Lowering my sword, I paused to catch my breath as I wiped the rain from my brow; it was useless. More water poured over me as the buffeting wind tore at my hair and clothes. The water running down my nape slipped down my back in an icy trail.
My pounding adrenaline kept much of the cold at bay, but now that I wasn’t fighting, the chill was seeping into my bones, creeping through my hands, and creating shivers along my skin.
The distant lights from the palace were the only source of illumination on the battlefield. The torches had all gone out, but that glow was enough to reveal the war taking place.
I had to keep moving, or I’d freeze here. And since there was no one coming at me, I had to find out about the gargoyle.
Turning, I sprinted toward where the creature had fallen. I found the beast, sprawled face down near the edge of the woods as hail pelted the earth. Frozen balls, the size of a coin, hammered my flesh.
The howling wind whipped the hail through the air. One of the balls hit my temple, knocking me to the side. I didn’t know who’d unleashed this new phase of hell, but I hoped their dick or vagina rotted off, and I didn’t care which side they were on.
Trying to avoid more of the unrelenting hail, I fell to my knees beside the gargoyle. The wet ground squished beneath me, and more water rushed into my pants through my knees, but I was already too wet to care.
The cannonball that had taken him—or at least I thought it was a him—from the sky was still on his back, but it hadn’t penetrated the creature.
The ball had knocked him from the sky and pinned him to the ground; he appeared to be unconscious… or dead. It was difficult to tell as the gargoyle wasn’t bleeding.
For all I knew, they didn’t have blood, and when they died, they turned back into stone. If he were a statue again, his splayed position would certainly make for an interesting one.
Grasping the cannonball, I rolled it off the creature’s back as a woman fell to her knees beside me. “Is it dead?” she yelled, her words barely carrying over the chaos.
“I don’t know!”
She studied the gargoyle for a second before grasping one of its arms. “We should turn it over!”
“What about its wings?”
When it fell, its wings remained wide. We might damage the delicate-looking things if we tried turning him over with his wings in such a position.
It was strange to see such a powerful, solid creature with wings as delicate as a butterfly’s, but holes, most likely from arrows, riddled the thin, membrane structures. Those wings were the gargoyle’s one weakness… minus the fact that their heart could be stolen.
“Can we fold them against its back?” she yelled.
I ran my hands across the gargoyle’s throat to detect a pulse. If it were dead, we were wasting our time.
“Does it have a heartbeat?” she asked.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Tucker
“I have no idea! I don’t feel one, but I’m also not sure if they normally have one or not.”
I knew about the Heart of Stone; I was with Ellery and Ryker when it was discovered, but I had no idea how it worked. When Ellery returned it to them, did it break into pieces to enter all of them? Or did it magically disappear into them? Did it give them heartbeats afterward?
I was completely clueless about how these creatures worked, and we were running out of time. The gargoyle had fallen at the edge of the Revenant Woods; the shadows there protected it, but the soldiers were pressing closer.
They’d stopped trying to enter the forest, realizing it was a suicide mission and their fires wouldn’t stay lit, but they’d come for us. And they would gladly kill or capture a gargoyle. I was sure Ryker’s father would love to get his hands on one.
Looking up, I wiped away the water pouring down my face as I examined the trees. Some of the fires still burned in the underbrush, but they were mostly down to hot coals.
Many of the closest treetops were gone, and more trees had fallen, but flames no longer devoured them. At least we didn’t have to worry about a fire getting to him.
The poltergeists still hovered at the edge of the tree line, but most of the monstrous forest animals had retreated. They probably lingered nearby, waiting to pounce if anyone tried to harm the woods again, but they’d left this fight to us and the poltergeists.
I winced when another ball of hail pelted me in the back of the skull. Staying at the tree line wasn’t helping with my throbbing head.
Rising, I grasped one of the gargoyle’s wings and gently pulled it toward his back. The large wing moved far more easily than I’d expected, and when I closed it in place, it remained there.
