Curse of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 2) (7 page)

From a distance, the marmot looked the same. He stood in the same position on his haunches, wings draped down his back and antlers arching skyward. Scraps of metal, wicker, alabaster, and glass littered the surrounding area and caught in the gargoyle’s antlers. The horrific purifier had been reduced to nothing more than loose trash. A breeze lifted shredded phoenix feathers into the air, and I waved a hand in front of my face to keep them out of my eyes.

The elements swirled through an elongated vortex stretching from the marmot’s toes up past his antlers. I tilted my head, trying to make sense of the chaotic magic through the dense swirl of fire element. When my brain made the belated connection, I sidestepped into the earth zone to double-check. My heart beat in my ears as I crouched to run a finger through a bright white radial line on the ground. A fine powder of quartz gritted against my fingertip. The explosion had pulverized my five quartz barriers, but perversely my inverted pentagrams had inflated to dwarf both me and the marmot. Worse, they appeared to be working as anchors for the purifier, holding it in place. Not only had I made the purifier explode, but I’d also made it stronger.

Just peachy.

I couldn’t tell if the mutated pentagrams rested against the marmot or if the infinitesimal gap remained between the gargoyle and the purifier. At least magic no longer pulsed from the marmot.

I scrabbled for the elements to heal him, and this time earth tumbled into me but nothing else.

I’d worked all the elements right after the blast. Why couldn’t I touch more than one at a time now?

Because I wasn’t cocooned inside Velasquez’s protective ward, I reasoned. He must have trapped the elements inside the shield when he’d created it, before magic polarized around us. That explained why fire had been the strongest element at the time. I’d thought I’d injured the metaphysical pathways in my brain, but standing in the earth section, I could draw on as much earth as normal without strain.

Frustrated, I shoved my hands through the vortex of magic and planted them on the marmot’s chest, ignoring the swirling magic pricking my skin with a thousand sharp needles. Again, I felt nothing, but even live gargoyles could be as still as stone and equally as cold to the touch. I needed magic to get inside him. I needed to fix the damage the purifier had caused before it was too late.

Out of options, I held on to earth and refined it down to the thinnest strand of quartz possible. The destructive cycle spinning around my wrist made me clumsy, jolting earth into the tortured gargoyle when I meant to feather it against him. A delicate echo of the marmot’s essence pushed back against the foreign intrusion, and I withdrew as gently as possible. His life signs were faint enough to be alarming, but he lived.

I couldn’t help him, not with magic like this. I glanced to the horizon. The polarization had to wear off soon. The balanced elements on the outside of this bubble would eat through the divided magic and degrade the purifier’s pattern. Until that happened, I had no way to assess the marmot’s injuries or right the internal damage the purifier had wrought on the helpless gargoyle.

Yet somehow, the bubble looked larger than it had before.

“He’s alive?” Oliver called from where he huddled several feet away.

“Yes, but it’s like he’s asleep.”

“That’s because he’s dormant,” Grant said. The squad convened around us, everyone looking at the marmot.

“A lot of gargoyles do this,” Seradon said. “It’s like they check out for a while. They still give power, some more freely than gargoyles who are awake, but they don’t interact with anyone. They become sort of like quiet statues.”

“For how long?” I asked.

Seradon shrugged. “I don’t know. You haven’t encountered this before?”

I shook my head, feeling like a hypocrite. I should know more about gargoyles than anyone. I was the gargoyle healer, after all.

“This guy’s been dormant for years. Probably a decade or two, maybe longer,” Grant said.

“He hasn’t moved that whole time?” I shared a glance with Oliver. The young gargoyle looked as confused as I felt. The squad seemed to believe the marmot’s catatonic state was normal, but I couldn’t think of a reason a gargoyle would opt to mimic a statue, passively feeding
everyone
magic in the vicinity. They were usually more picky than that. Plus, gargoyles needed to eat at least a few times a month. “Can he move, if he wants to?”

“I guess so. Being dormant is probably what saved him from being torn apart by the purifier,” Seradon said. “Don’t fret so much. This is all part of a gargoyle’s life cycle.”

I frowned and nodded. She sounded confident, but in my healer heart I knew she was wrong. Nothing about the marmot’s lifeless state was normal, but it explained his pockmarked skin. I suspected his internal health would have looked poor even before Elsa’s interference. It also explained how she’d been able to surgically attach the abominable purifier: The marmot had been helpless to stop her. That hadn’t prevented him from feeling the pain of the implants, though.

“Are there more like this? Dormant?” My swollen knuckle protested, and I relaxed my fisted hands.

“A few,” Seradon said.

Shame burned in my veins. I’d been concentrating on sick gargoyles who came to me or who contacted me through their chosen families. I hadn’t paid any attention to the welfare of the public gargoyles or those who couldn’t even speak for themselves. I needed to step up my efforts as a healer. I couldn’t leave gargoyles helpless to be preyed upon by psychopaths like Elsa, who saw them as tools and not living creatures.

“This is bad,” Winnigan said. She walked around the marmot, eyes on the horizon.

“I’m done messing around,” Grant said. “Form up a link.”

“The damn thing did its best to burn me out, sir. I’m mud and won’t be much use for hours,” Seradon said.

Mud?
Fresh guilt welled up on a wave of gratitude, and I tried to think of a more adequate way to thank her for saving me from being nullified. “I’m sorry” tumbled out.

Seradon chuckled. “Aww, civilian guilt. That’s cute.”

Velasquez snorted, but his expression was blank when I looked at him.

“We don’t have hours,” Grant said.

“Good thing we have Mika. She can take my place.”

Grant pinned me with his sharp brown eyes. “It’s not ideal but I can make it work.”

I wasn’t half the earth elemental Seradon was, as the explosion I’d unleashed just proved. With a sinking stomach, I looked around the group. They assessed me with neutral expressions, telling me without words that no one was happy to be stuck with me. I felt acute relief when Grant spoke and everyone shifted their attention to him.

“The polarized magic isn’t dissipating on its own. Since the blast, it’s gained at least ten feet in every direction. We need to break the constructive pattern.”

I hugged my stomach. It hadn’t been a trick of my imagination. Even the spokes looked longer, stretching far beyond the dome of polarized magic and disappearing into the park. They didn’t need the marmot to feed from any longer; the purifier was self-sustaining and prepared to assimilate the entire city.

“I don’t get it,” Marciano said. “The purifier should have torn itself apart once it didn’t have the gargoyle to feed on.”

“I think it might be my fault,” I said, waving a hand at the intact inverted pentagrams. Grant had to be regretting allowing Velasquez and Seradon to talk him into letting me save the gargoyle. If not for the flicker of life in the marmot, I’d be regretting it, too.

“Placing blame or feeling guilty won’t get us anywhere,” Grant said. “We need to—”

The polarized fire section rolled over a lit gas pit. Raw elemental magic roared from the flames, surging into the polarization field. Even from over fifty feet away, the backwash of heat tightened my skin. The influx of energy flared against the seam between fire and earth, built up, then surged through the looping pattern of the stretched helixes, feeding into earth. Earth spewed energy into water, water sloshed into wood, wood shot into air, and the entire polarized bubble bulged outward in a powerful push that covered another five feet in every direction.

“That’s going to be a problem,” Velasquez said.

I studied the park with fresh eyes. Elemental magic was always strongest around the physical source, and Focal Park had been designed as a place of natural enhancement. Its pentagon shape reflected the five elements, and each section represented a dominant element, all radiating from the center of the park in a natural constructive order. Elsa had aligned her purifier exactly along those lines, so each polarized segment ate through the matching element section of the park.

“That woman couldn’t have made a bigger mess if she tried,” the captain said, echoing my thoughts.

Air and earth fed their polarized sections passively, but in a few feet, the wood section would reach the entrance to the lush botanical gardens, and a dozen more gas torches and fire pits aligned with the fire field’s path. If the polarization fields reacted to those as they had the small fire pit, this bubble of messed-up energy would expand in alarming leaps. Currently the only obstacles in the purifier’s way were the smaller pieces of balancing elements in every section—a fountain in the fire section, a wind chime in the earth section—and us.

“If this reaches the river, it could swallow the city,” Winnigan said, staring off into the distance where sunlight glinted off Lincoln River directly in the path of the polarized water section.

“Or it could negate it,” Velasquez said. “That much water at once could overwhelm everything and cause the whole mess to collapse.”

His words gave me hope, but if Winnigan was right and the city’s elements divided into five separate sections, Terra Haven would fall apart. Everything from basic housekeeping magic to the complex structural patterns of the city’s communication and transportation networks would collapse.

Not to mention the devastation to lives. We were proof that humans could function in the polarized fields, even if magic wasn’t working right, but some creatures depended on the blended elements for sustenance. Stuck in this divided energy, gargoyles throughout the city would sicken from the imbalance and be forced to flee the city or die.

“We’re not letting it reach the river,” Grant said. “We’re countering this now. Spread out to your element and link.”

The squad traded glances and hustled to their sections. Seradon strode to my side and gave me quiet directions.

“This is different than what we did before, and it’s going to hurt. Since you can’t access all the elements, the link will have to act as one person. Grab earth and push it to Winnigan, then let Velasquez push fire to you.”

Earth element burrowed into me, sharp as shale without another element to buffer it, but no matter how much I drew or how hard I pushed, I couldn’t penetrate the barrier between earth and water. The magic I fed into the wall of helixes warped and transformed into water, exiting the barrier in a useless splash. Around the circle, the captain, Marciano, Winnigan, and Velasquez were each haloed in an impressive display of elemental magic, but everyone had the same problem I did. Worse, our efforts fed the purifier, and the bubble pushed outward.

Grant cussed. “Stand on the dividing lines and try again.”

We all shifted to the right. Sweat trickled down my neck, stinging my cuts. Keeping my eyes on the marmot, I aligned myself in the middle of the purifier’s wall, with polarized fire encasing the right side of my body and earth the left side. The helixes moved harmlessly through me—until I tried to grab an element. I reached for earth first, and magic pounded out of control against my brain. Refining my draw down to a slender strand enabled me to manipulate the element, but the moment I opened myself to more, earth crashed through me, breaking my hold and leaving my metaphysical pathways bruised. Reversing tactics, I reached for fire. It roared into me, overwhelming and unchecked, then guttering to a mere flutter too soft to grasp. Heat beat against my right side and charred my elemental senses. Through sheer determination, I clung to a whipcord of fire and yanked it to me.

Between one second and the next, the fire element morphed into earth inside me. With a cry, I threw the wild energy from me before it ripped me apart. I staggered into Seradon, gasping for air. Pain speared through my skull, subsiding to a dull headache as I clutched my temples. Elements didn’t do that. It would have been like having a real flame in a fireplace turn spontaneously into molten lava. The elements could feed and support each other, but they didn’t transform.

“You okay?” Seradon asked.

I straightened and nodded. To the right, Velasquez collapsed to one knee, a beam of raw fire shooting from his palm into the sky. Shaking his head, he surged to his feet. Marciano knocked himself flat on his back, and grass sprang up around the left side of his body, covering him in seconds. Around the circle, the polarized bubble surged and churned, eating across more parkland.

“Stop!” Grant ordered. “This is useless. We need to be on the outside where we can get some damn control.”

The squad convened in the earth section. Sweat matted Velasquez’s shirt to his chest and ran down his neck. He stuck an arm back into the hot air of the fire section, then retracted it.

“That’s not natural,” he muttered.