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

  In doing so, I’d destroy the baetyl. It wasn’t a gargoyle that would boost me until tired, then cut me off. The baetyl would feed me magic until it ran out.

  Would that be so bad? I could cure a thousand ailments before the baetyl was tapped out. It wasn’t as if this was an active baetyl. Only seven gargoyles who’d been born here remained alive. Seven lives against the hundreds, thousands, I could save. The gargoyles would approve. They’d lived out their time, and their deaths could mean something. Their deaths could help me and the world become better.

  All I had to do was reach for the baetyl’s magic again. It sang inside my head, offering itself. I had healed its heart. It would give me whatever I asked.

  If I accepted and used all that power, I’d be no better than Walter or Elsa. Even with my head swimming with pain and addled by the baetyl’s magic, I knew it was wrong to throw away the dormant gargoyles’ lives in the name of using the power to save others. It was a palatable excuse to embrace the almost limitless power of the baetyl, but it wasn’t morally sound. Letting the gargoyles die wasn’t saving anyone. It was murder in the name of a nebulous greater good.

  On the heels of that thought, my argument with Marcus flashed through my mind, followed by a zing of understanding. Marcus had been right; I’d been flinging myself into danger to save others, more than willing to sacrifice myself to save the gargoyles. With blood pooling beneath me and my body broken and weak, the irony of the timing of my epiphany wasn’t lost on me.

  My actions might have been noble if I’d been at all discriminating. I’d been so focused on rescuing gargoyles, I’d forgotten to treat myself with the same reverence. Worse, I’d been ignoring my own value. Just as the baetyl’s power was needed here to heal the dormant gargoyles and give life to generations of new gargoyles, my life and magic was needed to heal all gargoyles, not just the ones in front of me.

  I weighed my logic against my conscience. Was I being egotistical to claim my life was more valuable than any one gargoyle’s? Than the lives of the seven gargoyles? The answer came quickly: Sacrificing myself to save a life or seven lives was shortsighted and foolish. I deserved better. The gargoyles deserved more of their guardian.

  Just as clearly, I knew the same logic couldn’t be applied to healing the baetyl. If my death was necessary to repair the baetyl, my sacrifice wouldn’t be a shortsighted waste of life; I’d be saving generations of future gargoyles.

  Envisioning the baetyl filled with gargoyles, healthy eggs hatching in the heart once more, I found the courage to open myself to the baetyl’s magic again. It roared inside me, buffeting me with its eagerness, filling my head with its knowledge. Gritting my teeth, I severed the crystals from my back and mended my flesh. Shards of bloody quartz rained down around me, and I helped the baetyl absorb them, burying all traces of my hopeless wings. Then I rolled my fragile human body off the onyx crystals and straightened.

  Oliver perched twenty feet away on a bright citrine crystal hardly larger than him but glowing twice as bright as it had before we’d entered the heart. The baetyl examined him through my eyes and gathered itself. He wasn’t a gargoyle who belonged here, but together, with a few tweaks, we could make him one of ours.

  It wouldn’t be hard to alter him to resonate with us. The baetyl played images through my head, showing me the process. Altering his pattern would kill him, but then we’d bring him back and he’d be better than before. And bringing him back . . .

  For a breathless moment, a pattern more intricate than anything I’d yet encountered lay before my inner eye, thousands upon thousands of glowing elemental strands laid just so and compressed into a single spark. It was the pattern of life itself and the root of every living creature. Tears of awe dripped down my chin, and I blinked to clear my vision. To have the chance to use the baetyl’s power to create life—

  I forced myself to look away from Oliver. To make him a gargoyle of this baetyl, I’d have to kill him first, and I wasn’t going to do that.

  Denied, the baetyl’s power receded, taking with it the knowledge of how to shape life from the elements. Gasping, I scrambled for the memory, but it slipped from my mind. I lifted my gaze back to Oliver, seeing only the gargoyle and not the elemental design of his life inside him. My chest ached, and telling myself I’d made the right decision didn’t make me feel any better. I’d had life in my hands, and now I couldn’t remember more than a fragment of the pattern.

  “Don’t come near me, Oliver.” I didn’t trust myself; if he came closer and the baetyl offered me the chance to create life again, I didn’t think I could say no twice.

  Swiping tears from my cheeks with shaky fingertips, I crawled over a large jasper crystal. It would have been simple enough to move the quartz out of my way using the baetyl’s power, but the more I held the power, the more I wanted to use it. If I gave in just to shift crystals out of my path, it wouldn’t take much to convince me I really did need wings. Or that Oliver would be better off sharing this baetyl with me. Or that the power in my hands was worth more than the lives of the gargoyles I’d come here to save.

  So I climbed over and through the crystals and up the sloping floor back to Marcus, telling myself I wanted to be human and to heal the baetyl and leave. I didn’t want wings or to fly. Flying was scary because it meant leaving the ground. Heights were scary.

  I didn’t believe any of it, and that alarmed me. I was scared of heights, but the baetyl wasn’t. Fear wasn’t a concept it understood.

  I scrambled down the glowing side of a tigereye crystal that wouldn’t reach its full potential for another three centuries and spotted Marcus. He stood, sword in hand, gaze assessing and steady, and relief made me stumble. He rushed to my side before I fully caught my balance, but he didn’t reach out to steady me. Up close, I could see the worry in his lapis lazuli eyes, and behind them, I caught hints of the pattern of elements that made him, him.

  “So you’re scared of heights,” Marcus said.

  “What?” I squinted, trying to map his pattern, unexpectedly warmed by his voice.

  “It’s a good fear. It’ll keep you safe. Fear is good.” He used a soothing tone, as if he expected me to bolt.

  “What are you talking about?” I demanded. The nightmares had twisted a few thread-thin strands of elements out of place inside him, making snarls.

  “You’ve been chanting about being scared of heights,” he said.

  I blinked. “I have?” Damn it, I lost the snarls. I let the magic I’d kindled in my fingertips flow back into the baetyl.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here.” Marcus gestured for me to precede him toward the exit. Blood soaked through his shirt at the shoulder. Sweat beaded and rolled down his face.

  “Are you hurt? I can heal you,” I offered.

  “You can heal me? Since when?”

  I opened my mouth and realized I couldn’t explain eternity in words. It didn’t even make sense to me, at least not when I tried to define it. But I could feel it in the silence in my mind and in the baetyl’s strength.

  “I need to finish healing the baetyl,” I said instead.

  “Finish?”

  I turned unerringly to face the closest cave-in. Marcus inhaled sharply, and in the periphery of my vision I saw him stretch a hand toward my back, but he dropped it before he touched me.

  “Mika?”

  “Hang on.”

  “Oliver said you’d healed the heart,” he said, using that soothing tone again, but I barely heard him. The quartz that had hummed inside me while I’d been in the heart grated here near the giant gaps in the roof. Magic pulsed from the heart, perfect and pure, then fractured over the broken ceiling and misshaped crystals. That had to be fixed or the discordant magic reverberating back to the heart would eventually damage it and the entire baetyl again.

  “It’s still flawed. Can’t you hear the disharmony?” I asked, reaching for the baetyl’s magic.

  Marcus swung back in front of me. “You’re not repairing the ceiling by
yourself.” The tip of his sword etched a short scratch into an aventurine crystal with his exuberant gesture. I wrapped the blade in air, yanked it from Marcus, opened a fissure in the ground, and threw the sword into the depths before I remembered embracing the baetyl’s magic. Contemplating the shadowy hole barely large enough to fit the broadsword, I tried to remember the elements I’d just used, but couldn’t. Had I been in control of the magic or had the baetyl? Deliberately, I stitched the floor back together, sealing the sword in the earth. The satisfaction of eliminating the threat to the crystals wasn’t mine, but the fear that chased it was.

  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.