No Quest for the Wicked (13 page)

And yet, it was better than spending the day at my desk. That thought brought a smile to my face. I leaned back my head and joined Granny in a hearty “Woo hoo!”

A second later, something hit the carpet from below, knocking it sideways. If I hadn’t still had a death grip on it, I’d have fallen right off. My clinging to Owen with my other hand was the only thing that kept him from falling, and his weight almost pulled me off. He grabbed the carpet just in time, giving me a chance to hold on with both hands. Granny had the head of her cane hooked over the side while the driver, tied securely onto the carpet with the fringe, fought desperately to turn it right-side up.

All the while, the carpet plunged downward. The wind, no longer deflected by whatever magical force field usually held it back, whistled fiercely around us. With the passengers hanging on to the edge of the carpet, it couldn’t right itself. It was as though three people were trying to climb into a canoe at the same time.

Granny shouted something, but I couldn’t make out the words over the roar of the wind. I didn’t think she was talking to me, though. She seemed to be talking to the carpet, probably telling it to straighten up and fly right, if it knew what was good for it, because she had beaten plenty of rugs in her time.

Whatever she said, it worked. The carpet gradually rolled back to its proper position, with us lying across it. “Now, that’s more like it,” she said with a grunt of satisfaction. I pressed my cheek against the carpet pile and took several deep breaths before carefully sitting up. Owen and I took one look at each other and fell together in a one-armed hug—each of us keeping a hand firmly on the carpet.

“What happened?” I asked Owen as I clung to him. “I thought these things were supposed to be safe.”

“This isn’t the time for that sort of thing,” Granny snapped before Owen could respond. “You two need to see this.”

I reluctantly looked away from Owen to where Granny was pointing. A gargoyle flew toward us, but it wasn’t any MSI gargoyle I’d ever met. This one looked ancient. It was nearly featureless from time and the elements wearing away the carving, and its stony skin was stained and mossy.

“That’s not one of ours,” Owen said, releasing me to reach for his phone. He flipped the phone open and said, “Sam, we’re under attack. Fifth Avenue, probably around Madison Square by now. It’s a gargoyle, and I don’t think it’s local.” He closed the phone and returned it to his pocket as he said, “They’re sending help.”

I was afraid the help wouldn’t arrive soon enough. The strange gargoyle wheeled around to fly straight at us, on a collision course. The carpet twisted out of the way just in time, like a matador’s cape being whisked away from the bull’s charge. For a moment, my fingertips were the only part of me still connected to the carpet. I could see the street directly below me. The ancient gargoyle’s momentum sent it flying down a cross street while we barely jerked away before we slammed into the side of a building. When our driver had recovered from the near-miss and had the carpet back in the proper position, he poured on the speed.

To no avail. This gargoyle wasn’t as agile as the ones I knew, so it couldn’t turn on a dime, but it could build up some speed once it got started. This time, it came from above, dropping with its clawed feet extended. If it hit us, it would knock us out of the sky. To my dismay, our driver flew straight toward it on a collision course. At the last second, the carpet jerked to the side and practically came to a midair halt. The gargoyle shot past, unable to adjust its course in time. Our carpet sped up again, rising to fly over the roof of a nearby building, then dropping as we flew down Broadway. Our driver used the tall buildings as cover.

We reached Union Square without further incident. I let myself relax slightly, but then Owen called out a warning. The ancient gargoyle was back, approaching us quickly with its mouth pulled back in a rictus-like grimace. Our carpet sped up, and the gargoyle kept up, gaining on us. I couldn’t bear to watch and turned to Owen. His jaw was clenched in frustration, and his cheeks flamed as his fingers twitched. I figured he couldn’t possibly want to be able to do magic now more than I wanted him to.

“You get away! Shoo!” Granny shouted, waving at the gargoyle as it drew near. I wasn’t sure what she did, but the gargoyle veered away, furiously flapping its wings. It looked like it had been blown off course.

“Hey, you’re a wizard!” Owen said.

She shot him a withering glare. “Of course I am, even if I don’t have all your fancy spells.”

He shook his head. “Sorry. I’m just not used to not being able to do this for myself. Are you open to learning a fancy spell?”

“I’m always willing to learn,” she said archly. “That’s what keeps me young.”

Owen addressed the driver, saying, “Take us out over the river. I don’t want anyone below to get hurt.” The carpet banked as it turned east down Fourteenth Street. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be over the water, though I supposed it might be better than landing on the street if the carpet tipped again. To Granny, Owen said, “Repeat after me,” and then he said a long string of something that sounded like mostly consonants.

She tried to emulate him, but got her tongue tangled. “Do you have to use such foreign talk?” she complained, absently waving a hand that deflected the pursuing gargoyle again. “What’s wrong with good old English?”

“For this, yes, I’m afraid you need the foreign language. This is a pretty complicated process that’s countering other magic. Now, try it again.” He kept coaching her until he felt she wouldn’t carry out an entirely different spell. All the while, our carpet rose, dipped, and zigzagged as it evaded the gargoyle attacker. I played lookout and shouted warnings to the driver while Granny practiced.

When she got it, Owen said, “Now here’s the hand gesture.” That one she picked up a little more quickly, though she didn’t move her fingers as fluidly as he did. “The last part is all mental. You need to focus on the fact that the gargoyle is stone, that it shouldn’t be flying. It shouldn’t move at all. Can you do that?”

“That doesn’t take much imagination,” she said dryly. “It’s the natural order of things.”

“Okay, then, next time it comes at us, do it.” We were over the river now, nothing below us but dirty water. The gargoyle plummeted toward us, its wings folded against its sides in a steep dive. If it hit us, it would drive the carpet—and its passengers—straight into the river. “Now!” Owen shouted to Granny. Then he instructed the driver, “Hold your course until I say otherwise.”

Granny moved her hands the way he’d taught her while shouting that phrase that sounded like nonsense to me. I felt the tingle of magic, but the gargoyle kept dropping toward us. “Move!” Owen shouted to the driver. The carpet barely swerved out of the way as the gargoyle dropped like the proverbial stone. I couldn’t resist a glance over the side to watch it fall into the river. I imagined I heard a splash, but that was unlikely from this height.

“What did I just do?” Granny asked Owen.

“You told it to turn back into stone. I got the feeling this one had only recently been animated, so it was easy enough to return it to its original state.”

“Ha! Not so easy, since you needed me to do it,” Granny said with a grin, poking him in the chest.

“But you needed my fancy spell to do it,” he countered with a grin of his own.

“I’m sure I’d have figured something out eventually,” she said.

“Don’t try using that spell on our gargoyles,” he warned. “I’m not sure it would even work, since most of them have been alive for centuries. It’s more likely to just make them cranky.”

“I bet I could figure something out,” she said with a wicked gleam in her eye. “Then they’d better stay on my good side. Otherwise, I think they’d look real good in my garden. I could train ivy over them.”

Owen’s phone rang, and he winced guiltily at Granny’s mischievous grin as he said, “Hi, Sam. No, we’re okay, we got rid of it. We’re on the East River. It looks like we’re coming up on the Williamsburg Bridge.” Then his eyes went wide. “Oh, no, Rod and the others could be in danger, too.” He looked grim and nodded a few times as he listened.

“Are they okay?” I asked, clutching his arm as he ended the call.

“Yeah, Sam warned them in time.”

“Someone really doesn’t want us to succeed.”

“And that someone seems to be a step ahead of us.”

“On the bright side, our unknown follower couldn’t possibly have kept up with us through all that, not on foot, and we’d have seen anything else in the air.”

When we finally reached the MSI building without further incident, I asked the driver to take us to the front door. “I’m not getting off in midair this time,” I said with a shudder.

Much to my relief, the carpet landed on the ground, and all of us let out a collective sigh. I sat there for a while, reveling in the knowledge that I couldn’t fall from where I was. Owen stood first and extended a hand to help Granny up, then he pulled me to my feet and straight into his arms, where he held me in a fierce hug. I buried my face against his shoulder and hugged him back, enjoying the feel of solid earth beneath my feet and solid man in my arms. “I am never, ever getting on one of those things again,” I said. “At least, not until they install seatbelts.”

“Seatbelts sound like a very good idea,” Owen agreed. Without loosening his hold on me, he spoke over my shoulder to Rocky and Rollo, the security gargoyles who had just landed beside us. “Someone’s animating gargoyles. I don’t know where they got that one, but it looked old and European. It even had moss growing on it.”

I turned to see Rocky shuddering. “Moss? Talk about a personal hygiene problem! What kind of creep doesn’t bother to scrape off the moss?”

“We’ll look into it,” Rollo said.

“Thanks,” Owen said. “Now, could one of you escort Katie’s grandmother up to Merlin’s office?”

Granny gripped her cane with both hands and planted it firmly on the ground in front of her. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had grown roots. “I’m not letting Katie out of my sight. She’s going to need me.”

“I’ve already needed you,” I said. “Maybe all that”—I gestured in the general direction where our aerial adventures had taken place—“was when I needed you, and you saved us.”

She shook her head. “Nope. That’s not it. I’ve still got the ache in my big toe, so it’s still to come.”

“But Mrs. Callahan,” Owen began.

Granny cut him off. “You can call me Granny.”

He blinked and blushed slightly. “But Granny, the thing is, we’re going to be working in a restricted area that’s very dangerous for anyone with magical powers. You can’t go in there. And by that I mean you physically wouldn’t be able to get in that area. It has nothing to do with wanting you there or giving you permission. We won’t be there long, and I need Katie’s help. Inside this building, nothing will happen to her.”

“And you can hang out with Merlin,” I added. “We need you to tell him what just happened to us. Maybe you could help figure out who in the company is working for the other side.”

She glared back and forth between us for a long time, then nodded and said, “Well, alrighty then. I’ll report to Merlin, and you two run along and do your thing.” She waved a warning finger at us. “But don’t take too long because I’ll have to come looking for you.” Then she turned and told the gargoyles, “Gentlemen, let’s go.”

With my grandmother temporarily out of our hair, Owen and I entered the building and ran down the stairs to the basement workroom. It seemed like days had passed since I’d brought Owen breakfast that morning. The coffee Thermos still sat there in the outer room, and I emptied the contents into a cup. The coffee was a drinkable temperature, though perhaps not as hot as I preferred. Under the circumstances, I wasn’t going to complain about the temperature of my caffeine. I added a good dose of sugar and drank half the cup in one gulp before handing it to Owen. “Here, the sugar and caffeine will help after all that excitement,” I said.

He obediently drained the cup, then abruptly hurled it across the room so that it bounced off the wall and then shattered on the floor. Bright spots blazed on his cheeks as he fought to get control of himself. “Did that help?” I asked him.

“Not so much.” The red patches on his face faded, to be replaced by a pink flush that rose from his collar to his hairline. “I was so helpless out there. We would have died if it hadn’t been for a little old lady with her folk magic. I had to teach someone else to do a spell because I couldn’t work it myself.”

I knew there was nothing I could say to make it better, so I didn’t try. Instead, I said calmly, “It’s about time.”

“For what?”

“For you to admit that this sucks. You’ve been playing Pollyanna all along, acting like you’d practically planned to end up this way, and wasn’t it great that losing your powers meant you got to do all this awesome research and kept the magical world from seeing you as a threat. I knew that couldn’t be real. I mean, really, you were the most powerful wizard of your generation, and you lost all trace of magic. It’s
awful
. It’s like losing your eyesight, or an arm or a leg.”

“Thank you for the pep talk,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

“I’m not trying to cheer you up. That would be pointless. I’m just glad you’re finally being honest with me—and with yourself.” I hesitated, then asked, “Do you also really believe it will come back?”

He worried his lower lip in his teeth for a while, then whispered, “No.” His shoulders sagged in defeat.

I stepped forward and pulled him against me in a big hug. “I’m so sorry, honey.”

After holding me for a couple of minutes, he said, “So, now that we’ve dealt with my issues, are you ready to talk about what’s going on with you?”

“Well, since I’m not throwing things, that’s not an immediate crisis, and we have work to do.”

He placed his hands on either side of my face, kissed me, and said, “Fine, but at some point, you’re going to have to stop avoiding the discussion. I won’t forget.” Then the two of us headed into the manuscript room.

He pulled a stack of paper toward himself, lifted off the top half, and handed it to me. “I labeled it as I was transcribing. Look for the word ‘spell’ in the margins and pull those pages.” I shuffled quickly through the pages, handing the “spell” pages to him as soon as I had a handful. From there, he turned the rest of his stack over to me while he read more carefully through the spells, sorting the pages into piles. After he’d gone through the whole stack, he picked up one of his piles. “These are the ones the doorman used and a few others that fall into the same era that seem like they might also be used for attack or defense.”