I glared at him over my shoulder, but he and Naomi missed it, both too busy looking into each other’s eyes.
Face flaming, I gave Rourke a pat and twisted through the rest of the gargoyles to my cot at the front of the car, only then sneaking a peek out the open door again. The beautiful conductor radiated confidence, which wasn’t surprising; she had to be a strong fire elemental to do her job. Plus, she and Marcus had history. It was there in her body language when she casually touched his arm and echoed in his relaxed posture. And The Smile. The one that reappeared with nauseating frequency. Here was a woman in Marcus’s social stratum. Viewing my crush alongside Naomi made it all the more pathetic.
I growled at myself, imitating the noise I’d heard most frequently from Marcus today. It didn’t matter what the man thought of me. It mattered how helpful he was with saving the gargoyles.
Pushing the squirmy ugliness of jealousy down, I reached for my bag. I’d stowed it earlier under my cot, and I had to stand back up to get the leverage to budge it now. Underneath my change of clothes and snacks rested forty pounds of a gargoyle healer’s best tool: seed crystals. Pure quartz and infinitely malleable, the seed crystals could be used to heal all manner of physical injuries, including being grafted onto a gargoyle to replace chipped or severed body parts.
Four fit comfortably in my hand and I rolled a few more into my pockets. Then I walked among the gargoyles, checking them with gentle probes of magic. Their life forces flickered with the same muted strength as they had before we’d carted them from their resting places, with little variation between each gargoyle. The years had been equally cruel to them all, pockmarking their skin and eroding rough patches. I could feel the peripheral ache of these wounds when I delved into each gargoyle, but I didn’t know how much awareness the dormant gargoyles possessed.
For Rourke’s sake, I hoped it wasn’t much.
I don’t normally have violent feelings, but I’d entertained a lot of fantasies in the last months of stabbing Elsa so she could see how it felt. She’d viewed Rourke as nothing more than a tool to be used. She hadn’t seen him as a living creature, and she hadn’t cared about hurting him. With people like her in the world, it was no wonder gargoyles were more willing to let the dormant ones die rather than risk exposing their vulnerabilities to humans.
“I’ll never tell,” I whispered to Rourke. “You’re safe with us.”
“Oliver, Celeste, do you want to come inside?” Marcus asked, swinging up into the freight car. Behind him, the massive khalkotauroi plodded toward the engine, his copper hoofbeats reverberating through the station. A cart piled high with hay bales trundled behind him, pulled by a pair of station stable boys. The giant fire-breathing bull would need a lot of fuel to power a train this size through the mountains.
“I’m going to stay up here,” Oliver said, hanging over the edge. His tongue lolled from his mouth, his grin looking twice as goofy upside down.
“Come down through the front if you change your mind,” Marcus said, pointing toward the human-size door at the front of the freight car.
Celeste didn’t answer. She’d been quiet all day after we’d convinced Marcus to help. I didn’t know if she was naturally recalcitrant or if her worry kept her silent.
The train released three shrill whistles, and coach attendants repeated the signal with their smaller silver whistles. A few more people rushed by the open door, racing to board before we pulled out of the station.
Marcus tossed two balls of fire into the brass lanterns, using quick flicks of air to close the glass shields around the lit wicks, and then swung the enormous loading door shut. It rumbled on its runners and closed with a deafening clang of metal on metal, locking me inside the windowless container with seven mostly dead gargoyles and one grumpy fire elemental.
*
I spent the first half hour on the train sitting stiff and self-conscious on my cot, pretending to read a novel about a courtesan spy. Or maybe about a princess con artist. I couldn’t keep the story line straight, but I kept turning the pages and trying to look natural. I’d fretted over getting the gargoyles to their baetyl and surviving Reaper’s Ridge. I’d pictured all types of caves buried in the mountain and had run through dozens of techniques I’d used on gargoyles, hoping one of them would suffice for the baetyl. But I’d failed to consider the actual night spent on the train. Alone. With Marcus.
He’d lain down on his cot after we’d pulled out of the station and we’d checked to ensure the rocking motion of the train wouldn’t topple any gargoyles. He hadn’t opened his eyes since. I didn’t think he was asleep, but I couldn’t be sure.
With the rhythmic clack-clack of the tracks beneath us and the gentle sway of the freight car, it was hard to maintain the level of urgency that had hounded me in Terra Haven. Without that sense of dire purpose, the terrors of Reaper’s Ridge filled my thoughts.
The storms that tore it apart were composed of raw, wild magic, completely unpredictable and impossible to control. If we got trapped inside a storm of pure fire element, we’d be burned alive in seconds, and it’d be the most merciful way to die. I’d heard the horror stories of the bodies found—from drowning victims lodged in trees to frozen remains discovered in the middle of the summer. There’d even been a few instances of people who had seemed to explode, as if the wild magic had burst them apart.