She shook her head, denying my words.
“Who are you talking to?” Celeste asked. The gryphon perched on a wide tigereye crystal behind me, her sharp eyes scouring the shadowy baetyl.
“Her.”
“Who?” Oliver asked, squinting at the massive gargoyle.
“You don’t see her?” Frowning, I flicked my glance to Oliver and back to the bear. She hadn’t moved, and next to Oliver she looked . . . less. Less substantial. Weak.
“See who?”
“The bear? The other gargoyles?” Only there weren’t other gargoyles now, just the bear, Oliver, and Celeste.
“I don’t see anything,” Oliver said.
Confusion muffled my fear, helping me pick out details I’d overlooked in my panic—like the fact that I could see the geometric shapes of the baetyl through the bear gargoyle. Her paws also made no sound on the crystals—none of the gargoyles’ feet had. Frowning, I settled back on my heels, relaxing enough to unclench my fists, but I didn’t lower the shield.
The bear dropped to all fours, nose snuffling the air around my shield; then she turned and faded from sight. Trapped air gusted from my lungs. I dropped my shield without releasing my grasp of quartz magic and rubbed my hands together, wincing when I roughed up cuts on my palms.
“It was an apparition,” I said. I explained the gargoyles pouring out of the baetyl and the hippo swallowing me and sending me into a nightmare. I didn’t describe the nightmare.
“I think Marcus is trapped in a nightmare, too. I got out by using quartz magic.” If that was the only key to escaping the trap, Marcus wasn’t going to wake from his nightmare any time soon. He was a big, bad FPD fire elemental. He had oodles of training for all kinds of dangerous situations, but he’d never think to use something as simple as quartz-tuned earth magic to escape whatever madness he was likely seeing right now.
“The baetyl must be trying to protect itself,” Celeste said. “Humans aren’t meant to be here. If it were whole, you wouldn’t have made it this far. So it’s fighting back the only way it can.”
“The baetyl is sentient?” I glanced around, imagining all the crystals sprouting eyes and watching me. The thought chased a shudder down my spine.
“It is magic unto itself,” Celeste said with a shrug that whispered the rock feathers of her shoulders together.
I’d had plenty of time to think about the nature of the baetyl on the way up Reaper’s Ridge. I’d abandoned my earlier hope that it might resemble gargoyle magic on an immense, advanced level. A gargoyle, no matter how enraged or injured, could never create magic storms. The apparitions and nightmares only confirmed it: I was dealing with very foreign, very dangerous magic like no other I’d encountered before. Even if it wasn’t sentient, it had some level of awareness—enough to tell when it had been invaded and to deploy honed defenses.
I rolled my shoulders against the urge to hunch, as if I could hide myself by making myself smaller.
“Why didn’t it attack me the second time? Why did the bear walk away?”
“Maybe it recognizes you as a guardian,” Oliver said.
I doubted it; otherwise it wouldn’t have attacked me in the first place. If I could trust any part of an apparition, I’d say the bear gargoyle had been confused by the shield. Not many humans could manipulate the earth element through only quartz. It’d taken me years of practice to make it feel natural.
I remembered something Anya, Oliver’s sister, had told me when we first met. She’d said my magic smelled like a gargoyle. Could holding a quartz shield have been enough to confuse the baetyl into thinking I might be a gargoyle?
“Do I . . . Does my magic smell like a gargoyle?” I asked, half afraid the question would offend my companions.
Oliver shrugged. “You are a guardian.”
I looked askance at Celeste. She padded closer and pressed her beak to my chest, inhaling deeply.
“Your magic smells like a healer, but there are notes of a baetyl in it.” She backed away, eyeing me with fresh wonder. “My sense of smell is not good, otherwise . . . I waited so long out of fear . . .”
When I interpreted her wondrous expression, a zing of shock jolted through me. Up until this moment, she hadn’t fully believed I was a guardian, but there was no mistaking the certitude in her eyes now. Celeste rolled her shoulders and fluffed her feathers, and when she settled, she looked as if someone had lifted a heavy load from her back.
Oliver saw the change in her and smiled smugly.
“Your magic is a bit like a baetyl’s and it’s what makes you a guardian,” Oliver said. “Or maybe because you’re a guardian, it’s why your magic smells so good.”
“Just mine? Not Marcus’s?”
“Just you, Mika. Only you.”
A seed of hope sprouted in my chest, nurtured by the thought that maybe, just maybe, having magic even remotely similar to the baetyl would enable me to fix it.
I took a deep breath, tasting the quartz air as I watched Marcus’s hands clench into fists and feebly box at nothing. He looked helpless and vulnerable. Even his scowl was weak. No amount of prodding had stirred him, either.
“The baetyl’s not going to let me help Marcus until we fix it, is it?”
Celeste shrugged. “He might be beyond help. But Rourke is not, and we are wasting time.”
My stomach twisted. She was right, but it didn’t make her words more palatable.