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

“Maybe the wind current earrings, too,” Oliver said, eyeing the earrings I wore. I wriggled my head to set the earrings in motion, and the gargoyle’s bright eyes tracked the movement.

Like all my pieces, the earrings were made out of quartz. These were carnelian—at Oliver’s request—and I’d reshaped the sturdy rock to slender, twisting ribbons so light the breeze fluttered them against my neck. Maintaining the structural integrity of the quartz while stretching it so thin took a level of skill that had taken me almost a decade to master. I owed my abilities as a gargoyle healer to those years of dedication, too. I’d worn my hair up so the sun could shine through the slivers of orange rock and catch people’s eyes. Since I was the only person in the city escorted everywhere by a gargoyle, I tended to attract attention, and I wasn’t above trading on the free advertising.

Oliver wriggled the ruff of rock fur behind his ears, as if he were trying to mimic the movement of my earrings. Laughing at his antics, I completely missed seeing the bundle of elemental energy barreling toward me. The outer air layer hit me like a pillow upside the head, then bounced back and expanded into an oval sheet of fire held together with traces of air and water. Heat radiated from it, and I retreated a step when the golden and red flames reshaped into the perfect likeness of a man’s face. He scowled, his bright eyes blazing straight into mine.

“Mika Stillwater,” he snapped. “Your services are required on an urgent matter. Come at once.”

Seeing the fiery face move was disconcerting enough; hearing the burning mouth bark my name chased a thrill of alarm down my spine. I clutched the handle of my bag tighter and shifted another step back. The disembodied flaming head followed.

I’d seen long-distance projections sent with such precision before, but only as invitations to special events. Given the tension in the man’s face, he wasn’t summoning me to a social gathering.

I opened my mouth to respond, but he looked to the side at something only he could see, then back at me. This time his gaze rested beyond my shoulder, and I realized it was a captured message, not a projection. I also realized I knew him.

“Your specialty is needed,” he growled. The sphere collapsed into an arrow of pure flame. It darted away from me, then spun and pointed left down a side street. It held that position, quivering in place.

“Wasn’t that—”

“Full-spectrum guard Velasquez,” I said, finishing Oliver’s question.
The most powerful fire elemental I’d ever met,
I added silently. You didn’t make it into the ranks of the Federal Pentagon Defense, the country’s most elite law enforcement organization, unless you were an FSPP or nearly so. I’d had the good fortune to meet the local FPD full-five squad when I’d rescued Oliver and his siblings, but I hadn’t expected to encounter the specialized team again, let alone receive a personal summons from the burly fire elemental.

Velasquez’s words sank past my surprise. The only reason he would need me was if a gargoyle was in trouble.

“We need to hurry,” I said, yanking my backpack’s straps securely over both arms.

“Someone needs us!” Oliver shouted gleefully.

The moment I lurched into motion, the flaming arrow moved. As if attached to me by a stiff tether, it kept exactly the same distance between us even as I picked up my pace to a run. Oliver loped like an enormous inchworm ahead of me, his back arching and straightening with each stride, and he unfurled his wings for short glides to increase his speed.

Watching his increasingly long leaps, I was struck by a feeling of déjà vu. It’d been a race through the streets after a baby gargoyle that had altered the course of my life. Until that moment, I’d been a rather typical earth elemental, with a stable job and a life spent mostly behind a worktable. These days, I did a lot more rushing about, usually racing toward injured gargoyles, and I didn’t think I’d ever get used to this nauseating jolt of adrenaline.

Between Oliver’s stone feet pounding on the cobblestones, my heavy steps, and the clatter of seed crystals knocking together in my bag, we made enough racket to sound like a rampaging minotaur. People scurried out of our way and gawked from the edges of the road. Several waved and pointed, calling out encouragement. A few actually knew my name.

Our guiding arrow took us through downtown, winding along the least crowded roads. We pounded down wide sidewalks and through narrow alleys, and every time the arrow darted out of sight, I prayed it had stopped just around the corner so I could rest. My lungs and legs burned, and the heavy sack pummeled bruises into my lower back.

I zigzagged past a tavern and a haberdashery, before the narrow street opened into Focal Park. Or it should have. I stumbled to a halt. A massive blue-green ward twice as tall as the nearest building cordoned off the mile-long public park. As far as I could see up and down the street, emergency personnel held focal points of the shimmering ward at regular intervals. I braced my hands on my knees, sucking in oxygen. I’d never seen a ward that huge. It looked like it was designed to keep out an invading army.

And Velasquez’s fiery arrow pointed straight at it.

* * *

A crowd of people loitered outside the park’s earth entrance, where guards blockaded the pathway to a tunnel hidden behind the ward. Most of the people must have been herded from the park, judging by the number of blankets, picnic baskets, and various sports equipment they held. Questions rumbled through the displaced citizens, but I didn’t hear any answers.

Together Oliver and I wormed through the crowd, and as people noticed Oliver, they cleared a path.

“Is there a sick gargoyle in the park?” someone shouted.

“I’ve heard gargoyles go berserk. Is that what happened?” another person asked.

I shook my head at the absurd question, but I couldn’t take my eyes from the towering ward. What was Velasquez involving me in?

A woman burst through the crowd and grabbed my arm, and I yelped before recognizing Kylie.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the burning arrow hovering just this side of the ward. It’d received some nervous looks from the crowd and a few from the guards, too.

“Don’t scare me like that,” I said. “It’s a summons from Velasquez.” Kylie knew who the fire elemental was without me needing to remind her. She’d been there when the full-five squad had carted away the man who’d kidnapped Oliver and his siblings. Since then, she’d followed the squad more than once for a story. In fact . . . “Was your rumor scout about the captain?”

Flushing, Kylie crossed her arms defensively. “Yes.”

My stomach sank. Kylie had a standing rumor scout patrolling for mention of Captain Grant Monaghan, the air elemental in charge of Velasquez’s squad. If the captain was here, the whole squad probably was, which meant the danger level of whatever I was rushing toward was far greater than a sick gargoyle. The ward more than confirmed it.

“What did he say?” Kylie asked.

“He needs me.”

Kylie’s eyebrows shot upward. “That’s what Mr. Gruffy-Pants himself said?”

“Basically.” My footsteps had slowed while I talked, and Oliver butted my palm with a soft whine. The same urgency hummed in my veins, but I couldn’t have Kylie following us into danger.

“Wait here,” I told Kylie. “I’ll tell you everything later. It’ll be an exclusive.” I winked, then spun toward the tunnel entrance.

“Really? You thought that’d work?” Kylie fell into step on the other side of Oliver. “The people have a right to know what’s going on in there, and if Grant is in there, I need to make sure he—ah, that the squad—is okay and . . . acting in the best interest of the citizens. A government that keeps secrets from the people is a corrupt government.”

Her slipup was more telling than her ongoing protests about democracy and the balancing power of the press.

“Fine,” I hissed as we approached the guards posted at the park entrance. The burning arrow hadn’t moved from where it pressed an inch away from the ward, crushing my meager hope that Velasquez stood on this side of the ward.

“The park is closed,” a tall woman in uniform said.

“I see that,” I said, and Kylie snorted, then turned the sound into a cough. The guard scowled at us both. “I was summoned by FPD Fire Elemental Velasquez.” I pointed to the arrow. “I’m a gargoyle healer, and he said I’m needed.” I added a point toward Oliver, in case she’d missed the presence of the excited stone dragon who pranced between Kylie and me.

“And I’m her assistant,” Kylie said. I wanted to protest, but I knew how much her career meant to her, and there was obviously a story on the other side of this magical curtain. Plus I was beginning to suspect her crush on Captain Monaghan might have developed into something more, so I kept my mouth shut and tried not to fidget.

The guard looped a bubble of air around the burning arrow and yanked it to us. She probed the elemental strands, and the message unfurled again. Velasquez’s hard expression glared at the guard this time as he called me to his side without a single
please
or an ounce of deference in his tone.

When the message reverted to an arrow of flame, the guard released it and gestured for her companions to let us pass. Oliver trundled ahead with Kylie close beside him, but my footsteps lagged. As long as I remained on this side of the ward, I was safe.

But a gargoyle wasn’t.

I hurried to catch up with Kylie and Oliver.

2

Kylie stepped through the ward first, and I jumped to the side, startled, when threads of air anchored to her ears unraveled and slid down the smooth blue-green sheet of the ward, followed by a shimmer of fire and water from her linen shirt. The elements dissipated once they came untethered from her body and clothing.

“Hey!” Kylie protested, out of sight on the other side of the ward.

I pushed through the ward, and my scalp tingled, but otherwise I felt nothing more than a slight pressure.

“It took me ten minutes to perfect that antiwrinkle weave,” Kylie complained, glaring at the ward with her hands on her hips. This close, the shimmery blue-green wall seemed to stretch all the way to the puffy white clouds. “No wonder I couldn’t pick up any sounds from the park. This is criminal. The government keeping secrets from the public is reprehensible.”

I patted my head. When I’d pulled my hair back in a ponytail, I’d wrapped my head in a twist of air to keep flyaways from escaping into a frizzy mess. The ward had sluiced the infinitesimal magic from me, which meant it was a two-way barrier. It was the kind of ward I’d expect in a holding cell at a guard station, not encasing the enormous public park.

I turned my back to the ward. A steep rocky bank rose in front of us with only a sliver of sky visible between the tunnel entrance and the ward. The long tunnel carved through the hill normally had plenty of ambient light reflected from both ends along a series of strategically placed mirrors, but with the ward blocking the sunlight on our side, the mouth of the tunnel gaped black and foreboding.

Oliver loped into the darkness, the echoes of his footsteps creating a dozen phantom gargoyles.

I grabbed fire energy, formed a small glow ball, and followed him. Kylie trotted to catch up, sending three small glow balls ahead of us. When no monsters jumped out of the darkness, I stepped up my pace to a jog. Seed crystals and books battered my back.

“What was all that around your ear?” I asked Kylie.

“Trade secrets.”

“They looked an awful lot like modified rumor scouts. How many ways do you have to spy on people?”

“Shh.” Kylie glanced over her shoulder. The acoustics of the tunnel might have carried our voices to the guards on the other side of the ward if not for the cacophony Oliver created. Kylie must have come to the same conclusion, because she said, “Being a journalist is as much about finding a story as it is about writing it. How am I supposed to know where the stories are if I haven’t got feelers in the field?”

“Feelers? Are you stalking more than Captain Monaghan?”

“I don’t stalk anyone.”

“Right. You’re my assistant.”

“Exactly.” She beamed.

“In that case, help me out.” I ducked out of the straps of my bag and thrust it toward Kylie. Since she had insisted on coming along, I didn’t feel bad letting her take the burden. Not that it was a burden to her. With speed I envied, Kylie layered a net of air and settled the bag on top of it. Air was her element, and the bag floated obediently at her side without her having to hold the straps.

Oliver waited at the tunnel’s exit, and I released my glow ball when I caught up with him, squinting against the bright sunlight as I scanned the grounds. Somewhere ahead of us lay a danger great enough to ward off the park and call in the FPD. I didn’t want to rush in blindly.

Oliver had no such caution and launched into the sky. I ducked aside to avoid the back draft from his wings and gathered a wad of raw magic. I had no idea what I’d do with it, but I felt better holding it.

A soft breeze fluttered my ponytail, pulling the coolness of the tunnel across the back of my neck. On any other warm, sunny day, the large granite boulders and tall rock plateaus dotting the sloped hill in front of us would have been crowded with sunbathers of every species.