Secret of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles, #3)
Rebecca Chastain
For everyone who has made a wrong choice for the right reason.
1
I fanned a tiny hummingbird feather back and forth, collecting the swirling air element from the breeze before scooping up the soft bands of fire element from a guttering candle flame. An equal mix of water element came from a bowl of spring water, and wood element from a pot of wheatgrass. Splitting my concentration, I kept the four-element cocktail spinning to one side and plucked a quartz seed crystal from my pocket.
I tuned a tendril of earth magic to quartz and used it to flatten and stretch the marble-size crystal. When the tensile structure of the quartz began to give, threatening to crack, I eased my magic out of the crystal. The flattened disk lay across my right palm, barely a foot and a half across and so thin it bent toward the ground around the edges. Hopefully it’d be enough.
“Stand back, Oliver,” I said, glancing toward my gargoyle companion.
He undulated sideways, his carnelian Chinese dragon body moving as fluidly as a flesh-and-blood dragon’s.
“Is this good, Mika?” he asked, studying the motionless sick gargoyle in front of me. Oliver didn’t voice the doubts I read in his glowing sunset-orange eyes, and his magic boost never wavered. He wanted this to work as badly as I did.
“Yep. Here it goes.”
The sick gargoyle’s marmot body had once been a beautiful brown jasper, with vivid blue dumortierite tipping his reindeer antlers and long wings, but now he was pockmarked and only a few dull shades more colorful than gray. From his lifeless brown eyes to his rigid posture, everything about the marmot gargoyle looked dead, but he was only dormant. Inside him, a spark of life remained, and I was determined to wake him from his comatose state.
Ignoring the chilly morning air that brushed my stomach when I raised my arms, I lifted the sheet of quartz high above the gargoyle. Standing on his hind legs, the marmot was almost eye level with me, and his antlers cleared my head by several feet. Ideally, I would have placed the thin quartz across his antlers, but their points were too far apart, so I settled for positioning the quartz above his head. With exaggerated care, I layered the four-element mix across the surface of the quartz disk, gradually sinking it into the thin membrane until the clear crystal swirled with magic. Hardly breathing, I collected air to cushion the bottom of the quartz, then retracted my hand. The disk remained floating above the marmot.
Crossing my fingers, I backed up, buried my eyes in the crook of my elbow, and dropped the quartz onto the marmot. The fragile sheet shattered, tiny grains spraying against my thighs. I lowered my arm. The five elements rolled down the marmot, coating his crown and ears, then muzzle, neck, wings, and stomach before sliding off his bottom toes and the tips of his stone feathers. The moment it touched the ground, the spell dissipated.
A fine glitter of quartz dust circled the marmot, and it crunched under my feet when I stepped closer to examine him. The gargoyle’s eyes remained dull. His ears didn’t twitch. Weaving a basic five-element pentagram, I tuned it to the gargoyle’s resonance and tested him. His life pulsed against my magic, the reedy sensation encased in muted pain.
“No change.” I brushed quartz dust from the marmot’s upraised paws, then blew more from his forehead with a heavy sigh. It’d been silly to get my hopes up.
Many people believed gargoyles went through a dormant phase as a normal part of their lives, opting to check out for decades at a time, but my healer instincts said otherwise, and one test of the marmot’s failing health had backed up my suspicion. Gargoyles typically enjoyed a sedentary life, choosing to remain near specific buildings for most of their days, but they still moved. Frequently. They were also picky about whose magic they enhanced, yet this paralyzed marmot gave a magic boost to anyone in the vicinity, as if his powers were as out of his control as his limbs. He was trapped inside his own body—and he wasn’t the only one. I’d found six other dormant gargoyles in Terra Haven stuck in an identical dormant state.
“What now?” Oliver asked.
“We try something else,” I said, which was better than saying, I don’t know.
I slumped, dropping my forehead to rest against the marmot’s. I’d already tried everything I could think of. I’d attempted healing him with and without Oliver’s enhancement, beneath new and full moons and all the days in between, using exotic, expensive resources and basic seed crystals. I was running out of ideas—even the desperate ones, like today’s modified, outdated spell originally designed to heal lethargy in humans—and the marmot was running out of time. Never strong to begin with, his life signs grew fainter every day. Even the other dormant gargoyles fared better than he did, but not by much.
Familiar weariness pulled my eyes closed. In the three months since I’d first learned about the comatose gargoyles, I’d been searching for a cure nonstop, and sleepless nights bent over my table scouring increasingly obscure references combined with a series of hope-crushing failures had sapped my energy.
“We’ll find something, Mika.” Oliver planted a paw on my hip, nuzzling my side, and I staggered beneath his weight.
“I know. Together we can do anything.” The words tasted bitter.