Just a few more steps. Keep watching Grant, you big, scary—
A massive, dirt-clotted root surged from the ground, seizing my legs. I snapped forward, agony searing up the backs of my thighs as my momentum propelled me into an unnatural flex. Kicking and clawing, I scrabbled to free myself, but the spriggan’s thorny roots spiraled tighter up my thighs and constricted, ruthlessly grinding my leg bones together. I screamed in pain, and the spriggan’s head whipped toward me.
Without taking his gaze from me, he swung a backhanded blow into Grant, using vines thicker than my thighs to sweep the captain off his feet. I struggled harder, fighting the roots binding me, but it was like trying to escape hardened concrete.
His body blocking out the sun, the spriggan bent to examine me, and terror locked my muscles. Enormous round eyes regarded me, hunger burning in their insane depths. The spriggan’s creepy, childlike face pushed closer, filling my vision. He smiled, revealing a cluster of jagged wooden teeth longer than my legs. I trembled. His mouth opened wide, wider—wide enough to swallow me whole.
With fumbling fingers, I yanked open the top of the dragon’s breath pouch and threw the contents and bag down the spriggan’s throat. He reared back, shrieking, the sound drilling through my eardrums. The roots shackling me loosened, and I fell from his grasp, my numb legs refusing to support me. Whimpering, I dug my fingers into fistfuls of shredded wood and brambles, straining to drag my sluggish body away from the spriggan. Flailing vines hooked my side, tossing me several feet and slamming me against a broken stump. Head reeling, I yanked magic to me and built a shield of air to encase myself, but the spriggan crashed a fist of vines through it, catapulting me across broken limbs like a ragdoll. Moaning, I curled into a fetal position, my entire body throbbing.
A golden meteor crashed to the ground beside me, then enveloped me in stone wings. Quinn pressed us both to the ground, his head tucked against me beneath his wings, and I curled around his hunched body, hugging him to me. A complex air shield formed over us, and I clutched it, sobbing with relief as I took control of Grant’s weave and cocooned Quinn and myself in time to deflect the spriggan’s next slap. I had the impression of blades of air and fire through the link, but then the giant roared and battered us, the blows scraping us back and forth across the jagged ground. Quinn dug his claws into the earth, and I clung to his neck for all I was worth, fighting to hold the shield.
When the assault slackened, then ceased, I didn’t trust it. Quinn kept his head tucked beneath his wings, his cool quartz breath gusting across my neck. A maelstrom of crunching exploded nearby, and Quinn and I squeezed even tighter together. Then it quieted to an eerie creaking whine, and when that faded, the only sounds left were human-size footsteps cracking through the rubble.
“You guys can relax now,” Grant said.
Quinn whiffled against my neck one last time before popping his head out above his wings. A moment later, he folded his stone feathers against his side, allowing me to stand.
I rose stiffly, sharp needles of pain replacing the numbness in my legs. Quinn propped me up, and I leaned heavily on the gargoyle, looking first to Grant to assure myself he was intact, then searching the rubble for the spriggan’s massive body.
It had disappeared.
Oh no. “Did you have to kill him? Where’s the body? Did you incinerate him?” No, not even the captain could have created a fire hot enough to burn a creature the spriggan’s size to ash that quickly. I jerked to take in our surroundings. “Did you bury him? Did he run—”
“Take a breath, Kylie,” Grant said.
“Are we—”
“A breath. Now.”
I dutifully sucked in air.
“Come here,” he said, adding, “Quietly,” when I opened my mouth to demand an answer.
I limped after Grant as he tramped through the most heavily churned soil at the center of the destruction. There, in the midst of the wrecked trees, lay a small being no larger than a toddler with the dark wood skin of a dryad and the impish triangular face of a boy. Eyes closed, his sides slowly expanded and contracted. He was asleep.
“The spriggan shrank,” I said, feeling the need to state the obvious.
“This is his normal size.” Grant circled the spriggan, using gentle weaves of wood and water to assess his health. “Spriggans only swell up like that when they’re threatened. Or their dryads are.”
“Or when they go crazy,” I said.
Quinn crept forward, sniffing the air around the tiny spriggan, the action more catlike than gargoyle. “Are you sure it’s safe? He won’t attack anymore?”
“The dragon’s breath bought us a few days, and I’ll make sure he’s safely home before he wakes.”
Grant stripped off his shirt. The move was so unexpected, I simply stared at his broad, sun-kissed chest. His abdomen flexed as he tugged his shirt over his shoulders, revealing sculpted biceps and muscled forearms to match the rest of him. A dozen scratches crisscrossed his torso, none deep. The protective spells in his clothing had spared him worse injury.
My fingers itched for my camera, my hand actually fumbling in the air beside my hip before I remembered my camera and bag lay on the other side of the battlefield. I also realized I was standing flat-footed, staring at Grant like I never seen a perfect male chest before. Thankfully, he was too busy creating a sling out of his shirt to notice me gawking. I allowed my gaze to linger on his back as he bent to scoop the tiny spriggan into the cradle of his shirt, but I forced myself to look away before he straightened.
When I turned aside, pain jabbed my foot. A twig protruded from the shredded leather of my shoe. More detritus clung to the tattered hem of my pants. The only protective spells in my clothing were the kind that countered wrinkles, and I had more than my fair share of cuts beneath them. Most were on my arms, and I peeled back my sleeves to make sure none needed immediate attention. They stung but, for the most part, were shallow. I lifted my shirt to examine my stomach, poking gingerly at a tender spot over my ribs.
“Are you hurt?”
Grant’s gaze slid over my bare midriff, then down my legs and back up my chest. I fought a blush. He’s looking for wounds, not checking me out.
“I’m just scratched. It’s nothing serious.” I dropped the hem of my shirt. I knew without looking that my knees would be black and blue and tender for a while after the squeeze a spriggan had given them, but it wasn’t worth mentioning. When my gaze fell on Quinn, I forgot about my own injuries. Gouges sliced through his citrine body like malicious carvings. I rushed to his side.
“Oh, Quinn! Look at you! We’ll get you straight to Mika when we reach Terra Haven.”
Quinn left off nosing a particularly deep cut on his forearm and raised his chin. “I’m just scratched. It’s nothing serious,” he said, copying my words and tone exactly.
Grant snorted. I shot a glare in his direction before turning back to the young gargoyle.
“You saved my life twice today, Quinn. Thank you. I couldn’t have asked for a braver companion.”
He wriggled closer to me, eyebrows drawn. “I thought you were going to die. It scared me.”
I smiled. “It scared me, too.”
“Promise me you’ll stick to reporting from the sidelines from here on out,” Grant said, regarding me with his granite-hard captain’s expression. My spine stiffened, an argument poised on the tip of my tongue, until I read the concern in his eyes.
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
Grant sighed.
Movement at the periphery of my vision pulled my head around in time to witness the last of the dryads circling the destruction and melting into the forest in the direction of Colden Creek. I looked for Potentate Heartwood in their numbers but didn’t spot her. Rubbing tingling fingertips against my jeans, I stared after the dryads.
The forest lay hushed around us, seemingly empty of all life but the three of us and the unconscious spriggan. I remembered the frightened coyotes and panicked oxen. We likely were
the only creatures in Emerald Crown Grove right now.
The drone of a familiar male voice drifted across the field. I gritted my teeth and amended the thought: just the spriggan, the three of us who stopped him . . . and Nathan.
The senior writer crept closer now that the battle was over, the useless jerk. Where had he been when Grant was being flung through the air? Where had he been while the spriggan was doing his best to kill me and Quinn? If Nathan had linked his magic to ours, we would have been that much stronger. But, no, he’d stood on the fringes and observed.
I couldn’t catch the specifics of his words—those fed directly into the communication bubble floating against his chest to be stored for later use—but I knew the gist. He was stealing my story. The bastard.
“Where’s the rest of your squad?” I asked Grant. “Shouldn’t they have gotten here by now?” I left unsaid that we could have seriously used their help.
“They’re probably still dealing with the poisonous river serpent nest that hatched in Lincoln River,” Grant said without looking up. “Cleanup is a real pain with those.”
Of course. The story I had to beat. How could I have forgotten? Too busy trying not to die, I guess. Even so, I should have put it together sooner. The city guards wouldn’t have been equipped to handle the disposal of serpents; a task that dangerous required the special skills of Terra Haven’s FPD magic heavyweights.
Grant finished situating the sleeping spriggan in his shirt sling, then draped a loop around his neck so the spriggan rested against his chest. The image momentarily arrested my thoughts—both how good paternal looked on Grant and how chilling it was to see the violent creature snuggled up against his bare chest. If the spriggan woke, it could spear a vine straight through Grant’s heart before he could react.
The shutter click of a camera snapped me out of my daze. Nathan stood on a downed tree at the edge of the destruction, lens aimed at Grant and the spriggan.
Then my brain processed the ramifications of Grant’s words.
“You knew they were never coming, didn’t you?” I hissed the question, projecting my voice too low for Nathan to overhear.
Grant shrugged. “The odds were slim, but at least Nathan got word to my squad so they would know where to come next if I had failed.”
His matter-of-fact acceptance of his own possible death left me speechless.
Grant cupped an arm underneath the spriggan, supporting the small creature’s weight as he turned to survey the damage. “Good thing we got here so fast. This guy did an incredible amount of damage in just a few hours.”
I rubbed my thumb against my tingling fingertips. “You’re sure the spriggan showed up only a few hours ago? Not days ago?”
“Definitely only hours.” Grant walked the perimeter of the spriggan’s former footprint, sending tiny test pentagrams into the ground, checking for who knew what. “This guy has probably been roaming around partially crazed for a while, maybe weeks, but the familiarity of the dryads’ forest was likely what triggered his complete loss of control. If he’d gone unchecked for days, the forest would be decimated.” He looked up and winked at me as he added, “Not to mention, I’d be terrible at my job.”
His words confirmed my suspicions from this morning; I’d been tracking the rumors of restless dryads for weeks. Unless they’d had a collective premonitory vision about the spriggan, something else was going on in Emerald Crown Grove.
“You know he’s stealing your story, right?”
I followed Grant’s gaze to Nathan, watching as the reporter scurried down a narrow path toward Terra Haven. I visualized the weave to create a fireball, having learned the elemental structure during to my link with Grant, but I dismissed it before it formed, just as I dismissed the impulse to sprint after Nathan. Even if I had the energy to run all the way to Terra Haven, even if I could write the perfect story on the way and type it up faster than Nathan, I couldn’t prove the story had been mine first and Nathan was the thief. Dahlia would be more likely to take the word of a senior writer than her newest hire; at best, I’d look like a slacker without the ambition to find my own stories, and at worst like a whiner and a plagiarizer.
I released a heavy sigh, cupping a hand over my ribs when the motion stretched a bruise. “Yeah, I know.”
“Do you want me to detain him until you get your story submitted? It’s the least I could do.”
Grant’s offer warmed me to my toes, and I was sorely tempted. “No, but thank you. He can have this story.” I managed to say it without grinding my teeth. Almost. “I’ve got something even better in mind.”
I crossed my fingers. I hoped I was right.
13
Quinn and I parted ways with Grant at dusk, the captain with the spriggan still bundled against his bare chest striding off to book the quickest transport home for the volatile creature, Quinn and I trudging toward the Chronicle. When I suggested Quinn go directly home to check in with Mika and get his wounds seen to, he refused.
“You always say the story isn’t done until it’s turned in. I’m coming with you,” he said.
I smiled and didn’t try to send him away again.
My own cuts and scrapes had been tended to by Grant, all disinfected and a few of the deeper gouges patched with magic. He’d made me promise to make an appointment with a healer tomorrow, and I fully intended to keep my word.
Around us, Terra Haven was going to bed, all the shop fronts shutting down for the day. A few restaurants remained open, but all carpet rental shops were closed. We caught a late airbus through downtown, Quinn riding on the roof to the delight of the few passengers and the driver. Rather than fly to his usual perch atop the roof, the gargoyle shuffled up the steps to the Chronicle at my side, and I held the door open for him. Exhaustion draped his shoulders, weighing down his head. I had a feeling the moment he stopped moving, he’d pass out. I felt the same way.
At this late hour, only a few reporters hunched over their typewriters in the bullpen, lamps or glowballs illuminating their workstations. Nathan wasn’t among them.
I plodded straight to the darkroom, planning to develop my photos first so they would have time to dry while I wrote. Fortunately, my camera and bag had been right where I’d left them, unharmed, and I’d snapped a few pictures of the tiny spriggan strapped to Grant’s chest when he wasn’t looking—for the Chronicle, of course, and in case Dahlia wanted a visual for a follow-up article.
I expected to find the darkroom empty, but Stella puttered inside. The red-tinted glowball turned her thick white braid orange and softened the deep grooves of her face. I hadn’t yet learned everyone’s names, but Stella and I had bonded during hours of shared time in the miniature lab. As the photography department’s head developer, she had been kind enough to teach me a few tricks to get the most out of my pictures, too.
Stella took in my appearance, then Quinn at my side. The red light mixed with his golden tones, casting a stunning rainbow of sunset colors through the gargoyle’s thick stone ruff and across his wings.
“Do you need medical help?” Stella asked.
I scanned my clothes self-consciously. I’d gotten strange glances on the bus, too, but mainly people had been more interested in Quinn. My shirt hung in tatters; my pants flaked mud and blood and remnants of the harpy’s nest onto the hardwood floor. I knew I must smell awful, but my nose had grown accustomed to my own funk.
“It’s not as bad as it looks.” I fumbled into my bag for my camera, and Stella surprised me by taking it from my hands.
“I’ll develop these, hon. I wouldn’t want you to mix up the chemicals in your addled state. And I imagine you’ve got an important story to write; you got that look in your eye.”
“Thank you.” Tears misted my vision, my gratitude disproportionate in my exhausted state.
Stella started to pat me on my shoulder, hesitated at touching my filthy garment, and settled for tapping the back of my hand before shooing me from the darkroom.
Someone had left a
copy of the evening edition of the Chronicle on every typewriter squeezed onto the small table at the junior writers’ shared workstation. Not someone; Nathan.
Spriggan on a Warpath of Destruction. The headline spanned the front page, and a picture of Grant fighting the spriggan wrapped through the fold. The picture had been framed to capture Grant’s small figure in juxtaposition with the giant spriggan, and no one would have guessed that if the shot had been shifted an inch to the right, I would have been in the photo, too.
I skimmed the article. Nathan made no mention of me at all. His details on why the dragon’s breath worked were conspicuously absent, glossed over in his praise of Terra Haven’s illustrious FPD captain. He made no mention whatsoever of where the dragon’s breath had come from. Omitting information on Beldame Zipporah had probably been wise; having met the harpy, I had no desire to aggrandize her in any way that might encourage others to seek her help and endanger their lives. The weight of the favor I owed her hung over my head, though it had been well worth it to save the dryads and spriggan—and my own life.
Despite all it lacked, the article still told a stellar story. It grated to see Nathan’s name in the byline instead of mine. I wondered if the placement of the newspapers atop my workstation had been to discourage me from writing my own version of the story or simply a means for Nathan to gloat. Probably both.
“I should never have mentioned the dryads in front of Nathan,” Quinn said, his wings hunched above his shoulders.
Deadlines & Dryads Page 10
