Marcus had already reached the same conclusion, because he was haggling. “Tell you what: I’ll accept your price, but only if you agree to pay me half again as much when I sell it back to you.”
Gus’s eyes shone as he shook Marcus’s hand enthusiastically. He snatched up the wad of bills Marcus pulled from his pocket and leapt agilely from the seat to the ground. After unhooking a slender board from the front of the sled, he unhitched the towline from the sled and attached it to the board. When he activated the board’s spell, it floated a foot or so off the ground. Gus stepped on, grabbed the reins, and signaled the cerberi with a sharp whistle. They folded back down the line in the direction we’d come. By the time the last cerberus squeezed past the cart, they were galloping. Gus rode the floating board like he’d been air surfing his whole life, and he and his cerberi disappeared back into the forest. In less than a minute, the sound of the cerberi’s enormous paws faded and an unnatural silence settled around us, broken only by the rumble of rockslides and thunder across the canyon.
“I don’t think he expects you to live long enough to return his sled,” I said.
“Easiest money I ever made.” Marcus jumped from the driver’s seat.
I tried to match his nonchalance as I scrambled to the ground. No birds chirped or called, no squirrels jumped through the branches above us, no lizards scurried through the fallen leaves. If any animals lived this close to Reaper’s Ridge, they stayed hidden.
An eagle’s shriek echoed off the hills, chased by a clap of thunder. Celeste dove through the trees to land next to me, folding her wings to her black sides as she trotted the last few steps.
“Where is the driver going?” she demanded.
“It doesn’t matter. We need to move the sled ourselves,” Marcus said. “Mika, set us a new towline.”
Gus had taken the original towline with him, but a spare coil of rope was clipped to the underside of the sled. I tied the ends to the eye hooks in the front of the sled, creating a loop of rope.
“Can you pull it?” Marcus asked. He never ceased scanning the surroundings, crossbow and null trap at the ready.
I stepped into the circle of rope and leaned my weight into it. The sled shifted a few inches. Oliver loped to my side and reared to grab the line with his front paws, but his sinuous shape prevented him from getting any leverage and the sled didn’t budge. We all turned to Celeste.
“Well?” Marcus asked.
She gave him a hard stare. “I am no animal of burden.”
“It’s you or me, and I think we’d both prefer me standing guard.”
“This is debasing,” Celeste grumbled, but she allowed me settle the rope around her broad chest for the same reason she’d trusted me with the secret of baetyls: love. She would do anything to save her mate. With Celeste pulling and me leaning against the back of the sled, we got the platform in motion.
The road switchbacked down into the canyon, and the slant helped us keep momentum through the increasingly dense undergrowth choking the unused path. After flying across the countryside behind the cerberi, our walking pace chafed. It also gave me too much time to think, and a snarl of doubt twisted my thoughts into knots. What if I couldn’t repair the baetyl? What if we couldn’t find it? How would we feed the gargoyles magic without attracting the storms? What good was my paltry magic against the massive collections of wild, raw elements? Every storm I’d caught a glimpse of could overwhelm me on sheer power alone. What had ever made me think I could do this?
Concussive explosions echoed through the narrowing canyon, the source hidden in the crevices of the mountainside. Every so often, wind howled through the trees, a different temperature every time. I twitched and jumped as I walked, trying to suppress my growing nerves, but the ridge never gave me a quiet moment to gather my wits.
By the time we reached the base of the canyon, I’d switched from cursing Gus for leaving and Captain Monaghan and the rest of the squad for being on vacation when I needed them to counting my blessings. I had Marcus with me, an air sled to move the gargoyles, and Oliver at my side. I wasn’t alone. It would be so much worse to face this by myself.
A solid granite bridge arched above the shallow river at the base of the gorge, and Marcus made us wait while he examined it before he allowed us to cross. I would have preferred to test it with earth, but since we didn’t want to attract storms, Marcus’s visual inspection had to suffice.
I stood at Celeste’s shoulder while we waited, studying the thick foliage overgrowing the road on the opposite side.
“You know the way, right?” I asked.
Celeste nodded, and when Marcus gave the go-ahead, she surged up the bank on the other side. I threw my weight against the back of the sled, scrambling after her. After a few dozen feet, she found a marginally clearer path through the dense undergrowth. Another hundred feet up the mountain, it revealed itself to be a real road, widening and clearing as it curved in a switchback.
My footsteps faltered when a wave of dizziness shoved through me. I glanced around, looking for a source. Beside me, Oliver whined.
“It’s the ridge,” Marcus said. He’d stopped up the trail to let us catch up.
“It feels . . .” I tried to put a term to the irritation grating against my elemental senses. My head felt like I’d been gritting my teeth for hours, the ache at my temples faint but grinding.
“Like a warning against trespassers?” he suggested.
Exactly. The entire mountain hummed with menace.
“We could turn around.”