Struggling to ignore the baetyl’s siren song, I slapped Marcus, holding nothing back. His head rocked and his eyes fluttered. I leaned closer, hand raised for another strike. Sweat and tears dripped from my chin to his chest.
Marcus’s eyes snapped open and he lashed out, crushing my wrist in his fist while his eyes searched mine.
“We need to move,” I rasped.
He released me with a ragged breath.
It took us four tries before we both got our feet beneath us. Marcus’s eyes lost their focus and he sagged against me as we stumbled toward the exit, his breathing labored. I wrapped my arm around him and did my best to support him on quivering legs.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I babbled. “You’ve got to hang on. A few more steps. You’re too strong to give up now. I need you to stay with me. I want you to. You were right: I like you. You can’t give up on me now before I have a chance to get to know you. You can’t let me have blown my chance with you. Just keep going. I’m so sorry. A little farther.”
We were five feet from the exit of the baetyl when Marcus toppled again, taking me down with him. Blood trickled from his nose, and I couldn’t wake him. Whimpering, I pulled my leg out from under him, scraping my knee on the sharp crystal floor.
I rolled Marcus onto his back, then fell across his chest when my body gave out. With the tiny crystals packed together like so many teeth and the strangling, moist heat, I couldn’t shake the illusion that we were inside a monster’s mouth, waiting to be crushed. Waiting. Waiting . . .
Marcus’s ragged breathing finally prompted me back into action, and I crawled to crouch at his head, wedged my hands under his armpits, and heaved. He inched across the jagged floor. When his mangled sword sheath caught on the crystals, I used a knife from his boot to cut it free, then left both behind.
“Mika?”
I tugged Marcus another three inches and collapsed. My butt felt like it’d been beaten with a porcupine, but the pain was distant. The only thing that mattered was getting Marcus out of the baetyl.
“Is that you?”
I glanced down at Marcus. His eyes were closed but his mouth gaped open. I stared at his slack mouth, uncomprehending as the voice repeated, “Mika?”
Finally I thought to look up. Oliver hunched inside the tunnel at the edge of the crystals a few feet away, eyes so wide they looked like circles.
“Oliver!”
He flinched, and my heart fractured. I’d given him reason to fear me.
“It’s okay. I’m me,” I said, my voice raspy and foreign. “Are you okay? Where’s Celeste?”
“It’s you!” Tension lifted from his shoulders and his wings settled against his back. “Hang on.” Face set in firm lines of determination, he slunk across the intervening crystal floor, whimper-growling with each step. He leaned forward as if pressing against a great wind, and I wondered what sort of pressure the baetyl pushed back against him.
Shadows danced around my vision. The heat had increased to oven temperatures while Marcus and I had climbed toward the exit, and my swollen skin ached. I grabbed Marcus’s armpits again and hauled him a few more inches. Then Oliver was beside me, twisting to grip Marcus’s shirt with his back paw. Together we tugged, and the large man moved a foot. I would have cheered if I had the breath.
In a few more pulls, we cleared the crystals and the ground smoothed. Oliver stopped making pained sounds. I sagged against the tunnel wall, gulping humid air.
Light from the baetyl bathed us in the cool glow of golden citrine, mint prasiolite, sunset-orange carnelian, cerulean dumortierite, and shimmering combinations of so many other crystals. I swept my gaze over the glorious shapes, memorizing the deadly beauty of the baetyl. I’d never see another again, and I’d already forgotten so much; I didn’t want to forget this.
Then I turned my back on the baetyl’s divine splendor, grabbed Marcus’s shirt, and helped Oliver drag him up the dirt path.
* * *
I made Oliver stop once I could breathe without feeling like I was drowning. The baetyl pressed into me, calling to me, but its voice had changed.
I lowered myself to the ground next to Marcus, who remained alarmingly unconscious. Oliver whined, but the baetyl sang inside my head, drowning him out. Too tired to remember all the reasons I’d had for avoiding it, too tired to resist it, I opened myself to the power, but the baetyl didn’t try to link with me; it tried to talk to me.
Once I felt its magic, I felt its need. The baetyl was healed—mostly. The last gap existed at the mouth of the tunnel, where the wild magic storms had torn apart the pattern beneath the crystals. Following the baetyl’s guidance, I layered elements across the opening, and when the last element settled into place, a wash of magic gusted through the tunnel, toppling me and sending Oliver rolling.
The baetyl receded from my mind, and I let it go without regret this time. I’d done it. I’d healed the baetyl. No one but a gargoyle born in those crystal-lined walls would be allowed in or out now.
I collapsed to my side in the warm tunnel, shifting so Marcus’s head rested on my stomach. I needed to get him out. The humidity had decreased and the air was warm rather than stifling, but we had a ways to go. At the very least, I needed to clean his wounds and send Oliver for a healer. I needed to check Oliver, too. I needed to finish my mission and get the dormant gargoyles into the baetyl. I needed to bandage myself back together.
I cobbled together my energy—
And passed out.
* * *
Something bit my arm, and I jerked awake.
“Easy there,” Marcus said.
I grabbed the elements before I recognized his voice, confused at the infinitesimal amount I could hold. The space was wrong, too dark and cool, and the glowballs didn’t illuminate much. Where were the crystals? The baetyl—
Memory returned in a rush. I tried to sit up, but a warm hand on my shoulder held me down.
“Relax, Mika, we’re all okay.”
“The gargoyles?”
“Celeste says they’re weak but fine.”
“Celeste’s okay?”
“She’s fine. Oliver, too. Now hold still.” He slathered a compound of kachina greenthread across my forearm, covering a dozen cuts. I hissed at the sting, then relaxed as the plant’s numbing agents took the pain away. Oliver peered at me over the top of my head, smiling, and my heart eased. Marcus shooed him back, and the young gargoyle took flight across a star-speckled sky, landing a few feet away on a flat boulder. His entire body glowed as if lit from a fire within, reminding me of the crystals inside the baetyl, but it was only a trick of the firelight on his carnelian body.
I’d lifted my free arm to pet Oliver before he’d flown away, and I examined it now. Ragged fibers at my shoulder were all that remained of the shirt’s sleeve, and lamb’s ear bandages crisscrossed my bicep and forearm. The rest of my shirt was bunched around my chest, and the numbness of my stomach told me Marcus had already tended the cuts there. I turned my arm toward the light and stared at the back of my hand. The crystals the baetyl and I had grown into my flesh were gone. In their place was a series of six-sided scars trailing up to my wrist, the flat scar tissue lavender and sparkly like it’d caught amethyst dust inside it as it healed. I flexed my fingers, relieved when they all moved stiffly.
“Your back is similar,” Marcus said. He didn’t look up from my other arm, using slender strands of air to tie the lamb’s ear leaves into place.
“My back?” I echoed. My wings.
“There was so much blood on your back, I started there, but the wounds had been sealed. It took me a while to figure out the red was part of the scars.”
“What does it look like?” I wished I had a mirror or could move to feel my shoulder blades. I was lying on my back without pain, but I still wanted confirmation that I was whole.
“Like you’ve been run through with a sword on both shoulder blades, and the scar tissue is the color of Oliver.”
Carnelian. I’d alw
ays secretly believed Oliver had the most beautiful wings of any gargoyle. I must have tried to give myself a similar pair. I heard the question in Marcus’s voice, too, but I wasn’t ready to try to explain the baetyl’s power and the way it’d warped my thoughts.
The silence prodded my self-awareness, making me conscious of my prone position, of wearing little more than flimsy bandages and a strip of cloth across my breasts, of Marcus kneeling over me, close enough for me to count his lashes. I felt small and alone, unfamiliar with my own identity after sharing the baetyl’s ancient presence, and even my body, covered in ointment and bandages and new, alien scars, was a stranger’s.
I breathed through the vulnerability, focusing on Marcus’s face to ground myself. He looked good, his skin golden in the firelight and his eyes alert. I wasn’t surprised he’d recovered first—grateful and relieved, but not surprised.
“How are you?” I asked, hoping he didn’t hear the quaver in my voice.
“Alive, thanks to you pulling me out of the baetyl.” He finally met my gaze, letting me see his chagrin.
“It was the least I could do after almost killing you.”
He grunted. “You’ve apologized enough for that already.”
I flushed. How much did he remember of my frantic babbling when I’d been carrying him out?
“What happened in there?” he asked. “The gargoyles swarmed, and then . . .”
“You were stuck in your worst nightmare?”
He nodded. “When it ended, you were gone.”
“The gargoyles weren’t real. They were a warped version of the baetyl’s last attempt to protect itself from our invasion. I escaped the nightmares by using quartz element.” Talking grounded me, and my lingering sense of loneliness faded as I explained the fissures that had opened in the nightmare when I’d wielded quartz-tuned earth.
“Such a simple solution. I tried . . . a lot of other things.”
“I tried to wake you,” I said, seeing his haunted expression.
He shook his head. “You did the right thing. You stuck to the mission. Tell me how you ended up in control of all the baetyl’s power.”
“I healed the heart.”
I did my best to articulate my experience, but I don’t think I was successful. Describing the kinship I’d felt with the baetyl proved impossible. It’d been so natural and right at the time, but like the patterns it had shown me, the memory had faded. I settled for comparing it to being linked to an enormous gargoyle, and that seemed to satisfy Marcus.
I didn’t tell him about briefly possessing the pattern of life itself. Just thinking about it, knowing I’d lost the most precious knowledge in the world, made my breath hitch with yearning, and I wouldn’t be able to talk about it without crying or sounding like an idiot. Or both. I didn’t have to explain the power of the baetyl to Marcus. He’d felt it through his link with me, just as he’d been in the link when I’d repaired the enormous cave-ins and collapsed all the old mine tunnels.
“It was addictive,” I said. Unconsciously, I reached for my connection with the baetyl, finding only a hollow ache. Staring up at the stars, eyes unfocused, I relived the awe of holding all that power.
“Thank you,” I whispered, unable to meet Marcus’s eyes. “For not letting me kill myself. I would still be in there if you hadn’t linked with me. You saved me from myself, just as you promised.”
“Mika . . .”
I dropped my gaze to meet his. “Everything you said earlier was right. I haven’t been thinking about the risks or the danger. I’ve been trying to do what’s right, and saving gargoyle lives is right.”
The beginnings of a scowl clouded Marcus’s expression, emphasized by the flickering shadows. I almost smiled to see it, and I hurried to continue before he thought I wanted to resume our previous argument.
“But killing myself to do so isn’t in the gargoyles’ best interest. It’s not the way to protect them. You’re right; they deserve more than a martyr. They deserve a guardian who does everything possible for every gargoyle, the ones in front of me and the ones I can help in the future.”
He blasted me with The Smile. My heart flipped and I closed my eyes. I understood his point of view, and even agreed with it, but that didn’t mean it made me happy. I wanted to save every gargoyle. Letting a gargoyle die to save myself would be dreadful, and I prayed I’d never have to face that decision.
“I’m thankful you’re exactly the type of person you are,” Marcus said.
My eyes snapped open in surprise. He gave me a shrug.
“Not many people would have turned their back on the baetyl’s power.”
“It would have destroyed me if I hadn’t.” I would have killed him, too.
“But it didn’t. You did what you came here to do. You healed a baetyl.”
I smiled, and the triumph chased away my troubled thoughts. “Now we just have to get the gargoyles into it, and we’ll be set.”
I remembered setting the final barrier, sealing off the baetyl, and my good mood died as fast as it’d risen.
I struggled to sit up and Marcus tried to assist me without touching a bandage, which meant he was limited to guiding me up with a hand on a tiny patch of skin between my shoulder blades. My butt cheeks protested the extra weight on them, but I was pretty sure they were only bruised. Blinking, I stared at my legs. Marcus had cut away my pants, leaving me with barely enough denim to cover my hips for modesty. So many bandages crisscrossed down my legs that I resembled a freshly wrapped mummy. My boots, still on my feet, completed the ridiculous ensemble.
“How long have I been out?” I demanded. How much blood had I lost?
“Awhile. We can probably remove most of those,” he said, indicating the strips of lamb’s ear leaves on my legs. “Your pants did a decent job of protecting you. Better than your shirt. I still need to get these nicks on your face.”
I batted his hand aside. “Have you tended your own injuries?”
“The worst of them.”
“Let me see.”
Marcus sat back with a huff and pulled his shirt over his head. For an embarrassing moment, my brain stopped working in the face of his broad, muscular chest and the defined lines of his abdomen. I blinked and shut my mouth and reminded myself that I was an adult and the man was injured. Dried blood caked his chest and ran down his side from a gash on his shoulder, which he’d covered with lamb’s ear leaves. My brain lurched back into action when I saw the bloody tatters of the back of his shirt.
“Turn around,” I croaked.
Mouth tight, Marcus shifted so I could see his back. I sucked in a breath and reached for him, stopping before I touched his flayed back. The abuse of dragging him across the sharp tips of the baetyl floor had been too much for his shirt’s protective magic; the crystals had sliced through the spell and fabric, into his flesh and muscles. Blood oozed from a dozen long cuts, staining the waist of his leather pants black. It reminded me of the injuries he’d sustained during the Focal Park fiasco, only so much worse.
“Good. You got the dirt out before the cuts could become infected,” I said, my voice empty. I pushed aside my horror and guilt, both of which wouldn’t help Marcus. “Got any more greenthread?”
He handed me a half empty glass bottle, then rose to retrieve more lamb’s ear leaves from his pack. I glanced around, taking in the campfire Marcus had built on the landing outside the tunnel opening. A few feet down the hill, the air sled lay on the ground, the dormant gargoyles scattered where they’d tumbled during the magic storms. Celeste crouched among them but she watched me, silently reminding me I hadn’t finished my mission.
When Marcus sat back in front of me, I gently applied the greenthread concoction to his cuts. The compound stung before it numbed the wounds, as I knew from experience, but he never reacted. With each lamb’s ear leaf I laid across the treated cuts, Marcus relaxed a little more, the subtle loosening of his muscles telling me how much the wounds had hurt. The greenthread would take away the pain and hast
en the healing, but I was afraid he’d be left with scars.
We secured the lamb’s ear leaves in place by wrapping him in strips cut from the remainder of his shirt rather than using bands of air. Marcus insisted, claiming the shirt was too ruined to be used for anything else.
“But air would be more gentle,” I argued.
“The shirt will soak up blood. Air won’t,” he said, ending the discussion.
When I’d satisfied myself that the wound on the back of his head was superficial and I’d dabbed greenthread compound into his thick hair, Marcus pulled on yesterday’s shirt and tenderly dabbed greenthread onto the cuts on my face.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. I couldn’t have gotten him out of the baetyl by any other means than dragging him, but it was my fault he’d been there in the first place. I should have insisted he wait outside. If I’d known what to expect, I would have.
He laid a blunt finger over my lips. “I knew what I was doing.”
He was too close, and I felt vulnerable, covered in wounds and bandages and little else. Ignoring the tingle in my lips, I eased back. I avoided his stunning lapis lazuli eyes and the warmth they held, too discombobulated to distinguish emotion from firelight. Even dirty, bleeding, and frowning, the man was too attractive, and all my emotional barriers had been shredded inside the baetyl.
Marcus shifted back onto his heels, visibly relaxing when the move didn’t hurt. “You didn’t kill me. That means more to me than any apology.”
“You’ve got low standards,” I said, trying to joke.
“I saw what the baetyl did to my sword, and I knew it didn’t like me or want me there.”
I searched his face. “You could feel that?”
“I could feel how powerful it was, and you held it in check.” His voice held a hint of awe. “Even when you looked at me like I was something disgusting caught on the sole of your shoe, you held it back.”
“I didn’t—” I cut myself off. I remembered thinking Marcus was repugnant and wrong. It’d been the baetyl, but it’d been me, too.
“Thank you for saving my life,” Marcus said.
“I should have—”
Secret of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 3) Page 14