Relief washed the strength from my limbs and I sat. I had an answer to the dormancy sickness. I had a cure. I even understood why Celeste had taken so long to come forward. In telling me about the existence of baetyls, she’d endangered the lives of all gargoyles. Even Oliver had never mentioned a baetyl to me, and he trusted me with his life. For all Celeste knew, I could publish the information, and then there’d be a mob of unscrupulous scavengers hunting for baetyls and the helpless gargoyles inside. She’d had to extend her trust even further in asking me to fix Rourke’s baetyl: To fix it, I’d have to be told its exact location.
I have a cure. I repeated the words again in my head to savor them. This morning I’d despaired of finding a remedy in time, and now . . . I have a cure. The words reknit my confidence. My inability to cure the comatose gargoyles hadn’t been my fault. I’d been attacking the symptom, and the problem wasn’t even a part of the gargoyles. It existed elsewhere, outside their bodies.
The ramifications of that thought dampened my satisfaction. The problem existed outside the gargoyles.
“When Rourke said his baetyl was injured, did he mean the baetyl itself or the baetyl’s magic?” I asked.
“They’re the same thing. A baetyl’s magic is the baetyl,” Celeste said, confused by my distinction.
“Is a baetyl’s magic like a gargoyle’s?” I was a quartz savant, but my skills with normal five-element magic weren’t half as impressive. It meant I could perform amazing feats with quartz-tuned earth, which was how I became a healer of gargoyles and their living-quartz bodies, but the rest of my abilities were midlevel at best.
“A baetyl’s magic is . . .” Celeste hunted for the right word.
“Everything,” Oliver said.
Celeste nodded, as if he’d made sense.
I tamped down my frustration, knowing they weren’t being purposely obtuse. We were close to saving the dormant gargoyles. All I had to do was figure out how to fix a baetyl, which as far as I could tell was either a cave with magic or a form of magic contained in a cave.
A magic that could heal comatose gargoyles. A magic that was everything.
Fixing a cave I could probably do, especially with the help of gargoyles to boost my magic. Fixing a form of magic itself sounded beyond my capabilities.
“How big is a baetyl?” I asked.
“I’ve never been inside Rourke’s, but probably no larger than this park,” Celeste said.
I struggled to keep my expression blank. Focal Park covered over a square mile. I was hopelessly out of my depth.
“Are you asking me only because you don’t think you can trust anyone else? I can find you others—” Stronger elementals.
“No. No one else has a chance of helping,” Celeste said. “You’re the closest thing to a gargoyle who can work magic. If any human can integrate with the baetyl’s magic, it is you, Guardian.”
Oliver nodded in agreement.
I stared at them both in astonishment. They saw me as a pseudo-gargoyle? It was flattering and perplexing all at once.
“You’re sure this is the only answer? Maybe I could replicate a baetyl’s magic here,” I suggested.
“You couldn’t even come close. This is the only way.”
Of course it was. “Once I fix the baetyl, Rourke and the others will recover?”
“After they’ve spent long enough inside it, yes.”
I took a deep breath and modified my previous plan to include finding the secret location of Rourke’s baetyl, carting over three thousand pounds of frozen gargoyles inside, and then repairing a form of magic I knew nothing about in a cave larger than several city blocks. Because I was a guardian or because I was the equivalent of a human gargoyle, Celeste believed me capable of all three impossible tasks.
I’d have to be, too, since seven lives depended on it.
“You don’t happen to know where his baetyl is, do you?” I asked.
“Of course.”
My spirits lifted. “Really? Where?”
“Waupecony Ridge.”
Her words punched my gut and I deflated. “You mean Reaper’s Ridge?”
3
The Native Americans hadn’t been poetic when they named the white quartz–laden peak Waupecony Ridge, or White Bone Ridge. They understood the perils of the mountain, but early settlers wouldn’t listen to their warnings, especially not once they saw the veins of gold lacing the snowy quartz. From the beginning, there were reports of Waupecony Ridge miners who lost their memory and even more who wandered from the mining camps only to be found days or weeks later, starved, dead, and often the snack of local predators.
Then the Hidden Cache Mining Company had purchased rights to the entire ridge and begun large-scale mining. They pulled a fortune from the mountain for several years—right up until forty-three of their miners were torn asunder in a freak explosion of wild fire and earth magic. It was the first in a battery of elemental storms, and when they couldn’t be contained, the federal government had decreed the area too dangerous for continued operation. That hadn’t prevented the elemental storms raging across the hillsides from claiming a life or two a year, killing hikers and fortune hunters too foolish to heed the restrictions, earning the area the nickname Reaper’s Ridge.
Occasionally, a Federal Pentagon Defense squad would be dispatched to Reaper’s Ridge to subdue wayward storms, and even the elite FPD warriors couldn’t do much more than enforce a wide perimeter around the ridge.
Why did the baetyl have to be there?
“I can’t do this on my own. I’m going to need help,” I said.
“I’ll help,” Celeste said, and Oliver seconded her.
I nodded, not really listening. I would have preferred going to Kylie for assistance. She was my best friend and had helped me in the past, but she was out of town, covering the blooming of the Asking Tree for the Terra Haven Chronicle. Even if she had been available, she was a journalist at heart. Dangling exclusive information about gargoyle birthing grounds in her face, then telling her she had to keep it a secret, would be pure torture. More practically, she didn’t have the physical strength, magical know-how, or warrior training I’d need to survive Reaper’s Ridge. I needed the help of seasoned full-spectrum elementals. I needed Captain Grant Monaghan and his squad.