Secret of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 3) Read online

  Instead, I did the only thing I could: I turned my back on him and walked away. He’d been a true friend, helping me when there was no incentive for him, risking his life to get me this far, and I abandoned him.

  11

  From the shadows of overhanging crystals, the gargoyles swarmed, but when they drew close, they turned, parted, and let me pass. A braver person would have been able to walk confidently through the bombarding apparitions, but my steps faltered and shook, and I flinched when the gargoyles darted out of the shadows, mouths agape and faces contorted with killing rage. The baetyl might be temporarily confused by the flavor of my magic, but once it realized I wasn’t a gargoyle, it’d crush me.

  Behind me, Marcus wasn’t as lucky. I turned, watching helplessly as the apparitions dove into his body, their ghostly forms disappearing when they touched his flesh. He thrashed and moaned, feebly slapping the air. I almost ran back to him, but I knew it would be pointless. I could stand over him and guard his body or I could fix the baetyl and save his mind.

  I wasn’t stupid enough to test the baetyl’s crystals with so much as a grain of quartz element, but the deeper I crawled and climbed through the maze of crystals, the more heavily its magic pressed against my skin. Its jagged disharmony set my teeth on edge. A headache unfurled across my skull, the pain a dull pound compared to the sharp sting of the cuts on my arms.

  I examined my wounds in the glow of an especially bright, clear crystal. Blood oozed through my shirt at my left bicep, caking the rip in the fabric. I didn’t think peeling the cloth from the cut would help at this point, so I ignored the gash. A series of nicks spiraled down my forearms, with one long scratch on the underside of my right arm. Most had stopped bleeding already, and my shirt was doing a decent job soaking up the rest of the blood. My hands hurt the worst. Lacerations crisscrossed my palms, oozing blood.

  Oliver and Celeste walked across the crystals without being cut, but the tension in them reminded me of their first steps. Not only was this baetyl broken, but it also wasn’t their cynosure baetyl. The magic in here was not theirs, and every step hurt them in a different way. I picked up my pace.

  Celeste led us to the cave-in. Amid all the flat planes and jewel tones of the crystals, the mound of soil and rocks lay like a physical insult on the otherwise pristine floor. High above us, a jagged dark patch marred the lines of the ceiling.

  It wasn’t a natural collapse. The sturdy beams of enormous crystals spanning the breadth of the baetyl should have prevented any part of the cavern from caving in, but if the structural integrity had been destroyed from above by the Hidden Cache miners, it wouldn’t have mattered how strong the crystals inside the baetyl were.

  We paused as I assessed the ugly gap in the crystals and waited for inspiration. I had hoped that when I encountered the problem, I’d see the solution. Obviously, the cave-in needed to be mended, but the scope of it worried me. Even from a hundred feet below it, the hole looked large enough to drive two trains through side by side. Enhanced by Oliver and Celeste, I could probably do it—if I had a few days and control of all the elements.

  Which meant I needed to get started right away. For Marcus and for the dormant gargoyles waiting outside, none of whom had time to spare. Except . . .

  I couldn’t focus on the cave-in. I peered into the gloom of the baetyl, straining to see . . . to hear . . . something.

  “What’s that way?”

  “The heart,” Celeste said.

  Yes, the heart. “Take me there.”

  The crystals grew denser the deeper we traveled, and their internal light increased until a dozen different shades of soft twilight lit the cavern. Celeste was forced to find her own way, not fitting through the same spaces as Oliver and me. I spent more time crawling through gaps than walking, with Oliver helping me over the larger crystals. The blood from my palms blended into his carnelian sides when he let me use him for handholds rather than the sharp edges of the quartz.

  We passed two other cave-ins, both smaller than the first but not by much. I examined them without really seeing them. The baetyl’s magic had grown stronger, the broken and pure notes shredding my senses like a cheese grater, disrupting my ability to concentrate on anything else.

  I lost track of time. My sense of direction narrowed to the painful-sweet siren song of the heart. If I’d thought about it, I wouldn’t have been able to find the exit, but leaving had lost all sense of importance. The heart was all that mattered.

  I slid down the slope of a citrine crystal as wide as my shoulders and landed softly on a bed of onyx peaks, then paused in surprise. The network of crystals opened, creating a gap that stretched to the ceiling. Another twenty feet in front of me, a massive wall of interlocking crystals wove from the ceiling to the floor. I scanned the surface, hunting for an opening in what looked like an impenetrable maze of quartz.

  Celeste coasted to my side from a large gap higher up, and I stepped aside to give Oliver a place to land when he slid down the crystal behind me.

  “The heart is inside,” Celeste said.

  I’d assumed as much. “How do I get through the wall?”

  “There are openings up higher,” Oliver said.

  “How do you know?” He’d been at my side the whole time; he hadn’t had the opportunity to scout ahead to check for gaps in the wall.

  “This baetyl shares similarities with mine.”

  I waited for him to elaborate. He ducked his head and looked away, and I realized he didn’t want to say anything else. The fact that I was here, inside a baetyl, didn’t make a difference. Baetyls were private, even from gargoyle guardians. Only the extreme extenuating circumstances had forced Celeste to reveal their existence, but it hadn’t changed the gargoyles’ instinctive secretive nature. Not even for Oliver, my stalwart companion.

  “How high up?” I asked.

  “The biggest should be near the top.”

  I tilted my head back. The ceiling here was at least twelve stories high. Contemplating that height, even while standing on solid ground, made my legs weak. I pressed my fingertips into my stomach to quiet the butterflies.

  In an ideal world, Celeste would have been able to carry me up and through the wall. She outweighed me by at least four hundred pounds and was larger than most mules. If she’d been a real gryphon, she wouldn’t have had a problem. Gryphons and gargoyles both used air magic to fly, but the differences in how they did so was the speculation of scholars. All I knew was that for gargoyles to use their stone feathers to lift their solid rock bodies, they couldn’t also carry anything much heavier than their own heads. Even a gargoyle as large as Celeste wouldn’t be able to lift me. Her magic wouldn’t support both of us.

  “You’ll have to climb,” Celeste said.

  I worried my bottom lip, eyeing the crystal wall. The smallest branch of quartz was thicker than my thigh; the largest could have fit three of my studio lofts inside. All were packed so densely at the base that I couldn’t fit more than an arm through the gaps.

  “To the top?” I asked.

  “Not that far. You might fit through about halfway up.”

  I closed my eyes and swiped sweat from my forehead with trembling fingers.

  “I’ll go with you,” Oliver said.

  I gave him a tremulous smile. He knew how scared I was of heights, even if he didn’t understand why.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll try to guide you through from the other side.” Celeste walked a few paces away to give herself room to unfurl her wings, then launched into the air. She had to fly back the way we’d come first to give herself time and room to gain the necessary height. I lost her among the crystals, her dark black and purple body disappearing in the shadows. When I spotted her again, I almost mistook her for an apparitional gargoyle swooping out of the dark gap between a dumortierite crystal and a shadowy cluster of smoky quartz crystals. Her flight path should have looked erratic and cumbersome as she wove through the crystals; instead, her movements were organ
ic. Every flap of her wings and turn of her body was timed for her to soar gracefully through the upper reaches of the baetyl.

  Observing her, I saw the baetyl’s design with fresh understanding: I’d been traversing the baetyl as a human, clumsy and crawling, but it had never been designed for two-legged movement. It was a place for wings and flight.

  When Celeste closed in on the wall near the ceiling, she tucked her wings and plummeted into an opening not visible from where we stood. I waited to hear the sounds of her progress, but if she had to touch down, none of her footsteps were loud enough to reach us.

  I glanced back through the crystals behind us, ignoring the pull of the baetyl telling me I was facing the wrong way. Overlapping quartz of every color and size disguised the way back, hiding the cave-ins and the exit. I tried to picture how deep we were inside Reaper’s Ridge. A half mile? A mile?

  If Marcus were at my side, he would have already started climbing the wall and finding a way through for us. But he wasn’t with me. Lost amid the crystals, he lay helpless and tortured by nightmares, dependent on me to save him.

  I stopped stalling and turned back toward the wall.

  “Let’s see if we can find a way through.”

  Oliver scampered across the sharp crystals to the left and I walked the opposite direction, taking great care with my footing. When neither of us spotted any openings near the bottom, I selected an accessible-looking section near the right wall and began to climb. The crystals comprising the wall were some of the largest in the baetyl, and their girth meant not every angle was razor sharp. Unfortunately, it also meant I had fewer handholds on the slick surfaces.

  Oliver had a harder time than me, lacking the traction provided by fingerprints and leather boot soles. After falling off twice, he flapped to a narrow ledge above me and guided me up the wall.

  I did my best not to look down. Sweat and blood slicked my hands, and the tips and edges of crystals cut into my stomach and hips as I scaled the uneven surface. In a few places, the crystals were wide enough for me to walk along like uneven stairs, but more often, I clung to fragile toeholds and inched my way higher.

  I almost cried when I reached the first opening large enough for me and looked through: Beyond the gap crisscrossed another layer of interlocking crystals too tight for me to navigate.

  “How thick is this wall?” I asked, eyes closed. A tear escaped after all, but I didn’t have a spare hand to brush it from my cheek.

  “I don’t know,” Oliver said. He draped from a rose quartz crystal above me, brows furrowed with sympathy.

  “Guess. More than two feet?”

  “Definitely. Probably more like twenty to forty.”

  Another tear slid down my face. “Okay. We keep going up.”

  I balanced precariously on the slanted edge of an agate crystal thirty feet above the sharp baetyl floor when I finally found a promising hole large enough to wiggle through. I squirmed through on my stomach, then lay there, panting, savoring the reprieve for my tired arm muscles. When I’d regained my breath, I pushed myself to my feet and carefully stood.

  Crystals jutted from every angle around me, and when I looked down, I forgot how to breathe. I stood on an aventurine crystal, and despite its almost jade color and the glow it emitted, I could see through it to the crystals below it—and the crystals below those, as if I stood on a plane of glass three stories in the air. My head went light and my heart beat its way up my throat. I crouched and closed my eyes. When vertigo tilted the crystal beneath my hands, I jerked my eyes open and stared straight ahead.

  “Are you okay?” Oliver asked, peeking at me from the other side of the opening.

  I nodded, my throat too dry to form words.

  “The crystal is strong. You won’t fall.”

  I nodded again and forced myself to look around. The opening wasn’t a dead end—I could go up.

  Lucky me.

  Oliver tried to squeeze through the opening with me, but his inchworm way of walking bunched his body up too tall to fit through the gap. He shot me a worried look.

  “Maybe if I fly and use my momentum to slide in,” he suggested.

  I shook my head, but it took me two tries to get my voice to work. “You should take a safer route. Like Celeste.”

  “Are you going to be okay without me?”

  I thought about Marcus lying helpless near the entrance, being bombarded by the baetyl’s fractured magic. I thought about the dormant gargoyles growing weaker, depending on me to save them.

  “Yes.” I pushed to my unsteady feet, almost grateful for the pain of my injuries to focus my thoughts. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

  Through a beam of smoky quartz, I watched Oliver launch into the air and fly away.

  * * *

  I’d never felt so alone and foreign in my skin as I did while inside the crystal wall. I’d worked with quartz my whole life. I’d identified as an earth elemental since grade school, but I found myself missing wood. A blade of grass, a patch of moss—any hint of growing greenery would have soothed my taut nerves. There wasn’t even dust. Surrounded by all the shiny, glowing geometric planes, my flesh looked strange, too pink and rounded. I couldn’t even take solace in the elements. I continued to hold quartz even though I hadn’t seen a phantom gargoyle since I’d touched the wall, but the element had grown brittle and fragmented. Knowing it was a reflection of the baetyl was no comfort. I’d never had a place change the nature of the elements, and being perpetually in touch with the flawed magic screwed knots into my shoulders. Only fear of not being able to take hold of it again and being powerless against the apparitions prevented me from releasing the element.

  I hurried and it still took a century. Sweat dripped down my face and stuck my shirt to my back. The cuts in my hands stung in a peripheral way until I slipped and grabbed for purchase on the slick crystals. Most of the time, I was forced to crawl, contorting myself around the overlapping branches of quartz. With the crystals so close together, I no longer feared falling to my death; instead I developed a new phobia of getting a foot or arm stuck and being trapped until I starved to death.

  When I heard Oliver and Celeste, I thought it was a hallucination. I inched through a gap so tight I couldn’t lift my head, moving mostly by gravity on the smooth slant with a little help from my feet. Then stone paws wrapped gently around my wrists and pulled me through.

  Oliver curled around me, halting my descent with his body. I lifted my head, spotting Celeste first. She stood beside me, fitting easily on the rose quartz ledge. Gratefully, I got to all fours, then grabbed Oliver’s wing when I caught sight of the drop-off beyond him.

  “I’ve got you,” Oliver said.

  “Thank . . .” I forgot my own words as I took in the heart.

  The wide open, perfect sphere of the heart was defined on all sides by thousands of crystals of every size, as if it were an enormous woven quartz basket—one that could fit two or three city blocks with room to spare. Hundreds of crystal ledges like the one we stood on protruded from the walls all the way around the heart, the enclosure designed to fit droves of gargoyles.

  The structural beauty of the quartz sphere was surpassed only by the central crystal. It thrust from the floor nearly to the twelve-story ceiling, its girth so broad a dozen gargoyles could have stretched out on the sloped top. Unlike all the other crystals in the baetyl, which were each made of a singular type of quartz, the towering heart crystal swirled with every variety of quartz in a riot of color, the pattern never repeating.

  I was so mesmerized by the beauty of the heart that when I spotted the enormous crack running through the multicolored crystal, I physically recoiled. The culprit was obvious: Another cave-in had split the ceiling directly above the crystal. I followed the length of the crystal back to the floor, spotting the pile of dirt and boulders near the base.

  I didn’t need to look further. I’d found the crux of the problem.

  A laugh bubbled out of me. We’d made it. After months
of fruitless searching and experimentation, I had a cure. I was finally going to save the dormant gargoyles.

  Excitement overrode my vertigo, and I crouched to search for a way to the floor.

  “There’s an easy way down over here,” Oliver said.

  Thanks to the frequency of the protruding crystal ledges, descending was almost as simple as walking down stairs. Oliver stayed at my side, between me and the drop-off, and Celeste trailed behind us. I did my best not to notice the empty space below the see-through crystals, but I didn’t take a full breath until I stood on the floor that was so densely packed with evenly sized crystals it was almost smooth.

  Oliver touched down beside me, then hissed, flapping back up to a ledge.

  “It hurts worse here,” he said.

  “I feel it, too.” The hum of energy emanating from the heart crystal hammered spikes into my skull, all but drowning out the sweeter notes I’d heard earlier.

  When I looked up, I spotted the eggs. Lying amid of the multicolored crystalline floor, the drab spheres struck me as insultingly ugly. There were nine, each no larger than an ostrich egg, and all were the same dead gray as the gargoyles we’d encountered on the mountain. Several were cracked open, and I looked away from the lifeless husks inside.

  A flare of earth and air boiled out of the crack in the heart crystal high above me, the elements snarling together as they drifted through the crystal wall. I gaped at the newly formed magical storm. Anywhere else in the world, I would have said the spontaneous creation of wild magic was impossible. The elements existed all around us, but it was people or creatures who called them forth and put them to use. They didn’t burst unguided from inert stone.

  But this wasn’t ordinary quartz. It might have been sedentary, but if the heart crystal could use magic to rejuvenate gargoyles and protect itself, it wielded magic as adroitly as any walking, breathing creature. Broken, it’d lost control of its own powers and the elements escaped, warped and deadly.

  If saving the lives of the dormant gargoyles wasn’t a worthy enough cause, stopping the formation of more wild storms would have been more than enough reason to heal the heart crystal.