The Key (The Magnificent 12 3)

Rows of gargoyles stared down with hideous malevolence. (Medieval church builders loved them some gargoyles.)

Then, the gargoyle that had taken the main blast of the lightning bolt … blinked.

If you read about the gargoyles of Notre-Dame, you may come across a story that they were mostly used to direct rainwater. This is nonsense, of course. Okay, not total nonsense because they were used to keep the rain that rushes down off the roof from draining down the side of the church and messing up the nice stonework.

But that doesn’t explain why they look like demons. There are dozens of other ways to design a rainspout. They could have been just pipes. Or Hello Kitties. But no, they were carved to look like demons—bits of hungry lion and screeching eagle and sinister wolf and dragon.

Gargoyles were there to send a message to people—people who, in the Middle Ages, mostly couldn’t read. The message was that the end of the world was nigh and they’d better show up for service on Sunday. Or else.

These particular gargoyles were very old, eroded stone figures, so they’d lost some of their fearsomeness. Unless of course you woke them up with a magic spell and a bolt of lightning, because then, well, then they got very real, very fast, and in very lifelike detail.

“That thing just eyeballed me,” Stefan said.

“Yep,” Mack agreed.

“Fly, my gargoyles, fly!” Valin cackled madly, arms upraised. “Destroy them. Destroy them all!”

Needless to say, he added a crazy laugh that went, “Ahhh-ha-ha-ha-haaaahhhh!”

The lightning-struck gargoyle grew detailed. Long years had worn away the scales, and roughened the edges of its wings, and dulled the sharpness of its talons. Now those emerged from the stone. They became whole and complete and terrifying.

This was no longer a stone sculpture to frighten children. It was a living, steam-breathing emissary of hell.

The gargoyle then emitted a cry. How to describe it? A cry full of furious frustration, sudden unexpected liberation, and a realization that all its centuries of imprisonment as a stone object, all its forced immobility and helplessness, were at an end.

The gargoyle opened its leathery wings, fixed its mad eyes on Mack, and swooped down from its roofline perch.

Others then moved. Others then stared with fixed hatred on the small band of kids standing (rather improbably) in the middle of the Seine.

Dozens?

No, more than dozens. Hundreds!

Some had only half a body—they had been sculpted that way. Some leered lasciviously while others glared furiously. Some had wings; some moved sinuously like snakes through the air. They seemed almost to swim down out of a sky boiling gray and black and riven by bolts of lightning.

“We don’t want to go that way anyhow,” Mack yelled. “Back! Back!”

They turned and ran across the water. Now the current was their friend. Each step was like a step and a half. It was strangely like ice-skating somehow, but dragging Stefan through the water was slowing them down.

The first gargoyle raked Mack’s hair with its talons. Blood dribbled down his face and he made a sort of frightened whinnying sound, like a horse that’s just seen a rattlesnake.

They passed beneath the first small bridge, a temporary—very temporary—respite, then out the other side for a renewed onslaught.

But at the same time his mind was working furiously. He had Vargran. They all did. But the enlightened puissance was an easily exhausted resource: like the patience of a boy who finds himself in a Claire’s store, or a girl who finds herself in a discussion of belching, or a reader forced to wade through an overly long simile.

The point is, the enlightened puissance is like a battery that runs down and then needs to be recharged. So Mack had to take that into account. He’d already used up a whole lot of e.p. walking on water. And they would need all their combined strength to pull off the dramatic stunt they were planning.

On the other hand, it was important not to die.

Beneath the next bridge and out, and beneath and out, and this time the gargoyles encircled them, swooping to cut them off so that they had to push and flail and bat at monsters to get out the other side.

“We must use the Vargran!” Rodrigo cried seconds before a gargoyle struck him in the back and knocked him forward. Rodrigo hit the water, but instead of landing on it as though it was solid, he plunged in, bellyflop-style. He bobbed up after a second, but in order to walk on the water, he needed first to be able to walk.

Sylvie, Charlie, and Xiao grabbed Rodrigo’s arms and hauled him up, up until he could get one foot above the surface. Then he was able to stand. But pulling this off had made the knot of four kids a focus for the gargoyles. They swarmed in a fast-moving spiral, all gray talons and beaks, horns and wings.

“Stefan!” Mack yelled. “Swim for the bridge on your own. Dietmar and Jarrah with me!”

He led them in a body slam against the spinning gargoyles. But that so didn’t work. Dietmar was knocked down into the water, just like Rodrigo had been. A gargoyle had talons in Jarrah’s hair and was dragging her, pulling her away.