Free Curse of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 2) by Rebecca Chastain

any sense.”
    I was so used to seeing the park without the ward, I hadn’t noticed it was missing.
    “We don’t know what we’re dealing with, so watch where you step.” He resumed his march toward the front edge of the polarization field.
    “Sure. I’ll keep my eye out for invisible pockets of nothing,” I muttered as I trotted to catch up with his long-legged stride. I fell into step beside him. “Why did it hurt?” I asked, speaking loud enough for him to hear this time. I’d been cuffed with null bands before, and they’d slid a barrier between me and the elements, but they hadn’t inflicted pain.
    “It was pulling the magic from you.”
    “But why? Why couldn’t I walk through it?”
    “Nulls are balanced voids. When you bungled into it, it reacted as if you were the enemy. It couldn’t let you keep walking. It had to destroy the magic inside you, so it trapped you.”
    “You make it sound like it had the ability to think.”
    “A poor analogy, then. It reacted to the magic in you the same way fire reacts to paper: You were consumable.”
    What a pleasant thought.
    “Usually null pockets deteriorate on their own, and pretty fast, but I don’t trust the elements to act normally right now.”
    As if to reinforce his words, the earth moved beneath our feet like a blanket being shaken out. A low rumble rolled up the hill, drowning out the creaking protests of the cottonwoods. I flung out my arms for balance, managing to keep my feet beneath me. Velasquez widened his stance and rode the undulating ground like he’d done it a dozen times before. My legs continued to tremble even after the granite resumed its characteristic inert state.
    “Stay close and stay behind me.”
    Velasquez’s matter-of-fact tone snapped me into motion. Following in his footsteps, I jogged across sun-warmed rocks, my feet slapping the hard stone in tandem with his. We had at least another twenty feet to go before we reached the edge of the polarization field, all of it uphill, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were moving too slowly. It was all well and good to be safe and conserve our energy instead of making a headlong dash, but the longer we were inside the polarized magic, the more my skin crawled with the need to escape.
    The granite shivered beneath my feet, the smooth wind-worn rock growing rough and uneven between one step and the next. I glanced around. None of the other rocks in our section were moving or reshaping. The earth was responding to our footsteps.
    “Velasquez . . .”
    “I see it.” The fire elemental altered his stride, his footsteps landing softer without him slowing. I tried to do the same and fell behind.
    Velasquez jumped to a wide boulder a step above us. I’d barely cleared the step behind him when the boulder sprouted a short wall in front of Velasquez, solid rock reshaping as fast as a blink. With speed I’d never have accredited to the large man, he sprang to the right. A crest of speckled gray granite swirled behind his feet, the dense rock moving and re-forming like water but sounding like a landslide. When he landed, a sheet of schist shot skyward at his right side, dwarfing him. Velasquez slammed into it, the impact bouncing him back a half step. Schist bulged from the wall and frothed up the smooth surface, coating it in short, jagged peaks.
    I slammed a knee into the protrusion Velasquez had avoided and windmilled my arms to counter my forward momentum. The granite beneath me lifted, carrying me toward Velasquez. He grabbed my arm, balancing me as the rocks ground to a halt.
    Neither of us moved, our ragged breathing filling the space between us. Velasquez was a foot shorter than me, standing in a knee-deep hole and hemmed in on two sides by rock walls where moments before there’d been a flat expanse of granite. I swallowed hard.
    The earth growled behind me, and I twisted to look. A ridge of brown-and-black-banded hornfels pushed upward along the dividing line between the