Read Curse of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 2) for Free Online Page A

and slid a feeler into the marmot.
    Ice-hard water blocked me, and my magic cut into the gargoyle when it should have penetrated painlessly. Grabbing more water, I matched my feeler to the unbalanced energies in the marmot. Pulses of pain, steady as a heartbeat, pounded into my brain through my connection to the gargoyle. I didn’t have to open my eyes to know the pain strobed in rhythm with the purifier’s energy as it drove polarized elements into the gargoyle and sucked out raw, enhancing magic.
    I slid deeper into the gargoyle, then scrambled to reconfigure the elements I held to balance with the marmot, pulling in more wood and letting go of a lot of earth. This wasn’t natural. A gargoyle should be the same resonance throughout. When I realized what it meant, my eyes popped open.
    “He’s polarizing on the inside,” I said.
    Seradon’s sympathetic brown eyes slid from the gargoyle to me. “I know.”
    “I don’t feel him fighting back. I thought he was because he’s kept the magic near his skin normal, but inside it’s like he’s . . .” Dead . I didn’t want to say it out loud, not within the marmot’s hearing.
    “While he’s dormant, I don’t think he can fight.”
    “How did Elsa do this to him?”
    “Greed makes people do horrible things.”
    That wasn’t what I meant. I wanted to know how she’d made the gargoyle “dormant” in the first place, but now wasn’t the time for a drawn-out conversation. The gargoyle felt fragile. The divided energy was eroding his innards, and if he took much more abuse, he’d be torn apart from the inside out in a cruel and agonizingly slow death.
    Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and retracted my elemental feeler from the gargoyle back to the quartz implant. It was time to prove myself worthy of my title.
    I couldn’t disconnect the thick bands of earth element welding the quartz to the gargoyle without hurting him, so I opted for quick slices of wood.
    Magic oozed from the fresh cuts, and tendrils of helixes stretched toward the fresh wounds like magical leeches. I hacked them away and layered patches across the cuts, tuning my magic to the marmot’s current balance on the inside and to strong jasper quartz on the outside, effectively sealing the cuts.
    I would have preferred to use the crystal to pack the wound, reshaping it as I might a seed crystal into quartz the marmot’s body could eventually absorb, but the impurities in the crystal made that impossible. If I’d been able to reach it, I would have extracted the foreign quartz with my fingers, but since the shield and purifier wouldn’t let me physically close to the gargoyle, I had to remove it using the elements. I considered a burst of air to push it from the open wound, but I didn’t want to cause the gargoyle additional pain from the backlash of pressure. I also didn’t have time for any finesse. I grabbed the quartz crystal where it was attached to the metal loop of the purifier and reshaped the rock into a blunt knob too large to fit back into the gargoyle’s wound.
    I was admiring my handiwork when the purifier’s weave reknit around the quartz and arced from the knob into the hole drilled into the gargoyle’s neck. Raw magic pulsed out of the gargoyle through quartz embedded on the other side of his neck.
    “No!” I sliced through the purifier’s weave, tearing it apart all the way around the metal loop. The moment I stopped, the weave started to regrow. I switched strategies and attacked the wall of helixes suspended inside the loop. My blades of air and wood sliced a path from the top of the metal circle to the bottom, severing a thousand complex looping strands between the polarized water and earth sections.
    The weave should have dissolved. The influx of earth flowing into water through the gap I’d created should have shattered the rest of the elemental wall. Instead, the barrier grew back together into the same pattern as before, and watching the magic rebuild itself