Curse of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 2) (14 page)

“That’s some complex quartz manipulation she’s doing,” Seradon said. “Look at how she’s holding Oliver together while countering the purifier. She’s perpetually healing and fighting at the same time. Do you think you could do that?”

I didn’t know who she directed her question toward, but I couldn’t believe she doubted her teammates. They could do mind-boggling things with the elements; surely they could work quartz at this scale.

“Maybe. No. Not like that.” Marcus squinted at my weaves. “But if the purifier wasn’t embedded in the gargoyle and I only had to hold it back, I could do that.”

Grant shook his head. “No. Seradon’s right. We need the gargoyles to be closer. Can we move them?”

“That’d take time,” Marcus said.

“It might be our only option.”

“We could hold the lines closer,” Anya said.

“What? No!” I whirled to face the gargoyle. She flared her wings at my outburst. Seated next to Oliver, I was marginally taller than the blue and green panther. When I’d first met her, she’d been barely as large as a housecat, but she’d always possessed the same determined look when she made up her mind.

“Let her speak,” Grant said.

“No.” Anya was proposing likely suicide for her and her siblings. It was bad enough Oliver was suffering through the purifier’s attack.

“My siblings and I could hold the divisive braids here, close enough for Mika to reach.” Anya glanced at her siblings, and they all nodded in complete agreement. I bit off another protest. “Mika would be able to keep them from burrowing into us as she’s doing with Oliver.”

Fight this same battle on five fronts against five different elemental braids of polarizing magic? Even with the full power of the link behind me, I doubted it was possible.

“If I fail, you’ll all be trapped. You might die.” It was hard to force the words out, but Anya needed to know.

The gargoyle panther shook her head. “You will protect us.”

“I
am
protecting you by telling you not to do this.”

“We have to. For Oliver. I know you won’t let us die.”

I swallowed against a lump in my throat. I didn’t deserve that kind of blind trust, but against such unwavering confidence, there wasn’t anything I could say to change her mind.

“It might work,” Seradon said.

“It
will
work. Mika is strong,” Anya said.

“It will only work if the purifier will lock on a closer gargoyle and let go of the one farther away,” Grant said.

“I will try,” Lydia said. She spread her wings to launch, and I grabbed for her.

“Wait! Let me try something.”

I fumbled with the elements, my panic making me clumsy, and I teetered into the vast magic of the link.
I am a gargoyle healer. I am terrified.
The thoughts anchored me.

After pummeling the braid back far enough to give myself a breather, I used a hook of earth to lift a vein of quartz from the soil in front of Oliver. I separated a solid bar of purified quartz from the rest and dropped it onto my palm. Then I shoved the earth smooth again while shaping the quartz into a disk. I made it the exact same size and shape as the disks I’d used to protect the marmot, and I placed it against Oliver’s chest. A few layers of the elements and a twist to invert the pentagram, and I had a duplicate blockade.

The purifier’s thick magic passed through it as if it didn’t exist and burrowed into Oliver.

“It was worth a try,” Seradon said.

I wasn’t ready to give up. Stripping the quartz of all elemental magic, I started fresh, feeding it a combination of elements that resonated with gargoyles. If I could make the purifier think the quartz rock was a gargoyle, maybe I could trick it into locking on to a piece of rock instead of a living creature.

This time when I held the disk in front of Oliver, the fire and earth braid reacted, unraveling my magic too fast to follow and pulverizing the quartz to dust before leaping into Oliver.

I slumped even as I blocked the deadly braid. I could tune quartz to harmonize with a gargoyle, but I couldn’t infuse the complexity of a living being into the lump of rock to make it strong enough to withstand more than a second of the braid’s attack.

Smoke blew into my eyes, and Kylie casually pushed it aside with a brush of air, her magic stronger thanks to the gargoyles. The expanding raw earth stifled the river Winnigan continued to funnel from the newly formed lake along the path Grant had cut, and steam hissed louder than a geyser as the water evaporated in the fire section. Across the park, new green growth smothered the burning trees. It wouldn’t be much longer before the purifier’s divided magic retook the ground we’d gained and continued its inexorable push toward the city. I couldn’t think of any other options to try, and we were running out of time. We had to stop this.

I forced the words through numb lips. “We have to use gargoyles.”

Seradon rested her hand on my shoulder, her eyes troubled. “If you can keep the purifier’s invasion to a minimum, you’ll be able to break them all free. This should work.”

If
and
should
were not words I wanted to use in tandem with gargoyle lives.

“You’ll have to free all the gargoyles simultaneously when I activate the destructive pentagram again,” the captain said. “This is powerful, unpredictable magic. If your timing’s off, the backlash could leave you scarred. Or nullified.”

Now he tried to talk me out of it?

I slashed the hungry tendrils of fire and earth as they tried to root into Oliver, but my eyes swept over the other four gargoyles. If we didn’t give this a try, the city would be consumed and torn apart by the polarized magic. That thought alone should have been enough motivation, but I wasn’t thinking about the city. I was thinking about the countless gargoyles who would suffer or die. Out in the city, four other gargoyles were currently being used as amplification tools for the purifier, helplessly being fed upon. They didn’t have anyone fighting the purifier for them. My little gargoyles were willing to try to save them, and their bravery humbled me. I didn’t relish taking the chance of being mentally scarred; the possibility of being nullified made my hands shake.

“I won’t be any help with the pentagram,” I said.

“We already laid the ground work. We’ll manage without you this time,” Grant said.

I turned to Lydia. She cocked her agate head, and when I reached across Oliver, she rubbed against me. “You’ll be paralyzed the moment you touch the magic. Don’t fly into it.”

“Okay.” She backed up to give herself room to extend her wings.

“Be careful.”

Lydia launched into the air and flew toward the purifier’s braid of air and fire on the other side of the fire section. I watched her go with my heart in my throat, wishing I could call her back.

No one spoke as she dropped to the ground a few feet from the thick helix cables flowing out of the park in an unerringly straight line. Lydia examined the braid, her long neck snaking back and forth in agitation; then she flared her wings and dove into the flow of magic.

The instant it touched her, she froze, paralyzed. Polarized air and fire drilled into her body, and I dove in with it. Pain exploded in my mind, almost jostling me from the gargoyle, but I clung to her and threw my magic against the purifier. Earth countered air and water countered fire. Dividing my efforts, I patched Lydia’s insides with fresh gargoyle-tuned weaves of quartz, and I didn’t let up until the purifier’s hold had weakened to mere tendrils. Then I bounced back to Oliver and checked the steady creep of the purifier into his body.

“It worked,” Marcus said.

The purifier’s braid now ended at Lydia. Whatever gargoyle had previously been pinned on the end of the esurient magic had been freed, leaving Lydia as trapped as Oliver.

“Praise the skies,” Grant said in a rare display of emotion.

“Captain,” Seradon said. The warning in her tone made me look. The polarization field bulged, consuming three feet of ground in every direction, extinguishing the last of the water in the fire section. A crack and grumble of shifting earth dammed Winnigan’s rerouted river.

“Looks like it’s going to be a race,” Grant said. “The rest of you gargoyles, move out.”

“Wait!” I grabbed for Anya, Herbert, and Quinn, and they stumbled to a stop, turning to look at me. “Drop in one at a time around the circle. And fight with everything you’ve got.”

Quinn ran back to me to nuzzle his broad lion head against my arm; then all three were airborne, flying high over the purifier’s bubble to sacrifice themselves, secure in their beliefs that I could save them.

* * *

Anya fused with the purifier first, stepping into the line of wood and air between Marciano and Grant. I thought I was prepared for the purifier’s swift attack, but it still caught me off guard. For several harrowing minutes, I grappled with the ferocious braid, patching Anya as I could until I forced the purifier
almost
out of her. Then I had to leap to Oliver to fight the encroaching divisive magic in him, then in Lydia, before I could check on Anya again. A few quick snips kept the purifier in place.

I took a steadying breath. I could do this.

“Herbert needs somewhere to land,” Seradon said. “Velasquez, build him a platform. Make it strong. If he falls into the water, he might drown before we can save him.”

I struggled to focus on the physical world. Where Herbert needed to land between the water and the wood sections, the ground had eroded, and a waterfall cascaded along the purifier’s braid. The moment the line touched him, Herbert would be paralyzed and he’d plummet to the bottom of the churning water.

A platform of granite lifted from the ground, growing until it cleared the water by five feet. I felt for the magic creating it, surprised to find more than the cables of earth reshaping the rock—I could distinguish Marcus’s magic signature, a steady heat wrapped around a core of rosewood and sparking with lightning like a living jewel. It was a signature as impressive as the man himself. He wasn’t half bad with earth, either. I should have expected nothing less from an FSPP, even if he was a fire elemental. Nevertheless, I wasn’t taking any chances with Herbert’s life.

Any
more
chances,
my guilty conscience accused.

“It needs to be stronger.” I twined my magic through Marcus’s, reinforcing the granite with a cage made from quartz I located from near the base of the pillar. Nothing short of a fire-fused thunderbolt would break the platform.

“You’re getting bossy,” Marcus said.

My rebuttal was cut short when Herbert landed on the platform and the purifier’s polarized wood and water magic sliced into him. Methodically, I beat it back, layering familiar patches to lessen the pain. His acute agony had barely faded to a dull ache when Quinn fell into the line of water and earth.

“Too fast,” I gasped, but he was too far away to hear, and it was too late anyway. The purifier drew strength from all five gargoyles, eating into them. I siphoned magic from the link to combat it on five fronts, frustrated by the lag in the magic. When I tried to grab more, Grant growled.

“Work with what you’ve got,” he said, his voice coming from over my shoulder in the mirror sphere.

I growled right back, too focused on saving Quinn to form words. A giant shaft of air speared between one anchor and the next, consuming the magic in the link as Grant rebuilt the destructive pentagram. The extra boost the four gargoyles had given us had been cut off one by one as they’d sacrificed themselves to the purifier.

I seized all available remaining magic, and even though I wielded more than I could normally hold even when a gargoyle boosted me, it still didn’t feel like enough.

As soon as Quinn was safe, I hopped to Oliver, then Lydia, Anya, Herbert, and back to Quinn. Cycling through the gargoyles wasn’t fast enough. The purifier ate into them with mechanical relentlessness, and every time I slowed to fight it out of one gargoyle, it gained a deeper hold on the others.

Dividing my magic, I countered air in Anya and Lydia at once, then shifted to counter fire in Lydia and Oliver. Working my way around the circle fighting the purifier in two gargoyles at once proved more effective, but it still wasn’t enough. I split my focus again. Since earth was my strongest element, I kept a steady onslaught of earth against air in Lydia and Anya while countering an additional polarized element in a third gargoyle. Oliver, Quinn, Herbert, and back to Oliver, then to the fire in Lydia, the wood in Anya, and back to Oliver.

I lost all sensation of my body, dizzy inside the magic and unable to slow for even a second to gain my bearings. My world narrowed to the noxious rooting braids and the purifier’s unrelenting attack.

“Is she breathing?” Kylie asked. Her words bubbled out of the space between the gargoyles, and I dismissed them. They had nothing to do with saving the gargoyles.

“Don’t touch her. Don’t break her concentration,” Seradon said.

I wouldn’t break. I’d shatter. Or disintegrate. I existed in three places at once, fighting three different battles, and every so often, I found a spare thought for a fourth division of magic, and I wove a healing patch in a gargoyle. I was beyond being able to differentiate between them. They were simply five points, five homes for my consciousness. Five pieces of me, and all of them hurt.