The Dark Portal (The Gryphon Chronicles, Book 3) (30 page)

Emrys flashed around a rueful smile. “He’s all right! Thank you, Lord Crafanc.”

“Becaw,” Red replied, giving the head dwarf an extra feather in case somebody else got hurt.

One of the other
warriors gave Wallace a hand up. “Atta boy! On your feet, you lazy lie-about.”

“Always have t
o learn the hard way, don’t you, Wally?” Another dwarf warrior clapped Wallace on the back.

He grinned
, the blood still wet on his clothes. “You know me. I just do it for attention.” He winked at Jake. “At least we know what to do now. When the lad says smash ’em, he means smash ’em. Into itty-bitty bits.”

“Sure, I thi
nk we’re getting the hang of it!” his friend teased. “Better late than never. Before
somebody
gets his butt bitten off.”

They laughed heartily.

Jake could not believe the dwarves were back to joking around after what had just happened, but they clapped each other on the back, took a few discreet swigs from their flasks, and seemed ready to fight again.

H
e shook his head, dazed. Mad, they were. Like wild, miniature Vikings.

“All right, everybody, listen up
,” Emrys ordered. “Now that we know what we’re dealing with, we’ll go deeper into the mine and set another trap—” His words broke off abruptly as he was interrupted by the sound of a long, rumbling growl.

“Ahh, we’ve got company, boys,” one of the dwarves said under his breath.

Indeed.

Whether it had been the smell of the bait or t
he scent of Wallace’s blood, they had lured more gargoyles than anyone expected.

Certainly more than they were quite ready for
.

The beasts began appearing in the shadows of all four tunnels around them.

Now it was they who were trapped in the center of the junction—in about the same spot where the bait had lain before the first gargoyle had devoured it.

Jake felt dizzy with fear
as he glanced around, finding all four tunnels blocked by large gargoyles.

“Don’t move,” Derek ordered softly. “We’re surrounded.”

“How did that happen?” one of the dwarves asked angrily through gritted teeth.

“Stealthy little buggers,” said another.

“Hungry, too,” Wallace added.

“Jake, to me,” Derek murmured.

Everyone backed toward the center of the intersection, facing outward in all directions, the dwarves with the spears, Derek with his Bowie knives, Red hissing, Helena baring her fangs.

Jake held the wand out before him
as he moved to Derek’s side. Red crept into position on his right.

“Fire at will, Jake. I suggest you clear the tunnel we arrived by
first, or they’ll have us trapped down here,” Derek said softly.

He gulped and nodded. “Petrificus!”

The battle exploded.

With his heart pounding in his ears and terror narrowing his senses down to tunnel vision, it was impossible to follow everything that was going on around him all at once. The gargoyles attacked; the dwarves swung their axes, chopping at the beasts to ward them off. Jake turned one monster after the other to stone; Derek smashed them into bits; it seemed to last for hours.

When one tall, horned gargoyle with crazed, glowing eyes put its head down and charged at Jake like a possessed bull, he froze for a fraction of a second that he could ill afford; then he fumbled with sweaty, shaking hands and only managed to drop the wand.

He
cursed and bent to pick it up, and would have had his head bitten off if Red had not pushed in front of him and roared in the charging beast’s face.

It skidded to a halt.

The ugly bull gargoyle stood as tall as Red; the two creatures had a staring contest. It only lasted about three seconds, but to Jake, it felt much longer. Then, to his astonishment, the bull gargoyle turned tail and ran from the Gryphon.

“Petrificus!”
Jake got it in the back while it fled, having recovered his wand.

The nearest dwarf used the blunt end of his axe blade to knock the statue down and pound the parts to gravel.

Someone screamed.

“He got me!”

“Hang on, Joffrey! We’ll get you a gryphon feather!”

“Petrificus!”

“This one’s mine!”

Smash!

Another gargoyle statue crumbled under a blow from Emrys’s sledgehammer.

Jake looked around, chest heaving. “Is that it? Is that all of them?”

He could hear the hurt man whimpering in the dark. Red hurried to give him a feather, then suddenly, a feline roar from above made Jake look up.

He was just in time to see a gargoyle with ugly, stunted wings dropping down toward him from the ceiling.

But Helena leaped off the metal catwalk and slammed the creature aside, driving it against the opposite wall with the force of her jump.

They both tumbled to the ground. The stunned gargoyle got up and ran, galloping
away on all fours.

The leopard-governess ran after it in blind fury, chasing it down the tunnel with the single-minded purpose of a cat who had already got a taste of its mouse.

“Helena, come back here!” Derek ordered. “Everyone needs to stick together! Blast that woman. Shapeshifters!”

“She can’
t help her instincts,” Jake blurted out, feeling like his life had just flashed before his eyes.

“
Come on,” Derek ordered everyone.

They a
ll ran down the tunnel after Helena, already hearing the snarls and growls of a ferocious fight echoing from the darkness ahead.

Strangely, they also heard
the unmistakable sound of running water.

“Oh, perfect,” Derek muttered.

At the end of the tunnel, they arrived in a large, hollowed-out cavern with an underground river cutting through it.

The high, sloped walls of the craggy cavern had rough-cut rock ledges here and th
ere, and a rock dome ceiling some forty feet high.

There were all sorts of ladders leading to higher tunnels above, with barrels and mining equipment clustered around the walls of the ground level. The rushing water was noisy, reverberating through the cave.

Through the Vampire Monocle
, Jake scanned the cavern until he spotted the governess-leopard on a rock ledge twenty feet above them. She had caught her gargoyle in her jaws and was shaking it violently by the back of its neck, just like a cat with its prey.

“Helena, really!” Derek scolded her.

She flung the gargoyle from her jaws, tossing it against the rock ledge.

Jake lifted the wand to turn it to stone, but the gargoyle recovered with surprising speed; it jumped up, shook itself, then launched at Helena in a counterattack.

Derek grabbed his arm and stopped him. “Wait for a clear shot. You might hit her.”

Jake obeyed, but he glanced around the cavern and saw fit to war
n the others of what the monocle showed him. “Stay on your toes. I’m counting six more of them in the shadows.”

“I see seven,” Emrys countered in a low tone.

It was true. They were everywhere. This was starting to look more like an infestation than a mere pest problem.

But after the group had successfully
fought off the first wave back at the intersection of the tunnels, these ones did not seem too keen to attack, other than the one Helena was battling.

“If she gets hurt, they’re goin’ to be all over her,” Emrys said grimly.

“I know. Helena, that’s enough!” Derek yelled. “Get out of there!”

H
e had no sooner shouted the warning than the gargoyle swiped at her ribcage with its claws. The cavern echoed with the shrill, sudden scream of an animal in pain.

Derek was instantly in mot
ion, both Bowie knives in hand. He dashed across the wooden footbridge over the river, scaled the ladder with effortless speed, and leaped up onto the rock ledge, turning to put the wounded shapeshifter behind him.

Helena tried to get up, but Jake could see she was hurt badly. Derek kicked the bloodied gargoyle off the ledge, but another one came at him.

“Red, get Emrys and me up there!” Jake cried. “Emrys, you get the gryphon feather to Helena; I’ll turn the gargoyles to stone. Hurry up! Derek can’t kill them, he can only hold them off, but not forever. We have to help him!” Jake rushed Emrys onto the Gryphon’s back, then jumped on behind him. “You’d better hold on. Hurry, Red, they need us!”

The Gryphon
lifted off and headed for the rock ledge, avoiding gargoyles who leaped at them from all directions.

“Petrificus!”
Jake yelled again and again, zapping each attacking beast.

When the
y fell out of the air as stone statues, the dwarves below smashed them—though the drops from various heights did much of that work for them.

Emrys held on tigh
t as they neared the rock ledge where Derek and Helena were still under siege; the head dwarf grimaced at the strangeness of riding on a gryphon, muttering dwarven curses to himself.

Red managed to land, though there wasn’t much room on the ledge,
with nasty, snarling gargoyles on all sides.

Jake swung off the Gryphon’s back
, then steadied Emrys, but he couldn’t help thinking they were in as much danger from Derek’s whirling blades as from the beasts’ big, curved claws.

Wand in hand, Jake went to the edge to stand beside the Guardian, casting the Petrificus spell on one gargoyle after another, while Emrys got another scarlet feather from Red and hurried to turn it into powder
, as before.

Poor Helena. They could hear her meowing pitifully behind him. Ja
ke had never seen Derek so furious. Guardians were dangerous under normal circumstances, but never more so than when someone they cared about was hurt.

“Petrificus!” Jake sent another bolt of lightning flying
from the wand, then made a halfhearted attempt to cheer Derek up. “I’m getting pretty good at this if I do say so myself.”

Another gargoyle turned to stone on the other end of the
wand’s lightning bolt and dropped, instantly rolling back down the cavern’s sloping wall.

“There you are. Steady, girl,” Emrys encouraged his black, furry patient.

“How is she?” Derek demanded as he parried a slashing blow from a drooling gargoyle’s sickle-shaped ivory claws. “Jake,” he urged in an aside.

“No problem. Petrificus!”

Zap!

“Nasty little blackguard got her pretty good,” Emrys reported from behind them. “But she’ll be feeling better in a moment.”

“Next time maybe she’ll listen to me,” Derek muttered.

“Next time?” Jake retorted. “Petrificus! Look out below!”

Smash.

“Kind of fun.”

Derek shook his head and kept on fighting. “You are your father’s son.”

Within another moment, the attack trickled off.

“Did we get them all?” Jake asked eagerly.

“I think…maybe,” Derek murmured.

But no.

Jake scanned the cavern
through the Vampire Monocle. There were still some gargoyles left, but they had retreated to the distant edges of the cavern, worn out and perhaps realizing it was a losing battle.