked.

T
he sharp-toned order brought Jake back to his senses like a much-needed slap across the face.

“We don’t have time for pa
nic. Pull yourself together. This gargoyle hunt is over for now,” the head dwarf announced. “We need to get after them at once if we’re going to save ’em. Now, let’s go, people, hurry!”

That was when
Jake turned and dazedly realized the dwarves were already making preparations to rescue the pair. They scurried about with orderly speed, lighting the rest of the torches; somebody thrust one into his hand.

While Jake just stood there, at a loss, the dwarves went about
efficiently tethering themselves together, each tying a knot around his waist with the same long rope.

He lost track of which one of them had caught the Vampire Monocle when he dropped it
, and was so out of sorts that he forgot to ask for it back.

He turned his bewildered gaze to Emrys as the head dwarf came over to him.

“Don’t worry, lad, we’re miners. We deal with these kinds of accidents all the time. We’ll get ’em back safe.” He snapped the map open, poring over it by torchlight. “I just need to figure out where this river leads…”

“Can she change herself back whenever she wants?” one of the warriors muttered
to his friend. “Last I heard, cats can’t swim.”

Jake glanced at him, aghast
at this point, then he looked at the river again. The water never stopped for a second.

It just kept flowing full force constantly through the cavern, frothy, rough
, and rapid, like it had not just swallowed up the closest thing he had to a father.

Life had robbed him of his par
ents. Was it about to take Derek away from him, too?

Suddenly, Wallace pointed at the water. “Look!”

Bubbles were rising from the middle of the spot where the footbridge had broken in half.

For a heartbeat, Jake thought it might be Helena or Derek. But no, he had seen the water carry them away.

Then he realized.

Thirty seconds had passed since he had turned the gargoyle attacking them to stone, but he had not destroyed it.

After falling onto the bridge, the gargoyle statue must have sunk to the bottom, too heavy to be washed away.

Still intact, now it was coming back to life.

Jake narrowed his eyes. This time, he wanted revenge. He took out his wand and readied himself to use his telekinesis, waiting the final few seconds for the gargoyle to appear.

“Stand back,” he told the dwarves through
gritted teeth. Red pounced over to stand by his side.

“Here it comes!” Wallace
yelled as a dark shape glided into view just under the water’s surface.

Suddenly
, the big, fanged gargoyle shot up from the river. It had no sooner cleared the surface than Jake aimed the wand at it.
“Petrificus!”
he shouted for all he was worth.

Inst
antly, it started turning back into stone, but it fought against the spell, struggling to keep flying.

Jake let out a yell of effort as he c
ast a bolt of his telekinesis at it. The gargoyle exploded spectacularly in midair. The other gargoyles screamed from all the high, rocky places around the cavern upon seeing this.

“That’s wh
at you’re all going to get!” he roared at them, turning in fury to pick his next target. He cast the spell at another big one of them from across the cavern, then shattered it, too. “You want to hurt my friends?”

The gargoyles fled from him into any tunnel they could find. He could hear the
m chattering in fear as they raced into the shadows.

Wallace looked askance at him. “Remind me not to get on your ba
d side.”

Jake paid the dwarf
no mind, fixated on the fleeing monsters.

His furious vow echoed after them. “Run if you like, but the darkness won’t save you! I’m going to hunt do
wn every one of you and turn you all to dust!”

“No, you’re not, my lord. At least, not yet.” Emrys pressed Jake’s arm down before he t
ried again. “First we’ve got to get moving. Tether yourself to the safety line! No time to lose.” Emrys marched off and tied himself to the front end of the rope, obviously assuming that Jake would obey.

But Jake clenched his jaw and
debated what to do. Killing gargoyles was vastly preferable to watching Emrys pull Derek, dead, out of the river.

He could not bear to
see it, and after losing his parents, he felt certain that would be the outcome. Life always pulled the rug out from under you just when everything started going well.

Red nudged him. “Becaw?”

“I can’t, Red.” Jake shook his head and gave the Gryphon an imploring glance. “You know what Derek would do if he were here—he’d go after those monsters. So I say, let’s go and finish them off, for him. C’mon, boy.”

“Becaw?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Mine rescues are the dwarves’ expertise, but I’m the only one that can kill those beasts with the Petrificus spell, so I might as well do the part I’m good at. How many people are they going to eat? So you coming with me or not?”

“Caw!”

As the dwarves jogged off, all tethered to their safety line, then filed under the low, narrow ledge alongside the river one by one, Jake and Red exchanged a grim glance, but made no move to follow.

When they were gone, probably assuming
that he and Red were right behind them, Jake climbed onto the Gryphon’s back. “Let’s go kill some gargoyles,” he said in a hard tone that would have made Derek proud.

Red lifted off the ground and flew up into one of the tunnels that had served as the gargoyles’ escape route.

Then they pressed on into the dark.

For an hour, Jake and Red stalked the gargoyles through the maze of coalmine tunnels,
pressing ever deeper into the mine. With the wand in one hand and the torch in the other, he destroyed many more along the way.

Meanwhile, to avoid getting lost in the black labyrinth of the mine, he left
a trail of Illuminium powder behind them like breadcrumbs, pouring out small dribs of it every twenty paces, so that Red and he could find their way out again when their work was done.

As for his horror over what had happened to Derek and Helena, he had almost
managed to convince himself that Emrys and his crew had rescued them by now.

Hopefully,
the dwarves had also figured out what he was up to and would not panic, realizing he had Claw the Courageous with him.

The gargoyles seemed to be figuring it out, too. T
hey cowered in the shadows after seeing him turn a dozen of their kind into statues and then smash them to smithereens.

The beasts
were doing all they could to elude Red’s keen eyesight, hearing, and sense of smell, and Jake’s wand.

Well, except for one.

Jake had noticed some time ago that one of the gargoyles was actually following them. Both Red and he had whipped around a few times trying to catch a glimpse of the bold creature, to no avail.

The hair on Jake’
s nape prickled as he sensed this unseen enemy watching their every move, as if it was sizing them up. He turned around and held up the torch once more, searching the shadows, but still he could not see it.

“Becaw,” Red urged him.

“All right, I’m coming,” he answered uneasily.

They moved
on but both stayed vigilant, determined to track the gargoyles back to their point of origin and finish the rest off there. The hunt led them farther away from the coal cart tracks and all the more frequently used passages of the mine, to a distant tunnel, low and narrow and very dark indeed.

Jake had to hunch over to walk down the angled sl
ope of the passage and bumped his head on the ceiling more than once. “Ow,” he muttered.

“Caw?”

“I’m fine,” he grumbled, but what happened next took him completely by surprise.

Out of nowhere, the little
, demented, monkey-looking gargoyle that he had seen—and mistaken for a statue—in town and in the cemetery, leaped out of the darkness into the torch’s ring of light, and snatched the wand right out of his hand.

Before Jake
could even react, the creature took off running.

“Hey! Come back here!”
he shouted. “Red, he took the wand!”

Which meant they were suddenly defenseless.

At once, Jake hurried after the thief, trying not to bump his head again, and crouching awkwardly in the low tunnel as he ran. Red was right behind him.

He couldn’
t believe that little gargoyle ‘statue’ had been one of Garnock’s minions all along.

“Have you been spying on me?” he hollered.

Even more surprising was that the imp was clever enough to have realized that he should steal the wand.

Without it
, Jake could not destroy the gargoyles, and it was only a matter of time before the larger, nastier beasts figured out that they were now free to turn the tables on them.

Jake did not intend to give them enough time to put it together.
Nor did he intend to get eaten alive. “Get back here, you!”

Just ahead, the
little imp-gargoyle vaulted through a hole in the rock face into some hollow space beyond—probably some sort of underground cavern.

Jake rushed up to the hole, but it was too dark to see inside. “I’ve got to go in
after him.”

“Caw!”