“He is not mated,” Celeste said. She no longer looked ready to rip apart the freight car, so she must have been able to feel Rourke’s increasing stabilization.
Marcus floated the abused silver platter in the air in front of him, rotating it over an intense blue-white cone of flame. While I patched Oliver, he reshaped the softened metal, removing the claw-foot dents Oliver had embossed in it. Then Marcus meticulously re-etched the swirling leaf design through the cooling silver until the platter looked better than when I’d taken it from the dining car.
He glanced my way, and I snapped my mouth shut. Of course Marcus could do the precise work of an artisan. Just because he looked like he was built to run through granite walls, had the elemental strength to match, and spent his time fighting the worst magical creatures and problems in the city didn’t mean he couldn’t do delicate work with his magic, too.
“How much longer do we need to keep this up?” he asked.
I looked to Celeste. The gryphon stared over my head at her mate, worry sitting strangely on her eagle face.
“Awhile longer,” I finally said.
“Are you done there?” he asked.
“Yep. But we need to keep using magic.” I gave Oliver a pat and he snuggled against my legs. The clear quartz I’d used to rebuild his chipped ruff to its previous shape looked peculiar among his orange-red rock fur, but in a few days, his body would absorb the crystal and replace it with carnelian.
“It doesn’t matter what we do with the elements?”
I shook my head, hunting for ideas. I could blow wind around the freight car and maybe pull a few drops of moisture from the air, but neither would keep much magic moving for the dormant gargoyles to passively feed from.
“How about a game of Elemental’s Apprentice?” Marcus asked.
“The kid’s game?”
“Got a better idea?”
I sighed. “No.”
Elemental’s Apprentice was a game of humiliation. The premise was simple: Using only magic, two people tossed raw elements back and forth, sometimes with physical items included. The person who dropped the elements first lost. The easiest way to win was to toss your opponent more element than they could handle. Since I’d always been only a midlevel earth elemental with even weaker skills with air and water, I’d almost always lost, usually getting drenched with water in the process. Against an FSPP, I didn’t stand a chance.
“Let’s start with air,” Marcus said. He sat on his cot, his back to the wall with the broken door and his legs stretched out. Everything about his posture said he was relaxed and expected an easy victory.
“Sure.” I shifted to sit cross-legged on the floor and Oliver curled around me, eyes glowing in anticipation. Pulling on my connection with the gargoyles, I collected a massive bundle of air, weaving the element into a tight vortex and plucking a few strands loose so it’d unravel the moment Marcus caught it. I wasn’t going to make this easy on him.
“Whoa. Hang on,” he said. “I didn’t mean a battle to the death, and I see what you’re doing there with that trap. It wouldn’t work, but that’s not the point. We just need to keep magic circulating, right? Let’s keep this friendly.”
I shifted the vortex to the side so I could study him. He looked sincere—and amused.
“For the gargoyles,” he added.
Still not trusting him, I dispersed my wind-funnel trap and made a small fist-size bundle of air, then wrapped and tied it off so it would hold its form once I threw it. I tossed it to Marcus and immediately prepared a wall of earth magic in front of me in case he hurled it back five times as big and too fast for me to catch. Instead, he lobbed it back, scoffing when I had to drop my barrier to catch it.
“Not a fan of the game?” he asked.
“I’ve played with a few poor sports.”
“The kind who set traps in their first throw?”
I didn’t appreciate the implication. “The kind who enjoy humiliating the weaker woman. You know, typical FSPP superiority crap.” I threw the air back to him with more force than necessary.
Oliver tilted his head against my thigh as he tracked the air ball’s flight back to me in the heavy silence. I rested a hand on his side and let out a long breath.
“Sorry, that was uncalled for,” I said, reminding myself Marcus had never done anything but help me.
We threw the element back and forth a few times before Marcus asked, “Do you know a lot of full-spectrum elementals?”
“Personally? Just you. And Grant and the rest of the squad,” I added quickly. “But as a kid, there were a few in my school. I wasn’t sad when they got transferred.” Some of my friends had been jealous of the more talented students and the special school they’d been whisked away to in their early teens. I’d been relieved to see them go.
“You’re lucky. I know a lot of full-spectrum pricks.”
My gaze snapped to Marcus’s, and he winked.
“I was one of them for a while. I could teach you some dastardly tricks some other time. Beef up the air, then add water.”
“Are you testing my control over the elements I’m weakest with?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because tomorrow we’re going to Reaper’s Ridge, and I want to see what you’ve got.”
I frowned. “You know what I’ve got. This isn’t the first time we’ve worked together.” Even if he’d forgotten when we’d fought together in Focal Park, we’d spent today linked. The intimate combining of our magic would have left Marcus with no questions about how weak I was in every element.
“Which is why I didn’t agree to come with you just because you gave me puppy-dog eyes. I know you’re not going to flip out, but you’re handicapped by that whole everyone-else-first healer thing.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Puppy-dog eyes?
“Tomorrow will be about more than throwing yourself in front of every threatened gargoyle. You’ll actually have to try to survive.” His scowl was back in full force.
“That’s the plan,” I said, confused by the turn in his mood.