Together Oliver and I wormed through the crowd, and as people noticed Oliver, they cleared a path.
“Is there a sick gargoyle in the park?” someone shouted.
“I’ve heard gargoyles go berserk. Is that what happened?” another person asked.
I shook my head at the absurd question, but I couldn’t take my eyes from the towering ward. What was Velasquez involving me in?
A woman burst through the crowd and grabbed my arm, and I yelped before recognizing Kylie.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the burning arrow hovering just this side of the ward. It’d received some nervous looks from the crowd and a few from the guards, too.
“Don’t scare me like that,” I said. “It’s a summons from Velasquez.” Kylie knew who the fire elemental was without me needing to remind her. She’d been there when the full-five squad had carted away the man who’d kidnapped Oliver and his siblings. Since then, she’d followed the squad more than once for a story. In fact . . . “Was your rumor scout about the captain?”
Flushing, Kylie crossed her arms defensively. “Yes.”
My stomach sank. Kylie had a standing rumor scout patrolling for mention of Captain Grant Monaghan, the air elemental in charge of Velasquez’s squad. If the captain was here, the whole squad probably was, which meant the danger level of whatever I was rushing toward was far greater than a sick gargoyle. The ward more than confirmed it.
“What did he say?” Kylie asked.
“He needs me.”
Kylie’s eyebrows shot upward. “That’s what Mr. Gruffy-Pants himself said?”
“Basically.” My footsteps had slowed while I talked, and Oliver butted my palm with a soft whine. The same urgency hummed in my veins, but I couldn’t have Kylie following us into danger.
“Wait here,” I told Kylie. “I’ll tell you everything later. It’ll be an exclusive.” I winked, then spun toward the tunnel entrance.
“Really? You thought that’d work?” Kylie fell into step on the other side of Oliver. “The people have a right to know what’s going on in there, and if Grant is in there, I need to make sure he—ah, that the squad—is okay and . . . acting in the best interest of the citizens. A government that keeps secrets from the people is a corrupt government.”
Her slipup was more telling than her ongoing protests about democracy and the balancing power of the press.
“Fine,” I hissed as we approached the guards posted at the park entrance. The burning arrow hadn’t moved from where it pressed an inch away from the ward, crushing my meager hope that Velasquez stood on this side of the ward.
“The park is closed,” a tall woman in uniform said.
“I see that,” I said, and Kylie snorted, then turned the sound into a cough. The guard scowled at us both. “I was summoned by FPD Fire Elemental Velasquez.” I pointed to the arrow. “I’m a gargoyle healer, and he said I’m needed.” I added a point toward Oliver, in case she’d missed the presence of the excited stone dragon who pranced between Kylie and me.
“And I’m her assistant,” Kylie said. I wanted to protest, but I knew how much her career meant to her, and there was obviously a story on the other side of this magical curtain. Plus I was beginning to suspect her crush on Captain Monaghan might have developed into something more, so I kept my mouth shut and tried not to fidget.
The guard looped a bubble of air around the burning arrow and yanked it to us. She probed the elemental strands, and the message unfurled again. Velasquez’s hard expression glared at the guard this time as he called me to his side without a single please or an ounce of deference in his tone.
When the message reverted to an arrow of flame, the guard released it and gestured for her companions to let us pass. Oliver trundled ahead with Kylie close beside him, but my footsteps lagged. As long as I remained on this side of the ward, I was safe.
But a gargoyle wasn’t.
I hurried to catch up with Kylie and Oliver.
2
Kylie stepped through the ward first, and I jumped to the side, startled, when threads of air anchored to her ears unraveled and slid down the smooth blue-green sheet of the ward, followed by a shimmer of fire and water from her linen shirt. The elements dissipated once they came untethered from her body and clothing.
“Hey!” Kylie protested, out of sight on the other side of the ward.
I pushed through the ward, and my scalp tingled, but otherwise I felt nothing more than a slight pressure.
“It took me ten minutes to perfect that antiwrinkle weave,” Kylie complained, glaring at the ward with her hands on her hips. This close, the shimmery blue-green wall seemed to stretch all the way to the puffy white clouds. “No wonder I couldn’t pick up any sounds from the park. This is criminal. The government keeping secrets from the public is reprehensible.”
I patted my head. When I’d pulled my hair back in a ponytail, I’d wrapped my head in a twist of air to keep flyaways from escaping into a frizzy mess. The ward had sluiced the infinitesimal magic from me, which meant it was a two-way barrier. It was the kind of ward I’d expect in a holding cell at a guard station, not encasing the enormous public park.
I turned my back to the ward. A steep rocky bank rose in front of us with only a sliver of sky visible between the tunnel entrance and the ward. The long tunnel carved through the hill normally had plenty of ambient light reflected from both ends along a series of strategically placed mirrors, but with the ward blocking the sunlight on our side, the mouth of the tunnel gaped black and foreboding.
Oliver loped into the darkness, the echoes of his footsteps creating a dozen phantom gargoyles.
I grabbed fire energy, formed a small glow ball, and followed him. Kylie trotted to catch up, sending three small glow balls ahead of us. When no monsters jumped out of the darkness, I stepped up my pace to a jog. Seed crystals and books battered my back.
“What was all that around your ear?” I asked Kylie.
“Trade secrets.”
“They looked an awful lot like modified rumor scouts. How many ways do you have to spy on people?”
“Shh.” Kylie glanced over her shoulder. The acoustics of the tunnel might have carried our voices to the guards on the other side of the ward if not for the cacophony Oliver created. Kylie must have come to the same conclusion, because she said, “Being a journalist is as much about finding a story as it is about writing it. How am I supposed to know where the stories are if I haven’t got feelers in the field?”
“Feelers? Are you stalking more than Captain Monaghan?”
“I don’t stalk anyone.”
“Right. You’re my assistant.”
“Exactly.” She beamed.
“In that case, help me out.” I ducked out of the straps of my bag and thrust it toward Kylie. Since she had insisted on coming along, I didn’t feel bad letting her take the burden. Not that it was a burden to her. With speed I envied, Kylie layered a net of air and settled the bag on top of it. Air was her element, and the bag floated obediently at her side without her having to hold the straps.
Oliver waited at the tunnel’s exit, and I released my glow ball when I caught up with him, squinting against the bright sunlight as I scanned the grounds. Somewhere ahead of us lay a danger great enough to ward off the park and call in the FPD. I didn’t want to rush in blindly.
Oliver had no such caution and launched into the sky. I ducked aside to avoid the back draft from his wings and gathered a wad of raw magic. I had no idea what I’d do with it, but I felt better holding it.
A soft breeze fluttered my ponytail, pulling the coolness of the tunnel across the back of my neck. On any other warm, sunny day, the large granite boulders and tall rock plateaus dotting the sloped hill in front of us would have been crowded with sunbathers of every species.
“This is creepy,” Kylie whispered.
I agreed. I scanned the horizon from our vantage at the top of the earth section, visually tracing the massive ward that could have wrapped thirty
city blocks with room to spare. They’d even run the ward through Lincoln River to our left, where it edged the water section of the pentagon-shaped park. Birds flitted through the canopy of a cluster of oaks nearby, chattering to themselves. A few squirrels scurried across the short grass. If it weren’t for the lack of people and the daunting ward, I would have said nothing was wrong. No bolts of lightning pierced the sky. No horrors leapt from the rocks above us.
“What now?” I asked, stepping clear of the tunnel to check on Oliver.
A fiery arrow blossomed in the air a foot in front of me. I skittered backward and lashed out wildly with raw water and earth to counter the flames. My spastic defense missed the arrow by several feet and collapsed ineffectively on itself. The arrow floated down the hill, then froze in place, pointing the way.
A flush crept up my cheeks. We weren’t under attack, and if we had been, my high-strung reaction would have been worthless.
“I guess we follow that,” Kylie said, graciously not commenting on my bungled magic.
“Right.” Not making eye contact, I jogged toward the arrow, unsurprised when it moved ahead of me on an invisible tether. I dodged tall pillars of rocks and leapt across the smaller gaps between the wide, smooth boulders. Without the burden of my heavy bag, I’d gotten my second wind and I practically flew down the slope. Kylie followed close on my heels, having no problem maintaining her air basket while running.
I scanned the park as I ran. The loudest sounds came from the right, where heavy reed wind chimes were scattered throughout the sculptures in the air section. The coal beds and shallow fire pits between the rock slope and air section were empty and quiet. Across the park, the botanical gardens twined up a slope above long grass sports fields. A small army could have hidden among the dense foliage and groves of trees, but only if they moved soundlessly.
The whole park naturally sloped to the left toward the streams and rowing ponds of the water section that fed into Lincoln River, but the arrow cut right, following a sand pathway that looped around the tiered rock gardens at the bottom of the earth section.
“I see them,” Oliver shouted, diving haphazardly toward us. He flared his wings to cut his dive a few seconds too late and plowed furrows into the earth with all four feet. “They’re in the center of the park. Hurry.”
I pushed into a sprint. It’d taken us almost twenty minutes to reach the park. A lot could happen in that amount of time, especially to a sick gargoyle. Yet despite craning my neck to peer in every direction, I didn’t see a cause for alarm, not even when I pounded up the slope to the heart of the park over a half mile from the tunnel and found the entire full-five squad.
The center of the park mirrored the outer boundaries in a smaller pentagon, this one marble, with a pentagram etched into it and the deep grooves coated with smooth glass. Centered on a ten-foot-tall plateau and ringed in sycamore trees and pillars of granite, the pentagram was used in elaborate and powerful FSPP spells, and I expected to find the captain and his squad arrayed at their respective focal points, deep in some massive weave of magic, fighting a colossal and scary enemy. Instead, they clustered to the side around a gargoyle standing in the shade of a sycamore.
Clutching a cramp in my side, I trotted across the pentagram toward the gargoyle. He stood frozen, elemental magic swirling around him, and a flashback to finding Oliver and his siblings paralyzed in life-draining traps jolted fresh alarm through me. A complex shield swirled around the trap, but someone blocked my line of sight before I could see more. Blinking, I took in the whole scene.
I didn’t know anyone’s first name but Captain Monaghan’s—thanks to Kylie’s obsession with him—but I remembered all their faces. Marciano loomed a head taller than everyone else, close to seven feet tall, as if his body had grown to mimic the trees of his element. He stood next to a slender redhead, the water elemental Winnigan, and they maintained the shield I’d caught a glimpse of. The captain had shifted closer to Seradon to study something she pointed to, and it was his broad chest and shoulders blocking my view. The man was intimidatingly large, which I supposed was useful in his profession, if aggravating right now. I might have mistaken the sturdy earth elemental beside him for a man, with her short brown hair and tall, muscled body, but next to the captain, Seradon almost looked petite.
“We’re going to have to do this without her,” the captain said. “We can’t wait any longer.”
“She’s here.” Velasquez stood a little apart, arms crossed over his thick chest. Everyone in the squad was in prime physical condition, but he looked like he could pick up the full-grown gargoyle in front of them and not break a sweat. His dark blue eyes shifted to track Oliver, who had veered wide around the pentagram and then rushed to the shielded gargoyle. Velasquez stepped in front of the charging stone dragon, and Oliver scrambled to stop without crashing into him, flapping his wings to counter his forward momentum.
I didn’t hear what Velasquez said to Oliver because the captain and Seradon had turned to face me, and the weight of their combined gazes slowed my steps.
“Perfect timing,” Seradon said with a friendly smile.
Velasquez’s guiding arrow dove toward the shielded gargoyle. It flared wide and bubbled into a solid ball of flame, expanding in a flash. Seradon ducked to avoid being engulfed. Velasquez grabbed the wildly pulsing magic and slashed it apart. The arrow winked out of existence with a puff of smoke.
“Yep, not a moment too soon,” Seradon said.
I stared. That wasn’t how magic worked. A weave didn’t morph into something else, and it didn’t expand without added fuel.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“See for yourself,” Seradon said, gesturing for me to examine the gargoyle.
I checked his face first, and his lifeless eyes ratcheted my tension.
That’s just how gargoyles’ eyes look when they’re unconscious, I reminded myself, taking no comfort from the thought.
He had the body of an earthy brown jasper marmot, though far larger than the mammal counterpart ever grew. Standing on his back feet, he nearly looked me in the eye, and the reindeer antlers arching from behind his little ears stretched two feet above my head. Enormous wings draped his back, falling to curve against the earth behind his feet. Blue dumortierite tipped his feathers and antlers.
I paced around him, checking his body visually when all I wanted to do was get my magic into him. At one time, he’d been beautiful, but now pockmarks and erosion marred his hide, a sign of poor nutrition. Terra Haven had no shortage of the quartz loam all gargoyles needed in addition to a steady diet of magic, but something had prevented this gargoyle from getting a good meal.
I suspected it was the massive contraption encasing him. The shield warped the view, but I could make out oblong loops of wicker, metal, glass, alabaster—and feathers?—evenly spaced around the gargoyle and pressed so tightly to the length of his body that they bent and met above his head. Elements twisted along the loops and filled the empty space, but the ward distorted the details.
“Who let you in here?” Captain Monaghan barked, and I jumped. The imposing air elemental wasn’t looking at me, though.
Kylie planted her hands on her hips and lifted her chin. She stood a head shorter than the captain, but she made it seem like they looked eye to eye. “The constitution.”
Grant snorted. “You’re stalking me.”
“Wow. Carting around that massive ego must be a burden.”
“How did you know where to find me?”
“Must have been the flaming arrow.”
Grant narrowed his dark brown eyes, his face a thundercloud. I’d have taken a step back, but Kylie dismissed him, turning to face the gargoyle.
“How long’s this . . . thing been on the gargoyle?” She leaned close to the shield, squinting at the magic flowing inside.
Grant grabbed her by her elbows, lifted her off her feet, and deposited her several paces behind us next to a slouched woman I hadn’t noticed. “Stay here.
Don’t interrupt,” he ordered.
Kylie’s eyes bulged and she opened her mouth, but Grant had already turned away. She settled for crossing her arms and glaring at his back for all of a second before crouching beside the woman. The stranger slouched with her elbows on her bent knees and her head in her hands, rocking herself. Long black hair hid her face, and she flinched when Kylie touched her arm.
“I still say Mika shouldn’t be here,” Marciano said, his deep voice a gentle rumble. He didn’t look away from the shield when he spoke. “She’s going to get hurt.”
“This is going to require a delicate touch, especially for the gargoyle,” Seradon said. She watched the captain instead of the wood elemental. “Mika’s a gargoyle healer and she has an FSPP-strength specialty with quartz. You’ve seen her work. She can do things I can’t. We need her.”
In desperation, I’d once created a trap spun like a web through hundreds of pieces of quartz. My life and the lives of five gargoyles had depended on making the trap hold until the FPD arrived, so I’d put everything I had into it. Seradon had been impressed with my use of quartz—more so than I realized.
“That was a one-time thing,” I said. “I haven’t done anything that complex since.”
“Well, you’re about to. That damn contraption is fused to the gargoyle.”
Fused? I bent to get a better view. There, on the gargoyle’s neck, a rod of quartz had been grafted into the jasper fur, and both ends of the metal loop fed into the quartz. I watched, horrified, as a surge of raw elemental magic speared into the gargoyle, then retracted twice as strong, flowing through the quartz implant and circling the metal loop.
No wonder the gargoyle looked so terrible: The bizarre contraption was sucking out his life!
I pushed closer, only to be brought up short by Velasquez. He’d grabbed my bicep in an iron fist, preventing me from smacking into the squad’s shield.
Curse of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 2) Page 2
