Marcus floated the abused silver platter in the air in front of him, rotating it over an intense blue-white cone of flame. While I patched Oliver, he reshaped the softened metal, removing the claw-foot dents Oliver had embossed in it. Then Marcus meticulously re-etched the swirling leaf design through the cooling silver until the platter looked better than when I’d taken it from the dining car.
He glanced my way, and I snapped my mouth shut. Of course Marcus could do the precise work of an artisan. Just because he looked like he was built to run through granite walls, had the elemental strength to match, and spent his time fighting the worst magical creatures and problems in the city didn’t mean he couldn’t do delicate work with his magic, too.
“How much longer do we need to keep this up?” he asked.
I looked to Celeste. The gryphon stared over my head at her mate, worry sitting strangely on her eagle face.
“Awhile longer,” I finally said.
“Are you done there?” he asked.
“Yep. But we need to keep using magic.” I gave Oliver a pat and he snuggled against my legs. The clear quartz I’d used to rebuild his chipped ruff to its previous shape looked peculiar among his orange-red rock fur, but in a few days, his body would absorb the crystal and replace it with carnelian.
“It doesn’t matter what we do with the elements?”
I shook my head, hunting for ideas. I could blow wind around the freight car and maybe pull a few drops of moisture from the air, but neither would keep much magic moving for the dormant gargoyles to passively feed from.
“How about a game of Elemental’s Apprentice?” Marcus asked.
“The kid’s game?”
“Got a better idea?”
I sighed. “No.”
Elemental’s Apprentice was a game of humiliation. The premise was simple: Using only magic, two people tossed raw elements back and forth, sometimes with physical items included. The person who dropped the elements first lost. The easiest way to win was to toss your opponent more element than they could handle. Since I’d always been only a midlevel earth elemental with even weaker skills with air and water, I’d almost always lost, usually getting drenched with water in the process. Against an FSPP, I didn’t stand a chance.
“Let’s start with air,” Marcus said. He sat on his cot, his back to the wall with the broken door and his legs stretched out. Everything about his posture said he was relaxed and expected an easy victory.
“Sure.” I shifted to sit cross-legged on the floor and Oliver curled around me, eyes glowing in anticipation. Pulling on my connection with the gargoyles, I collected a massive bundle of air, weaving the element into a tight vortex and plucking a few strands loose so it’d unravel the moment Marcus caught it. I wasn’t going to make this easy on him.
“Whoa. Hang on,” he said. “I didn’t mean a battle to the death, and I see what you’re doing there with that trap. It wouldn’t work, but that’s not the point. We just need to keep magic circulating, right? Let’s keep this friendly.”
I shifted the vortex to the side so I could study him. He looked sincere—and amused.
“For the gargoyles,” he added.
Still not trusting him, I dispersed my wind-funnel trap and made a small fist-size bundle of air, then wrapped and tied it off so it would hold its form once I threw it. I tossed it to Marcus and immediately prepared a wall of earth magic in front of me in case he hurled it back five times as big and too fast for me to catch. Instead, he lobbed it back, scoffing when I had to drop my barrier to catch it.
“Not a fan of the game?” he asked.
“I’ve played with a few poor sports.”
“The kind who set traps in their first throw?”
I didn’t appreciate the implication. “The kind who enjoy humiliating the weaker woman. You know, typical FSPP superiority crap.” I threw the air back to him with more force than necessary.
Oliver tilted his head against my thigh as he tracked the air ball’s flight back to me in the heavy silence. I rested a hand on his side and let out a long breath.
“Sorry, that was uncalled for,” I said, reminding myself Marcus had never done anything but help me.
We threw the element back and forth a few times before Marcus asked, “Do you know a lot of full-spectrum elementals?”
“Personally? Just you. And Grant and the rest of the squad,” I added quickly. “But as a kid, there were a few in my school. I wasn’t sad when they got transferred.” Some of my friends had been jealous of the more talented students and the special school they’d been whisked away to in their early teens. I’d been relieved to see them go.
“You’re lucky. I know a lot of full-spectrum pricks.”
My gaze snapped to Marcus’s, and he winked.
“I was one of them for a while. I could teach you some dastardly tricks some other time. Beef up the air, then add water.”
“Are you testing my control over the elements I’m weakest with?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because tomorrow we’re going to Reaper’s Ridge, and I want to see what you’ve got.”
I frowned. “You know what I’ve got. This isn’t the first time we’ve worked together.” Even if he’d forgotten when we’d fought together in Focal Park, we’d spent today linked. The intimate combining of our magic would have left Marcus with no questions about how weak I was in every element.
“Which is why I didn’t agree to come with you just because you gave me puppy-dog eyes. I know you’re not going to flip out, but you’re handicapped by that whole everyone-else-first healer thing.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Puppy-dog eyes?
“Tomorrow will be about more than throwing yourself in front of every threatened gargoyle. You’ll actually have to try to survive.” His scowl was back in full force.
“That’s the plan,” I said, confused by the turn in his mood.
His mouth flattened. “Grab some water and let me judge if you’re capable of two things at once.”
“And here I thought it was just a friendly game.” He’d seen me do far more complex divisions of magic than handling two elements at once. I’d hoped having a little food in his stomach would offset his sour mood, but it’d been too much to ask of a single meal, even one as spectacular as the potpies.
I wound together a bundle of water element strands and prepared to throw it to Marcus.
“No. With water.”
“What water?” I asked, looking around. Oliver had smashed the teapot.
“Gather it up.”
I examined the spray of moisture staining the floor, then Marcus. He raised a challenging eyebrow. Gritting my teeth, I got to work. Pulling the droplets together took more of my concentration than I would have liked. I fumbled the air ball, dropped it once, and had to shave it in half to keep it under control before I finally wrapped strands of water element around a collected handful of water, encased it in a bubble of air, and floated the wobbling blob off the floor.
“Bring it on,” Marcus said, not commenting on my sloppy work.
I lobbed the water inside my thin barrier, hoping it’d break apart and drench him. Instead, Marcus caught it, combined it with a separate perfect sphere of water I hadn’t noticed him collect, and tossed it back to me as I released the air ball toward him. I caught the water, wrapping it in thicker elemental bands to stabilize it.
In between throws, I sent tiny probes of magic into the dormant gargoyles, checking their health levels. They hadn’t gained much strength, but they were no longer weakening. Celeste had relaxed, too, and the worry had eased from her expression. She’d curled up on the open threshold, but her head remained high and she watched Rourke like, well, an eagle.
“Why do you feel more comfortable with water than air?” Marcus asked, breaking the silence and startling me into almost dropping the air ball.
I’d half resolved not to speak to him again, but his tone had lost its bickering edge, so I responde
d. “My parents are both water elementals.”
“Really?”
“Pretty strong, too. They spent a lot of time working with me to help me perfect my limited ability.”
“Where’d you get your knack for earth?”
“I don’t know. No one in the family had an affinity for quartz like I do.”
“Add in some earth. No. Make it quartz. I should get some practice.”
As easily as thinking, I’d collected earth element and tuned it to quartz. For reasons I’d never been able to explain, I was stronger with quartz than I was with untuned earth. I used to assume it was because I’d practiced with the element so much, but lately I’d been considering I might have been born with a specialized strength. Quartz had always been easier for me and more accessible. It was only as an adult that I’d thought to use it to make a living. Then I’d met Oliver and his siblings, and my life had been completely changed.
For the fun of it, I wrapped the quartz-tuned earth around three seed crystals, then tossed them to Marcus. He caught it and fumbled, the crystals clattering against each other like castanets, but recovered quickly. I took petty delight in his lack of perfection.
“Wood, too,” he said.
I dutifully wove pure wood into a knot and bounced it to him. Marcus added a cotton rag from his bag to give the element weight. If not for the gargoyles’ extra magic, I would have had a hard time holding all the separate elements together with air, but with their help, keeping four elemental balls alight wasn’t even tough.
“Now fire,” Marcus said.
I made a glowball. Marcus returned it with a two-inch flame fluttering at the heart of the light. I caught it delicately, looping it back to the fire elemental from a safe distance. Schools forbade playing with real flames. Losing control of a bucket of water was messy but easy enough to clean; losing control of naked fire could cause permanent harm. That didn’t mean I hadn’t tried—and walked away with singed eyebrows.
“It won’t bite,” he said.
“I’m rather partial to my hair,” I muttered.
Marcus chuckled. The warm light of the lanterns and the bouncing flame softened the hard planes of his face, and his mirth held a hint of The Smile. I pulled my gaze away before he caught me staring and focused on the arcs of elements between us.
For a while we let the muted clack-clack of the metal wheels across the seams of the rail fill the silence. Outside, the sky had darkened, and the scenery through the gap of the missing door had become lost in the shadows. Reaper’s Ridge and all the dangers it presented were still a day away, and for the moment, no urgency pushed against my thoughts. In this warm environment so far removed from the real world, it seemed perfectly natural to strike up a conversation with Marcus. We skirted around discussing tomorrow and the dangers awaiting us, sticking to innocuous topics like our pasts—my rather ordinary upbringing in Terra Haven, his adventurous military experiences and exciting missions with the FPD—our favorite places to eat in the city, and the best temple for the summer solstice.
While we talked, we tossed the elements back and forth until our moves were so synchronous I didn’t have to think about them, which was probably Marcus’s intent. The whole game was likely a strategic plan designed to familiarize me with working with him and vice versa. I didn’t care. I enjoyed the moment of comfortable normalcy—something I’d lacked during the frantic months I’d searched for a cure. I also monitored the dormant gargoyles. When their life signs had been stable for over an hour and Celeste had fully relaxed, I reluctantly ended our game.
“You should get some sleep. You’ll want to be rested for whatever we face tomorrow,” Marcus said, tossing the water out the open door and resealing the air barrier. He let the other elemental bundles dissipate, and the cotton cloth fluttered to his hand. I caught the seed crystals with a scoop of air and dropped them into my bag.
Oliver had fallen asleep tight around me, and I had to wake him to free myself from his stony embrace before hobbling on stiff legs to my cot. Stretching out, I toed off my boots and pulled the scratchy wool blanket over myself. Marcus dimmed the lanterns and settled on his cot. The cozy atmosphere morphed, turning the friendly energy into something intimate and awkward as I listened to him arrange his covers. Tension crept back into my muscles, and I thought it would keep me awake, but the rocking of the train lulled me to sleep minutes later.
* * *
I woke looking into Celeste’s glowing amethyst eyes. Marcus breathed softly on his cot, asleep, and Oliver lay stretched out and sleeping on the floor beside me. I couldn’t tell how long I’d been asleep, but I guessed it’d been a few hours. Softly, I reached for the dormant gargoyles, testing them. They’d weakened. Not as much as before, but I didn’t want to take any chances.
Rolling quietly to my feet, I tiptoed into the middle of the gargoyles, where I’d left my bag of seed crystals. I sat and wriggled my chilled toes into my boots, then opened myself to the gargoyles’ boost. After carefully heating the air in a weak version of Marcus’s spell, I decided to do what I did best: work with quartz.
Before I’d become a gargoyle healer, I’d had ambitions of being Terra Haven’s preeminent quartz artisan. Now the goal felt juvenile and shallow. Nothing compared to the joyful rush of healing a sick or injured gargoyle, and the most prestigious artistic accomplishment couldn’t compete with saving a life. However, I still enjoyed creating beautiful objects with quartz and it kept my skills sharp, and the money I made selling quartz jewelry and figurines at a gallery in the city augmented my sporadic healer income.
Drawing as much as I could hold of all the elements to help feed the dormant gargoyles, I separated delicate strands of earth, fire, and air to combine several seeds into a blob. With practiced ease, I twisted the lump and stretched it into the most popular figurine I sold: a replica of Oliver. Normally I used carnelian to match his distinctive body, but the clear quartz did a good job of catching the light and refracting it through the small details of his eyes, ears, and folded wings.
As soon as I finished, I started the next figurine, making one for each of the dormant gargoyles, then a few of Celeste. I strung together ten crystals and created the train, complete with miniature people on the inside and the khalkotauroi in the engine car, clear hay strands scattered around his feet, clear flame breathing from his nostrils to heat the water. I left out Conductor Naomi.
Sleep weighted my eyelids, and after a while, I reclined on my side with my head propped on the curled fox. I planned to doze for only a few minutes, but when I woke, indigo sky was visible through the open door and the glow of the sun lit the edge of the horizon.
Today was the day—either I was a guardian, capable of fixing a baetyl and saving the comatose gargoyles, or I wasn’t, and everyone in our party could die for my hubris. I prayed I wasn’t handing Reaper’s Ridge its next victims.
6
“Naomi agreed to let us use her private bathroom, but you’ll need to be quick to make it through the train without disturbing the passengers,” Marcus said when he noticed I was awake.
I grimaced, not needing the reminder of the gorgeous conductor before I’d fully woken; thinking of Reaper’s Ridge had made me queasy enough already. But refusing the offer out of spite would cause only me to suffer. Besides, my bladder didn’t care how Marcus had convinced Naomi to give us access to her quarters. I grabbed my bag and scurried through the open door. When I returned in fresh clothes and as clean as a sponge bath could get me, Celeste was perched atop the freight car once more. She nodded her head to me but didn’t talk, and I didn’t linger in the chilly morning air.
Marcus knelt in front of the figurines I’d created last night, holding up a clear replica of Oliver to examine it in the light of a glowball he’d formed.
“The detail in this is amazing,” he said without turning toward me.
“You can have it, if you want.” Caught off guard by his praise, I tried to sound dismissive, as if it wasn’t one of my finer pieces.
<
br /> The glowball winked out and he closed his long fingers around the figurine. “Thanks.” He grabbed his bag and squeezed past me on his way to the bathroom.
“He’s smart,” Oliver said after Marcus had left.
“Because he picked the one that looked like you?”
“Yes.”
Chuckling, I checked on the dormant gargoyles. They were all weak but stable. It pleased me to see the fox’s injuries were healing nicely, and when I checked Oliver, his new patch of clear ruff had striations of red carnelian stretching to the surface. By the time we returned to Terra Haven, all signs of his injury would be healed.
I glanced around at the dormant gargoyles and tried to picture the return trip. Would they be with me? Would they remain in their baetyl? Would they all live through the trip?
Would I?
Marcus returned wearing brown leather pants, thick leather boots, and a lightweight fitted gray cotton shirt with a tiny flame stitched at the high collar. The shirt was regulation FPD attire and woven with protective magic, but the leather pants were new. They hugged his long legs and creaked when he sat on his cot. I glanced down at my unspelled jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt. The comparison between us said more obviously than words how unprepared I was for traversing Reaper’s Ridge.
Marcus’s attitude had changed to match his clothes, the camaraderie of last night chased away by the sunrise and his familiar scowl back in place. He silently handed me an apple stabbed with a paring knife, half a loaf of bread, and a hunk of soft white cheese. I jerked the knife from the apple and ate the fruit, then concentrated on cutting slices of cheese for each bite of bread. Across from me, Marcus methodically consumed his identical breakfast, seemingly unaffected by the heavy silence choking the air and making it hard to swallow.
“Repairing the baetyl is your job. For everything else, you’ll do what I say, when I say it.”
I lifted my eyebrows at his high-handed order. Marcus gave me a hard stare, no emotion behind his eyes.
“Is that clear?”
I stuffed a bite of bread into my mouth to choke off a dozen flippant responses and made myself nod. Marcus had experience, training, and more magic than me. It made sense for him to be in charge, especially in the wild magic of Reaper’s Ridge. Besides, telling him I’d follow his orders only if I agreed with them wouldn’t appease him, and I couldn’t afford to have him back out of helping me now.
Secret of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 3) Page 5
