I swallowed and shook out my arms and shoulders. For the dormant gargoyles, for Marcus, for Celeste and Oliver—for all their sakes—I had to risk it.
Marcus’s accusations of throwing my life away echoed in my thoughts, and I shook my head to dispel them. He was wrong; I valued my life greatly. Even knowing the number of lives at stake, my arms shook as I raised my hands, and I couldn’t uproot my feet. I didn’t want to die. If there were any other option . . .
“I’m not trying to kill myself,” I whispered. “I’m trying to save lives.”
Before I lost my courage, I took a step and slapped my palms to the crystal’s smooth surface, simultaneously sliding my magic into the heart.
The baetyl’s magic bowled into me.
12
I curled my fingers against the flat surface, straining for control. The baetyl’s magic battered me, swelling through my body and questing to push further, to explode through my skin and outward. I stared at my blood-splattered pink knuckles, the tendons rigid outlines. Next to the beautiful glossy surface, my blotchy skin was an atrocity.
I shook my head. The thought wasn’t mine. It wasn’t the baetyl’s, either. The enormous geode didn’t have anything so easy to comprehend as thoughts, but I could feel its distaste. My blood-and-sinew body was a foreign abomination that did not belong.
I’m here to help. I didn’t know if I said it out loud or only thought it, but it didn’t matter. The baetyl wasn’t listening. It pushed magic through me, using me, and fire and water burst from my fingers, flaring up the sides of the crystal. Droplets fell back to splatter my face, but the flames roared upward until they touched the crack and splintered into a burst of sparks.
I closed my eyes and grabbed for dominance over my own magic. I felt as vulnerable as the first time I’d linked with the FPD squad in Focal Park, when I’d nearly lost myself to the overwhelming magic—only this was a hundred times worse. The baetyl’s copious magic threatened to pull me into its undertow and destroy me. I fought back the only way I knew how: by grounding myself in my own individuality.
I am an earth elemental. I am a gargoyle healer. I am a gargoyle guardian, I chanted, reasserting my control bit by bit. I focused on the earth element, and the more I held, the more the baetyl quieted. When I fine-tuned it to quartz, the baetyl’s magic shifted to a contained pulse inside me.
I peeled my hands from the crystal, leaving bloody prints behind. Magic sat inside me, quiet as a sleeping dragon and more powerful than twenty-five gargoyle-enhanced full-spectrum elementals. The world bounced in my vision as I pivoted to locate Oliver and Celeste. I kept my movements slow and careful, as if I balanced fine china on my head, afraid a sudden movement would wake the baetyl’s magic and it’d annihilate me.
“Mika?” Oliver asked, his chiming voice high with worry.
“It’s alive,” I whispered, and the wonder of the realization threatened my internal balance. The baetyl’s magic quivered, and I repeated my mantra, idly manipulating the quartz element without releasing it. The baetyl quieted.
“Can you fix it?” Celeste asked.
With this amount of magic, I could do anything . . . if I could maintain control.
“Whatever happens, don’t open yourselves to me,” I said, and waited until they both promised before turning back to the heart crystal and covering the bloody marks with my hands again. Disguising the ugly blotches helped me concentrate.
In infinitesimal increments, I drew the other four elements to me and wove a filament to match the elements inside the heart crystal. When I pressed the blend into the crystal, the baetyl’s magic stopped testing me and unfurled, as unresisting as a gargoyle’s enhancement.
I took a breath and forgot to exhale. Time stilled. The serene magic held the weight of the baetyl’s ancient life, and ancient had a texture: a velvet stillness of centuries of patience wrapped in the glassy-smooth sides of crystals that grew a few millimeters a decade. It had strength, too. Power akin to the boost of a hundred gargoyles breathed inside that vast sensation, a singular entity of immense power.
And I was linked to it.
I turned my attention up, sliding my magic through layers of tigereye and amethyst, prasiolite and carnelian, onyx and jasper and agate all wrapped in a honeycomb of elements. I lost myself in the purity of the shifting quartz varieties, and when I encountered the crack, the serrated edge splintered the velvet glass power inside me.
My breath exploded from my lungs and I sucked in another one. In my chest, my heart beat like hummingbird wings, a blur cocooned in eons, pulsing ninety times in a single minute. The baetyl’s magic recoiled from the fluttering sensation, frothing inside me and threatening to spill through my skin. I gulped in another breath and held it, willing my heart to calm. If I lost control of the baetyl’s power, I’d drown. Fighting was useless. I couldn’t combat the strength of the baetyl; I could only work with it.
Keeping my eyes screwed shut, I nudged my magic back in line with the healthy quartz of the baetyl, then reached for the crack. I was prepared for the jagged texture this time, and I let it flow over me. As carefully as I would heal a gargoyle, I knitted the broken seams back together. The quartz reshaped beneath my magical touch, closing the base of the wound, but it didn’t heal. The jangle of broken magic buffeted me, refusing to be calmed.
Pulling back to the base of the crack, I searched the enormous crystal until I found the problem. The honeycomb of elements had been shattered along with the physical quartz. I could mold the physical seams back together, but if I didn’t fix the magic inside the crystal, it would tear itself apart again.