Curse of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 2) (10 page)

“Look! The purifier stops there.” I pointed to a pile of boulders ahead of us and to our left. The fire–earth braid fed into the rocks, but it didn’t come out the other side. “Maybe it’s weakening.” Given the oppressive stillness of the air and the swelling cacophony of the granite around us, I amended my hope. “Or it has a finite reach.”

Marcus hopped to a higher pillar, sidestepping the curl of granite that followed his foot.

“Or it found another patient for you,” he said.

I spotted the gargoyle among the boulders. The foxlike gargoyle’s dull tigereye body and dirt-brown wings blended into the rocks—or they would have if a massive malicious braid of magic hadn’t speared into her.

“Oh no! Hurry!” If she’d been subject to the purifier’s dividing magic this whole time, it had to be tearing her apart.

“Working on it,” Marcus grunted.

The ground beneath us rumbled and the pillars close to the edge of the field shifted and rose. Marcus cursed and danced across the top of the rocks, fighting for footing on the shifting tops. We were close to escape, but the leading edge of the bubble crept forward, pulling taller pillars into our path.

“I’m going to have to jump,” Marcus shouted over the near-constant booming.

“Okay.” If he could angle toward the hillside, the drop would be only a few feet, but first he had to clear the ever-rising cliff steps.

Marcus grabbed both my legs in a crushing grip. I tightened my arms around his shoulders.

“Here we go.”

He sprinted up the shifting rocks, and I jounced on his back, eyes locked on the perpetually advancing edge of the field. Just as Marcus planted his foot on the last rising pillar and pushed off, the bubble shifted and grew by several feet at once. Granite burst from the inert ground beneath us, shooting toward our plummeting bodies.

I yanked earth magic to me and sheared off the top of the growing pillar before it could break Marcus’s legs. His right foot clipped the edge of the pillar, but his left hit the top solidly. Working blindly on the rock beneath his feet, I drove pure earthen strands into the granite and stretched it the same way I would manipulate quartz. The grainy rock reshaped, as malleable as dough. Lifting the rock beneath Marcus’s foot, I launched us toward safety.

We catapulted through the barrier, and my connection to the raw earth magic snapped. Blinded by the backlash, I lost my grip on Marcus and braced for impact with the rocky ground. It never came. Soft strands of air cushioned my fall. I opened my eyes, closing them just as quickly as the light refracted into a thousand razors inside my head.

I sucked in a breath, then another, savoring the light texture of the air in my lungs despite by body’s conflicting pains.

“Am I dead?” I croaked.

“Mind blasted.”

Clutching my head, I squinted in the direction of Marcus’s voice. When the sunlight didn’t slice my brain this time, I opened my eyes wider.

I sat on a large boulder a few feet up the hill from Marcus, and once he saw I could support myself, his bands of air and wood magic holding me up dissipated.

“Good move with the rock wave.”

In a sea of pillars, one column of granite looked like it had melted toward us before being sheared off by a colossal blade. With the backlash of magic reverberating in my brain, it took me a moment to process the sight. I’d reshaped a couple hundred pounds of pure granite as easily as I might have a grape-size quartz seed crystal. That kind of strength couldn’t be matched even by an FSPP earth elemental. Yet inside the polarized earth section, it’d been easy.

Mind blasted?
Not fried, right?
I scrambled for the elements, going limp when they responded. Reverently, I spun the five harmonious elements together, forming a basic pentagram and floating it in the air in front of me just to admire the beauty of the combined elements. The amount of earth I could hold was paltry compared to what I’d wielded inside the bubble, but I didn’t care. Buffered and mixed with the other elements, earth felt smooth again, not sharp and raw like it had in the polarization field. It felt whole, and so did I. Out here, with all the elements working together, we had a chance at stopping Elsa’s monstrosity.

First things first, we had to save the fox gargoyle.

I pushed to my feet—and fell back to the ground with a strangled gasp. The wound in my foot caused nauseous waves of pain to pulse through me, and I took shallow breaths until the urge to vomit subsided.

“Have you ever had a field patch?” Marcus asked.

I shook my head, keeping my lips pressed together.

“Oh, goodie. A virgin.”

I jerked to look at his expression. He winked at me with an exaggerated leer obviously designed to distract me. I would have rolled my eyes, but he chose that moment to unlace my shoe. My fingers clawed into the soil, but I managed to contain most of my whimper as the shoe peeled from my foot. A fine slice of fire cut away my sock and it dropped to the rock.

“Hey, you’ll live,” Marcus said with irritating cheer. Something cold settled against my skin, then crept
into
the wound. It should have hurt or grossed me out, but the pain abated until only a cold spot remained, and I decided I’d never felt anything sweeter.

“What was that?”

“A field patch. A little water cooled to ice to block the nerves, a little earth to dam the bleeding, a little fire to counter infection. You’ll need a healer and proper healing when we’re done, but this will tide you over.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” I said, awed. I shifted to pull my foot up to take a look, but Marcus captured my ankle.

“No. If you see it, you’ll think about it too much. Let me wrap it.”

Marcus knelt and spun tiny bands of fire around his midsection, slicing strips from the bottom of his shirt. With his pants riding low on his hips, the shortened shirt revealed a tanned stomach and a sculpted V of muscle veering into his waistband. I looked away. Having spent the last ten minutes clinging to his back, I knew Marcus didn’t possess an ounce of fat—I didn’t need to ogle the man for proof. Even if the view was a good deal more pleasant than anything else in my sight.

“If you teach me how to repeat the patch, I could put it on your back,” I said.

“Just get some of the rocks out, and we’ll call it even.”

I waited for Marcus to say he was joking, but he didn’t look up from my foot. He wound the strips of his shirt into a makeshift bandage, his speed silently reminding me that we didn’t have any time to waste.

“Turn so I can see what I’m doing,” I said.

I grimaced at the raw texture of Marcus’s back. Carrying me had reopened the wounds, and they looked far worse than I remembered. My civilian guilt, as Seradon had called it, welled up stronger than ever. I glanced at the blood drying on my shirt, all his, and then got to work.

Wrapping a band of earth with soft layers of water, I dabbed the elements across his back. The water loosened the grit caked in the wounds and the earth pulled on all like matter. Bloody pebbles rolled down his back to the ground.

If he’d been as similar to a gargoyle as he’d boasted, I would have slid magic into him and healed him from the inside. Unfortunately, my earth elemental skills were useless on human physiology, and if I tried to push magic into him, I’d likely do more damage than good. My clumsy efforts were the best option, but it must have felt like I was picking at the cuts with my finger. I winced with the extraction of each tiny rock, but Marcus didn’t react.

“I think that’s the worst of it,” I said as Marcus tied off the wrap on my foot.

“Good. We need to get moving. Here’s your shoe.”

The leather fit snug around the bandage, making me grateful I couldn’t feel the puncture. When I stood, I put my full weight on my foot and all I felt was the cool press of Marcus’s magic.

I looked for Oliver, and the view took my breath away.

Beyond the misshapen wedge of the earth section we’d escaped, an expanding triangle of the park lay scorched and strewn with embers. Flames belched from pockets in the ground and lightning crackled brilliant streaks through the shimmering hot air. Viewed through this, the air section beyond looked to be one giant sandstorm, and dirt hazed the sky above it. Oliver’s slender orange-red body had been swallowed by the storm, and I fought the urge to run to find him. I should never have sent him with Captain Monaghan. Oliver was my responsibility, and now he was all alone and fighting through a sandstorm created by powerful, unpredictable magic.

Logically, I knew his humping lope would have been a disaster in the air-sensitive earth section. Oliver wouldn’t have been able to fly to even out his gait, and while Marcus was strong, I doubted he could have carried me
and
Oliver out. It wouldn’t do any good for me to get trapped in the sandstorm with Oliver, either, as much as I yearned to go help him.

Telling myself I wasn’t abandoning Oliver, I hobbled a few steps toward the fox gargoyle. When the numbness in my foot held, I hurried to the base of the pile of boulders.

From this angle, the gargoyle was hidden. While I hunted for a foothold, I kept an eye on the leading edge of the creeping polarization bubble. At best, we had ten minutes to free the gargoyle before the field reached us.

“Here.” Marcus indicated an almost natural staircase up the rocks on the other side of the boulders. I clambered up, trying not to rely on my injured foot. Just because I couldn’t feel the wound didn’t mean I wouldn’t make it worse by stressing it.

I forgot about my foot when I reached the gargoyle. Hardly larger than a bear cub, she lay curled in a tight ball in the narrow bed of rocks, her long tigereye fox muzzle partially hidden under her thick tail. Up close, I could see her wings weren’t dusty brown; they were a smoky citrine so gritty and scarred and covered with dirt that they looked brown. Her eyes were dim, as if she’d been sleeping when the purifier exploded and locked on to her. Or knocked unconscious. Her magic passively fed into and boosted the atrocious polarizing magic just as the marmot gargoyle’s had. No quartz had been necessary to forge a connection between the purifier’s braid and the fox, either; it’d burrowed in using raw power.

“I think if I can remove the braid, it’ll be like unhooking an anchor,” I said. “It might cause the purifier to unravel. Having another gargoyle to feed off of must be strengthening it.”

“Okay. I’ll check on the others.”

Almost on top of his words, an air message opened above us and Winnigan’s voice emerged. “We’re out. Seradon’s going to get healed. I’m headed your way.”

Marcus responded as he continued to climb up the boulders toward the peak. Movement in the periphery of my vision pulled my head up. Seradon and Winnigan jogged across the flat sunbathing grounds, skirting the expanding polarization field. When she reached a natural path, Seradon peeled away, angling toward the tunnel exit. Despite having been magically stunted from the initial blast and then swimming her way out of the water section, she managed a cheerful wave and smile before she disappeared out of sight. In her place, I would have been dragging myself on all fours toward the nearest escape route. For all our sakes, I hoped an FSPP healer waited just outside the park, ready to repair Seradon’s metaphysical pathways so she could rush back before the captain was ready to link.

Maybe the link wouldn’t be necessary if I could break the purifier’s hold on the fox.

Forming a basic mixture of elements, I slid it into the gargoyle. As I expected, I had to adjust the elements immediately. The purifier’s braid of fire and earth had warped the fox’s insides, and it was pulling her apart. I wasted precious seconds trying to sever the braid where it tunneled into the gargoyle’s neck. The massive bands of elemental energy were too strong for me, so I switched tactics. Laying my hands on her wings, I drove my magic deep into the gargoyle, hunting for the tip of the purifier’s magic where it anchored to her body. If I couldn’t cut the purifier off before it entered her, maybe I could stop it from digging any deeper.

I found the end of the braid less than two inches from the gargoyle’s opposite side. The purifier’s magic twisted and churned inside the gargoyle, corkscrewing her innards and creating a rift inside her as if she were just another rock, not a living creature. Only her innate magic bound into her tigereye body kept her alive, and it was failing.

While I examined it, the braid of fire and earth tunneled through another half inch of her body. It wasn’t anchored in her; it was boring through her! If it managed to push out her other side, it’d shatter her body.

Knowing I had mere minutes to save her life, I gathered counterelements—water and wood—and threw them against the fire and earth of the purifier. I anticipated the backlash of pain that resonated into me, and I didn’t let up. The forward progress of the braid halted; then it began to swell inside the gargoyle, opening physical fractures.

Cursing, I released my countermagic and grabbed quartz-tuned earth. As fast as I could, I healed the fresh wounds; then I shifted my focus to the fox’s neck. The divisive magic of the purifier had polarized the magic inside the gargoyle, and I patched the large fractures just under her skin, hoping it would thwart the purifier. Undeterred, the fire and earth braid passed seamlessly through my magic and continued to burrow into the gargoyle.