Capture the Crown (Gargoyle Queen #1) -Jennifer Estep Page 0,46

head snapped up. A moment ago, I had been all alone in this fever dream, or whatever it truly was. Now Leonidas was standing in the chamber.

The prince looked much better than when I had last seen him in the clearing outside my cottage. The color had returned to his face, and his body no longer seemed stiff with pain. He was also wearing a new black riding coat with glittering amethyst buttons, which added to his tall, strong, imposing presence.

My heart lifted like a gargoyle shooting up into the sky, but it plummeted back down just as quickly. Leonidas Morricone wasn’t here. Not really. He had just wandered into my fever dream.

“What are you doing?” he asked again.

I sighed for the third time. “Dying.”

Leonidas’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, but he walked forward and peered down into the chasm. A frown creased his face when he spotted my body lying on the ledge.

Several seconds ticked by in silence. I expected him to return to his own dream—or mind—but instead, he lowered himself to the ground and sat on the edge of the chasm next to me, the sleeve of his coat close enough to brush my elbow, if either one of us had been in our real bodies.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Something I should have expected. Conley, the mine foreman, shoved Penelope into the chasm and killed her. Then he did the same thing to me. He didn’t want to share his blood money with us. Greedy bastard. My only regret is that I didn’t find some way to drag him down with me.”

A small smile quirked Leonidas’s lips. “I didn’t realize you were so murderous.”

I thought of how I had frozen when the miners first attacked me. Over the years, I had worked so bloody hard with Alvis and had trained so bloody much with Rhea to keep from being overwhelmed by other people’s thoughts and feelings, to keep from being paralyzed like I had been during the Seven Spire massacre, but it had happened again anyway.

That was the problem with my mind magier magic—it made me feel too much. Most people only had to handle their own fear, anger, or terror, but I got assaulted by everyone else’s emotions too. Or perhaps the problem wasn’t my magic. Perhaps the problem was me, and my inability to handle all those messy feelings, especially my own, no matter how deep down I tried to shove them.

Either way, it was finally going to cost me my life. Although I supposed that was fitting, since I had cost so many people their lives during the massacre. Poetic justice was finally being served to Coward Gemma.

Leonidas kept staring at me, so I shrugged, as though I weren’t silently cursing my own bloody weakness.

“Perhaps if I had been more murderous, I wouldn’t be in this situation.” I changed the subject. “What are you doing here?”

“I was going about my business when I heard you cry out in my mind. Even worse, I felt your pain. I knew that you were in trouble, so I sort of . . . cast my mind about and followed the cry and the pain back here to you.”

It sounded like he was talking about seeking, an ability that let some mind magiers step outside their own bodies and view whatever person or place they wished. If he could do that, then he was even more powerful and dangerous than I’d realized.

“I also heard another cry, but it didn’t sound like you,” Leonidas continued. “It was lower, rougher, almost like . . . rocks crunching together.”

He had to be talking about Grimley. The gargoyle must have felt my injury through our mental bond, the same way that I could sense whenever he had been hurt. I had been in so much pain before that I hadn’t even tried to communicate with him.

Grims? I sent the thought out. Are you there?

Gemma! he replied, although his voice was the faintest whisper in my mind.

Grims! Grims!

I called out to him again and again, but an eerie, buzzing silence filled my head, along with a gaping emptiness in my heart where his strong, solid, comforting presence should have been. His absence made me want to weep, but I didn’t have the strength for that either, not even in this ghostly form.

Thanks to my injuries, my magic was rapidly weakening, right along with my body. Strangely enough, the thought didn’t fill me with as much fear as I’d expected, just a cold, growing numbness.