A shouted curse pulled my head up, reminding me we weren’t alone in Focal Park. A few hundred feet away, one of the cleanup crew tumbled into an enormous sinkhole, only to swing back up to solid ground on thick bands of air wielded by her four coworkers. She clutched the arm of the woman who grabbed her while one of the men reinforced the crumbling cliff, using hefty bands of earth element to reshape the granite beneath the topsoil and strengthen their footing.
The eroded crater in the middle of Terra Haven’s premier park hadn’t occurred naturally. Neither had the mutations in the botanical gardens or the flow of now-cool magma that had decimated a fifth of the grounds. The entire park had been deformed, all thanks to Elsa Lansing.
May she rot in prison.
Elsa had attempted to manually re-create a gargoyle’s magical enhancement in an inanimate invention and failed spectacularly, nearly destroying the city along with Focal Park. But that was the least of her sins.
I ran a finger over five smooth patches on the marmot’s neck. The clear crystal integrated into his fading brown jasper neck was my healer handiwork, and it’d taken me over a month to coax his weak body to graft enough layers of quartz to seal the five stab wounds. It turned out that to mimic a gargoyle’s enhancement, Elsa had required the magic of a gargoyle, and she’d had no compunction against drilling into the marmot and draining his life to fuel her invention. Comatose and paralyzed, the marmot hadn’t been able to fight back or even flee.
Rotting in prison was too good for Elsa, and knowing her invention had nullified her, leaving her unable to ever touch the elements again, was only a small consolation.
The earth rumbled behind me where towers of three-foot-wide granite pillars jutted from what had been a smooth slope before Elsa’s invention went haywire. One of the taller granite posts snapped off at the base, then flew across the park to hover above the sunken ground. Cables of wood element pulverized the rock, crumbling the entire thousand-pound column into the gaping earth. Magic glowed around all five workers, funneling through the woman who had fallen into the pit, as they selected another pillar to demolish.
If not for my status as Terra Haven’s sole gargoyle healer, I would have been banned from the hazardous park with the rest of the city’s citizens during the restoration process. Instead, I had special clearance to tend to the marmot and one other dormant gargoyle in the park. The other, a large fox, lay out of the way atop a high granite outcrop, but after righting her internal imbalance caused by the invention’s malicious magic, I’d stuck to the more accessible marmot for my healing experiments. He’d had the good sense to be on level ground when sickness struck, not perched at a vertigo-inducing height.
“Let’s get this cleaned up, then see if the library has received the journal we special ordered,” I said, unable to infuse any enthusiasm into my words.
“She’s here,” Oliver whispered.
My shoulders stiffened. I didn’t need to turn to know he meant the onyx and amethyst gryphon gargoyle. She’d been following me around for the last month, observing from a distance any time I interacted with a dormant gargoyle—a critical witness to my repeated failures.
The first time she’d shown up, I’d thought she’d come to help. Every gargoyle I’d asked about the dormancy sickness had refused to talk to me about it except for Oliver and his four siblings, and they were as perplexed as I was—by the disease and by the other gargoyles’ silence. But the gryphon was different. She’d helped me in the past: When Oliver had been a baby, he and his siblings had been kidnapped and imprisoned by Walter, a mercenary earth elemental who had tortured them to steal their magic for himself—and for the highest bidders in his black market scheme. While I’d been desperately trying to rescue the hatchlings, the gryphon had convinced the city guards to investigate my wild tale. Without her timely arrival, I wouldn’t be alive, and neither would Oliver or his siblings.
I’d been wrong about her intentions now, though. The gryphon refused to let me or Oliver get close enough to talk, and I’d grown to resent her judgmental presence. It was bad enough that I hadn’t found a cure after months of research and experimentation; having an audience made it ten times worse.
I ground my teeth and used a soft push of air to sweep the quartz powder into a pile. With Oliver’s help, I packed up my supplies, the weight of the gryphon’s censure boring into my back the entire time. Irritation made my movements clumsy. I didn’t need the gryphon to point out my deplorable incompetence; I lived it every day, watching the dormant gargoyles slowly fade while I tried useless spells. My frustration with today’s failure was made worse by the fact that I’d never really expected the spell to work; I simply hadn’t had anything better to try—and I hadn’t for weeks. But the gryphon’s silent condemnation was the final straw.
“I’ve had enough of this.” I spun and locked gazes with the gryphon. She lurked closer than normal, and I could easily make out her glowing lavender eyes, despite her location in the dappled shadows fifty yards away.
“Do you need help?” I called, my tone conveying the butt out meaning of my words. I projected my voice through a cone of air to direct it toward the gryphon and away from the cleanup crew. I didn’t need them sticking their noses into this, too.
The gryphon’s neck feathers ruffled, and sunlight ghosted across the ripple of onyx. Her hard eyes remained expressionless.