Curse of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 2) (17 page)

“Are you up for linking yet?” Grant asked Seradon.

She shook her head. “Still can’t lift a pebble.”

“Okay. Mika, sit your ass down before you fall down and link up. We’re forming a bridge and getting to the heart of this.”

I didn’t wait until I was sitting; I thrust an equalized bundle of elements at Grant, and he deftly caught it, pulling me into a link. His thundercloud of magical strength swamped my thoughts; then Marcus’s heated rosewood shield snapped into the link, followed by the cool slap of Winnigan’s magic and a snarl of smoldering ironwood that must have been Marciano. Practice made it easier to distinguish each elemental in the link, but I didn’t take any pleasure in the new skill since it got me no closer to saving the marmot.

I lowered myself to sit on a blob of marble. At one point, it’d probably been a bench, but the polarization had reshaped it into a black-veined lump of rock. Kylie kept a hand on my arm as if she thought I’d tip off the seat. When the gargoyles dropped into the link, opening a seemingly bottomless well of magic, I thought Kylie’s concern might be justified. Magic roared through me, and I teetered on the edge of control. Losing myself in the magic was tempting. If I let go and lost myself, I’d be buffered from my pain.

I’d also be useless to the marmot.

I am a gargoyle healer.
I didn’t really need the words to collect myself this time, but it helped me to hear it, even if it was only in my thoughts.

“Are you okay?” Kylie asked. “Can I do anything?”

I shook my head. At one time, I would have thought this amount of magic could solve any problem. Now I knew better. All magic had its limits.

Grant and Marcus clasped forearms, and Marciano grabbed hold of Marcus’s other arm. Winnigan trotted to my side and reached for me. She stood close enough for us to lock arms without me needing to stand; then she and Marciano linked up so we made a human chain. Seradon stood back out of the way, her face a mask of frustration. Not being able to help must have been tearing her up inside.

I glanced at the marmot. I knew exactly how she felt.

The captain eased into the null field, arms splayed, one toward the gargoyle, the other toward Marcus. Tight lines formed around his eyes and his face whitened, but if I hadn’t been inside the null myself, I never would have known pain ate through his body from the inside out.

Grant drew on all our magic, and I swayed toward him. I wasn’t the only one; the squad tilted toward the captain as the forcible suction of the elements through us tilted our equilibrium.

Grant funneled all the magic out of the palm he stretched toward the marmot. The captain’s long arms enabled him to progress a few feet closer to the marmot than I had, but despite the massive level of our combined power, little more magic escaped into the null. With another step, his fingers on Marcus’s arm slid past the invisible barrier, submerging Grant in the null field.

The link frayed and magic whiplashed. With a cry, I cut myself free of the wild energy, and an explosion of raw elements burst into the air. A backdraft of wind pressed me to the marble and knocked Kylie to her butt; then it dissipated. Down the line, elements bloomed from the squad, displacing the air with audible snaps and pops. Inside the bubble, the captain stood several feet from the center, not even close enough to touch the marmot.

“Grant!” Kylie picked herself up and darted toward the null field. Seradon intercepted her.

The captain turned, his body hunched, and reached for Marcus, having lost contact in the wild release of magic. Marcus and Marciano both reached into the field, feeding their individual magic into Grant and yanking him free.

The marmot remained imprisoned in the middle of the null, as helpless to free himself as we were to reach him.

“It’s not dissipating or weakening,” Winnigan said, massaging her temples. “It’s
eating
magic and getting stronger.”

Chills tingled down my spine. Elsa had a lot to answer for. Her attempt to manufacture her own gargoyle-like enhancement had backfired in the worst way possible—and after having experienced the polarized magic, that was saying something.

“How big could the null field get?” Kylie asked.

I caught the anxious look Winnigan and Grant shared, and fresh dread weighted my stomach. If they were worried, I should be paralyzed with fear.

“It might stop where the polarization stopped,” Winnigan said. “It might not. We’ve never dealt with anything like this.”

If the null field got that big, the marmot would certainly die. The fox, too. If it didn’t stop expanding, all magic would cease to exist and everyone would die. We
had
to get magic to the center. But how? I looked around, desperately hoping a solution would drop out of the air.

“A bridge,” Marciano said. He was a man of few words, and he didn’t waste any now.

Grant snapped his fingers and pointed at Marciano. “Right. If we can’t be the bridge, we can make one. Something physical. With one of us on the inside guiding the magic, this could work.”

“Here.” Marciano wrapped wood, fire, and water around the branch of one of the remaining standing sycamores. The limb came free and Marciano’s magic stitched the bark together to repair the damage. Even as the limb floated toward us on hefty bands of air, Marciano reshaped it, stretching and growing the branch until it was thinner than my wrist and long enough to span the null field.

“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.