I opened my eyes and squinted at the purifier. I could feel myself—or rather, my magic—resting on the underside of the shield, buffeted by the pounding pressure of the polarized water element, but the sensation was distant. Seradon was buffering me.
She had aligned us with a thin metal strip defining the line between the polarized water and earth elements, and I got my first good look at the complexity of the purifier. A tangle of helixes so dense they looked braided spiraled around the metal, each made of one strand of earth and one strand of water. Hundreds of tiny fingers of earth connected each helix, all of them feeding magic from the polarized earth section into the strands of water, strengthening them. In turn, the water strands spun pure water into the polarized section on the left.
I’d never seen anything like it, especially not the way the helixes cascaded down the empty center of the metal loop, maintaining a perfect wall between the two polarized elements. On the left, the spinning water strands kept the water from flowing back into the earth section. On the right, the earth strands absorbed energy from the polarized earth section and fed it through the helixes into the water.
Seradon used a scissor of air and wood to sever the helixes atop the metal and provide a clear path for us. Raw water element battered her weaves from one side, earth on the other, but they couldn’t counter her destructive magic, not on the scale she wielded through the link. Faster than I would have thought possible, she tore apart the magic surrounding the thin metal and unplugged it from quartz.
Success! If we could break through all the loops and the magic that wrapped them as easily, we could take the power out of this contraption in no time.
It almost seemed like the marmot was helping or fighting back, too. A thin inner bubble of normal, coexisting elements rested between the gargoyle’s pockmarked skin and the polarized energy.
Behind us, the helixes divided and duplicated, reweaving a tangled braid along the metal. Before today, I would have said with complete conviction that the elements required a person or creature to shape them into a pattern. Destroyed weaves dissipated; they didn’t reconstruct a previous pattern—only this one just had.
“How is that possible?”
“Elsa might be able to explain it,” Seradon said. “All I need to know is it rebuilds itself and it’s faster than the five of us could counter, thanks to the fuel source of the gargoyle. That’s partly why we need to disconnect it.”
Of course. If it had been easy, the squad would have taken care of the problem already.
“Your turn,” she said. “Cut off the purifier from the gargoyle, and we’ll deal with the rest.”
She made it sound almost easy.
I gathered a balance of elements, and magic swamped me, feeding from five incredibly powerful people and enhanced by Oliver. Flailing, I fought for control.
“Relax,” Seradon said. “Let it go and try again.”
With a gasp, I released the elements. Instantly, I was back to being a part of the link, not drowning in it. I took a deep breath, then teased a minuscule balance of elements from the link. A rush of magic responded, nearly as much as I could wield when enhanced by a gargoyle but still a manageable amount.
I probed the quartz implant. Elsa had drilled the ragged, two-inch hole with a blade of elemental wood, then wedged a sharp quartz crystal into the wound, fusing the rock to the gargoyle’s muscles and flesh with crude bridges of earth. She hadn’t even tuned the earth element to quartz, let alone to the more specific resonance of the gargoyle’s jasper body. She’d anchored her doomed purifier to the gargoyle the way a person might pound stakes of a tent into the ground, as if the gargoyle had no more feeling than the soil. I gritted my teeth. Being nullified was too good a fate for Elsa.
I tuned my elemental bundle to resonate with the gargoyle by rote, narrowed the amount I held to a gentle stream, and slid a feeler into the marmot.
Ice-hard water blocked me, and my magic cut into the gargoyle when it should have penetrated painlessly. Grabbing more water, I matched my feeler to the unbalanced energies in the marmot. Pulses of pain, steady as a heartbeat, pounded into my brain through my connection to the gargoyle. I didn’t have to open my eyes to know the pain strobed in rhythm with the purifier’s energy as it drove polarized elements into the gargoyle and sucked out raw, enhancing magic.
I slid deeper into the gargoyle, then scrambled to reconfigure the elements I held to balance with the marmot, pulling in more wood and letting go of a lot of earth. This wasn’t natural. A gargoyle should be the same resonance throughout. When I realized what it meant, my eyes popped open.
“He’s polarizing on the inside,” I said.
Seradon’s sympathetic brown eyes slid from the gargoyle to me. “I know.”
“I don’t feel him fighting back. I thought he was because he’s kept the magic near his skin normal, but inside it’s like he’s . . .” Dead. I didn’t want to say it out loud, not within the marmot’s hearing.
“While he’s dormant, I don’t think he can fight.”
“How did Elsa do this to him?”
“Greed makes people do horrible things.”
That wasn’t what I meant. I wanted to know how she’d made the gargoyle “dormant” in the first place, but now wasn’t the time for a drawn-out conversation. The gargoyle felt fragile. The divided energy was eroding his innards, and if he took much more abuse, he’d be torn apart from the inside out in a cruel and agonizingly slow death.
Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and retracted my elemental feeler from the gargoyle back to the quartz implant. It was time to prove myself worthy of my title.
I couldn’t disconnect the thick bands of earth element welding the quartz to the gargoyle without hurting him, so I opted for quick slices of wood.
Magic oozed from the fresh cuts, and tendrils of helixes stretched toward the fresh wounds like magical leeches. I hacked them away and layered patches across the cuts, tuning my magic to the marmot’s current balance on the inside and to strong jasper quartz on the outside, effectively sealing the cuts.
I would have preferred to use the crystal to pack the wound, reshaping it as I might a seed crystal into quartz the marmot’s body could eventually absorb, but the impurities in the crystal made that impossible. If I’d been able to reach it, I would have extracted the foreign quartz with my fingers, but since the shield and purifier wouldn’t let me physically close to the gargoyle, I had to remove it using the elements. I considered a burst of air to push it from the open wound, but I didn’t want to cause the gargoyle additional pain from the backlash of pressure. I also didn’t have time for any finesse. I grabbed the quartz crystal where it was attached to the metal loop of the purifier and reshaped the rock into a blunt knob too large to fit back into the gargoyle’s wound.
I was admiring my handiwork when the purifier’s weave reknit around the quartz and arced from the knob into the hole drilled into the gargoyle’s neck. Raw magic pulsed out of the gargoyle through quartz embedded on the other side of his neck.
“No!” I sliced through the purifier’s weave, tearing it apart all the way around the metal loop. The moment I stopped, the weave started to regrow. I switched strategies and attacked the wall of helixes suspended inside the loop. My blades of air and wood sliced a path from the top of the metal circle to the bottom, severing a thousand complex looping strands between the polarized water and earth sections.
The weave should have dissolved. The influx of earth flowing into water through the gap I’d created should have shattered the rest of the elemental wall. Instead, the barrier grew back together into the same pattern as before, and watching the magic rebuild itself made my skin crawl.
“You’re making it worse. Concentrate on the gargoyle, Healer,” Seradon said.
I jerked my attention back to the gargoyle, heart sinking to find him weaker. I severed the purifier’s connection with the gargoyle again and grabbed the quartz knob, flattening it against the metal. It wasn’t enough; the p
athway was established, making the quartz redundant, and the purifier’s weave jumped the gap again. I needed a blockade.
Hoping I could count on the purifier to behave like normal elemental magic, I formed a destructive pentagram, layering the elements to counter each other. I wedged the pentagram into the reshaped quartz and bound it in place with ties of quartz-tuned earth. When the purifier’s weave hit the quartz this time, it burrowed into the pentagram, shredding it. Without the presence of all five elements to balance the pentagram, it couldn’t withstand the influx of earth and water. I reshaped it, stronger this time in wood and air to counter the disproportional elements; then I grabbed the center of the pentagram and inverted the elements. I’d never tried such a complex maneuver before, yet with the strength of the squad behind my weaves, it was almost easy.
The purifier’s energy fell through the center of the pentagram, then curved back to spin through the destructive elements embedded in the quartz. The affluence of energy reinforced the barricade, cycling through the pentagram in a nonstop five-pronged loop that prevented it from jumping the hairbreadth of space between the metal rod and the gargoyle’s punctured neck.
“Good thinking. I wouldn’t have considered using the quartz like that.”
Seradon’s voice floated across my consciousness but didn’t fully register as I raced for the next quartz implant. With righteous fury, I severed the purifier’s weave—this time wood and water from a wicker loop—then sliced through the clumsy earth elements grafting the quartz to the gargoyle. In seconds, I’d flattened the quartz onto the wicker, pulling it from the gargoyle’s side in the process. I layered the five elements in a destructive pentagram, embedded it in the quartz, and inverted it, all before the purifier reknit the weave down the length of the wicker. Coating the open wound of the drilled hole with gargoyle-tuned patches took a little longer, as I had to compensate for the variations within the marmot. It wasn’t my best work, but it’d hold until the squad could destroy the purifier.
I shifted to the next quartz, only to be brought up short as the magic I’d been using pulled away from me, taking bits and pieces of me with it. I scrabbled with metaphysical fingers to regain control.
“Easy. Hang on,” Seradon said, squeezing my fingers until the bones ground together.
My eyes snapped open. The polarized magic fluctuated and dimmed as one of the squad siphoned a chunk of elemental wood through the shield and released it harmlessly into the air. The pressure of the purifier slackened, but the maneuver had weakened the shield’s structure, and the squad strained to hold it together, using every scrap of our combined magic.
“I’m going to pull you out for a second.”
I gasped as my part of the link flew up the wicker of the purifier, scattering tatters of the self-replicating helixes, then shot into the shield. The pressure of the polarized elements burst through my senses. The separation Seradon had maintained slipped, jerking my awareness to the bombarded shield. Magic dragged from me as someone—Winnigan? Grant?—wove increasingly complex patches, manipulating the elements faster than I would have been able to follow if I hadn’t been part of the link. I watched in awe as more than thirty strands around the shield shifted and knotted into discrete patterns—at once. And I’d been impressed with being able to invert a tiny pentagram!
Inside the shield, the elements swirled more volatile than before. The sections I’d capped pulsed with new intensity, vibrating against the shield with increased strength.
“Oh no,” I whispered. In protecting the gargoyle, I’d forced the magic to switch directions, and it hammered the shield with heightened ferocity.
“What happens if it breaks the shield?” I asked.
“We don’t want to find out. Hold on; we’re going back in.”
Hold on? To what? I tried to find myself in the vast collective of energy, but it was like trying to find particles of my breath once it mingled with the air. Seradon fortunately had no problem. She scooped me out of the connection and together we slid through the shield, then plowed down a loop of expensive woven phoenix feathers, battering through the purifier’s weave of wood and air.
The gargoyle’s insides were worse than before, not better. I’d removed the purifier’s water and wood anchors, but now magic pulsed uneven bursts into and out of the air, fire, and earth anchors, destabilizing the gargoyle’s body with increased speed. The feedback of pain was muted, as distant as the gargoyle’s life itself. We were losing him.
I prepared to slice through the earth element, fusing the third quartz crystal to the marmot’s neck, only to be abandoned in limbo when the squad pulled magic through me to reinforce the shield again.
“This is bad,” Marciano said.
My body floated far away, and having magic drawn from me doubled the sensation. Seradon held us in place this time, but her grip felt tenuous, and if I lost my focus on the quartz, I was afraid I’d be blown apart and trapped in the purifier’s mutant weave.
“Can you slow down, Mika?” Grant asked.
“No.” Not without sacrificing the gargoyle. “I need to go faster. The gargoyle is being torn apart.”
“Do you have to make the purifier stronger?” Velasquez asked, his deep voice strained.
“The blockades are the only way to stop it from feeding off the gargoyle,” Seradon said. “She’s doing the right thing.”
“Then we’ll hold it,” the captain said.
I didn’t want to voice my doubts. They were a full-five squad. They knew far better than me what they were capable of, but it seemed like they could barely maintain the shield on the purifier now. When I blocked the last three links, the strain on them would be enormous, but I wasn’t going to waste time arguing.
I delved into the quartz. Power leapt to my bidding again, and in a few swift cuts, I’d disconnected the crude implant, reshaped the quartz, and created and inverted a destructive pentagram, blocking the purifier’s third link with the gargoyle. Applying the finishing patches took less tweaking this time; I was getting good at predicting the marmot’s imbalance.
The magic available to me through the link squeezed down to a trickle.
“Captain?” Velasquez asked.
I didn’t wait for Grant to respond. I dove for the next quartz. The purifier pulsed fire into the gargoyle, and vats of magic shot out of the gargoyle through the only other remaining link. If I cut away one quartz connection, the other would continue to feed polarized magic into the gargoyle. Without an outlet, it would fill the helpless marmot and shred his insides.
“Spin the shield,” the captain said, his voice distant. “Set it on a counterpattern.”
The shield bounced into a riotous, distracting pattern. I scrambled to reorient on the quartz, the gargoyle, anything to define my individuality. I latched on to the marmot, sinking an elemental balance into him, then jumping to correct the levels of my magic to match the internal structure of the abused gargoyle.
“Give it a destructive layer,” Grant said.
“I’m going to break the last two at once,” I said, talking over the others. I didn’t have the ability to maintain my individuality, divide magic across the gargoyle to the two separate quartz bolts, and keep up with their conversation. “I think . . . I think that will cause the purifier to break up.”
“That’d be lucky,” Velasquez said, his voice close.
I readied the destructive pentagrams, holding them next to the gargoyle where the elemental magic remained in its natural state. The pentagrams slowly grew when they should have remained static, and I realized with fresh horror that the gargoyle was passively feeding its magic to me, to all of us, despite the copious amounts being drained from him by the purifier. I’d been wrong. He wasn’t doing anything to fight back or protect himself.
“Now.” I pulled on the magic of the link. It responded like taffy, but I demanded more. “I need to do this now.” I yanked, and for a second I felt Seradon, then the others beyond her. I think the captain said something, but w
hether it was encouragement or protest, I didn’t hear.
I slammed the pentagrams in place at the same time as I cut the quartz from the gargoyle. With separate strands, I reshaped the quartz into flat barriers and simultaneously shoved wads of jasper-tuned patches into the wounds before pulling the pentagrams through the quartz and inverting them.
The barriers snapped into place, and the world exploded.
4
The concussion tossed me into the air, and I landed on my back, half on top of a boulder. My head snapped against something marginally softer than granite. Blackness swooped through my vision; then my collapsed lungs inflated, and I sucked in a harsh breath. I stared at the sky and listened to my ears ring, the world as fuzzy as the fluffy clouds high above me. Twists of earth and fire canopied above me in a protective dome of magic—one I wasn’t holding.
Raw panic jolted through me, and I snatched at the elements, terrified the blast had burned through me and left me nullified, able to see the elements but never work them again. Fire and a smaller amount of air, earth, wood, and water trickled into me along misaligned pathways. I sagged with relief. It wasn’t the full amount I could usually draw, but I would heal. I was still a heal—
Oliver!
I jackknifed up—or tried to. The ground shifted beneath my butt and a steel band pinned my torso. I twisted, trying to see what trapped me. Seradon lay beside me, though slightly lower. She blinked groggily at the sky, blood trickling from her nose. I squirmed to try to reach her.
“Easy now,” Velasquez said, his deep voice startlingly close. More surprising, I’d felt the rumble of his words against my back. I was lying on top of the fire elemental! How had that happened?
The steel band lifted, and my brain finally put the obvious together: Velasquez had cushioned me and protected me from the blast. The boulder I thought I’d landed on had been his chest.
Above us, the protective shield dissipated. Velasquez helped me roll off him and I pushed to a sitting position, gasping when a fiery jab of pain shot through the top of my right shoulder. Tentatively, I investigated the pain with my fingers, sucking in air through clenched teeth when I encountered a splinter protruding from my skin. I craned my neck to see, setting off a fresh wave of pain.
Curse of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 2) Page 4
