Curse of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 2) (13 page)

With a snarl, I forced my attention from Oliver. Mimicking Marcus’s tunnel, I spun earth around the line of water. I hadn’t compensated for my strength when working the purified earth inside the purifier’s sphere, and the ground leapt upward into a rock tunnel through which the water magic slid unchallenged.

“Nice,” Marcus said in approval.

I barely heard him, having spun back to protecting Oliver. Only now I had to split my attention between maintaining the earthen tunnel and fighting the malicious braid. Oliver fought, too, but he couldn’t prevent the braid from dividing his internal magic. Already, fire swirled on his right, earth on his left, and the unnatural divide sapped his strength. Every task that forced my attention from Oliver enabled the purifier to bore farther into him, and I despaired at the increasing difficulty of battling the mindless magic. Worse, the magic in the link was dwindling. Winnigan required a chunk to lock the incoming air and outgoing water lines to the anchor in her section, and Marcus required twice as much to lock down the incoming water and outgoing fire lines as well as maintain his protection around the water line inside the polarized fire wedge. On top of that, the captain required the majority of our linked magic to build the remaining lines.

I jumped ahead of Grant to build a quartz anchor at the apex of the wood section and Marciano lashed the incoming fire element to his anchor. Not stopping, Grant plowed a wood line across the wood and water sections toward us. I built the last anchor a few feet to my left, in front of the earth section, but before I could turn back to Oliver, Grant thrust rough-hewn wood magic across the earth section, and I had to scramble to build a new tunnel through the rocks all the way to the anchor to protect his magic. At the last second, I remembered to make a constructive pentagram in the quartz anchor.

“Brace yourself,” Marcus said.

The wood magic slammed into the anchor and me at the same time as the captain transferred control to me. I fumbled to grab the fraying ends of the wood line and wrap it into my constructive pentagram inside the quartz. Grant gave me barely enough time to lock it in place before he shoved a fresh band of earth through the anchor. I held tight as Grant shot the final line of the pentagram across the park toward his air anchor.

Magic pulled me in four directions at once, and when I reached for Oliver, all the pieces I held started to unravel.

“Hold it!” Marcus said.

I lurched for the anchor, squeezing the wood and earth lines back into place, only to have my earth tunnels crumble. The entire pentagram trembled under the strain as I righted my fortifications.

“Just a little longer.”

My world narrowed to holding my four pieces of magic. If I failed, the pentagram would collapse, the purifier would continue to grow, and Oliver would die.

I shook with the need to get back to defending Oliver.

Marcus said something, but his words garbled against my anxiety. The braid tunneling into Oliver had thickened to span his chest. Without magic, I couldn’t tell how far through him it’d burrowed, or how much damage it had done. If I didn’t mend the rifts of the dichotomous magic, he’d be torn apart.

Magic blossomed through the link, doubling its strength. I gasped, looking around for what I already knew I’d find.

Gargoyles! We had help!

I spotted four winged shapes against the bright sky and my heart soared.

Through the link, I felt everyone shore up their defenses. Grant connected the earth line to his anchor and a surge of power swept through the five overlapping lines. Yet even with the influx of magic, when I attempted to split a fifth layer of magic toward Oliver, the four others I held quaked.

Far too slowly, the captain took control of the anchors, and when he had mine, I spun immediately for Oliver. The purifier had burrowed more than halfway through him, and I fought it back with precise ferocity, looking up only once I’d reduced the purifier’s magic to the weakest hold possible.

I saw Kylie first. Her white-blond hair streamed behind her as she ran down the hill at Seradon’s side. The crack of rock feet landing on granite announced the arrival of the gargoyles. Not just any gargoyles, either.
My
gargoyles.

Oliver’s four siblings landed in a semicircle around him, and my heart sank to my toes.

“Back up! Get away from Oliver.” I shooed them with a frantic arm, and they hopped aside, Herbert jerking back when I almost bopped his toucan nose. “This isn’t safe. What are you doing here?”

“We had to come. You need us,” Anya said.

An outsider would never guess the five adolescent gargoyles had been born in the same clutch. Quinn looked like a small citrine lion with the scales of a dragon instead of fur; Anya resembled a panther, though one with a navy dumortierite and mint-green aventurine body rather than black; Lydia’s purple, pink, and orange agate swanlike body glowed like a flying sunset; and Herbert’s pink quartz armadillo body and toucan beak were shot through with cobalt dumortierite. Aside from Lydia’s two lionlike feet vaguely resembling Quinn’s, no two siblings shared the same animal characteristics—other than wings, of course, but all gargoyles had wings. Their similarities were more subtle and were reflected in their magic.

“Is Oliver okay?” Quinn asked, creeping closer again.

“No.” I fought the purifier’s magic even as I waved him back.

“Whoa! What happened to the park?” Kylie asked as she pounded to a stop near us.

“Sir, I’m back with reinforcements,” Seradon said, speaking to the captain’s mirror sphere.

“Hold tight. I’m going to loose the destructive magic.” Grant’s sphere flickered and disintegrated.

“Grant!” Kylie cried.

“Hush. He’s fine,” Seradon said, grabbing Kylie’s arm and holding her in place without looking away from the park.

A perfect half-sphere of polarized magic cupped the middle two-thirds of the park, transforming the once beautiful terrain into five nightmarish wedges of destruction. Thick lines of the largest pentagram ever created inside the bounds of Terra Haven bisected the dome, the five quartz anchors at the pentagram’s points now barely two feet from the leading edge of the creeping magic. Ignoring all normal laws of magic, four bands of looping elemental pairings speared arrow-straight across the undulating grounds and disappeared into the city. The fifth bore into Oliver.

Grant stabilized the magic flowing through the enormous park-spanning pentagram. Drawing on the boost of magic from the gargoyles, he fortified the bonds connecting each tip of the pentagram, then freed them from the anchors.

The pentagram shrank until the tips rested against the underside of the purifier’s sphere. I held my breath.

“Come on,” Seradon said. “Work, damn it.”

Magic surged through the pentagram as each element branch drank from the polarized magic on one end and destroyed it on the other, using the purifier’s magic against itself.

The polarization field shrank, slowly at first, then faster, retreating in a rush toward the center of the park and the marmot gargoyle where it all began. A wave of heat escaping the fire section washed over us, whipping my ponytail against the side of my face and drying the sweat in my scalp. The incessant rumble and cracks of earth died down, and the snap of tree branches and the muted roar of the new waterfall filled in the silence.

My relieved sigh caught in my throat when I reached for Oliver. Magic gushed from him, the thick braid sucking down his life as fast as the pentagram destroyed the purifier’s polarized magic. The traumatic drain ripped fissures through Oliver’s insides, and pain fractured my skull, an echo of the agony Oliver experienced.

I tried to stop the purifier from feasting on his magic, but it was too strong. My only option was to hack the braid from him, inflicting more cuts into his tortured body to sever its tendrils. When I sliced the last of the fire and earth strands from his chest, the braid snapped toward the dwindling dome of polarized magic, its slingshot speeds unchanged when it passed through the fox gargoyle.

The moment I freed Oliver, I wove patches through his body, mending all the cuts and evening his internal magic with gentle brushes of magic. I didn’t let up until he’d stabilized, and then only because I didn’t want to add too much strain to his body.

He opened his eyes, blinking up at me, and even managed a small smile.

“We did it. You’re going to be okay,” I said.

“The other lines aren’t retreating,” Kylie said, pointing to the four remaining braids stretching beyond the horizon. At the center of the park, the dome of polarized magic shrank out of sight.

“Oh no,” Seradon said.

The other gargoyles. They didn’t have a healer on hand to cut the braids from them. The destruction of the purifier would drain the magic from them and kill them.

“I’ve got to help them!”

I sprang to my feet. I needed transportation. A pegasus or gryphon or flying carpet, something fast and—

The severed fire–earth braid rebounded, hurtling up the slope on its previous trajectory. I lunged for Oliver, but it reached him first, burrowing back into his chest with renewed vigor.

8

Oliver whimpered and stilled. I fell to my knees, fighting cable-thick bands of fire and earth. Through sheer will and with the backing of all the power of the link, I forced the purifier’s braid from Oliver. It wormed back into him the moment I slackened my defense.

Seradon crouched and examined Oliver. “She tuned it to gargoyles,” she said, recognizing the problem instantly. “Damn that woman!”

A dome of polarized magic sprang to life at the heart of the park, then swelled with alarming speed as the five divided elements rebuilt. Thanks to the earlier remodeling of the park, each section was sculpted to support a singular element and all the counterelements had already been eliminated.

Grant yanked magic through the link, setting fire to the overgrown groves in the botanical gardens and funneling water straight across the park to the fire section through a huge trough he cut into the earth in front of the expanding polarization bubble. The field stuttered as it battled destructive elements, its expansion reduced to a slow creep. The captain had bought us time, but not much.

A new mirror sphere rocketed across the park and opened in front of Marcus.

“This isn’t going to work until we can disconnect the gargoyles,” Grant said.

Everyone turned to look at me. When Grant spotted Kylie behind me, his face tightened, but he didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know if I can,” I said, keeping up a steady counterattack on the purifier’s braid in Oliver. Quinn crept closer to his brother on almost silent rock paws, and I shooed him back again.

“We don’t know how far away they are,” Marcus said, eyes on the horizon. The water–earth purifier line extended across Lincoln River and disappeared into the city beyond. The others looked equally long.

“It’s not just the distance,” I said. “Even if I could reach them all, I don’t think I could break the purifier’s connection. Once it gets a firm hold, I can’t force it out without tearing the gargoyle apart. All I could do for the fox was patch her insides so the magic didn’t kill her.”

“The fox?” Seradon asked.

“Another gargoyle was connected to this line, there, in the rocks,” I said, pointing. I wished I could get back to the fox now and check on her, but until the purifier was destroyed, I wasn’t leaving Oliver’s side. “This corrosive braid channeled through her.”

“Then it jumped to Oliver?” she asked.

“In a way. He put himself in its path. It would have kept going until it found another gargoyle. Oliver thought . . .” He thought I could save him, and I was doing a miserable job. “I’m barely staying ahead of the braid in him.”

“I see that,” Grant said.

Of course. Through the link, he’d know exactly how I fought the purifier in Oliver, just as I knew he continued to feed fire into the trees across the park, drawing on magic from the link. A huge column of smoke rose into the sky, matched in the fire section where the captain’s river of water doused flames and molten embers alike.

“If it bore through the fox that quickly, the other lines might have already slid through the first gargoyles they encountered and be on to the next,” Seradon said.

I felt sick.
Slid
didn’t come close to describing what would have happened to those gargoyles. Without my patches to hold them together, the dual polarized magic would have shattered their bodies, killing them before embedding itself in the next victim.

“So you can break the purifier lines from the next gargoyles before they have a chance to take root?” Grant phrased it as much as an order as a question.

“Maybe.” If I was close to the gargoyle. If the timing was just right. If I let the four currently trapped gargoyles die first.

“We couldn’t link that far apart,” Marcus said. “Even if Mika broke one or two of the purifier’s lines, she wouldn’t be able to hold them from all five gargoyles at once over that distance, either.”

“She might not need to. We could each take a gargoyle and defend it after she’s broken the purifier’s hold,” Winnigan said, her voice faint through Grant’s mirror sphere. He must have a similar sphere next to Winnigan and Marciano, conferencing us all into this conversation.