Curse of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 2) (3 page)

“This is creepy,” Kylie whispered.

I agreed. I scanned the horizon from our vantage at the top of the earth section, visually tracing the massive ward that could have wrapped thirty city blocks with room to spare. They’d even run the ward through Lincoln River to our left, where it edged the water section of the pentagon-shaped park. Birds flitted through the canopy of a cluster of oaks nearby, chattering to themselves. A few squirrels scurried across the short grass. If it weren’t for the lack of people and the daunting ward, I would have said nothing was wrong. No bolts of lightning pierced the sky. No horrors leapt from the rocks above us.

“What now?” I asked, stepping clear of the tunnel to check on Oliver.

A fiery arrow blossomed in the air a foot in front of me. I skittered backward and lashed out wildly with raw water and earth to counter the flames. My spastic defense missed the arrow by several feet and collapsed ineffectively on itself. The arrow floated down the hill, then froze in place, pointing the way.

A flush crept up my cheeks. We weren’t under attack, and if we had been, my high-strung reaction would have been worthless.

“I guess we follow that,” Kylie said, graciously not commenting on my bungled magic.

“Right.” Not making eye contact, I jogged toward the arrow, unsurprised when it moved ahead of me on an invisible tether. I dodged tall pillars of rocks and leapt across the smaller gaps between the wide, smooth boulders. Without the burden of my heavy bag, I’d gotten my second wind and I practically flew down the slope. Kylie followed close on my heels, having no problem maintaining her air basket while running.

I scanned the park as I ran. The loudest sounds came from the right, where heavy reed wind chimes were scattered throughout the sculptures in the air section. The coal beds and shallow fire pits between the rock slope and air section were empty and quiet. Across the park, the botanical gardens twined up a slope above long grass sports fields. A small army could have hidden among the dense foliage and groves of trees, but only if they moved soundlessly.

The whole park naturally sloped to the left toward the streams and rowing ponds of the water section that fed into Lincoln River, but the arrow cut right, following a sand pathway that looped around the tiered rock gardens at the bottom of the earth section.

“I see them,” Oliver shouted, diving haphazardly toward us. He flared his wings to cut his dive a few seconds too late and plowed furrows into the earth with all four feet. “They’re in the center of the park. Hurry.”

I pushed into a sprint. It’d taken us almost twenty minutes to reach the park. A lot could happen in that amount of time, especially to a sick gargoyle. Yet despite craning my neck to peer in every direction, I didn’t see a cause for alarm, not even when I pounded up the slope to the heart of the park over a half mile from the tunnel and found the entire full-five squad.

The center of the park mirrored the outer boundaries in a smaller pentagon, this one marble, with a pentagram etched into it and the deep grooves coated with smooth glass. Centered on a ten-foot-tall plateau and ringed in sycamore trees and pillars of granite, the pentagram was used in elaborate and powerful FSPP spells, and I expected to find the captain and his squad arrayed at their respective focal points, deep in some massive weave of magic, fighting a colossal and scary enemy. Instead, they clustered to the side around a gargoyle standing in the shade of a sycamore.

Clutching a cramp in my side, I trotted across the pentagram toward the gargoyle. He stood frozen, elemental magic swirling around him, and a flashback to finding Oliver and his siblings paralyzed in life-draining traps jolted fresh alarm through me. A complex shield swirled around the trap, but someone blocked my line of sight before I could see more. Blinking, I took in the whole scene.

I didn’t know anyone’s first name but Captain Monaghan’s—thanks to Kylie’s obsession with him—but I remembered all their faces. Marciano loomed a head taller than everyone else, close to seven feet tall, as if his body had grown to mimic the trees of his element. He stood next to a slender redhead, the water elemental Winnigan, and they maintained the shield I’d caught a glimpse of. The captain had shifted closer to Seradon to study something she pointed to, and it was his broad chest and shoulders blocking my view. The man was intimidatingly large, which I supposed was useful in his profession, if aggravating right now. I might have mistaken the sturdy earth elemental beside him for a man, with her short brown hair and tall, muscled body, but next to the captain, Seradon almost looked petite.

“We’re going to have to do this without her,” the captain said. “We can’t wait any longer.”

“She’s here.” Velasquez stood a little apart, arms crossed over his thick chest. Everyone in the squad was in prime physical condition, but he looked like he could pick up the full-grown gargoyle in front of them and not break a sweat. His dark blue eyes shifted to track Oliver, who had veered wide around the pentagram and then rushed to the shielded gargoyle. Velasquez stepped in front of the charging stone dragon, and Oliver scrambled to stop without crashing into him, flapping his wings to counter his forward momentum.

I didn’t hear what Velasquez said to Oliver because the captain and Seradon had turned to face me, and the weight of their combined gazes slowed my steps.

“Perfect timing,” Seradon said with a friendly smile.

Velasquez’s guiding arrow dove toward the shielded gargoyle. It flared wide and bubbled into a solid ball of flame, expanding in a flash. Seradon ducked to avoid being engulfed. Velasquez grabbed the wildly pulsing magic and slashed it apart. The arrow winked out of existence with a puff of smoke.

“Yep, not a moment too soon,” Seradon said.

I stared. That wasn’t how magic worked. A weave didn’t morph into something else, and it didn’t expand without added fuel.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“See for yourself,” Seradon said, gesturing for me to examine the gargoyle.

I checked his face first, and his lifeless eyes ratcheted my tension.

That’s just how gargoyles’ eyes look when they’re unconscious,
I reminded myself, taking no comfort from the thought.

He had the body of an earthy brown jasper marmot, though far larger than the mammal counterpart ever grew. Standing on his back feet, he nearly looked me in the eye, and the reindeer antlers arching from behind his little ears stretched two feet above my head. Enormous wings draped his back, falling to curve against the earth behind his feet. Blue dumortierite tipped his feathers and antlers.

I paced around him, checking his body visually when all I wanted to do was get my magic into him. At one time, he’d been beautiful, but now pockmarks and erosion marred his hide, a sign of poor nutrition. Terra Haven had no shortage of the quartz loam all gargoyles needed in addition to a steady diet of magic, but something had prevented this gargoyle from getting a good meal.

I suspected it was the massive contraption encasing him. The shield warped the view, but I could make out oblong loops of wicker, metal, glass, alabaster—and feathers?—evenly spaced around the gargoyle and pressed so tightly to the length of his body that they bent and met above his head. Elements twisted along the loops and filled the empty space, but the ward distorted the details.

“Who let
you
in here?” Captain Monaghan barked, and I jumped. The imposing air elemental wasn’t looking at me, though.

Kylie planted her hands on her hips and lifted her chin. She stood a head shorter than the captain, but she made it seem like they looked eye to eye. “The constitution.”

Grant snorted. “You’re stalking me.”

“Wow. Carting around that massive ego must be a burden.”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“Must have been the flaming arrow.”

Grant narrowed his dark brown eyes, his face a thundercloud. I’d have taken a step back, but Kylie dismissed him, turning to face the gargoyle.

“How long’s this . . . thing been on the gargoyle?” She leaned close to the shield, squinting at the magic flowing inside.

Grant grabbed her by her elbows, lifted her off her feet, and deposited her several paces behind us next to a slouched woman I hadn’t noticed. “Stay here. Don’t interrupt,” he ordered.

Kylie’s eyes bulged and she opened her mouth, but Grant had already turned away. She settled for crossing her arms and glaring at his back for all of a second before crouching beside the woman. The stranger slouched with her elbows on her bent knees and her head in her hands, rocking herself. Long black hair hid her face, and she flinched when Kylie touched her arm.

“I still say Mika shouldn’t be here,” Marciano said, his deep voice a gentle rumble. He didn’t look away from the shield when he spoke. “She’s going to get hurt.”

“This is going to require a delicate touch, especially for the gargoyle,” Seradon said. She watched the captain instead of the wood elemental. “Mika’s a gargoyle healer and she has an FSPP-strength specialty with quartz. You’ve seen her work. She can do things I can’t. We need her.”

In desperation, I’d once created a trap spun like a web through hundreds of pieces of quartz. My life and the lives of five gargoyles had depended on making the trap hold until the FPD arrived, so I’d put everything I had into it. Seradon had been impressed with my use of quartz—more so than I realized.

“That was a one-time thing,” I said. “I haven’t done anything that complex since.”

“Well, you’re about to. That damn contraption is fused to the gargoyle.”

Fused?
I bent to get a better view. There, on the gargoyle’s neck, a rod of quartz had been grafted into the jasper fur, and both ends of the metal loop fed into the quartz. I watched, horrified, as a surge of raw elemental magic speared into the gargoyle, then retracted twice as strong, flowing through the quartz implant and circling the metal loop.

No wonder the gargoyle looked so terrible: The bizarre contraption was sucking out his life!

I pushed closer, only to be brought up short by Velasquez. He’d grabbed my bicep in an iron fist, preventing me from smacking into the squad’s shield.

“Careful,” he said.

“What are you waiting for?” When Velasquez didn’t answer me, I spun to face the captain, breaking the fire elemental’s grip on my arm. “We need to get that . . . that
thing
off the gargoyle.”

“You need to understand what we’re working against,” Seradon said. “Elsa calls it a ‘purifier.’”

“Elsa?”

Seradon glanced at the dark-haired woman on the ground. She’d stopped rocking and was talking quietly with Kylie. “It’s supposed to separate the elements into their purest forms,” Seradon continued. “It’s her grand plan to manually create the magical enhancement of a gargoyle.”

“That’s impossible.” Gargoyles were unique in their ability to enhance magic in others. With a boost from a gargoyle, a person could more than double the amount of magic they could wield. No artificial source or man-made contraption could replicate it. “Even if it were possible, what’s it doing
feeding
off this gargoyle?”

“It turns out that to mimic a gargoyle’s enhancement, she needed a gargoyle as a power source.”

Before I could ask why Elsa wasn’t in null bands and on her way to the nearest guard station, Seradon continued.

“If that wasn’t bad enough, her idea of ‘purifying’ the elements is to rip them apart—polarize them into segregated sections—to make each stronger.”

“What do you mean?” No matter the strength, the elements always coexisted.

“Look here. And here.” Velasquez gestured around the gargoyle. “The
purifier
”—he infused the word with disgust—“isn’t letting the elements touch inside the loops.”

I stared at the end of the wicker loop as it sucked a pulse of magic from the gargoyle, draining its life one surge at a time. My fists clenched. Dragging my gaze from the horrific implant, I squinted at the space between the wicker and feather loops. Now that I knew what to look for beneath the elements in the ward, it didn’t take me long to make out the raw wood energy eddying in complete isolation. I checked the space between the feather and glass loops. A funnel of air whipped through the tight space and buffeted the inside of Marciano and Winnigan’s shield.

The polarized magic, as Seradon had labeled it, shouldn’t have remained confined in between the segregated sections. The looping objects hooked into the gargoyle weren’t solid; they were fragile-looking bands. Yet the magic reacted to them as if they were impenetrable walls. The only logic the two sections of the contraption followed was the most basic one: wood fed air. Every time a fresh surge of magic siphoned from the gargoyle to feed the wood section, the pocket of pure air also grew stronger, proving some interaction occurred between the two sections.

I moved with Velasquez, circling the gargoyle. Oliver paced at my heels, a low rumbling sound close to a growl vibrating in his throat. The pattern repeated all the way around the trapped gargoyle. The polarized elements each fed the next in a constructive cycle: wood strengthening air, air strengthening fire, fire strengthening earth, earth strengthening water, and water strengthening wood. The diabolical design ensured that the magic bled from the gargoyle perpetually strengthened the purifier.