Secret of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 3) Page 9

  Seeing his fear cut through my own panic. He was depending on me for protection. If I continued to react instead of attack, we wouldn’t survive. I needed to think like a guardian.

  “I’ll keep us safe,” I promised. “Stay close.”

  I concentrated on our immediate vicinity, unraveling earth and dousing fire, refusing to let any of the storm touch the ground near us. Across the ledge from us, Marcus did the same, holding a storm-free bubble around himself and Celeste. He wielded massive bands of the elements, slicing through fire more often than any other element. Taking my cue from him, when I had a chance to pick my next attack, I struck at earth; it was my strongest element and, after fire, the most deadly.

  Snow and sand blinded me, winds knocked me flat and lifted me from the ground, and fire scorched me more than once. I fought through it all, hunting for the disharmonious quartz-tuned knot of earth holding the whole storm together. The wild magic blurred into a huge, shape-changing monster, and my control of my magic slipped and fumbled with weariness. Occasionally an explosive blaze or a sheet of ice forced me to shield Oliver and myself, but I dropped my barriers as soon as it was safe. Defending would do nothing but tire me out—attacking was the only option.

  I whittled away the storm’s power with increasingly clumsy strokes, and when I found the snarl of quartz-tuned earth, it was pure happenstance. I pounced, clinging to it with strength born of desperation. As fast as I could finagle my fatigued magic, I tore it apart. The wild elements collapsed and dispersed in a harmless gust of warm air.

  A hush fell over the ridge, broken only by the harsh sounds of my panting followed by the chatter of my teeth when a chilly breeze plastered my soaked clothes to my body.

  It took a moment for me to focus on Marcus. Dark circles cupped his eyes and exhaustion weighted his shoulders. He swiped mud from his leather pants as he stood, hail falling from his shoulders when he bent forward. The spell in his shirt had kept his torso dry and clean, a fact I envied as my body convulsed in another shiver. I’d managed to get to my knees at some point, and dirty snow melted around my calves. With reddened fingers, I sluiced slush from my thighs.

  Plucking at my shirt to peel the wet fabric from my skin, I sought out Celeste. She’d flown to the sled where it sat on the ground, the spells previously holding it aloft destroyed by the wild magic. The taller gargoyles had toppled, including Rourke, and she used her talons to right him. Her lack of alarm told me most of what I needed to know—he was okay.

  For now.

  “Are you hurt?” Marcus asked. He loomed over me. I tilted my head back to look at him, but the muscles in my neck didn’t cooperate and my head lolled toward my shoulder. Damn, I was tired.

  “Sleep would be nice.” If there were time. We didn’t know how long this reprieve would last. Reaching deep into myself, I found the strength to stand. Oliver squirmed to his feet, stretching his wings, and I realized he’d been propping me up. I reached for him, and he brushed his head against my fingertips before coasting down the short incline to the dormant gargoyles.

  “We need to go into the baetyl now, before the energy has a chance to build again,” I said. I wouldn’t survive a second mega-storm.

  Marcus’s jaw muscles bunched. Grit pulled his dark hair into wayward spikes, and I thought the tousled look suited him far more than his scowl.

  “You think that’s wise?” he asked.

  My head pounded. “No. But I don’t think we have a choice. Let me check on the gargoyles, then we’ll go.”

  “You can’t even walk.”

  He issued the statement like a challenge. Giving him a scowl as fierce as the one he leveled on me, I straightened and took a step. My boot caught in the mud and the suction threw off my fragile balance. Marcus caught me when I stumbled into him. I glared at his Adam’s apple, daring him to say something. He didn’t. Shifting his grip to my bicep, he marched me down the slope to the gargoyles. I forced some rigidness into my backbone and dredged up the rest of my reserves so I could stand unaided when he released me. Unimpressed, Marcus crossed his arms, as if waiting to watch me face-plant.

  I tottered between the gargoyles, checking for injuries. Internally, they all were remarkably strong, and their renewed health breathed a modicum of energy into me. I couldn’t run a mile, or really even run at all, but I could do this; I could repair the baetyl. For them. To save seven lives.

  I had to.

  The gargoyles’ physical injuries were minor—nicks and scrapes where their paralyzed bodies had slammed and rattled into each other during the storm. Normally I would have pulled out seed crystals and healed them, but saving my strength was more important. I could feel the sluggishness of my magic; expending it now, even to ease the small pains in their bodies, would be foolish. I didn’t right those who had toppled for the same reason.

  I checked Oliver, then Celeste, relieved to find them basically unharmed. Celeste had the equivalent of bruises along her hip and back and Oliver felt weary, but they would both survive without any assistance on my part.

  Taking a deep breath, I turned to face the baetyl opening. The ledge had been completely reshaped by rockslides and new stone and plant growth, but the baetyl’s opening was unchanged. I took it as a good sign. At least some of the baetyl’s powers remained to protect it.

  “Okay, I’m ready,” I said.

  “Really.”

  It wasn’t a question, and when I met Marcus’s gaze, I found anger rather than skepticism.

  “Can you even get back up to the ledge?” he asked.

  Frowning, I wrapped my arms around myself for warmth. What had put a burr in his britches? “Are you going to test me every step of the way?”

  “I’m not here to carry you.” His hands flexed into fists, then relaxed. “Why didn’t you contact me before yesterday?”

  My eyebrows shot up at the non sequitur. Maybe I’d misheard him. “What?”

  “After Focal Park. I can tell when someone is interested in me, so don’t try to lie. You were interested. I made it clear all you had to do was come find me, but you never made a move.”

  “You want to talk about . . . about if I like you? Now?” My face heated under his glower.

  “Yes.”

  “But—” I glanced toward the baetyl, willing to attempt a jog up the hill if it would extricate me from what was fast becoming an embarrassing conversation.

  “I want an answer.”

  “Of course I liked you, but I was searching for a cure for the dormant gargoyles. There wasn’t time . . .” My reason was perfectly valid, but telling Marcus to his face that I hadn’t had time for him seemed callous. Besides, after the first few weeks of nonstop searching hadn’t unearthed a cure, I thought I’d already missed my chance with him. A man like Marcus didn’t have to wait around for women, and I’d told myself that whatever he’d seen in me that day in Focal Park wouldn’t have been enough to hold his attention after the excitement died down. His ambivalence toward me on this trip had confirmed my prediction. Except now he acted as if I’d offended him. Had I hurt his feelings?

  “Right. I should have realized that,” he said.

  “Thank you.” The knot in my stomach eased.

  “I mean, why bother making time for a life when you’re so intent on killing yourself?”

  He delivered the question in such an understanding tone that it took me a moment to process the words.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This. This is what I’m talking about.” He jabbed a finger at me and frustrated disdain replaced all the false sympathy in his expression. “You can barely stand up straight, but you’re ready to rush off to the next danger. You’ve got no regard for your life.”

  “That’s nonsense. I’m not trying to kill myself. I’m trying to save lives.”

  “Then act like it.”

  “What’s that mean?” The wind no longer felt quite so cold, and I shifted from hugging myself to mirroring Marcus’s crossed-arm stance.

&nbs
p; “You hunt out ways to throw yourself into danger. You want examples? We’re standing on Reaper’s Ridge—”

  “We just defeated Reaper’s Ri—”

  “And what about that stunt you pulled in Focal Park?” he asked, his words overpowering mine. “You were so eager to meet death, you practically ran to it.”

  “Someone had to break the null.”

  His ugly chuckle set my teeth on edge.

  “The null. Right. I hadn’t even gotten to that. I was talking about when you split your spirit among five different gargoyles and nearly liquefied your brain. But you just made my point. You think saving others means rushing into every dangerous situation you see—”

  “Isn’t that your job?” I shot back, irritated that he made me feel like I needed to defend myself. Of all people, he should understand.

  “I’m a Federal Pentagon Defense warrior. I have training. I have full-spectrum strength.”

  “So that makes it okay? I’m a guardian. The only guardian these gargoyles have. Of course I’m going to take risks to save their lives.”

  “Taking a risk is one thing; swapping your life for a gargoyle’s is another.”

  I clenched my jaw. Some people valued human lives more highly than gargoyles’, but I never expected the elitist attitude from Marcus. “Is your ego so fragile that you would have preferred I let gargoyles die so I could have spent time fawning over you?”

  “Don’t pretend you believe I’m that shallow.”

  “You don’t have a monopoly on being a savior, Marcus. The gargoyles need me. I’m the only person who has a chance at saving them. And you know what? If it means my life—one life—has to be sacrificed to save seven, then so be it.” Hearing my own conviction sent a tremor through my knees, but I didn’t take the words back.

  “That’s just it. Being a healer—being a guardian,” he corrected before I could, “doesn’t mean your life is a bargaining chip.”

  “It means I’ll do whatever I have to to save the gargoyles.”

  “This is why I said no,” he said softly, making me realize we’d been shouting. “You don’t have the good sense to save yourself. And it’s why I said yes, because I couldn’t let you kill yourself without trying to stop you.”

  “Are you saying you’re going to try to prevent me from going into the baetyl?” I glanced around, locating Oliver and Celeste. They watched from a few feet away. Celeste’s face was unreadable, but Oliver looked scared.

  Marcus shook his head sadly. “No. I’m not stopping you. Just . . .” He rubbed his hand across his mouth and jaw, his stubble rasping audibly in the charged silence. The tension left his shoulders and a pitying look replaced his scowl. “Just think about what I’ve said. The gargoyles don’t need a martyr; they need a guardian and a healer.”

  He turned away to rummage in his pack, and I glared at his back. I couldn’t decide what pissed me off more: the fact that he thought the lives of gargoyles weren’t worth as much as mine or that he thought my actions to save them were rash.

  Another breeze swept the hillside, and I ground my teeth together to stop their chattering. Every single scrap of me had been soaked, and even though it felt as if my blood were boiling, I wasn’t getting any drier.

  “Here,” Marcus said, his voice as flat as his expression. He poured an unmarked packet into a canteen, swished it, then thrust the canteen into my hands. “Drink it all.”

  I sniffed the opening and pulled my head back with a grimace when a nauseating odor of brine, algae, and something bitter made my nostrils try to pinch together. “What is it?”

  “A stimulant.”

  I glanced up at his cold eyes and took a sip, gagged, and doubled over coughing.

  “It’s not wine. Chug it. Try not to breathe between drinks and it won’t be so bad.”

  Eyes watering, I forced myself to raise the canteen again and took a massive swallow. My throat threatened to close, but I powered through.

  Marcus dumped a packet of the pungent powder directly into his mouth. With a band of air, he pulled a water bottle from the sled to his hand, took a gulp, swished, and swallowed. My tongue curled in sympathy for his assaulted taste buds.

  “Ugh. I have the breath of a swamp monster,” I muttered. I rubbed my tongue against the roof of my mouth, but it didn’t alleviate the nasty flavor.

  “Better than the breath of a burned-out null.”

  I rolled my eyes, but my frustrated comeback evaporated as energy surged through my veins. I raised my hands to stare at them, half expecting to see them glowing, but they remained reddened and dull. I took a step on legs that had transformed from pudding back to muscle and experimentally pulled the elements to me. They came in a rush.

  “This is amazing.” I jumped up and down. My mind, body, and magic felt as fresh as if I’d had a week off.

  Without warning, Marcus sent me stumbling with a blast of heated air that pulled the moisture from my clothing and dried me at the same time. I closed my eyes against the stinging wind but didn’t protest. When he finished, I was chapped but dry and warm. My smile seemed to irritate him, if the tick of his jaw muscle was any indication. I grinned wider.

  “Stop bouncing,” he ordered. “This isn’t a game. We still don’t know if you can fix a baetyl. We could be walking into a trap, so keep your wits sharp.”

  “Oh, good advice,” I said, my voice heavy with cheery sarcasm. Giving him a flippant response was easier than letting his words sink in. The scary unknown of the broken baetyl loomed in my imagination, feeding my fears. Psyching myself out about it wouldn’t help. “You know me. Always running into danger without a thought. But since you’re telling me to be cautious . . .”

  Marcus swiveled his head to glare at me, and the words died in my throat. I spun on a heel and marched up the incline to the tunnel entrance.

  Peering into the dark opening, it was harder to maintain a sense of detachment from my fear. The wild storms had all but drained me. My arms were cut, my legs and feet bruised. I’d been burned and frozen. And that had only been what had escaped the baetyl. What horrors lurked inside?

  * * *

  Marcus insisted on going first and Celeste fell in at his heels. Oliver and I trailed after them, and I wondered if Marcus could feel the heat of my glare between his shoulder blades. Our moody leader also insisted I conserve my strength for whatever was ahead, so all five glowballs illuminating the tunnel were his. The walls were rough and asymmetrical, run through with veins of quartz and shale. Only the floor was smooth, polished by thousands of stone footsteps. I expected a challenge around every bend—a physical obstacle or more storms—but we strolled into the mountain without issue.

  The cool air grew more humid the deeper we went, until moisture clung to the rock walls and dripped on our heads from the ceiling.

  “It’s too cold,” Oliver said, his chiming voice hushed. I shivered at the creepy shush-shush echoes of his words.

  “Is it supposed to be this wet?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  Marcus’s back stiffened and he halted at a turn in the tunnel. Celeste crowded up next to him and he stepped aside to make room. My feet ground to a halt beside her. We’d found the baetyl.

  Marcus’s glowballs illuminated a field of citrine crystals barely as tall as my hand and packed more densely than blades of grass across the sloped floor. Darkness swallowed the rest of the cavern to our left and right, but bulky shapes loomed beyond the light. Squinting, I could make out flat planes and sharp angles, and when my brain put the pieces together, I gasped in wonder.

  The baetyl was filled with crystals.

  Six-sided prisms longer and thicker than a freight car crisscrossed the baetyl at the edge of the light, overlapping compact crystals no larger than Celeste. Even smaller crystals filled the gaps, and everywhere I looked glistened as endless facets caught and reflected the glowballs’ fiery light.

  “It’s so dark. It’s worse than I feared,” Celeste said.

  I reached for fire to
form a glowball, and it flickered and wobbled before steadying into a sphere of light. Even then, the element stretched, skewing the light.

  The warp of the baetyl was in full effect.

  “Careful,” Marcus said when I pushed the glowball into the cavern.

  The light twisted, the element growing harder to control across the distance. Shadows guttered along the geometric lines of the baetyl, giving shape to crystal-coated alcoves and ledges of every color and type of quartz. The golden glow of the shifting light made the tigereye and agate crystals appear to ripple like liquid, and the jewel-bright spears of amethyst, citrine, prasiolite, and rose quartz refracted their colors across smoky quartz and shimmering clear crystals. The alien structure looked like the inside of a mountain-size geode, and the beauty of it stole my breath.

  Even the air felt different, smooth and ancient. The humidity of the tunnel gave way to a cooler texture with a scent as unique as the baetyl. Part undisturbed earth, part weighted air, and part mineral, the odor pooled in the back of my throat, and I took deep breaths to savor the aroma. It was the smell of pure quartz—and up until that moment, I hadn’t even known quartz had a smell, let alone that I had been craving it.

  In the clutter of quartz and dense shadows beyond my glowball, I couldn’t determine the boundaries of the baetyl, but Celeste’s comparison of its size to Focal Park seemed about right.

  The glowball twisted out of my grasp and imploded in a burst of sparks. Darkness coated the baetyl once more, hiding all but the tiny bubble of space Marcus’s lights illuminated. I smoothed my hands down my thighs.

  “Now what?” Marcus asked.

  I don’t know, sprang to my lips, but Marcus already knew I didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of saying it out loud.

  “We keep going,” I said.

  I contemplated the lawn of jagged crystals covering the floor. The baetyl had never been intended for fragile human bodies. Every surface had a sharp point. Tentatively, I tested the sole of my boot on the uneven peaks. When the crystals didn’t puncture the tread, I settled my weight onto my foot and took another step. The crystals held firm.