Secret of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 3)

by Rebecca Chastain

  I strode across the sloped floor, conscious that I moved alone. I expected my headache to get worse with each step closer, but it remained a steady, pounding pain. Still, I hesitated before touching the enormous crystal.

  Without a blemish or even a seam between the different types of quartz, the smooth surface felt as soft as silk. I petted it as if it were a gargoyle, and when nothing happened, I formed a hair-thin strand of quartz element and tested the surface. My magic met the resistance of the other four elements, and I grabbed fire, water, wood, and air to balance my probe. The elements responded to me as easily as if I stood outside the baetyl. Whatever had limited my magic earlier didn’t apply in the heart.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the heart crystal’s elemental chemistry to be almost identical to a gargoyle’s. A little more water, a little less air, but otherwise the same—if on a much grander scale.

  I widened my probe, reassured to find the crystal’s elements harmonious at the base.

  “Okay, Oliver. I could use a boost.”

  When I pushed deeper, the baetyl’s magic reacted. Faster than thought, it latched on to the line of my magic and burrowed back along the elements, flowing into me as smoothly as a gargoyle’s boost.

  Alarmed, I gathered myself to fight off the invasion, but the baetyl’s magic was already inside me. It didn’t react like a gargoyle’s, either. Rather than passively enhancing the amount of magic I could use, it reversed the rules and pumped the elements into me.

  I gasped when Oliver’s boost opened a fresh well of potential magic inside me, and before I could utter a warning, the baetyl’s magic rushed to fill the void, spilling through the link and diving into Oliver. With a pained scream, he severed his enhancement. A whiplash of displaced elements jerked from my control and shattered the baetyl’s grasp. Liberated, I fell backward, landing on my butt and hands. A dozen new pinpricks pierced my palms, but I barely registered the pain above the explosion inside my head.

  I stared in horrified awe at the heart, swaying in place until the agony abated to a throbbing in my temples and my blurry vision cleared. When I decided movement wouldn’t induce vomiting, I gingerly rolled to my feet and tottered to Oliver’s side. The gargoyle clutched his head with both front paws, his body curled tight.

  Cautiously, I reached for the elements again. They responded naturally, and I breathed a soft sigh of relief as I tuned them to the proper blend and tested Oliver. Aside from a headache, which I could do little more than buffer with gauzy weaves of carnelian-tuned quartz, he was fine.

  “Let’s not do that again,” I said, trying to inject a smidgen of levity into the moment.

  “I would advise against it. This is not our baetyl,” Celeste said, coasting down to land on the same crystal as Oliver. Her wings closed over her back with a soft rustle. After almost a year of working with gargoyles, it still amazed me that their heavy quartz feathers could sound so soft.

  “I shouldn’t have asked,” I said. It hurt Oliver just to be inside this baetyl; I should have realized asking him to open himself up to the elements here would have been a bad idea even if I couldn’t have predicted the baetyl had the ability to use my connection to the elements to overpower me.

  “I’m okay,” Oliver said, lowering a paw from where he’d been stroking his temple. “But can you hurry?”

  Despite the urgency, my footsteps lagged as I walked back to the heart crystal, and I stopped before I was close enough to touch it. The baetyl had exploited my lightest brush of magic, burrowing into me. I hadn’t known such a thing was possible, but even prepared, I doubted I would be able to prevent its invasion the second time around. It had pushed magic into me and filled all the extra space of Oliver’s boost without effort. The power it’d given me hadn’t been malevolent, but it hadn’t been mine, and I hadn’t been able to deny it—or control it. The baetyl’s magic hadn’t been passive, and opening myself back up to an aggressive, semi-sentient magic terrified me. If I wasn’t strong enough to seize control, the baetyl would crush me. No one would come to my rescue, either. Marcus was incapacitated; Oliver and Celeste were helpless against this baetyl.

  I swallowed and shook out my arms and shoulders. For the dormant gargoyles, for Marcus, for Celeste and Oliver—for all their sakes—I had to risk it.

  Marcus’s accusations of throwing my life away echoed in my thoughts, and I shook my head to dispel them. He was wrong; I valued my life greatly. Even knowing the number of lives at stake, my arms shook as I raised my hands, and I couldn’t uproot my feet. I didn’t want to die. If there were any other option . . .

  “I’m not trying to kill myself,” I whispered. “I’m trying to save lives.”

  Before I lost my courage, I took a step and slapped my palms to the crystal’s smooth surface, simultaneously sliding my magic into the heart.

  The baetyl’s magic bowled into me.

  12

  I curled my fingers against the flat surface, straining for control. The baetyl’s magic battered me, swelling through my body and questing to push further, to explode through my skin and outward. I stared at my blood-splattered pink knuckles, the tendons rigid outlines. Next to the beautiful glossy surface, my blotchy skin was an atrocity.

  I shook my head. The thought wasn’t mine. It wasn’t the baetyl’s, either. The enormous geode didn’t have anything so easy to comprehend as thoughts, but I could feel its distaste. My blood-and-sinew body was a foreign abomination that did not belong.

  I’m here to help. I didn’t know if I said it out loud or only thought it, but it didn’t matter. The baetyl wasn’t listening. It pushed magic through me, using me, and fire and water burst from my fingers, flaring up the sides of the crystal. Droplets fell back to splatter my face, but the flames roared upward until they touched the crack and splintered into a burst of sparks.

  I closed my eyes and grabbed for dominance over my own magic. I felt as vulnerable as the first time I’d linked with the FPD squad in Focal Park, when I’d nearly lost myself to the overwhelming magic—only this was a hundred times worse. The baetyl’s copious magic threatened to pull me into its undertow and destroy me. I fought back the only way I knew how: by grounding myself in my own individuality.

  I am an earth elemental. I am a gargoyle healer. I am a gargoyle guardian, I chanted, reasserting my control bit by bit. I focused on the earth element, and the more I held, the more the baetyl quieted. When I fine-tuned it to quartz, the baetyl’s magic shifted to a contained pulse inside me.

  I peeled my hands from the crystal, leaving bloody prints behind. Magic sat inside me, quiet as a sleeping dragon and more powerful than twenty-five gargoyle-enhanced full-spectrum elementals. The world bounced in my vision as I pivoted to locate Oliver and Celeste. I kept my movements slow and careful, as if I balanced fine china on my head, afraid a sudden movement would wake the baetyl’s magic and it’d annihilate me.

  “Mika?” Oliver asked, his chiming voice high with worry.

  “It’s alive,” I whispered, and the wonder of the realization threatened my internal balance. The baetyl’s magic quivered, and I repeated my mantra, idly manipulating the quartz element without releasing it. The baetyl quieted.

  “Can you fix it?” Celeste asked.

  With this amount of magic, I could do anything . . . if I could maintain control.

  “Whatever happens, don’t open yourselves to me,” I said, and waited until they both promised before turning back to the heart crystal and covering the bloody marks with my hands again. Disguising the ugly blotches helped me concentrate.

  In infinitesimal increments, I drew the other four elements to me and wove a filament to match the elements inside the heart crystal. When I pressed the blend into the crystal, the baetyl’s magic stopped testing me and unfurled, as unresisting as a gargoyle’s enhancement.

  I took a breath and forgot to exhale. Time stilled. The serene magic held the weight of the baetyl’s ancient life, and ancient had a texture: a velvet stillness of centuri
es of patience wrapped in the glassy-smooth sides of crystals that grew a few millimeters a decade. It had strength, too. Power akin to the boost of a hundred gargoyles breathed inside that vast sensation, a singular entity of immense power.

  And I was linked to it.

  I turned my attention up, sliding my magic through layers of tigereye and amethyst, prasiolite and carnelian, onyx and jasper and agate all wrapped in a honeycomb of elements. I lost myself in the purity of the shifting quartz varieties, and when I encountered the crack, the serrated edge splintered the velvet glass power inside me.

  My breath exploded from my lungs and I sucked in another one. In my chest, my heart beat like hummingbird wings, a blur cocooned in eons, pulsing ninety times in a single minute. The baetyl’s magic recoiled from the fluttering sensation, frothing inside me and threatening to spill through my skin. I gulped in another breath and held it, willing my heart to calm. If I lost control of the baetyl’s power, I’d drown. Fighting was useless. I couldn’t combat the strength of the baetyl; I could only work with it.

  Keeping my eyes screwed shut, I nudged my magic back in line with the healthy quartz of the baetyl, then reached for the crack. I was prepared for the jagged texture this time, and I let it flow over me. As carefully as I would heal a gargoyle, I knitted the broken seams back together. The quartz reshaped beneath my magical touch, closing the base of the wound, but it didn’t heal. The jangle of broken magic buffeted me, refusing to be calmed.

  Pulling back to the base of the crack, I searched the enormous crystal until I found the problem. The honeycomb of elements had been shattered along with the physical quartz. I could mold the physical seams back together, but if I didn’t fix the magic inside the crystal, it would tear itself apart again.

  One problem at a time. Sweeping my magic up the crystal, I pulled the fragmented pieces of the quartz together and sealed the top.

  My eyes snapped open in shock and I fell back from the heart crystal. The enormous pillar was wider than a house and composed of every variety of quartz possible, but I’d healed it as easily as I’d replaced Oliver’s broken ruff on the train. I stumbled to the spherical wall for a better look, eyes locked on the upper reaches of the crystal. My elemental senses didn’t deceive me; it was whole.

  “Whoa,” I breathed.

  The baetyl’s power pulsed inside me, waiting, ready.

  On wobbly legs, I returned to the base of the heart crystal. I didn’t need to touch it, but I did anyway. I needed the reminder that I had hands.

  Feeding elements back into the crystal, I studied the honeycomb, slowly working my way up as I memorized the pattern, then faster as I grew more confident. The heart crystal’s internal structure was incredibly intricate, but at its core, the honeycomb was gargoyle. Not a gargoyle, but a conglomeration of the pattern of the elements inside all gargoyles: the variances between quartz types, the shape of air element lifting their wings, the fire of life in their stone chests. All of it melded together into a complex design inside the heart—right up until the split.

  Where the elements had been severed, the quartz lay dormant, no different or more magical than my seed crystals. The wrongness of that lifeless quartz stirred the ancient magic inside me. Fury not completely my own curled my fingers into fists, but the pain of my nails gouging into the cuts on my palms brought me back under control.

  The baetyl’s magic vibrated a warning when I grasped the tattered edge of a severed line of earth magic. I added to it as I stretched the fragile thread through an elaborate knot of fire, water, wood, and air before reconnecting it on the other side of the mended fissure. The baetyl quieted.

  It approved.

  After that, I worked faster. Healing the enormous multi-quartz heart crystal tested everything I’d learned as a gargoyle healer. The baetyl was alive without being a creature. It both used magic and exuded magic—and was magic. It was the only explanation for how the baetyl could supply me magic without weakening itself. Against all logic, I used the baetyl’s own magic to heal it, and it grew stronger.

  The farther up the crystal I magically mended, the more my awareness of the baetyl expanded. I could sense that the heart crystal extended as deep into the soil as it protruded, and the roots of the other crystals riddled the soil in every direction.

  At the edge of my perception, I caught glimpses of a pattern in the placement of the crystals and the location of the types of quartz around the heart. I strained to comprehend the sophisticated arrangement, and the baetyl’s magic slid into the open door of my curiosity, stretching inside me. I protested, a murmur of sound too round and wet. Fear fluttered weak in my chest, vibrating around the frantic pulsing beneath my ribs. When the velvet-glass power buffered me from the fear, I experienced a flicker of relief; then that, too, was soothed into calm acceptance.

  By the time I finished looping and knotting the honeycomb of elements into perfect harmony, I no longer needed to use the existing edges of the torn elements as a guide. The pattern had become obvious. It was in the shape of the entire baetyl and the placement of the crystals that grew in it. It was in the location of the baetyl in the mountain. It was the essence of new and always, birth and renewal.

  The flaws in the baetyl’s perfection stood out as if on fire. Once the heart was healed, I dove toward the first problem. Dead baby gargoyle skeletons inside powdery eggs were not part of the grand design. I tore apart the lifeless rock and scattered the grains across the crystal-studded floor, then pulled the fine granules through a thousand tiny gaps I created between the crystals, sweeping the remains into the soil below.

  The cave-in rubble went with it, pulverized and scattered into the mountain. Growing the quartz in the gap in the ceiling took time, but I accelerated the process by flinging the elemental pattern of the heart into the gap. The ridge leapt to obey my command, shaking around us. I didn’t let up until crystals glittered across the ceiling, lit with the internal glow of the pattern. The crystals were small, but given another few centuries of growth, they’d match the rest. In the meantime, they completed the arc of the roof, connecting the broken magic again.

  A wash of power swept through the heart, bringing pain and taking it away again. The baetyl breathed around me, more than a pattern now. I could feel the crystals in my bones, the three remaining gaps in the roof like wounds in my own flesh. I turned to examine them, only to stare, befuddled, at the wall of crystals blocking my way.

  Walking took all my attention. I watched my feet lift and clop across the crystal floor, confused by the texture of my boots. When I reached the wall, I looked away from the flat brown leather with relief and pushed a hand flat against an amethyst crystal. My limb was pink and squishy. That wouldn’t do. I pulled quartz from the amethyst and spread it across my hand, growing little crystals to coat the doughy flesh.

  The quartz looked right, but it hurt.

  Movement in the heart spun me around. Gargoyles! I reached for them but pulled my magic back before it touched their bodies. They weren’t my gargoyles. They beat their wings, gaining altitude, then dove out of sight into the crystal wall high above me. The sinuous movement of the smaller gargoyle was familiar, but I’d never created a gargoyle in that shape.

  I’ve never created a gargoyle at all.

  I plucked at the thought, examining it. It felt important, yet it made about as much sense as the pain in my hands.

  I’d figure it out after the baetyl was whole.

  Facing the wall again, I shifted the crystals and walked unimpeded along the floor, bending the crystals back into place behind me without looking. Outside the heart, the remaining wounds pulsed with insistent urgency. Walking was taking too long; I unfurled my—

  Where were my wings? A frantic pat down my back revealed smooth flesh and no wings. How had I become this loathsome malformation?

  I quested into my body with the elements, tuning them to match the foreign liquid and meat materials. When I encountered the earth, water, and wood blend of my shoulder blades, I g
rafted my elements to them, converting them to quartz as I grew them.

  My body spasmed, and I screamed when two blades formed beneath my skin and burst out my back. The baetyl screamed in unison, every crystal shrieking. The sound terrified me, bringing me back to myself.

  I lay across a waist-high crop of variegated onyx, the sharp tips gouging into my stomach and armpit. The fingertips of my left hand hung a few inches above the baetyl floor, and I watched blood drip from my ring finger onto the prasiolite below.

  Breathing hurt, but as my vision darkened, I forced myself to take sips of air. Or maybe it was the baetyl that powered my lungs. It pulsed inside me more intimately than any gargoyle’s boost and sweet with possibility. I’d just moved twenty feet and untold tons of crisscrossing quartz as easily as I might push aside a gauze curtain. Stitching it back together should have taken the strength of every FSPP in Terra Haven working all day, and I’d done it without thinking.

  I’d modified my body’s blood and bones and skin to grow quartz as easily as I’d reshaped the heart crystal. And it’d been easy.

  I’d have grown myself wings if it hadn’t hurt too much.

  I whimpered when I realized I wanted to do it again. The power swelled inside me, waiting to be used, waiting for me. With the baetyl backing me, I could do anything. Fusing human and gargoyle physiology was only the start. I could level this mountain and build a new one. I could reshape the world in the design of the baetyl, making it all a perfect place for gargoyles. I could cure any disease. It wouldn’t have to be only gargoyles, either. With the baetyl sitting in my head, the complexity of my own body became remarkably simple. I could be a healer of all creatures—the greatest healer who ever lived. I could perform the kind of magic people would talk about generations from now. No one would match me. I’d be more powerful than any FSPP in the world—than all of them linked.