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CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

Ellery

“All right.” Tucker clapped his hands together as he grinned at the cavern. “Let’s get this party started.”

Ianto and I both looked at him like he’d lost his mind. As if scared his crazy might be contagious, Scarlet stepped away from him.

“We probably won’t need all of us for the wind,” Tucker continued. “But we will for the rain.”

There was some moisture in the dirt, but it would be more difficult to pull it from the earth than from the sky and clouds. However, with all of us working together, we soon had the steady patter of drops hitting the ground in the cavern’s center.

“Now for the wind,” Tucker said.

His grin didn’t align with the apprehension churning like acid in my stomach. Even if we did manage to get the gargoyles to speak to us, were we ready for what they might say?

“Wind,” Tucker encouraged with a wave of his hands.

Ryker, Scarlet, and I exchanged looks before drawing on the currents of air. Pulling them from deeper in the tunnel, we brought them toward us.

Our wind currents mixed with Tucker’s as they swept into the room. They didn’t possess the strength of a hurricane, but they were a breeze that would rattle trees until they clicked together.

Caught up in the wind, the rain swept toward the pathway and carried past to the gargoyles perched fifty feet away from us. The wind howled past their alcoves and drove the rain into their small spaces.

We’d only created enough rain to affect the first five gargoyles, but it peppered them until water slid down their stone faces and dripped from their jaws.

The first two were chiseled with their mouths closed, as was the fifth, but the third and fourth had their jaws open to reveal the four razor-sharp fangs within.

If those jaws clamped down on someone, they’d shatter bone.

“Now what?” Ianto asked.

We all kept our hands up, directing the wind and rain toward the gargoyles as Tucker edged closer to them.

He tilted his head back and forth as the elements created a strange, hollow-sounding noise within the third and fourth gargoyles.

It wasn’t words, but it certainly wasn’t any sound I’d ever heard before either.

“Can you hear us?” Tucker asked.

I didn’t want the answer to that question. And as the seconds ticked past, I didn’t get it.

“Push the wind and rain more towards those two,” Tucker said as he pointed at the third and fourth gargoyles. “Maybe we can try pushing it into them instead of blowing it across them.”

“I don’t think they’ll like that,” Callan said.

It seemed ridiculous to think such a thing about an inanimate object made of stone , but I agreed with him. However, I obeyed Tucker’s command and helped push the wind and rain more toward those two gargoyles.

That strange, hollow sound increased until it echoed around us. It reverberated within the cavern in a whomping noise I felt in my bones.

“Can you hear us?” Tucker asked again.

I waited, my breath held in anticipation of finally learning something… and in terror. I wasn’t ready to learn these statues were watching and listening to us like I’d suspected.

The hollow sound turned into something more like a groan. The wind nearly caught that noise, but judging by the way we all tensed, I wasn’t the only one who heard it.

“Yeeeessss.”