Curse of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 2) (6 page)

Inside the shield, the elements swirled more volatile than before. The sections I’d capped pulsed with new intensity, vibrating against the shield with increased strength.

“Oh no,” I whispered. In protecting the gargoyle, I’d forced the magic to switch directions, and it hammered the shield with heightened ferocity.

“What happens if it breaks the shield?” I asked.

“We don’t want to find out. Hold on; we’re going back in.”

Hold on?
To what? I tried to find myself in the vast collective of energy, but it was like trying to find particles of my breath once it mingled with the air. Seradon fortunately had no problem. She scooped me out of the connection and together we slid through the shield, then plowed down a loop of expensive woven phoenix feathers, battering through the purifier’s weave of wood and air.

The gargoyle’s insides were worse than before, not better. I’d removed the purifier’s water and wood anchors, but now magic pulsed uneven bursts into and out of the air, fire, and earth anchors, destabilizing the gargoyle’s body with increased speed. The feedback of pain was muted, as distant as the gargoyle’s life itself. We were losing him.

I prepared to slice through the earth element, fusing the third quartz crystal to the marmot’s neck, only to be abandoned in limbo when the squad pulled magic through me to reinforce the shield again.

“This is bad,” Marciano said.

My body floated far away, and having magic drawn from me doubled the sensation. Seradon held us in place this time, but her grip felt tenuous, and if I lost my focus on the quartz, I was afraid I’d be blown apart and trapped in the purifier’s mutant weave.

“Can you slow down, Mika?” Grant asked.

“No.” Not without sacrificing the gargoyle. “I need to go faster. The gargoyle is being torn apart.”

“Do you have to make the purifier stronger?” Velasquez asked, his deep voice strained.

“The blockades are the only way to stop it from feeding off the gargoyle,” Seradon said. “She’s doing the right thing.”

“Then we’ll hold it,” the captain said.

I didn’t want to voice my doubts. They were a full-five squad. They knew far better than me what they were capable of, but it seemed like they could barely maintain the shield on the purifier now. When I blocked the last three links, the strain on them would be enormous, but I wasn’t going to waste time arguing.

I delved into the quartz. Power leapt to my bidding again, and in a few swift cuts, I’d disconnected the crude implant, reshaped the quartz, and created and inverted a destructive pentagram, blocking the purifier’s third link with the gargoyle. Applying the finishing patches took less tweaking this time; I was getting good at predicting the marmot’s imbalance.

The magic available to me through the link squeezed down to a trickle.

“Captain?” Velasquez asked.

I didn’t wait for Grant to respond. I dove for the next quartz. The purifier pulsed fire into the gargoyle, and vats of magic shot out of the gargoyle through the only other remaining link. If I cut away one quartz connection, the other would continue to feed polarized magic into the gargoyle. Without an outlet, it would fill the helpless marmot and shred his insides.

“Spin the shield,” the captain said, his voice distant. “Set it on a counterpattern.”

The shield bounced into a riotous, distracting pattern. I scrambled to reorient on the quartz, the gargoyle, anything to define my individuality. I latched on to the marmot, sinking an elemental balance into him, then jumping to correct the levels of my magic to match the internal structure of the abused gargoyle.

“Give it a destructive layer,” Grant said.

“I’m going to break the last two at once,” I said, talking over the others. I didn’t have the ability to maintain my individuality, divide magic across the gargoyle to the two separate quartz bolts,
and
keep up with their conversation. “I think . . . I think that will cause the purifier to break up.”

“That’d be lucky,” Velasquez said, his voice close.

I readied the destructive pentagrams, holding them next to the gargoyle where the elemental magic remained in its natural state. The pentagrams slowly grew when they should have remained static, and I realized with fresh horror that the gargoyle was passively feeding its magic to me, to all of us, despite the copious amounts being drained from him by the purifier. I’d been wrong. He wasn’t doing anything to fight back or protect himself.

“Now.” I pulled on the magic of the link. It responded like taffy, but I demanded more. “I need to do this now.” I yanked, and for a second I felt Seradon, then the others beyond her. I think the captain said something, but whether it was encouragement or protest, I didn’t hear.

I slammed the pentagrams in place at the same time as I cut the quartz from the gargoyle. With separate strands, I reshaped the quartz into flat barriers and simultaneously shoved wads of jasper-tuned patches into the wounds before pulling the pentagrams through the quartz and inverting them.

The barriers snapped into place, and the world exploded.

4

The concussion tossed me into the air, and I landed on my back, half on top of a boulder. My head snapped against something marginally softer than granite. Blackness swooped through my vision; then my collapsed lungs inflated, and I sucked in a harsh breath. I stared at the sky and listened to my ears ring, the world as fuzzy as the fluffy clouds high above me. Twists of earth and fire canopied above me in a protective dome of magic—one I wasn’t holding.

Raw panic jolted through me, and I snatched at the elements, terrified the blast had burned through me and left me nullified, able to see the elements but never work them again. Fire and a smaller amount of air, earth, wood, and water trickled into me along misaligned pathways. I sagged with relief. It wasn’t the full amount I could usually draw, but I would heal. I was still a heal—

Oliver!

I jackknifed up—or tried to. The ground shifted beneath my butt and a steel band pinned my torso. I twisted, trying to see what trapped me. Seradon lay beside me, though slightly lower. She blinked groggily at the sky, blood trickling from her nose. I squirmed to try to reach her.

“Easy now,” Velasquez said, his deep voice startlingly close. More surprising, I’d felt the rumble of his words against my back. I was lying on top of the fire elemental! How had that happened?

The steel band lifted, and my brain finally put the obvious together: Velasquez had cushioned me and protected me from the blast. The boulder I thought I’d landed on had been his chest.

Above us, the protective shield dissipated. Velasquez helped me roll off him and I pushed to a sitting position, gasping when a fiery jab of pain shot through the top of my right shoulder. Tentatively, I investigated the pain with my fingers, sucking in air through clenched teeth when I encountered a splinter protruding from my skin. I craned my neck to see, setting off a fresh wave of pain.

“Hold still.” The two words were the only warning Velasquez gave me before he yanked the splinter free. Groaning, I studied the twisted shard he held up for my inspection. It looked like a frozen ribbon of blood; then I recognized the thin carnelian shape of my earring. I touched my earlobe. The delicate strands had all broken into jagged pieces. I patted at my neck, feeling the wetness of several cuts but no more embedded pieces.

“Did you get cut?” I asked, turning to check Velasquez as I took the back off the earring and let it drop.

“Not from those.” He brushed the front of his gray shirt, shedding sparkles of carnelian as he turned to help Seradon. She sat with her head in her hands, elbows on her knees, her posture an eerie echo of Elsa’s when I’d first seen her.

“I’ll live,” she said, blotting blood from her upper lip with the hem of her shirt.

“Look at me,” Velasquez said, touching my chin. He knelt in front of me, leaning close, and I hadn’t seen him move. His blue eyes filled my vision. They weren’t a flat color; rather, they had striations of darker agate and flecks of onyx. Lapis lazuli, I decided, arrested by their unexpected beauty.

The thought snapped my brain back to solid ground. Worry pinched Velasquez’s full lips. With unexpectedly gentle fingers, he pulled the skin down beneath one of my eyes, then the other. Impatiently, I tracked his finger. When he shifted to examine my shoulder, I resumed my search for Oliver.

The blast had thrown us over ten feet beyond the pentagram, into the dirt. The others had been flung farther and were scattered around the pentagram plateau. No one appeared gravely injured, but everyone moved gingerly.

Elements hung heavy in the air, or more precisely, earth shimmered thick enough to give the illusion of being tangible. A wall of fire and earth hung on invisible strings to my right.

The blood drained from my head. It was more than a wall; it was the same barrier I’d seen inside the purifier’s loops. Elongated and distorted and arching twice as tall as Grant, hundreds of helixes spun in an interlocking weave to create an impenetrable barrier between the two elements. The wall extended over thirty feet beyond the marmot before dipping down to touch the ground, but the complex braid of helixes that had previously been linked to the loop inside the purifier shot in a straight line toward the horizon. Four other evenly spaced elemental braids speared outward from the marmot like spokes on a wheel, and I didn’t need to move to know the magic in between each would look equally dense and singular.

“You’ll be fine,” Velasquez said. “You’re not as fragile as you look.”

I wasn’t paying attention. I’d spotted Oliver.

He lay in a crumpled heap below the pillar where he’d been perched. I lurched to my feet, catching myself with one hand on the ground when the world dipped and my legs buckled. Pushing back to my feet, I half crawled, half ran to the gargoyle, passing through the purifier’s fire-earth and air-fire walls without resistance.

“Oliver!” I fell beside him and slapped a hand to his side, gathering magic to examine him. Air leapt to my call, but the other elements I needed to balance the magic felt as if they existed on the other side of a mountain of sand. “Oliver, come on. Wake up.”

Bright red-orange eyes popped open, and Oliver lifted his head. His square jaw fell open in a dragon’s smile. I sucked in a full breath, releasing it with a breathy sob of relief. Scooting back, I gave him room to right himself. Together we examined his wings and limbs, equally relieved to find him whole. I tried again to pull the blend of elements necessary to test Oliver’s internal health, but once more only air responded.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Drained.”

“It’s no wonder,” Seradon said, stopping beside me and wriggling her jaw to pop her ears. “I’d be toast without you. If you ever want to join a squad, you can be part of my team anytime, Oliver.”

The half-grown dragon preened. I watched his movements closely, pleased not to see any stiffness or tenderness.

“His extra boost of magic right before the explosion gave me the strength I needed to cocoon us both,” Seradon said to me. “The purifier—and we really need a better name for this monstrosity—seared through my shield and drilled into my head like it knew where to look. Without Oliver, we’d both be burned out.”

I shuddered. “Thank you.”

“Yep, that’s what we do.” Seradon gave me a gentle pat on the back before striding to Grant’s side.

Burned out. My fingers trembled as I tightened my ponytail, and it took a moment for me to process the red sparkles tipping my fingers when I examined them. Carefully, I reached for my left earring. A few shards remained fused to the post and powdery pieces of orange-red quartz clung to my neck and scalp. I used my shirtsleeve to protect my fingers as I pulled the earring out; then I dropped it to the ground next to the pillar.

“Thank you, too, Oliver. You’re amazing.”

“Yep, that’s what I do.” Oliver grinned at his almost perfect imitation of Seradon’s inflection. I smiled, feeling my world right itself. One gargoyle safe, one to go.

I rose with a modicum of grace this time, but my legs were wobbly and I braced against the pillar until I felt steady enough to walk. Flexing the fingers of my right hand hurt, and I examined the swelling around my middle finger’s second knuckle. Blood oozed from a scrape, but it was coagulating. Considering I could have been nullified, a hurt knuckle seemed trivial.

Pushing away from the pillar, I headed for the marmot. Oliver yelped and stumbled into me, knocking me sideways. With a weird hopping kick, he jetted forward, then spun back toward me.

“What was that?” I rubbed my calf, where his alula had clipped me.

“That hurt!” Oliver pointed to the purifier braid separating the air and fire sections of the expanded bubble of polarized magic. I’d passed through the weave without feeling anything. I reached for the elements to test him, but now only fire responded. Frustrated, I had to rely on Oliver’s assurance that the pain had been temporary.

“Okay. Stay here until we get this sorted.”

Oliver nodded and curled his tail tight to his body. Hunched, he looked half his normal size, and I wished I’d insisted the young gargoyle wait outside the park, or better yet, at the library where he’d be safe.

I skirted a dirt-churned crater, realizing only when I saw sparkles of carnelian glinting in the indent that the divot was from the impact of Velasquez and me, or more accurately, the impact of Velasquez’s body as he shielded me. I had more than Seradon and Oliver to thank for my relatively unharmed state.