From across the room, I felt his magic build as he wove together the five elements. A sphere popped into existence around him, hesitated, then expanded in all directions at once. There wasn’t time to flee, and there was nowhere to go. The wall of magic slammed into the crowd, and the bidders swayed like a human ripple in a pond. Then it squeezed over me, a solid slimy sheet of magic stretching against my skin as if I were naked. I fought to stay on my feet. My magic swelled, uncalled and ineffectual. Then Walter’s bubble snapped together behind me and raced outward, leaving a greasy film behind. I staggered forward, but my senses tracked the magic out and up, where it mushroomed to encase the entire temple. A ward. A monstrously powerful ward. One that would keep out anyone attempting to pass. One at least seven times larger than a single FSPP could create. I pictured a wall of guards pitting themselves ineffectually against the ward. A chill of fear made me shiver.
The excitement in the room ratcheted higher. I caught a glimpse of the hatchling and wanted to cry. His head lolled limp, but I knew he wasn’t dead. Magic still leeched from his open wounds, feeding directly to Walter.
Hang in there, little guy.
Someone slid behind me, and I spun to see what they were doing, trusting no one in this room at my back. It was the professor. He wasn’t paying any attention to me or to Walter’s performance at the center of the pentagram. He was examining the walls. I watched him pause in front of a section of plaster and squint. He leaned back and forth, then touched the wall, pulling back with a jerk.
I hadn’t realized I’d stepped closer to him until he reached inside his professor’s coat and pulled out a long, slender knife. I backpedaled, far too slow. He seized my bicep, and the steel point of the knife pricked my neck.
“Don’t be scared, girl.” His hot breath whispered against my ear, and I shuddered.
“What—”
“Shh.”
A few people near us noticed the professor’s knife against my throat and sidled away. There’d be no help from these lowlifes.
“Reach out and touch the wall. Right there. Let’s see what happens.”
Walter’s voice droned in the background, but his words didn’t make sense in my acute panic. I could feel the swell of his magic. In my mind, I saw the gargoyle’s limbs crumble away with the surge of magic siphoned from him.
The knife jabbed my neck and I hissed at the sting. Where was Kylie? How had this ever seemed like a good plan? If it hadn’t been obvious that I was way out of my element before, it was painfully clear now. I had no fighting skills, no defense training. I’d never had to think about it before. And right now, all I could think was that I didn’t want to die.
“Now, girl!” the professor hissed. The stench of sweat and garlic oozed from him, coiling in my throat.
I stretched my fingers toward the wall. The faint tell-tale glimmer of yet another illusion masked this section of the wall. Just how strong was Walter? And how much longer could the hatchling survive?
Move away. Look away. Don’t touch. I pulled my hand back.
“Push through it,” the professor said, emphasizing his words with the pressure of his knife.
I reached forward again, and again I felt a compulsion to retreat. An illusion combined with a subtle ward, one designed for people to not even notice it was there.
I gritted my teeth and shoved my fingertips into the ward. Flames licked my flesh. With a yelp, I jerked free and examined my skin. My fingertips were red, pulsing with the pain of a burn.
“Hurts, don’t it? Let’s see what happens if you get closer.” The professor shoved me with a strength that belied his guise of age.
“No!” I fell against the warded illusion and my cry strangled on a scream of agony. The ward ensnared me. Fire engulfed my body. I convulsed, every twist and flail winding me tighter in the trap, ratcheting the pain. I screamed again as my skin melted. I scrabbled for water magic and doused the ward, and the ward soaked it up. I couldn’t break free!
I wrenched my head back toward the professor. A sea of faces watched me writhe, not a single one looking concerned. Help me! I begged, but I couldn’t form the words between screams.
8
My vision blackened, and I lashed out with magic again, desperate. Without control, my raw magic reverted to the strongest, most familiar form: quartz earth energy. I stabbed at the ward, and it split, a tiny fracture tearing like wet cloth under my weight. I fell. I couldn’t find my hands to brace myself, and I slammed into the rock floor behind the ward.
Residual panic launched me to my knees, then kept me conscious when the pain washed over me. My entire body felt raw from skin down to bone.
“There’s one in every crowd,” Walter said, tsking. “If anyone else would like to test me, you’re welcome to die, too. Now, bidding starts at fifty thousand.”
Walter’s words registered. That had been a death spell, not just a ward! I jerked toward the ceremony room. It was like looking through murky water. No one looked my way, not even the professor. Somehow I had survived, and Walter couldn’t tell that his murderous ward had failed.
Now would be a really good time to show up, Kylie. There was no way I was making it back through that ward. I was trapped until the auction was over and Walter’s spells dropped. If he found me alive after that, I had no delusion I’d remain breathing for long. Stuck on this side of the ward, it would be impossible to delay the auction, too.
I dropped my head to rest on the floor, taking shallow breaths until the pain receded enough to think. I wasn’t going to wait here to be discovered.
My eyes slowly adjusted to the gloomy light coming through the wall illusion, and I examined the small, dark alcove. I was in a storage room of some sort. The walls were smooth and wrapped back around the circular ceremonial room where the auction was currently under way. I felt along the wall, taking baby steps deeper into the darkness, until my foot crunched into something hard.
I reached blindly for the object. It gave with a tingle beneath my tender fingertips, like a cloth of magic. A ward. I jerked back. I’d had more than enough of Walter’s wards.
I glanced back toward the death ward. It was out of sight around the bend. I could either blunder along into another ward that might kill me, or I could chance creating a little light.
Drawing a trickle of fire magic, I set a small pea-size flame in the air in front of me.
Two tiny sets of terror-filled baby gargoyle eyes glowed in the faint light. I dropped to my knees in front of them, feeling hope for the first time.
The hatchlings’ mouths moved in panicked cries caught behind soundproofed traps, and they struggled futilely against magical bonds.
“It’s okay. I’m here to help. Anya sent me,” I whispered. They quivered and swiveled heads on weak necks, looking for an escape that didn’t exist.
When I reached toward the first one, he keened wildly, thrashing as much as the bonds permitted. He looked like a baby Chinese dragon, with a wide, square head and feathery rock tufts behind his ears. The net around him glowed red, the magic matching his blood-orange carnelian body getting brighter the more he struggled. His right side was perfect and whole. His left, though . . . Magic sucked into the net from the ragged wounds on the bottom of his two left feet and the tip of his left wing. Even without the trap holding him, there was no way the injured baby dragon could escape.
Cautious of both Walter’s magic and the hatchling, I hovered my hand above the trap. The energy pattern was almost familiar—weaves of earth and fire with swirls of wind and a whirlpool of water. The earth energy resonated with quartz, a pattern I was intimately tuned to. Seed crystals fused to the floor acted as focal knots for the chains of magic as well as anchors, holding the net—and the hatchling—in place. A subtle band of magic stretched from the net to the death ward around the corner, sustaining it. Since Walter had created the ward, any excess magic drained from the hatchling would feed into him. It was a brilliant design—from Walter’s perspective.
I h
ad no idea how to proceed. I had no experience with negating black magic traps. However, I couldn’t predict how much longer the auction would last or how long it would take Kylie to convince the guards. I had to improvise, and freeing the hatchlings was a good start. I wasn’t going to get a better opportunity. Gathering my resolve, I grabbed a seed crystal anchor.
It wouldn’t budge, no matter how much I strained. I couldn’t force a finger through a hole in the net, either. A clean slice of solid, five-elements magic only made the hatchling spasm in pain. Balancing my elemental magic to match Walter’s and feeding it into the crystal made the trap hum and the hatchling convulse. I jerked back and swiped sweat from my forehead. Working with the net wasn’t the answer. I needed to counter it.
Fire burns wood, wood breaks up earth, earth stops air, air dries water, water extinguishes fire. It was the destructive element cycle every child learned by the time they could talk, and I chanted it now to focus my thoughts.
With surgical precision honed from long hours of delicate work, I sliced the earth magic channeled through the quartz with an equal level of wood magic. Earth collapsed and fire burned bright, feeding off the new wood energy. The hatchling tried to bite me, but he hit the bonds of magic and flopped back, exhausted.
“I’m sorry, little guy,” I whispered. I added a trace of fire to expunge all wood, then doused the trap with water, pouring my magic over the fire faster and faster until it was extinguished. The net morphed in a blink, spinning the deluge of water magic into whirlpool patterns. The gargoyle’s magic sucked from his wounds in a gush and he passed out.
Panicked, I threw air into the net, drying the water with a concentrated blast. It took more effort than extinguishing the fire, my elemental contributions strengthening the net even as I fought it. I was panting by the time the last drop of water magic evaporated. Only air whipped through the net now, but it dried up the hatchling’s life with maniacal vigor. Grabbing earth magic, I dammed the air at each seed crystal. The first three were the hardest, the air pummeling the blockades of earth, disrupting my concentration as I created the next, but by the time I’d dammed five of the seven seed crystals, the air energy had fizzled down to a gentle breeze. I plugged the last two crystals, and the net dissipated. Magic leeched from the unconscious hatchling, but it was no longer actively siphoned.
I lifted my shirt hem with a trembling hand and wiped the sweat from my face. One down, one to go. I crawled toward the other gargoyle, this one a mutilated cygnet, though it took a long stare to make sense of the bulbous body and slender neck. With only one identifying wing tight against her body, the hatchling was a gross mimicry of a Thanksgiving dinner platter. Her rock feathers were a spectrum of purple, pink, and orange agate, as was the cage sucking away her life. Her body was almost the size of my head, making her the largest of all the hatchlings. She snaked her beak at me, eyes wild with pain.
I already felt like I’d worked a full shift at Jones and Sons, drained physically and magically from destroying the first net. But I’d succeeded in weakening Walter at least a little. I was congratulating myself as I rested until I realized that without the dragon hatchling’s extra power feeding Walter through the ward, Walter was pulling more magic from the remaining two hatchlings.
The thought made me pause. If I removed the net from the cygnet, all the drain would be on the hatchling Walter held for demonstration. The lion had already looked close to death. Would my rescue of these hatchlings kill him?
Did I have a choice? Once Walter finished the bidding, he would collect these hatchlings. If I didn’t act now, my hesitation would take away the one advantage I had: surprise.
Grimly, I bent to work on the cygnet’s net. I knew what to expect this time, and while I countered the surges of each element faster, it was no less draining on my energy reserves. At least when I finished, the cygnet was still cognizant.
I collapsed against the wall. Urgency warred with weariness. The light illuminating the bend of the wall was brighter. Without the reinforcing magic from the hatchlings’ nets, the illusion and ward covering the entrance had weakened. Similarly, the sounds of the auction room were no longer muted. I could hear Walter’s voice and those of the bidders. The bidding had escalated to astronomical amounts, but it also sounded like it was winding down. So far, everyone was still focused on Walter at the center of the magic-filled pentagram, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone noticed the flimsy illusion. Especially Walter. At my side, the cygnet was wisely silent.
“Triage time,” I whispered. Plucking seed crystals from my pocket, I surged quartz-tuned earth element magic, equal parts fire and a balance of wood, air, and water through it and into the unconscious stone dragon, starting with his front foot, clamping my teeth against the agonizing backlash.
Just as with Herbert, the dragon guided the growth of the seed crystals, defining the shape of his limbs even as I wove and stretched the complicated amalgam of elements. I looked up after the dragon’s front leg was whole to find the other hatchling watching with intent, glowing eyes.
“I told you, I’m here to help,” I whispered. The world went fuzzy when I swung my head back to the dragon. Exhaustion was catching up with me fast, but there wasn’t time to rest. I could only be grateful that the hatchlings weren’t as injured as Herbert had been. Without Anya’s assistance, regrowing the minor damage to the hatchling’s limbs taxed my magical limits.
The dragon regained consciousness when I finished growing his back leg. He leapt to his new red-veined crystal feet, threw his head back, and loosed a shriek. I grabbed his muzzle and clamped his jaw shut. The dragon yanked from my hold, whipping his head to stare at the cygnet, then down at his feet, then finally up at me.
Voices swelled, and I knew my luck had just run out.
9
I cast through my repertoire of skills for something resembling a weapon. There was nothing I could create that another slightly stronger elemental couldn’t destroy. A string of candle flames—the largest fire I could build without something flammable to burn—wouldn’t hold off a house cat, let alone the greedy masses and psychopathic black magic practitioners in the next room. Not even my stronger quartz skills would help me here. I couldn’t form a quartz wall strong enough to stop someone. The only ward I knew how to create on a large scale was a tint to block the sun for mornings I wanted to sleep in.
Anything’s better than nothing. I grabbed earth element, tinting it the deepest onyx of smoky quartz, so dark it was almost black, then formed a sheet of air and bound them together across the storage room opening, patching the illusion. If anyone looked into the nook, they’d see nothing but a dark shadow. The only problem with my solution—okay, one of the many problems with my solution—was it cut off my light, too. I fed a little fire into the pinprick of flame I had created earlier, stretching it to about an inch long, and placed it on the far side of the hatchlings.
In the flickering light, two pairs of glowing eyes watched me. The dragon shifted on his new crystal legs, whined softly, and rested his head on my knee as if in apology. I gave him a pat with hands numb with fear and got back to work. Fortunately, the dragon’s wings were tiny, smaller than Herbert’s despite the dragon being bigger, and it took only a few moments to regrow the mutilated appendage. The instant the hatchling was whole, a gush of energy surged into me, pushing exhaustion aside.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
A shuffle of footsteps drew closer, audible over the growing murmurs in the crowd.
“You’re flirting with death touching that ward,” Walter barked.
“I can see through it, and I don’t see the dead girl,” a woman said from a few feet away. There was more shuffling and several curses and yelps of pain.
“Stand clear,” Walter ordered, sounding like he was right behind me.
We were out of time. I threw open the top flap of my satchel and snatched the cygnet around the middle, stuffing her inside, head up, just in case gargoyles needed to breathe. I did
my best not to touch her open wounds, but it was a tight fit in the bag, and the leather scraped the swan’s sides. She whimpered but didn’t protest. There was no space left for the dragon.
Grunting, I tugged thirty pounds of solid rock to the wall, then laid the flap across the cygnet’s head, leaving it gapped at either end for air. I scooped the dragon up and showed him the space between the bag and the wall.
“Hide,” I urged. Trusting eyes blinked once at me; then the hatchling wriggled his sinuous body into the small gap, curling his stone tail tight to the leather satchel. I wove another tinting ward over the bag, pulling color from the plaster wall and stone floor into the ward. It was illusion on a scale normally unachievable for me, but with the dragon gargoyle’s enhancement, it was almost easy.
A backlash of magic slapped my body, and the oily pressure of Walter’s gigantic ward disappeared with the sting. Exclamations echoed through the nook.
“I thought you said nothing could get through that ward,” someone accused.
I rubbed my arms. Did that mean the lion hatchling was dead?
“Wait—” Walter cried.
The room erupted in noise. In rapid succession, I heard the unmistakable sounds of flesh hitting flesh, the ring of steel being drawn, and then the deafening crack of thrown lightning. Screams pierced the ringing in my ears.
Should I grab the hatchlings and make a run for it? No. Rushing through a crowd of panicked felons with the hatchlings they coveted was suicidal. Plus, I had no idea where the little lion was. Or even if he still lived.
Against every instinct, I remained crouched in the storage room.
“Halt! Terra Haven guards! Show me your hands!”
Magic of the Gargoyles Page 4
