House of Cards

by C. E. Murphy

  “What if I could turn that high wire into a platform?”

  “Can you?” Margrit’s voice was dubious. “I don’t know what it would take, but I don’t think a handful of selkies are going to be able to pull off that kind of trick. I’ve already had one misguided gargoyle try to rescue me, and all it’s done is drag me deeper into the hole.”

  “Alban Korund.” Kaaiai said the name thoughtfully. “I’ve got more experience at this sort of thing than he does, which probably doesn’t reassure you.”

  “Not really. What?” Margrit asked, with a glance toward Cara. “You don’t curl your lip and call him ‘the outcast’?”

  Kaaiai gave Cara a brief smile. “Young people are staunch in their prejudices.”

  “I’ve noticed old people are, too,” Margrit said dryly. “It just seems a little weird to me that a people who’ve chosen exile for their whole race would call Alban’s kettle black. I don’t even get the idea that he broke one of your laws, just that he walled himself off from his people.”

  “To a gargoyle, there’s not much worse. I think none of us can understand.” Kaaiai indicated not only himself and Cara, but Margrit, with a small circular gesture. “None of us share the intimacy gargoyles do, with their ability to exchange memories and thoughts. Deliberately exiling ourselves from the Old Races was a choice we made as a community. It didn’t leave us alone in the fashion that Alban Korund keeps himself. I think it would be like cutting away your hand, or your heart, to do what he’s done.”

  “And it’s unforgivable?”

  “It’s incomprehensible. There aren’t many of us as a whole, much less within the individual races. The idea of turning our backs on our people…” Kaaiai shook his head. “Whether it’s forgivable is for the gargoyles to say, not me.”

  “What would you say, if it were up to you?”

  Kaaiai lifted a big shoulder and let it fall. “I would welcome any of my people back with open arms, but we’ve lived apart from the rest of the Old Races for a long time. We may no longer think as they do. Which brings me to the point of asking you here, Ms. Knight.”

  Caution spilled through Margrit in cool waves. Janx’s theory sat badly with her, but Kaaiai’s easy admission that the selkies had changed gave it weight. She glanced toward Cara, whose eyes shone with enthusiasm as she looked from Kaaiai to Margrit and back again. The desperation that had once marked the young woman was gone, girlish hope replacing it. Even when fear had driven her, though, she’d advised Margrit against bargaining with Daisani. Cara’s conviction had seemed unalterable, and all appearances suggested her situation had only improved since then. If she, desperate and afraid, refused to work with Daisani, then it seemed unlikely a man like Kaaiai, clearly a leader, would condone or participate in the murder of Janx’s lieutenants.

  “I’m listening.” Margrit focused on Kaaiai, putting thoughts of Janx away. There would be time, and if Janx’s fears were right, the more information Margrit got now, the stronger her hand would be later. “What do you think I can do?”

  “We’ve spent generations hiding ourselves in our fight for survival. It’s time to challenge the order that has held the Old Races in place for millennia, and decide how we can best approach a new world. We need an advocate, Ms. Knight, and you’re the obvious choice.”

  Margrit left Kaaiai’s suite with her thoughts in chaos and closed the door gently, as if doing so would hide the way she grasped the knob and sagged against it. The security guard posted in the hall slid her a sideways glance, impersonally curious. Margrit arranged her face in the semblance of a smile, then gave it up and exhaled heavily, still leaning on the door.

  Alban’s sharp-cut features played in her mind’s eye. Of the Old Races’ three worst offenses, the gargoyle had broken two of them for her: he’d told her about their existence, and then he’d killed one of his own to protect her. The laws, Margrit had argued, were antiquated, but he’d insisted on enforcing his own exile. And now a selkie presented her with a chance to face those laws and do her best to knock them down.

  Intellect warred with ambition. She had no birthright to so blatantly and deliberately challenge their traditions. But she wanted to, and a better opportunity would never be offered. Laws were meant to be tested and changed as time passed. The ability to help shape a future for the Old Races was as much a brass ring as anything she coveted in her ordinary life.

  Her own arrogance was breathtaking. Margrit tilted a smile at the ceiling. Perhaps that was one of the reasons behind the Old Races’ law of not telling humans they existed. The almost assured destruction of their peoples, should humanity learn of the monsters that lived with them, was the obvious reason for secrecy. But the belief that humanity’s path was the better one was as much a danger to the fabric of the Old Races’ society as outright exposure. Margrit might well be doing none of them any favors by taking the stand that Kaaiai had offered.

  None of them save one, and there was no indication he would appreciate it.

  The elevator dinged, music muffled by the carpets. Margrit shook off the stillness that held her and managed a step or two away from the suite doors just as Tony Pulcella emerged from the elevators. They stared at each other, equally startled, before Margrit laughed. “Tony!”

  The big Italian cop grinned and came down the hall with long strides, pulling her into a hug. “What’re you doing here?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing.” Margrit smiled up at him, dusting imaginary motes off his shoulders. He wore a suit without a tie, looking well-pressed and handsome. “I forgot you were on security detail.”

  “Still don’t know how I got the job.” Tony gave a good-natured shrug.

  Margrit’s smile died abruptly, leaving her mouth curved but empty of emotion. She shot a glance over her shoulder at the closed suite doors, anger bringing color to her cheeks. It was almost impossible Kaaiai had asked for Tony by chance, without knowing his erstwhile girlfriend had had dealings with both Janx and Daisani.

  “Gotta say it’s less stressful than homicide, though. Maybe I oughta take a turn at doing this for a living. The hours are still crazy, and it’s boring as hell, but private security’s not as rough as being a cop. Might make it easier for us. What would you think? Hello?” he added after a few seconds, waving his hand in front of her face when she didn’t reply. “You with me, Grit?”

  Margrit nodded, bringing herself back to the conversation. Outrage on Tony’s behalf was useless. Confessing to him she suspected he’d been placed on security detail so Kaaiai could have a discreet method of getting to Margrit sounded insulting to his skills, even if she could explain the extraordinary world that Kaaiai belonged to. But it gave her a little more measure of the man who’d made her an on-the-surface irresistible offer. Like Janx and Daisani, Kaaiai seemed to have no compunction against using humans to obtain his ends.

  “I’m here. Sorry. I was thinking.” Her eyebrows furrowed as she pulled Tony’s suggestion back to mind. “Wouldn’t you hate it? You just said it’s boring, and you’ve only been doing it twelve hours.”

  “For what I hear some private security pays, I could stand being bored. Might even help you pay off those student loans you’re always complaining about, if you’re nice,” he added with a wink.

  “You know that’s posturing.” Her parents had paid for her schooling, an extravagance Margrit often felt embarrassed by, surrounded as she was by coworkers who had tens of thousands in loan bills.

  “So maybe I could take you on some nice vacations.” Tony’s expression turned serious. “We’ve had this problem with our schedules all along, Grit. I know I said I’d look at business school if you really wanted me home by six every evening, but maybe something like this would work out for us. It’d kinda let me keep one foot in the game and you wouldn’t have to worry.”

  “It’s worth thinking about.” Even as she spoke, guilt pounded through her veins in cold splashes. The offer that Kaaiai had laid out entwined her ever-more thoroughly in a world Ton
y didn’t belong to, and it was an offer Margrit doubted she’d resist. The breach they had worked so hard to close over the last weeks suddenly loomed again, widening with every moment. “But this probably isn’t the best time to talk about it. Shouldn’t you be at work?”

  Tony glanced over her head toward Kaaiai’s suite. “Yeah, I—Hey, shouldn’t you be? What are you doing here, Margrit?”

  “Mr. Kaaiai asked to see me.” Truth was the only answer she could come up with, feeble in its honesty. “It turned out he was a friend of Cara Delaney’s, the girl who asked me for help with the Daisani building, remember?”

  “I remember.” Tony’s gaze darkened. “Was?”

  “Oh. Oh! No, is. Is. She’s okay, Tony.” Relief brightened Margrit’s voice. “I just talked to her, in fact. Some of their friends packed her up and moved her out of the apartment that afternoon. They were afraid to get in touch with me in case Eliseo Daisani was trying to find her. She and Deirdre are okay.”

  Answering relief turned Tony’s frown into a quick smile. “Maybe that’s how I ended up with this job. Your client rubbing elbows with the rich and famous. I gotta say, Grit, I could get used to you working with the high and mighty.”

  Another stab of guilt assailed her. Margrit tried to push it off with a smile. “A young squatter and her baby don’t exactly qualify as high and mighty, Tony. Maybe it is how you got the job, though. Kaaiai could’ve looked me up and found out we were dating. Good for both of us, huh?” It was a less ugly interpretation than she’d imagined.

  “Great for both of us. Look, I’m on till eleven tonight, or later if the function runs late, so—”

  “So no dinner date. That’s okay. He’s only in town for ten days. We can handle a week and a half’s worth of disruption.”

  “I’m glad.” Tony’s voice lowered. “Wasn’t that long ago that ten days meant we weren’t seeing each other anymore.”

  “Things change.” For a moment the words sounded full of alarming portents. Margrit shivered and stood on her toes to steal a kiss. “I should get back to work. I’ll see you when we can, okay?”

  Margrit smiled and Tony released her, waiting until she’d reached the elevator to call, “Hey.” When she looked back, he lowered his voice to say, “Love you.”

  “Yeah.” Margrit dropped her gaze, trying to hold Tony’s image in her mind, then looked up with another smile. “You, too, babe. I’ll see you later.”

  SEVEN

  OPENING ARGUMENTS WERE brief and direct, but absorbed Margrit’s attention to a degree she was grateful for. A single day of interaction with the Old Races had thrown her world into chaos, and the opportunity to focus on something as ordinary as her job was almost liberating in its mundanity. Afternoon sunshine slipped across the courtroom through skylights, counting away minutes and hours of debate that she heard herself pursue with a passion she didn’t feel. Her client was guilty of rape, the evidence against him conclusive, but he’d insisted on a plea of not guilty and had forced a trial.

  She’d faced the prosecuting attorney before, and approved of him in a clinical way. In a case like this one he focused heavily on the facts, leaving circus-ring tactics aside. He was still a showman, as most good lawyers were, but with the weight of evidence on his side he made only modest efforts to appeal to the jury’s emotions. They didn’t need to be led by the nose: it was enough to imagine the unspeakable crime being perpetrated against their mothers, their sisters, their daughters, themselves.

  Nor did her client make a good defendant, even when not expected to speak for himself. She had discussed with him his posture, his expression, his body language more times than she could count. He still sat with open, sneering arrogance, as if his own sense of invulnerability would keep the jury from condemning him. Margrit had defended men like him in the past. They were always furious and astounded when they were found guilty.

  The afternoon start to the trial meant it was unlikely to be concluded before the following morning, and even that would be quick, by Margrit’s estimation. Her shoulders unknotted a degree when the judge’s gavel came down for the final time that day, and the prosecuting attorney stepped across the aisle as her client was led away. “This is his last chance for a plea bargain, Counselor.”

  Margrit shook her head as she shuffled papers into order. “A fact I’ll try to impress upon him, but he doesn’t believe he’s going to be found guilty.”

  “Margrit, he was damn near caught in the act.”

  She breathed a laugh, glancing up at her counterpart. Jacob Mills was a good ten years older than her, with gray starting to run through short-cropped, tight curls at his temples. He was exactly the kind of man her mother approved of, although the age difference would probably make Rebecca Knight raise an eyebrow. Margrit briefly entertained the idea of marrying another lawyer and dismissed it immediately: she had enough arguments with Tony, never mind someone trained in debate as she was. “I know, Jake. I’d just as soon we could all go home now, too, but I don’t think he’s going to take a plea.”

  “You know my offer. It hasn’t changed.”

  Margrit straightened, paperwork back in place. “That’s generous. I’ll give you a call tonight if he goes for it. Otherwise…”

  They shook hands, exchanging resigned smiles as Jacob finished her sentiment: “Otherwise, I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Despite the hour—it was well after five when she finished a fruitless discussion with her client—urgent voice mail brought her back to the office. She told herself that was the price of haring off to talk with selkies all morning, and kicked her shoes beneath her desk as she sat down to a pile of case files that hadn’t been there earlier.

  A draft of cool air disturbed her studies some time later. Margrit glanced at her computer screen before twisting to see who else was working late. “Maybe we should get some di—”

  A slim goateed man holding a glass-headed cane and wearing a dark suit stood a few feet away. “How generous. Do you always propose dinner to your wards, Margrit Knight?”

  Margrit slumped, heartbeat rattling hard enough to kill any appetite she might have had. “Malik. How’d you—Never mind. You didn’t screw up anybody’s computer, did you?” Her cell phone had dissolved into a mess of useless electronic pixels after it had been treated to Malik’s ethereal manner of travel. Janx gleefully confessed that any electronics touched by a djinn met the same fate. It was impossible to put a bug on the dragonlord, so long as he employed Malik al-Massrī.

  Irritation filmed Malik’s sharp features. “No. I’m not here for petty vandalism. I understand you’re to be my…” His thin nostrils flared, as if the words were so distasteful as to produce a foul odor. “My protector.”

  “Trust me, I’m not any happier about it than you are. I don’t suppose you’d be happy to just sit tight in the middle of the House of Cards, with four big burly guys keeping an eye on you, huh? It’d make life a lot easier for both of us.” Margrit bit her tongue on continuing. It was safe enough, comparitively, to respond to Malik’s arrogance with her own when they were at the House of Cards, under Janx’s watchful eye. Now there was no greater power on hand to control the djinn, and she didn’t want to offend him any more than she already had.

  That led directly into her second reaction, which was gut-cold fear. Margrit had sized Malik up as dangerous in the first moments she’d met him, his ambitions and sense of self larger than he was. He was easy to offend, and she’d already done it more than once.

  “On the contrary.” Malik took a few gliding steps toward her, his limp faint but noticeable. She came to her feet in nervous anticipation, as if there was somewhere to run. “I believe I’m a great deal less happy about it than you are. I do not require a human keeper, no more than sunlight requires that the shifting sand attend it.”

  “You people have such gorgeous phrases.” Margrit startled him into silence, which helped her to regain her equilibrium. “People—humans—don’t talk the way you do. Not unless they’re maki
ng speeches. Look, I don’t even pretend that I could keep you safe if somebody wanted to take you out. You, you go…” Margrit fluttered her fingers in the air, not wanting to actually say “go poof,” though that was what the djinn more or less did. “I don’t even know how you injure somebody who turns incorporeal. It must be possible.” She focused briefly on the cane she’d never seen him without, then brought her eyes back to his, finding anger darkening there. “Oh, come on. I’m not making fun of you. You’d know if I was. I’m just saying it’s possible, right?”

  Malik hissed, “Obviously.”

  Margrit lifted her hands in supplication. “So Janx thinks somebody who knows how to hurt a djinn is out there, and he brought in somebody outside of his usual chain of command, outside of your people’s rules, to keep an eye on things. Shouldn’t you be flattered he’s that concerned about you, instead of pissed off?”

  “Flattered. When the best ‘protection’ he’ll afford me is a weak human woman who admits her own uselessness as a guardian. Would you be flattered?”

  “No.” A smile ghosted over Margrit’s mouth. “You’re not supposed to be making a counterargument here, Malik. I’m trying to sway the jury. Play along.”

  “This is not a trial or a courtroom, sharmuta.” The last word’s sentiment was clear, and a sting of color came to Margrit’s cheeks. Malik took a final step forward, curling a hand over—into—Margrit’s throat. Air turned to unbreathable fog, clogging her throat and sending her heartbeat into terrorized spikes. She staggered back, trying to escape the djinn’s touch, but he flowed with her, fingers wrapped in her throat, almost palpable. Margrit swallowed convulsively, feeling a foreign body invading her throat like the thickness of a bad cough, swollen nodes closing off the possibility of breathing. Her chest ached, too little air caught there. Her chair caught her in the knees and she sat down again, a violent, awkward motion that Malik moved with easily. He leaned into her, fingers tightening around her windpipe, until his face was inches from hers.