Gus thought that was hysterical.
I tuned them out and gathered a test pentagram, sliding it into the nearest dormant gargoyle. Her life guttered faintly, with nothing to feed on since the sled’s magic was crafted into it and static. I gathered more of the elements, pulling them through the unfocused boost of all seven dormant gargoyles, and grabbed a handful of seed crystals from my bag. The magic I did was less important than letting the gargoyles feed, so I threaded earth through the quartz, reshaping the seeds into a singular sphere, then a diamond, then a snowflake. I kept the quartz in perpetual movement, and to use more magic, I worked as fast as possible, holding the quartz in front of me on a cushion of air that I constantly had to adjust to compensate for the movement of the sled beneath me.
It worked to distract me, too—from Gus and Marcus and anything else they talked about, and from the dwindling distance between us and Reaper’s Ridge.
“Stupid girl! Knock that nonsense off before you get us all killed,” Gus said.
A wallop of air swung toward the quartz I was working, and I countered it with earth without thinking. Gus’s air slapped against my barrier and shattered. He grimaced at the backlash, shooting me a hateful look over his shoulder.
“Get your charge in hand,” Gus barked at Marcus.
“Mika. The wild storms are drawn to any active magic. No more for a bit.”
I let the quartz drop to my lap. Marcus held the crossbow loose in his hand, a brass null trap affixed to the tip of the notched arrow. His eyes scanned the horizon, the sky, the broken patches of forest, never settling on one place for too long.
Reaper’s Ridge rose beside us twice as tall as the road we traveled and separated by a single canyon and a few hardy trees. Storms crawled across the ridge and exhaled from the rocky mountainside into violent snow flurries, explosive lightning and downpours, and fire. Under a cloudless piece of sky, a flash flood gushed across a few hundred feet of the hillside before dissipating as suddenly as it had formed. The muddy ground rolled, and new boulders pushed to the surface.
Chills rushed down my body. It was the disaster at Focal Park all over again, only instead of the ridge being divided into five sections of predictable polarized magic, the elements clashed and twisted together in a violent mishmash.
I clutched the edge of the sled and scanned the visible parts of the ridge, hunting for clues to the baetyl’s location, but the mountain guarded its secret well.
Gus whistled two short notes, and the sled slowed. I glanced past the cerberi. The overgrown road continued down into the canyon, unobstructed by anything larger than weeds.
“Why are we stopping?” I asked.
“This is as far as I go.”
“We’re not even to the base of the ridge,” Marcus said.
Gus spat over the side of the sled. “This is as far as I go,” he repeated.
7
“I hired you to get us to Reaper’s Ridge,” Marcus said, his voice a menacing rumble as he loomed over the wrinkled old man.
Gus clicked his tongue, and all the cerberi turned toward us, eighteen throats growling in unison. My skin tried to crawl. Oliver stood on his hind legs to see over the driver’s bench seat, wings flared in alarm. The cerberi raised their hackles and inched back toward the sled. Gus had dropped an anchor, and we remained in place as they stalked closer.
“Really?” Marcus let out an exasperated breath. “Don’t threaten me, old man. I’m not in the mood. If you don’t want to go any farther, how much to borrow your team and sled?”
Gus shook his head. “I wouldn’t send my least favorite hound to Reaper’s Ridge.”
“Fine. How much to buy the whole pack?”
“Not for sale.”
“Not even one?”
“Nope.”
Marcus’s profile tightened, his standard scowl becoming threatening.
“Get out or I’ll dump you out,” Gus said. He used a trickle of air to activate a spell woven into the sled, and it began to tilt to the right.
Marcus smacked the spell with a whip of air and the cart righted itself. Gus’s gnarled fingers tightened on the reins and his eyes darted across the canyon to the riotous magic. A band of fire and air quested toward us, crackling into fiery lightning before it stretched across the canyon.
“Suit yourself. We’re heading back,” Gus said.
Marcus clapped a hand over the driver’s mouth before he could signal his cerberi.
“How much for the sled?”
When Marcus removed his hand, Gus’s grin revealed a few missing teeth. He named an exorbitant price. My heart dropped. I didn’t have any more money, let alone the small fortune Gus demanded. Maybe if we carried the gargoyles one at a time, we could make it work. We’d have to move them in stages, making sure we did enough magic around them to keep them alive without doing so much magic as to attract a wild storm.
I eyed the wolf gargoyle. He weighed more than Marcus and me combined. Without using the elements, I wouldn’t be able to move him. We needed the sled.