Oliver’s four siblings landed in a semicircle around him, and my heart sank to my toes.
“Back up! Get away from Oliver.” I shooed them with a frantic arm, and they hopped aside, Herbert jerking back when I almost bopped his toucan nose. “This isn’t safe. What are you doing here?”
“We had to come. You need us,” Anya said.
An outsider would never guess the five adolescent gargoyles had been born in the same clutch. Quinn looked like a small citrine lion with the scales of a dragon instead of fur; Anya resembled a panther, though one with a navy dumortierite and mint-green aventurine body rather than black; Lydia’s purple, pink, and orange agate swanlike body glowed like a flying sunset; and Herbert’s pink quartz armadillo body and toucan beak were shot through with cobalt dumortierite. Aside from Lydia’s two lionlike feet vaguely resembling Quinn’s, no two siblings shared the same animal characteristics—other than wings, of course, but all gargoyles had wings. Their similarities were more subtle and were reflected in their magic.
“Is Oliver okay?” Quinn asked, creeping closer again.
“No.” I fought the purifier’s magic even as I waved him back.
“Whoa! What happened to the park?” Kylie asked as she pounded to a stop near us.
“Sir, I’m back with reinforcements,” Seradon said, speaking to the captain’s mirror sphere.
“Hold tight. I’m going to loose the destructive magic.” Grant’s sphere flickered and disintegrated.
“Grant!” Kylie cried.
“Hush. He’s fine,” Seradon said, grabbing Kylie’s arm and holding her in place without looking away from the park.
A perfect half-sphere of polarized magic cupped the middle two-thirds of the park, transforming the once beautiful terrain into five nightmarish wedges of destruction. Thick lines of the largest pentagram ever created inside the bounds of Terra Haven bisected the dome, the five quartz anchors at the pentagram’s points now barely two feet from the leading edge of the creeping magic. Ignoring all normal laws of magic, four bands of looping elemental pairings speared arrow-straight across the undulating grounds and disappeared into the city. The fifth bore into Oliver.
Grant stabilized the magic flowing through the enormous park-spanning pentagram. Drawing on the boost of magic from the gargoyles, he fortified the bonds connecting each tip of the pentagram, then freed them from the anchors.
The pentagram shrank until the tips rested against the underside of the purifier’s sphere. I held my breath.
“Come on,” Seradon said. “Work, damn it.”
Magic surged through the pentagram as each element branch drank from the polarized magic on one end and destroyed it on the other, using the purifier’s magic against itself.
The polarization field shrank, slowly at first, then faster, retreating in a rush toward the center of the park and the marmot gargoyle where it all began. A wave of heat escaping the fire section washed over us, whipping my ponytail against the side of my face and drying the sweat in my scalp. The incessant rumble and cracks of earth died down, and the snap of tree branches and the muted roar of the new waterfall filled in the silence.
My relieved sigh caught in my throat when I reached for Oliver. Magic gushed from him, the thick braid sucking down his life as fast as the pentagram destroyed the purifier’s polarized magic. The traumatic drain ripped fissures through Oliver’s insides, and pain fractured my skull, an echo of the agony Oliver experienced.
I tried to stop the purifier from feasting on his magic, but it was too strong. My only option was to hack the braid from him, inflicting more cuts into his tortured body to sever its tendrils. When I sliced the last of the fire and earth strands from his chest, the braid snapped toward the dwindling dome of polarized magic, its slingshot speeds unchanged when it passed through the fox gargoyle.
The moment I freed Oliver, I wove patches through his body, mending all the cuts and evening his internal magic with gentle brushes of magic. I didn’t let up until he’d stabilized, and then only because I didn’t want to add too much strain to his body.
He opened his eyes, blinking up at me, and even managed a small smile.
“We did it. You’re going to be okay,” I said.
“The other lines aren’t retreating,” Kylie said, pointing to the four remaining braids stretching beyond the horizon. At the center of the park, the dome of polarized magic shrank out of sight.
“Oh no,” Seradon said.
The other gargoyles. They didn’t have a healer on hand to cut the braids from them. The destruction of the purifier would drain the magic from them and kill them.
“I’ve got to help them!”
I sprang to my feet. I needed transportation. A pegasus or gryphon or flying carpet, something fast and—
The severed fire–earth braid rebounded, hurtling up the slope on its previous trajectory. I lunged for Oliver, but it reached him first, burrowing back into his chest with renewed vigor.
8
Oliver whimpered and stilled. I fell to my knees, fighting cable-thick bands of fire and earth. Through sheer will and with the backing of all the power of the link, I forced the purifier’s braid from Oliver. It wormed back into him the moment I slackened my defense.
Seradon crouched and examined Oliver. “She tuned it to gargoyles,” she said, recognizing the problem instantly. “Damn that woman!”
A dome of polarized magic sprang to life at the heart of the park, then swelled with alarming speed as the five divided elements rebuilt. Thanks to the earlier remodeling of the park, each section was sculpted to support a singular element and all the counterelements had already been eliminated.
Grant yanked magic through the link, setting fire to the overgrown groves in the botanical gardens and funneling water straight across the park to the fire section through a huge trough he cut into the earth in front of the expanding polarization bubble. The field stuttered as it battled destructive elements, its expansion reduced to a slow creep. The captain had bought us time, but not much.
A new mirror sphere rocketed across the park and opened in front of Marcus.
“This isn’t going to work until we can disconnect the gargoyles,” Grant said.
Everyone turned to look at me. When Grant spotted Kylie behind me, his face tightened, but he didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know if I can,” I said, keeping up a steady counterattack on the purifier’s braid in Oliver. Quinn crept closer to his brother on almost silent rock paws, and I shooed him back again.
“We don’t know how far away they are,” Marcus said, eyes on the horizon. The water–earth purifier line extended across Lincoln River and disappeared into the city beyond. The others looked equally long.
“It’s not just the distance,” I said. “Even if I could reach them all, I don’t think I could break the purifier’s connection. Once it gets a firm hold, I can’t force it out without tearing the gargoyle apart. All I could do for the fox was patch her insides so the magic didn’t kill her.”
“The fox?” Seradon asked.
“Another gargoyle was connected to this line, there, in the rocks,” I said, pointing. I wished I could get back to the fox now and check on her, but until the purifier was destroyed, I wasn’t leaving Oliver’s side. “This corrosive braid channeled through her.”
“Then it jumped to Oliver?” she asked.
“In a way. He put himself in its path. It would have kept going until it found another gargoyle. Oliver thought . . .” He thought I could save him, and I was doing a miserable job. “I’m barely staying ahead of the braid in him.”
“I see that,” Grant said.
Of course. Through the link, he’d know exactly how I fought the purifier in Oliver, just as I knew he continued to feed fire into the trees across the park, drawing on magic from the link. A huge column of smoke rose into the sky, matched in the fire section where the captain’s river of water doused flames and molten embers alike.
“If it bore through the fo
x that quickly, the other lines might have already slid through the first gargoyles they encountered and be on to the next,” Seradon said.
I felt sick. Slid didn’t come close to describing what would have happened to those gargoyles. Without my patches to hold them together, the dual polarized magic would have shattered their bodies, killing them before embedding itself in the next victim.
“So you can break the purifier lines from the next gargoyles before they have a chance to take root?” Grant phrased it as much as an order as a question.
“Maybe.” If I was close to the gargoyle. If the timing was just right. If I let the four currently trapped gargoyles die first.
“We couldn’t link that far apart,” Marcus said. “Even if Mika broke one or two of the purifier’s lines, she wouldn’t be able to hold them from all five gargoyles at once over that distance, either.”
“She might not need to. We could each take a gargoyle and defend it after she’s broken the purifier’s hold,” Winnigan said, her voice faint through Grant’s mirror sphere. He must have a similar sphere next to Winnigan and Marciano, conferencing us all into this conversation.
“That’s some complex quartz manipulation she’s doing,” Seradon said. “Look at how she’s holding Oliver together while countering the purifier. She’s perpetually healing and fighting at the same time. Do you think you could do that?”
I didn’t know who she directed her question toward, but I couldn’t believe she doubted her teammates. They could do mind-boggling things with the elements; surely they could work quartz at this scale.
“Maybe. No. Not like that.” Marcus squinted at my weaves. “But if the purifier wasn’t embedded in the gargoyle and I only had to hold it back, I could do that.”
Grant shook his head. “No. Seradon’s right. We need the gargoyles to be closer. Can we move them?”
“That’d take time,” Marcus said.
“It might be our only option.”
“We could hold the lines closer,” Anya said.
“What? No!” I whirled to face the gargoyle. She flared her wings at my outburst. Seated next to Oliver, I was marginally taller than the blue and green panther. When I’d first met her, she’d been barely as large as a housecat, but she’d always possessed the same determined look when she made up her mind.
“Let her speak,” Grant said.
“No.” Anya was proposing likely suicide for her and her siblings. It was bad enough Oliver was suffering through the purifier’s attack.
“My siblings and I could hold the divisive braids here, close enough for Mika to reach.” Anya glanced at her siblings, and they all nodded in complete agreement. I bit off another protest. “Mika would be able to keep them from burrowing into us as she’s doing with Oliver.”
Fight this same battle on five fronts against five different elemental braids of polarizing magic? Even with the full power of the link behind me, I doubted it was possible.
“If I fail, you’ll all be trapped. You might die.” It was hard to force the words out, but Anya needed to know.
The gargoyle panther shook her head. “You will protect us.”
“I am protecting you by telling you not to do this.”
“We have to. For Oliver. I know you won’t let us die.”
I swallowed against a lump in my throat. I didn’t deserve that kind of blind trust, but against such unwavering confidence, there wasn’t anything I could say to change her mind.
“It might work,” Seradon said.
“It will work. Mika is strong,” Anya said.
“It will only work if the purifier will lock on a closer gargoyle and let go of the one farther away,” Grant said.
“I will try,” Lydia said. She spread her wings to launch, and I grabbed for her.
“Wait! Let me try something.”
I fumbled with the elements, my panic making me clumsy, and I teetered into the vast magic of the link. I am a gargoyle healer. I am terrified. The thoughts anchored me.
After pummeling the braid back far enough to give myself a breather, I used a hook of earth to lift a vein of quartz from the soil in front of Oliver. I separated a solid bar of purified quartz from the rest and dropped it onto my palm. Then I shoved the earth smooth again while shaping the quartz into a disk. I made it the exact same size and shape as the disks I’d used to protect the marmot, and I placed it against Oliver’s chest. A few layers of the elements and a twist to invert the pentagram, and I had a duplicate blockade.
The purifier’s thick magic passed through it as if it didn’t exist and burrowed into Oliver.
“It was worth a try,” Seradon said.
I wasn’t ready to give up. Stripping the quartz of all elemental magic, I started fresh, feeding it a combination of elements that resonated with gargoyles. If I could make the purifier think the quartz rock was a gargoyle, maybe I could trick it into locking on to a piece of rock instead of a living creature.
This time when I held the disk in front of Oliver, the fire and earth braid reacted, unraveling my magic too fast to follow and pulverizing the quartz to dust before leaping into Oliver.
I slumped even as I blocked the deadly braid. I could tune quartz to harmonize with a gargoyle, but I couldn’t infuse the complexity of a living being into the lump of rock to make it strong enough to withstand more than a second of the braid’s attack.
Smoke blew into my eyes, and Kylie casually pushed it aside with a brush of air, her magic stronger thanks to the gargoyles. The expanding raw earth stifled the river Winnigan continued to funnel from the newly formed lake along the path Grant had cut, and steam hissed louder than a geyser as the water evaporated in the fire section. Across the park, new green growth smothered the burning trees. It wouldn’t be much longer before the purifier’s divided magic retook the ground we’d gained and continued its inexorable push toward the city. I couldn’t think of any other options to try, and we were running out of time. We had to stop this.
I forced the words through numb lips. “We have to use gargoyles.”
Seradon rested her hand on my shoulder, her eyes troubled. “If you can keep the purifier’s invasion to a minimum, you’ll be able to break them all free. This should work.”
If and should were not words I wanted to use in tandem with gargoyle lives.
“You’ll have to free all the gargoyles simultaneously when I activate the destructive pentagram again,” the captain said. “This is powerful, unpredictable magic. If your timing’s off, the backlash could leave you scarred. Or nullified.”
Now he tried to talk me out of it?
I slashed the hungry tendrils of fire and earth as they tried to root into Oliver, but my eyes swept over the other four gargoyles. If we didn’t give this a try, the city would be consumed and torn apart by the polarized magic. That thought alone should have been enough motivation, but I wasn’t thinking about the city. I was thinking about the countless gargoyles who would suffer or die. Out in the city, four other gargoyles were currently being used as amplification tools for the purifier, helplessly being fed upon. They didn’t have anyone fighting the purifier for them. My little gargoyles were willing to try to save them, and their bravery humbled me. I didn’t relish taking the chance of being mentally scarred; the possibility of being nullified made my hands shake.
“I won’t be any help with the pentagram,” I said.
“We already laid the ground work. We’ll manage without you this time,” Grant said.
I turned to Lydia. She cocked her agate head, and when I reached across Oliver, she rubbed against me. “You’ll be paralyzed the moment you touch the magic. Don’t fly into it.”
“Okay.” She backed up to give herself room to extend her wings.
“Be careful.”
Lydia launched into the air and flew toward the purifier’s braid of air and fire on the other side of the fire section. I watched her go with my heart in my throat, wishing I could call her back.
No one spoke as she dropped to t
he ground a few feet from the thick helix cables flowing out of the park in an unerringly straight line. Lydia examined the braid, her long neck snaking back and forth in agitation; then she flared her wings and dove into the flow of magic.
The instant it touched her, she froze, paralyzed. Polarized air and fire drilled into her body, and I dove in with it. Pain exploded in my mind, almost jostling me from the gargoyle, but I clung to her and threw my magic against the purifier. Earth countered air and water countered fire. Dividing my efforts, I patched Lydia’s insides with fresh gargoyle-tuned weaves of quartz, and I didn’t let up until the purifier’s hold had weakened to mere tendrils. Then I bounced back to Oliver and checked the steady creep of the purifier into his body.
“It worked,” Marcus said.
The purifier’s braid now ended at Lydia. Whatever gargoyle had previously been pinned on the end of the esurient magic had been freed, leaving Lydia as trapped as Oliver.
“Praise the skies,” Grant said in a rare display of emotion.
“Captain,” Seradon said. The warning in her tone made me look. The polarization field bulged, consuming three feet of ground in every direction, extinguishing the last of the water in the fire section. A crack and grumble of shifting earth dammed Winnigan’s rerouted river.
“Looks like it’s going to be a race,” Grant said. “The rest of you gargoyles, move out.”
“Wait!” I grabbed for Anya, Herbert, and Quinn, and they stumbled to a stop, turning to look at me. “Drop in one at a time around the circle. And fight with everything you’ve got.”
Quinn ran back to me to nuzzle his broad lion head against my arm; then all three were airborne, flying high over the purifier’s bubble to sacrifice themselves, secure in their beliefs that I could save them.
* * *
Anya fused with the purifier first, stepping into the line of wood and air between Marciano and Grant. I thought I was prepared for the purifier’s swift attack, but it still caught me off guard. For several harrowing minutes, I grappled with the ferocious braid, patching Anya as I could until I forced the purifier almost out of her. Then I had to leap to Oliver to fight the encroaching divisive magic in him, then in Lydia, before I could check on Anya again. A few quick snips kept the purifier in place.
Curse of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 2) Page 10