Celeste stuck her head in, but her wide shoulders caught on the door frame, halting her forward momentum with a shriek of protesting metal. Cool evening wind whistled through the open door, blowing my hair into my eyes.
“Rourke needs magic! He’s fading!” she yelled, grabbing the frame with her massive eagle feet and wrenching. The metal screamed but held.
“Calm down!” Marcus barked. His authoritative posture was ruined a moment later when Oliver catapulted from Celeste’s back through the door above her head. Marcus ducked and threw himself against the wall with a curse. Oliver’s slender body fit easily through the narrow doorway once he tucked his wings tight, which meant he plummeted like a rock to the floor, shattering our dinnerware. Immediately, he unfurled his wings and launched over the gargoyles straight for me.
I flung myself to the ground, covering my head with my hands. Oliver clipped the side of the freight car with a wing, deafening us all with the metallic reverberation. He landed heavily on the back of the black and white onyx wolf next to me, scrambling to maintain his perch on the gargoyle’s slick fish-scale sides and smooth flying-fish wings. His long tail struck me in the shoulder, knocking me sideways, and I scrambled to a safer location under the large tiger.
“Mika! They need help!” Oliver shouted.
“Everyone, CALM DOWN!” Marcus bellowed. “Celeste, let go of the door. Oliver, get your snaky butt over here.” He pointed to the empty floor space between our cots, kicking the dented silver platter out of the way and scooping the broken porcelain of our dishes into a net of air before tossing them out the open door. Oliver tried to take off, slipped, and crashed onto the fox. The impact shook the floor of the freight car and made my ears ring. Before I could check to make sure he was okay, he squirmed to his feet and wriggled to the location Marcus indicated. I crawled out from under the tiger and checked the fox. Bits of her tail had flaked off and a dull pain radiated through her body, but it was the weakness of her life signs that alarmed me.
“What’s the problem?” Marcus demanded.
“We’re too far from the city. Damn it! I’m an idiot.” Celeste had told me the only thing keeping these seven gargoyles alive had been their location in prominent, magic-laden places of Terra Haven. We’d removed them from the only thing sustaining them. I explained as much to Marcus even as I opened myself to the magic boost all the dormant gargoyles offered so they could feed off my magic. Compared to the magical enhancement of a normal, healthy gargoyle, their boosts were a mere trickle, but the amount of magic they offered wasn’t important.
“We have to use magic for them,” I said. “They need to feed on it. They’ve basically been starving for decades, surviving on the scraps they could consume indirectly from people who used them for magical boosts. If they don’t get more magic, and quickly, they’ll waste away.”
I hooked my heavy bag with a band of air and tugged. It wiggled in place, but I couldn’t lift it toward me. Then fresh magic gushed into me, and I felt Oliver in the enhancement—his eager energy and the coil of excitement that never dimmed inside him. A moment later, even more magic poured into me from Celeste, but I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish the signature of her enhancement the same way I could Oliver’s. Months of working closely together had tuned me to him in a way I hadn’t known was possible.
Filled with magic, I wove cables of air and levitated my forty-pound bag more effortlessly than if I’d lifted it with my hands. As soon as it was in reach, I removed a seed crystal and began reshaping it to patch the fox’s wounds. Fortunately, they were minor enough that I could knit her tigereye flesh into the new quartz, closing a half dozen nicks without overtaxing her delicate system.
“What can I do?” Marcus asked.
“Use the elements—and use their boost to let them feed off you.”
A few seconds later, the pummeling wind abated and the car quieted as Marcus coated the opening with a solid sheet of air, wrapping it around Celeste’s head when she refused to back up. A glow of fire element swept through the freight car, countering the cold air with a gentle heat. I stepped among the dormant gargoyles, checking each of them. The flicker of their lives stabilized, but they were all frighteningly weak.
“We can’t keep this up indefinitely,” Marcus said.
“I don’t think we’ll have to. As long as we make sure they get regular doses of magic, they should be okay.”
“How regular?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never done this before.” I wasn’t even sure I was right, but I hoped I was. Neither of us could sustain a steady volley of magic from now until we reached the baetyl, not even Marcus and not even if we took turns.
Once I was sure no other dormant gargoyles had been injured, I squeezed through them to Oliver’s side.
“I’m sorry. I got scared. I didn’t mean to hurt her,” he said, head drooping. “I wanted to help.”
“It’s okay. She’s fine, but you’re not.” A ragged patch had chipped from the ruff around his square face like a bad haircut, and the orange carnelian wound was sandpaper rough.
“It’s no big deal,” he said, despite flinching away from my delicate touch.
“Nothing we can’t fix in a few seconds,” I agreed. “And you’re always an incredible help.”
Oliver didn’t say anything, but his wings relaxed and he lost his hangdog expression.
I floated a seed crystal to my hand and reshaped it as I knit it into Oliver’s injury. At one time, it would have taken all my concentration to mold the crystal and weave the complex elements to mesh the inert quartz with Oliver’s living carnelian body. Now I could do it almost without looking.
“Can you feel how much stronger the others are already?” I asked when I finished.
“No.”
“You can’t?”