Marcus returned wearing brown leather pants, thick leather boots, and a lightweight fitted gray cotton shirt with a tiny flame stitched at the high collar. The shirt was regulation FPD attire and woven with protective magic, but the leather pants were new. They hugged his long legs and creaked when he sat on his cot. I glanced down at my unspelled jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt. The comparison between us said more obviously than words how unprepared I was for traversing Reaper’s Ridge.
Marcus’s attitude had changed to match his clothes, the camaraderie of last night chased away by the sunrise and his familiar scowl back in place. He silently handed me an apple stabbed with a paring knife, half a loaf of bread, and a hunk of soft white cheese. I jerked the knife from the apple and ate the fruit, then concentrated on cutting slices of cheese for each bite of bread. Across from me, Marcus methodically consumed his identical breakfast, seemingly unaffected by the heavy silence choking the air and making it hard to swallow.
“Repairing the baetyl is your job. For everything else, you’ll do what I say, when I say it.”
I lifted my eyebrows at his high-handed order. Marcus gave me a hard stare, no emotion behind his eyes.
“Is that clear?”
I stuffed a bite of bread into my mouth to choke off a dozen flippant responses and made myself nod. Marcus had experience, training, and more magic than me. It made sense for him to be in charge, especially in the wild magic of Reaper’s Ridge. Besides, telling him I’d follow his orders only if I agreed with them wouldn’t appease him, and I couldn’t afford to have him back out of helping me now.
I’d barely finished eating when the train began to slow.
“Are we there?” Oliver asked.
“Almost.”
My stomach tightened around my half-digested breakfast and I ran damp palms down my thighs. I tried to push my fear aside, but it wasn’t as easy as last night, when the danger was still a distant prospect. Oliver didn’t share my trepidation. The young gargoyle undulated out of the freight car with an excited trill and leapt to the roof. The metal popped under the combined weight of two gargoyles but didn’t dent.
Trying to calm myself, I focused on mundane tasks. I tucked my bag up against the larger loading door, folded my blanket on my cot, and laced my boots. The boots were the only part of my outfit that I was sure met Marcus’s approval. After our last adventure together, during which a spear of granite had skewered the bottom of my foot straight through my boot, I’d purchased the most heavy-duty pair I could find. They’d been advertised as guard boots and I wore them daily. I hadn’t expected to need them, having bought them mainly to counter the remembered pain of the wound, but they’d come in handy twice so far when injured gargoyles had been in too much pain to heed where they stepped.
By the time I’d adjusted the laces from the toe up to the calf on both boots, the train’s brakes were squealing and we’d slowed to a crawl. Marcus dropped the air barrier across the broken door, letting in a gentle breeze and the train’s perpetual burning-grass odor. I followed him out to the railing, my gaze lifting immediately to the mountains.
Lightning split the clear sky in the distance and thunder rumbled overhead a few seconds later. The tracks ran through a valley filled with sparse, dead weeds and scraggly brush, but a few hundred feet to the west, a dense pine forest blanketed the steep landscape. A gorge dipped into the hillside, revealing a barren ridge of quartz beyond it, the ragged white peaks glowing in the early-morning light. A thick shaft of fire belched from the hill, charring the rocks in its path and extinguishing in a bright explosion made soundless by the distance. Then the train rolled past the gap, and the tree line obstructed the view again.
Pain pinched my hand, and I uncurled my fingers from the railing to examine the red crescent marks of my fingernail imprints in my palm. When I looked up, Marcus was watching me. I tucked my hands into my armpits.
“We’re close. Any change in the gargoyles?” he asked.
I shook my head. “They need to get inside the baetyl.” If being near it had been enough, all the gargoyles from this baetyl would have stayed nearby until they recovered.
“Looks like we’re really going to Reaper’s Ridge, then,” he said. “The captain is going to skin me alive when he gets back. Unless we die first.”
A falling-down lean-to marked the once bustling Hidden Cache Station. Broken shards of glass lay around the base of the sunken ticket window, and paint flaked from the illegible sign and rotting siding. Weeds grew over extra lines of track that split out into the meadow to multiple neglected loading bays now defined only by thinner patches of weeds. Hidden Cache Station was no longer listed on any rail line, and I had Marcus and his connections to thank again for getting the train to stop here and not another fifty miles up the line at the nearest small town.
The station wasn’t empty. A rugged mountain air sled sat well clear of the dilapidated building, a pack of cerberi resting in the sled’s shade. The driver hopped from the padded seat to the ground as the train came to a stop. If the station’s run-down ticket booth and the mountain range had birthed a human child, the driver would have been their offspring. Wind, sun, and age had weathered his leathery skin into a crush of wrinkles around high cheekbones, a prominent nose, and thin eyes. Dirt caked his heavy pants, and streaks of grime coated a threadbare shirt covering his bony chest and stomach. The old man moved with unexpected agility, though, and clapped a worn cowboy hat to his head before shoving the air sled into position using brute force and a sizable amount of air magic.