Curse of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 2)

by Rebecca Chastain

  “Good,” Grant said, plucking the pole from the air.

  “It won’t work,” I said. I’d caught sight of my pack, tossed aside when I arrived and forgotten in what had become the water section when we fled.

  I shoved from my marble seat before my doubts could catch up with the impractical hope surging through me. I hopped across the uneven ground and dropped beside the waterlogged bag. Cold mud squished under my knees and soaked through my pants as I fumbled with the drawstring on the bag. When it wouldn’t loosen, I snapped it with a sharp twist of earth.

  “Mika?” Marcus asked.

  “Explain yourself, Healer,” Grant demanded.

  I yanked Kylie’s soggy library books and my ruined notebook from the bag and flung them out of the way, then upended the bag. Clear seed crystals poured into the mud, all twenty-five pounds scattering in front of me.

  “Wood is weak,” I said. “It’s too malleable and the grain in the wood will fracture our magic. You and I both had a hard enough time pushing magic from our bodies; we’d have to work five times as hard to funnel it through a branch. Quartz accepts all elements better. It’ll be a stronger, cleaner bridge.”

  I’d worked with seed crystals a thousand times, a hundred thousand times; effortlessly, I wrapped them in quartz-tuned earth magic and fused them together. When Oliver, then the other gargoyles, dropped magic into me, the crystals flew through the air too fast for my eyes to track, but I didn’t need to see what I was doing. I ran feelers of earth across the ground, and every crystal sang to me. I could differentiate the subtle variations in each one and discern how they’d best align together without looking. Even unaided, I could have mustered enough air to lift the crystals into place, but with the help of the gargoyles, the marble-size seeds were as light as grains of sand. The bar grew in a seamless length, complete before I finished talking.

  “True,” Seradon said. She paused to take in the finished rod. “But you’re not the strongest elemental. It should be Marciano inside the null guiding the magic.”

  “No. I’m the gargoyle healer. I’m going in.” I stood, lifting the quartz pole like a staff. It towered over me.

  “This is about more than saving the gargoyle,” Marcus said.

  “Of course. This is about saving magic itself, which includes saving all magic creatures, gargoyles included.” But especially this marmot. If the null continued to expand, a lot of lives were in jeopardy, but right now, only one was and I was the best person to help him. “Besides, none of you are stronger with quartz than me.”

  I sounded brave. I probably even looked brave since the quartz rod was helping me stand up straight. I was filthy, bloody, and battered, and I wasn’t backing down.

  I did my best not to acknowledge how terrified I was. This could go wrong in so many ways that if I didn’t keep moving, I’d be paralyzed with doubt. I was counting on my quartz specialty to be enough, but it might not be. And if it wasn’t, I could be dooming the marmot gargoyle. I could be dooming everyone. The more times we failed to break the null and the longer it existed, the stronger and bigger it grew. If I failed, it might be too big to stop the next time, even by a stronger elemental. Plus, there was the crushing pain of the null itself and the very real possibility I’d run out of air before I even reached the center.

  But I wouldn’t back down. Not only had I proven myself capable of doing things today that even these elite FSPPs didn’t know were possible, but also I was a gargoyle healer. I was supposed to protect the gargoyles in this city, yet I’d been oblivious to the marmot’s needs and he’d been trapped and tortured on my watch. I wasn’t going to fail him again.

  “Break the quartz into five pieces,” Marcus said.

  Grant nodded. He turned to Kylie. “Reporter, it’s time to do something useful for once.”

  While I severed the quartz rod into five pieces and gently coaxed them all to the length of the original piece, Winnigan talked Kylie through the process of linking with the squad. My best friend would be the fifth, taking my place on the outside.

  Seradon examined the slender rods. Quartz might be one of the strongest rocks in the world, but anything stretched too thin became fragile, and the five rods were now hardly thicker than my pinkie finger. They’d snap if I stepped on them, but they could still support their own weight, so they would have to be strong enough.

  “You’ll need to use all the magic together, and you won’t have a lot of energy left to combine it manually once you’re in the null,” Seradon said. “If you fuse the bridges together, it’ll give you one place to hold and allow the magic to mingle.”

  “Good thinking.” With Seradon’s help, I arranged the rods on the ground so the ends made five perfect wedges and the tips formed an apple-size pentagon at the center. A few twists of quartz element and they were fused.

  “I never would have called you into this mess if I’d known it was going to be this dangerous,” Seradon said.

  Surprised, I looked up into her worried brown eyes.

  “It should be me going into the null,” she said.

  “Aww, FPD guilt. That’s cute.”

  Seradon’s laugh came out as a bark, and she clapped me on the back.

  A rumble of earth shook the plateau as Grant guided the magic of the link into the sinkhole, lifting a sturdy slab of mud-covered hornfels to replace the missing chunk of ground. When he finished, the group circled my lines of quartz, each standing at an end. Seradon moved out of the way, a serious expression replacing her momentary mirth. A glow of magic surrounded me, swirling in the link between the others. I shared a glance with Kylie, reading my own fears in her large blue eyes. She managed a tremulous smile, and I tried to return it.

  Everyone picked up a rod and I lifted the central pentagon. Together we walked toward the null.

  “Kylie, let go and circle around,” Grant ordered. Her rod needed to pass through the null and out the other side before she could grab it again. The rest of the rods were long enough for the squad to hang on to the tips without encountering the expanding null sphere.

  I slid my hand down the slender quartz as Kylie let it go, lifting the fragile bridge higher so the sagging tip didn’t catch on the ground and snap. Kylie darted around the null to take her place on the other side, and the squad and I shifted to align the spokes to avoid hitting the marmot.

  Taking a deep breath, I released all magic and stepped into the null.

  * * *

  Nothingness punched me in the gut and the pain blossomed in all directions through my body. I fought against panic, striving for even breaths. My lungs pumped dense air, starving on the too-thin oxygen. No matter how deeply I inhaled, I couldn’t quite catch my breath.

  Leaning into the soupy null field, I locked eyes on the marmot and focused on moving my feet one agonizing step at a time. My heart constricted at the sight of him. No longer blinded by panic and without the film of elements that coated the outer layer of the null sphere muddying the view, I beheld the toll today’s numerous traumas had inflicted on the gargoyle. All color had leeched from his former earthy brown and blue-tipped body; he looked like a statue carved from a chunk of slate and as equally devoid of life.

  Hang on. I’m coming.

  The null drank magic from me, siphoning it from my muscles and knotting my joints until I hobbled on cramped feet and bowed legs. In the oddly thick environment, increasing my pace proved as impossible as jogging at the bottom of a lake. No energy lifted from the earth; no element twined through the air currents. The physical pieces were all in place, but without magic, the world felt dead. Even sounds were muffled and indistinct.

  My hand spasmed on the delicate quartz pentagon, and it flexed in my grip. My fingers curled, the pain gnarling them into a fist against my will. I stopped on quivering legs and let go of the unsupported pole to use my free hand to pry my gnarled fingers from the pentagon. If I crushed it, I’d have to start all over, wasting time the marmot didn’t have.

  I almost dropped the pentagon a
s I maneuvered the two rods I stood between to rest on my shoulders, with the pentagon pressing against my throat. Afraid to hold the unsupported quartz pole in my cramping hand and risk snapping it, I used the back of my hand to lift the sagging tip. The slender quartz weighed no more than five pounds, but it felt like fifty.

  My feet had taken root. I strained forward, pushing into the excruciating molasses, and heaved the lead weight of my throbbing foot. I kept my eyes pinned on the marmot, my entire existence narrowing to reaching him. Five minutes or five hours later, the fingers of my free hand brushed against his cold chest. The weight of Kylie’s quartz line lifted and I stumbled the last two steps on what felt like the broken bones of my own feet.

  The marmot appeared no better up close. No life pulsed beneath my hand. Even though I’d told myself I wouldn’t be able to feel anything without magic, it still came as a shock. He felt like a piece of carved rock.

  Please don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead.

  I leaned close to the gargoyle, until the V of the two quartz rods cut into my neck and two separate lines rested against the marmot’s slender shoulders. He was the center of everything, and short of climbing him, this was the closest I could get to the heart of the null.

  Very carefully, I closed my fingers around the pentagon. Magic trickled into me, soothing the persistent burn of the null in my fingertips. For a second, the relief swelled through me; then the misery of the other ninety-nine percent of my body overwhelmed my senses again.

  I drew the magic to me—and gritted my teeth as the pain in my extremities increased in response. I could feel the others at the end of the quartz lines and the gargoyles inside their link. They held overwhelming magic, but no matter how they strained to shove it to me, the null strangled their copious magic to the merest trickle. It would be enough. It had to be.

  I pushed every scrap of magic I could touch into the null. The soft lines of the loose elements drifted in the vacuum and vanished a few inches from the quartz.

  Black spots danced in my vision as my brain tried to shut down to protect itself from the pain, and I abandoned that tactic. I needed more magic than I could pull, and continuing to use the tiny trickle squeezing through the quartz wasn’t going to cut it. In torturous increments, I refined the incoming magic into the five elements, layering them around the pentagram in the constructive cycle: earth, water, wood, air, fire. The magic in the rods shifted to align the incoming elemental energy to match my pentagon as the others caught on to what I was doing.

  I planned on letting the constructive cycle do the work for me and build up its strength until it had enough magic to make an impact when I released it into the null, but it didn’t increase, or if it did, it wasn’t quick.

  While I waited, my feet and legs went numb. The pain didn’t abate, but I couldn’t feel the muscles anymore. I couldn’t find my foot to lift or my knee to bend. I couldn’t move or escape. Panting, I sucked in volumes of empty null and very little oxygen. At this rate, I’d suffocate before the magic built up to a usable level in the pentagon. I needed to create a faster, stronger constructive cycle—the strongest I’d ever encountered.

  I needed to use the purifier’s constructive pattern.

  Oh, the irony.

  I’d spent the last hour countering the purifier’s powerful helix braids. I knew them intimately. If I’d had a chance to think about it, I would have said I would take the knowledge of those destructive, horrific weaves to my grave, determined to never let them see the light of day again. Yet, less than a half hour later I was reconstructing them and praying it would save us.

  Knowing what the weaves looked like and re-creating them with thimblefuls of magic were two very different concepts. To keep the trickle of magic flowing, the constructive pattern along the pentagon had to be maintained, so I was forced to build the helixes into the empty air at the center of the pentagon, unanchored. The elements kept slipping from my grasp and evaporating into the null. Every time I held two elements long enough to twine them together, fire ate through my body as the null tried to pull my skin inside out. The jabbing, pounding pain in my skull should have long since liquefied my brain. Part of me hoped it would. Soon. Just to make the pain stop.

  Numbness crept up my hips and abdomen. I clung to the marmot with my free hand, afraid I’d topple. Three braids down and bands of steel nothingness tightened around my lower ribs, constricting my limited oxygen even further. The black dots were back, but this time I couldn’t stop. Even if I did, it wouldn’t help. The null had me in its jaws and it wasn’t going to let me go.

  I formed the final helix braid as the paralysis slid over my chest. I’d divided the inner space of the pentagon into five triangles, creating an inverted purifier with all the spokes pointing inward. With a final twist, I connected the free tips of the braids using a minuscule constructive loop, then released it.

  Please be alive. I stared into the gargoyle’s dead eyes, feeling the life suck from me. Air was a fond memory. You’d better live. You’d better make this worth it.

  Magic swirled in the pentagon faster than before, but nothing happened. Not even tiny tendrils of magic released to counter the null. I’d failed.

  I clung to the marmot, and his statue-like arms supported me under my armpits. My legs must have collapsed, because I was looking at the marmot’s pockmarked chest instead of his eyes.

  “Hold, damn it!” Grant’s order penetrated the void, his voice muffled like it was filtered through a wall of rugs.

  My neck went limp, and I remembered to loll my head back, away from the quartz pentagon. I couldn’t crush the pentagon.

  Kylie stood at the end of her quartz rod, and though her expression was intent, tears coursed down her cheeks. Marcus stood at the next quartz rod, his face beet red and veins at his temple protruding as he shouted over my head at Grant.

  “. . . have to get her . . . killing her . . .”

  Crap. I was dying. I mustered my energy and fought to remain conscious, to draw a breath, to live. The void smacked me down as easily as I might crush an ant. My will petered out.

  11

  Darkness closed around my irises, narrowing the world to a pinpoint. A compressed cyclone of elements shot from the pentagon in a flat disk, slicing along the bands of quartz. They hit the null’s boundary and it imploded. Magic hit me with the slap of a belly flop against my entire body. The elements poured into me, igniting every fiber of my being in fiery agony.

  Then air rushed into my lungs, and for a glorious instant, my body was absolutely pain-free. As if in slow motion, the purifier’s braids multiplied and swelled along the quartz rods before blasting outward, mindlessly hunting for the nearest gargoyles in their paths.

  I’d saved us only to doom us.

  No. Not again.

  Pain sank back into my body, but it was an echo of the previous crippling agony and unimportant. Yanking the pentagon over my head, I turned my back to the marmot to shield it and smashed the purifier-lined crystal rods against the marble. Shards of quartz exploded and magic ripped from the pieces, bursting apart and slamming me into the gargoyle. His hard paws jabbed my ribs and my head snapped back against the solid rock of his neck.

  My brain rang like a struck gong between my ears. Magic unraveled inside me, eating along my neural pathways. My knees gave out and I crumpled to the shard-strewn marble. A pillow of air cradled my head before it hit the ground, and I fought to keep my eyes open. The marmot still needed me.

  A rush of warmth cascaded from my scalp to my toes. Fire magic slid into my bones, accompanied by a peripheral feeling of rosewood and traces of lightning. Marcus. A spiral of tension uncoiled in my stomach; I was safe. Cool water and veins of wood spun around me, sinking slowly into my skin until they met up with the warmth of the fire in my bones, restoring the magic leeched from me and leaving me blissfully numb.

  “It’s just a field patch,” Marcus said. His voice rumbled against my ear.

  He held me cradled against his chest
. I was too euphoric from the lack of pain to care that I looked like a complete wimp. I allowed myself exactly five breaths to savor the glorious lack of pain before I struggled to stand. Marcus assisted me, not commenting when I had to brace a hand on his shoulder to stay upright after he set me on my feet.

  I reached for magic, and it trickled to me along scalded mental pathways. My legs almost gave out with relief. I hadn’t nullified myself.

  Oliver dropped from the pillar where he’d perched and landed next to me. He wrapped a wing around my leg, giving me much needed stability. Lydia swooped to land beside Marcus. She gently nipped at his shirt, then bumped his forearm with her rock head and leaned into him. Half grown, she came to his waist. She was going to be a huge gargoyle. The other siblings dropped to the ground and circled the marmot. Herbert flapped ungracefully when the muddy ground of the former water section suctioned to his armadillo paws, and he hopped a few feet to the left.

  The five gargoyles opened their magical boost to me, but I didn’t accept it. The pain behind what little magic I held told me not to push myself. It felt like I’d sprained my brain, and I needed to heal before I could work magic at full strength, let alone gargoyle-enhanced levels.

  I didn’t need the boost to form a soft probe, either. I slid the gargoyle-tuned mix of elements into the marmot, holding my breath. He’d been stabbed repeatedly, used as a magic pump, assaulted by polarized magic, and suffocated in a null. On top of that, he suffered from a disease that left him comatose. It was foolish to hope he’d survived.

  His fragile life beat deep inside his jasper body. My breath shook when I released it. He teetered on the edge of life, fractured by magic and pain and the mysterious dormancy disease. Using the thinnest, most delicate bands of jasper-tuned earth and soft brushes of fire, I fed him magic. As I moved the elements through him, I wove gossamer-fine patches over his fractures and watched as his body absorbed my magic and used it to begin to heal. His frailty dictated my speed—achingly slow—and the extent to which I could assist him. Well before he was whole, I eased my magic from him. Anything more would overtax his system and do more damage than good.