Curse of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 2) (18 page)

I almost dropped the pentagon as I maneuvered the two rods I stood between to rest on my shoulders, with the pentagon pressing against my throat. Afraid to hold the unsupported quartz pole in my cramping hand and risk snapping it, I used the back of my hand to lift the sagging tip. The slender quartz weighed no more than five pounds, but it felt like fifty.

My feet had taken root. I strained forward, pushing into the excruciating molasses, and heaved the lead weight of my throbbing foot. I kept my eyes pinned on the marmot, my entire existence narrowing to reaching him. Five minutes or five hours later, the fingers of my free hand brushed against his cold chest. The weight of Kylie’s quartz line lifted and I stumbled the last two steps on what felt like the broken bones of my own feet.

The marmot appeared no better up close. No life pulsed beneath my hand. Even though I’d told myself I wouldn’t be able to feel anything without magic, it still came as a shock. He felt like a piece of carved rock.

Please don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead.

I leaned close to the gargoyle, until the V of the two quartz rods cut into my neck and two separate lines rested against the marmot’s slender shoulders. He was the center of everything, and short of climbing him, this was the closest I could get to the heart of the null.

Very carefully, I closed my fingers around the pentagon. Magic trickled into me, soothing the persistent burn of the null in my fingertips. For a second, the relief swelled through me; then the misery of the other ninety-nine percent of my body overwhelmed my senses again.

I drew the magic to me—and gritted my teeth as the pain in my extremities increased in response. I could feel the others at the end of the quartz lines and the gargoyles inside their link. They held overwhelming magic, but no matter how they strained to shove it to me, the null strangled their copious magic to the merest trickle. It would be enough. It had to be.

I pushed every scrap of magic I could touch into the null. The soft lines of the loose elements drifted in the vacuum and vanished a few inches from the quartz.

Black spots danced in my vision as my brain tried to shut down to protect itself from the pain, and I abandoned that tactic. I needed more magic than I could pull, and continuing to use the tiny trickle squeezing through the quartz wasn’t going to cut it. In torturous increments, I refined the incoming magic into the five elements, layering them around the pentagram in the constructive cycle: earth, water, wood, air, fire. The magic in the rods shifted to align the incoming elemental energy to match my pentagon as the others caught on to what I was doing.

I planned on letting the constructive cycle do the work for me and build up its strength until it had enough magic to make an impact when I released it into the null, but it didn’t increase, or if it did, it wasn’t quick.

While I waited, my feet and legs went numb. The pain didn’t abate, but I couldn’t feel the muscles anymore. I couldn’t find my foot to lift or my knee to bend. I couldn’t move or escape. Panting, I sucked in volumes of empty null and very little oxygen. At this rate, I’d suffocate before the magic built up to a usable level in the pentagon. I needed to create a faster, stronger constructive cycle—the strongest I’d ever encountered.

I needed to use the purifier’s constructive pattern.

Oh, the irony.

I’d spent the last hour countering the purifier’s powerful helix braids. I knew them intimately. If I’d had a chance to think about it, I would have said I would take the knowledge of those destructive, horrific weaves to my grave, determined to never let them see the light of day again. Yet, less than a half hour later I was reconstructing them and praying it would save us.

Knowing what the weaves looked like and re-creating them with thimblefuls of magic were two very different concepts. To keep the trickle of magic flowing, the constructive pattern along the pentagon had to be maintained, so I was forced to build the helixes into the empty air at the center of the pentagon, unanchored. The elements kept slipping from my grasp and evaporating into the null. Every time I held two elements long enough to twine them together, fire ate through my body as the null tried to pull my skin inside out. The jabbing, pounding pain in my skull should have long since liquefied my brain. Part of me hoped it would. Soon. Just to make the pain stop.

Numbness crept up my hips and abdomen. I clung to the marmot with my free hand, afraid I’d topple. Three braids down and bands of steel nothingness tightened around my lower ribs, constricting my limited oxygen even further. The black dots were back, but this time I couldn’t stop. Even if I did, it wouldn’t help. The null had me in its jaws and it wasn’t going to let me go.

I formed the final helix braid as the paralysis slid over my chest. I’d divided the inner space of the pentagon into five triangles, creating an inverted purifier with all the spokes pointing inward. With a final twist, I connected the free tips of the braids using a minuscule constructive loop, then released it.

Please be alive.
I stared into the gargoyle’s dead eyes, feeling the life suck from me. Air was a fond memory.
You’d better live. You’d better make this worth it.

Magic swirled in the pentagon faster than before, but nothing happened. Not even tiny tendrils of magic released to counter the null. I’d failed.

I clung to the marmot, and his statue-like arms supported me under my armpits. My legs must have collapsed, because I was looking at the marmot’s pockmarked chest instead of his eyes.

“Hold, damn it!” Grant’s order penetrated the void, his voice muffled like it was filtered through a wall of rugs.

My neck went limp, and I remembered to loll my head back, away from the quartz pentagon. I couldn’t crush the pentagon.

Kylie stood at the end of her quartz rod, and though her expression was intent, tears coursed down her cheeks. Marcus stood at the next quartz rod, his face beet red and veins at his temple protruding as he shouted over my head at Grant.

“. . . have to get her . . . killing her . . .”

Crap. I was dying. I mustered my energy and fought to remain conscious, to draw a breath, to live. The void smacked me down as easily as I might crush an ant. My will petered out.

11

Darkness closed around my irises, narrowing the world to a pinpoint. A compressed cyclone of elements shot from the pentagon in a flat disk, slicing along the bands of quartz. They hit the null’s boundary and it imploded. Magic hit me with the slap of a belly flop against my entire body. The elements poured into me, igniting every fiber of my being in fiery agony.

Then air rushed into my lungs, and for a glorious instant, my body was absolutely pain-free. As if in slow motion, the purifier’s braids multiplied and swelled along the quartz rods before blasting outward, mindlessly hunting for the nearest gargoyles in their paths.

I’d saved us only to doom us.

No. Not again.

Pain sank back into my body, but it was an echo of the previous crippling agony and unimportant. Yanking the pentagon over my head, I turned my back to the marmot to shield it and smashed the purifier-lined crystal rods against the marble. Shards of quartz exploded and magic ripped from the pieces, bursting apart and slamming me into the gargoyle. His hard paws jabbed my ribs and my head snapped back against the solid rock of his neck.

My brain rang like a struck gong between my ears. Magic unraveled inside me, eating along my neural pathways. My knees gave out and I crumpled to the shard-strewn marble. A pillow of air cradled my head before it hit the ground, and I fought to keep my eyes open. The marmot still needed me.

A rush of warmth cascaded from my scalp to my toes. Fire magic slid into my bones, accompanied by a peripheral feeling of rosewood and traces of lightning. Marcus. A spiral of tension uncoiled in my stomach; I was safe. Cool water and veins of wood spun around me, sinking slowly into my skin until they met up with the warmth of the fire in my bones, restoring the magic leeched from me and leaving me blissfully numb.

“It’s just a field patch,” Marcus said. His voice rumbled against my ear.

He held me cradled against his chest. I was too euphoric from the lack of pain to care that I looked like a complete wimp. I allowed myself exactly five breaths to savor the glorious lack of pain before I struggled to stand. Marcus assisted me, not commenting when I had to brace a hand on his shoulder to stay upright after he set me on my feet.

I reached for magic, and it trickled to me along scalded mental pathways. My legs almost gave out with relief. I hadn’t nullified myself.

Oliver dropped from the pillar where he’d perched and landed next to me. He wrapped a wing around my leg, giving me much needed stability. Lydia swooped to land beside Marcus. She gently nipped at his shirt, then bumped his forearm with her rock head and leaned into him. Half grown, she came to his waist. She was going to be a huge gargoyle. The other siblings dropped to the ground and circled the marmot. Herbert flapped ungracefully when the muddy ground of the former water section suctioned to his armadillo paws, and he hopped a few feet to the left.

The five gargoyles opened their magical boost to me, but I didn’t accept it. The pain behind what little magic I held told me not to push myself. It felt like I’d sprained my brain, and I needed to heal before I could work magic at full strength, let alone gargoyle-enhanced levels.

I didn’t need the boost to form a soft probe, either. I slid the gargoyle-tuned mix of elements into the marmot, holding my breath. He’d been stabbed repeatedly, used as a magic pump, assaulted by polarized magic, and suffocated in a null. On top of that, he suffered from a disease that left him comatose. It was foolish to hope he’d survived.

His fragile life beat deep inside his jasper body. My breath shook when I released it. He teetered on the edge of life, fractured by magic and pain and the mysterious dormancy disease. Using the thinnest, most delicate bands of jasper-tuned earth and soft brushes of fire, I fed him magic. As I moved the elements through him, I wove gossamer-fine patches over his fractures and watched as his body absorbed my magic and used it to begin to heal. His frailty dictated my speed—achingly slow—and the extent to which I could assist him. Well before he was whole, I eased my magic from him. Anything more would overtax his system and do more damage than good.

I blinked at a world washed with muted pink and orange. It took my sluggish brain several seconds to connect the light with the sunset—longer to realize that I stared up at the sky because Marcus held me cradled in his arms.

Again.

How embarrassing.

“Will he live?” Marcus asked when I focused on his face.

“Yes. With more healing.” With all the trauma he’d experienced, I hadn’t been able to identify the cause of his coma, but that problem would have to wait until tomorrow. Or the next day. I needed to do some recovering of my own first.

“I think I can stand,” I said. It felt silly for him to be holding me.

“Mmm.” Marcus sat and placed me on the ground next to him. I decided it was a good compromise. “Grant has summoned healers.”

“Oh, good.” As wonderful as Marcus’s field patches were at numbing the pain, I needed true healing. So did Seradon and Marcus.

In the fading sunlight, the devastated park looked like the aftermath of a horrific war between elementals. Winnigan and Marciano stood at the bottom of the plateau, facing Lincoln River. Winnigan had removed her shoes to stand with her toes in the receding pool, and soft bands of the element twined up her legs, absorbing into her skin. Marciano stood behind her, his arms wrapped around the much smaller woman, his chin resting on her head. Silently, they soaked in the sunset. I hadn’t realized they were a couple, but somehow the giant and the petite redhead fit together.

Grant, Seradon, and Kylie sat at the end of a shattered line of quartz where Kylie had been standing when we broke the null. Her slumped posture indicated her exhaustion, but it didn’t stop her from pestering them with questions.

“You’ll recover faster if you don’t talk,” Grant advised.

Kylie visibly gathered herself to argue, but Seradon spoke first. “I think she’s earned a few answers.”

Grant scowled, then nodded. Kylie graced him with a triumphant grin, and it made me smile. She couldn’t have been hurt if she was still angling for her story. Or at least not
badly
hurt. She looked up and met my gaze, tossing me a wink Grant couldn’t see.

“In that case,” she said, “let’s start at the beginning. You said a concerned citizen reported Elsa. How were you contacted? What was your first impression of the scene?”

Grant’s grumpy one-word responses seemed to amuse Seradon. I had no doubt Kylie would coax the whole story from the captain, but I tuned them out. I didn’t want to relive today, not now and especially not knowing that my own Kylie interrogation lurked in my future.

“Are you okay?” I asked Marcus.

One dark eyebrow lifted. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Right, this was just another day in a full-five squad.”

“Are you mad?”

I shook my head. I was, but it was petty. I felt like I’d been pressed through a mesh strainer and clumsily reassembled while he merely looked a little tired.

“I wasn’t the one inside the null,” he said, as if he could read my mind.