Hands of Flame n-3

by C. E. Mutphy

  “You’re on your feet. That’s pretty remarkable in itself.”

  “There have to be some advantages to being a fairy tale.” Janx’s customary lightness was gone from his voice. Margrit’s heart ached with the lack of it; when it had gone missing in the past, it had done so because he’d been angry with her, rather than the near despondence she heard now. Trying to push sentiment away, she crossed to the tapestries, the ivory knight still clutched in her hand.

  “How old are they?” Margrit stopped short of brushing her fingers against the weavings. They looked soft and delicate, and she was afraid touch would prove them as rough as broken glass.

  “Old enough that their makers are no longer among us.” Janx joined her, tapestries lending vibrancy to his unusually sallow skin. “Young enough that we could see which of us would linger past our time, but that has been evident for many centuries.” As if challenging Margrit’s reservations, he brushed his knuckles over the closest tapestry, then said, with surprising care, “I didn’t think to see you again, Margrit Knight.”

  “Didn’t you?” Genuine sorrow deepened the ache in Margrit’s chest. “I still owe you a favor. I guess I figured there was no escaping it.”

  “You ran from our battle at the House of Cards. It was, I think, the one wise thing you’ve done since meeting Alban Korund. I might have even let you go.”

  “That’s the knife wound talking,” Margrit said with as much dry humor as she dared. “You’d get over it if some way to use me came along. What happened? You looked fine when you walked into the warehouse.”

  Janx’s mouth thinned. “I overestimated my strength.”

  “You must really feel like crap to admit that.” Margrit caught her breath to speak again and bit down on it, curiosity drawing her eyebrows together as she studied the dragonlord. He turned to her, expectation written in his gaze. Humor and warmth tangled inside her, pulling a crooked smile to her lips. “Nothing. Nothing important.”

  Or, if it was, she had no way at the moment of making use of its importance. Janx’s admission spoke of more than simple weariness. For him to confess to overestimating himself—for him to allow her to see him at such a low ebb, rather than putting on the carefree performance she so often saw from him—he had to trust her, and that was nearly beyond Margrit’s scope of comprehension.

  “You’re a very bad liar, my dear.” Janx deliberately lightened his voice, using the endearment to return their relationship to grounds she knew. He reached out to pluck the chess piece from her hand and held it aloft. “Now, don’t tell me I’ve rescued you from a difficult explanation only to have you steal my ivory knight.”

  “You haven’t. At least, I don’t think so. You said we had things to discuss.” Margrit left the tapestries to drop into one of the lush chairs. Her examination of the chess table lasted barely a handful of seconds before the soft cushions reminded her she’d had no sleep recently. She let her head fall back with a groan and sank deeper into the chair.

  “Margrit,” Janx said with some dismay. “You’re all sooty.”

  “Oh, crap!” Margrit jolted halfway to her feet, then relaxed again, muttering, “It’s dirty now anyway. Sorry.”

  “I expect it can be cleaned.” Janx folded himself down onto the chaise lounge on the other side of the chess table, looking for all the world as though he had been made to do such things. Unlike Margrit, his own clothes weren’t stained with black, though their color would help to hide it if they were. “Unexpected company you keep.”

  “I’ve been keeping strange company for months. Believe me, if I’d known you were planning on raiding the place, I’d have…tried to talk you out of it.” Her honesty, if not her skill with words, got a chuckle out of Janx as she continued, “I was trying to talk them out of similar idiocy.”

  “Did it work?”

  Margrit passed a hand over her forehead and came away wondering if she’d just left herself streakier with soot. “I think it might have if you hadn’t made your dramatic entrance. Now?” She shrugged, palms up. “They’re angry over Malik, and they know we were there.”

  “And you, Margrit?” A thump of silence passed before Janx clarified, “How are you over Malik al-Massrī’s death?”

  “Not sleeping,” Margrit replied, more candid than she expected herself to be with the dragonlord. “You?”

  “It was my life he was trying to end. Despite our long years of association, I find it difficult to regret that he, and not I, failed to survive the encounter.” Janx tilted his head in a semblance of a shrug. “On the other hand, it’s a new and particular sin for me, being involved in the death of one of our people. In all our centuries of rivalry, Eliseo and I have never had such dark encounters. I find I do not care for it.”

  “If you were outside of it, a judge instead of a participant, would it matter to you that it was an accident? That it happened because he was trying to kill you?”

  Janx leaned forward, replacing the knight on the board and idly pushing a pawn forward, letting the action make him look thoughtful. The corner of Margrit’s mouth curled, Janx’s theatrics never failing to amuse her. “No,” he finally said. “That it was an accident? No, it wouldn’t matter. That he was trying to kill me, and paid for that error with his life?” He looked up from the board. “If I were a judge, Margrit, I simply don’t think I’d believe it. Not even if three people said it was so. Not even if one of them was a gargoyle, who are not well known for telling lies. You remember Kaimana’s response at the quorum.”

  “That Old Races would simply never turn on each other. Yeah. I can’t decide if it’d be nice or alarming to be that naive.” Since the game was met, Margrit moved a pawn forward, too, glad of something to do with her hands.

  “There are stories that the djinn have different laws amongst themselves. That their rivalries are significant enough to cost lives, once in a while and their numbers high enough to tolerate the losses. Malik limped.” Janx nodded at the corundum cane and advanced another pawn.

  “I know. I always wondered how you hurt somebody who could dematerialize. I mean.” Margrit set her teeth together in a wince. “Assuming they don’t carry around toy pistols full of salt water.”

  “That was ingenious, by the by. It came to a rather horrific end, but I have to applaud your means.” Janx actually did, sitting back to bring his hands together in staccato claps as she, cringing again, kept her eyes on the chess game. “They’re saved, as I understand it, from materializing inside things by two objects inherently not desiring to share the same space. A safety buffer of sorts. But there’s an infinitesimal window in which it’s too late, and if you can slip into that window—” He lifted the cane and brandished it like the sword it held. “I wasn’t Malik’s first rite-of-passage challenge. He lost the other one, too, and his rival destroyed his knee and his place in the tribes.”

  “So he came to work for you,” Margrit said, fairly certain of her guess. Janx nodded and she sighed. “How long ago was that?”

  “Longer ago than Vanessa joined Eliseo,” he said after a few seconds. “Unlike Vanessa, he wasn’t always at my side. He didn’t like cold climates. But, yes, it was…some decades longer than Eliseo’s association with poor Vanessa Gray. There are moments when I miss his sour face. And then I remember he tried to kill me.”

  Margrit moved her knight forward and let her focus drift, watching ivory pieces swim with a life of their own. “If they don’t accept the offer I made them, they’re planning on retaliating for his death. I think that’s part of what was happening at the warehouse today. Although you were a bit excessive, Janx.”

  “Excessive?” His eyebrows rose and he folded his hand above a chess piece, more interested in conversation than playing. “My dear young lady, they took everything from me. I intend to have it back or leave them with nothing. Is that excessive?”

  “Listen to yourself. It’s Wagnerian. There’s a certain panache to it, but it’s completely over the top. Do you really want to have a hand in starti
ng a race war?”

  “If such a war is to be had, I fear I’ve already done my part. As have you.”

  “Maybe, but I’m trying to mitigate it, not compound it. Look, how long can you and Daisani keep this up, anyway? He’s been in New York thirty years. People gossip about who his plastic surgeon is. This is the modern world. You can’t stay in one place much longer than this. Why not take this one on the chin and move on?”

  “And what of you, Margrit, if we do? What of your lust for us—” Janx broke off with a laugh as a horrified noise burst from her throat, then finally moved a chess piece as he went on. “Perhaps not for me personally, to my everlasting chagrin, I assure you, but for what we are? A piece of magic brought into your world. Would you send Alban away, as well? Would you come away with us yourself, Thomas the Rhymer caught in our schemes?”

  “Alban hasn’t lived the kind of public life you have.” The sly glance Janx gave her warned that he knew she hadn’t answered the question, but Margrit continued regardless. “You’d still be out there. Even if you weren’t charging in and blowing up my life, I’d know you were still out there. Alive, undiscovered, more or less safe.”

  “Caged by our comparative safety. You, of all people, should understand what it is to resent that.”

  Margrit moved another chess piece, looking for an opening to let her rook move freely, as if sending it on a run through the park. “Is that why you go to the dark side? Because playing with the underworld feels less constrained? I understand, but me getting caught on one of my adventures wouldn’t end up with me on a dissecting table. I’d rather see all of you, even Alban, gone from New York if it meant you’d all stepped back from the edge of a genocidal war. I don’t think it matters if you don’t manage to wipe each other out. I’m afraid that kind of activity will get you noticed, and you know how dangerous that is.”

  “Would you come with us?” The air turned heavier with warmth as Janx transferred all his attention to Margrit, making her remember his true form.

  She looked away. “I don’t know. My whole life is here.”

  “As are all of ours, and yet you have no compunction against advising us to move on.”

  “No.” Margrit’s gaze sharpened as she returned it to the dragonlord. “This epoch in your life is here, not your whole life. I don’t have any idea how old you are, but no matter what you do, there’s only a limited window you can stay in any one human population if you’re in any kind of visible position. You have to change your skin every once in a while. Your whole life isn’t here. Just this go-around.”

  “So you would have us retreat.”

  “I would have you live, dragonlord. Grow stronger. Fight another day.” Margrit closed her eyes, muttering, “I really am starting to sound like you,” before refocusing on Janx. “Whatever it takes. You must’ve done it before. Why object now?”

  “You’re assuming I went gently into that good night in previous years, my dear. Does anything about me suggest that I might have done so?”

  Margrit opened her mouth and shut it over an escaping bubble of laughter. “No.” Then, seriousness overtaking her, she added, “But when was the last time, Janx? This century?” She flicked her fingers, trusting Janx to understand what she meant even if her words weren’t literally accurate. “The world’s population has doubled in the last hundred years, and I don’t even have words to describe the difference in media from even fifty years ago to today. If you let this play out, you’re no better than Aus—” Chagrin bit the word off too late.

  Interest lit Janx’s eyes. “Ausra?”

  Margrit sighed. “She was so determined that Alban should pay for Hajnal’s death that she couldn’t see what her actions were doing. She was willing to expose all of you to the modern world in her quest for vengeance. Your survival as a whole is much more important than any individual grievance. You’ve got to be able to see that.”

  “And you will fight passionately to make certain we do, without quite being able to commit yourself completely to our world. Margrit, I do not mean this for a threat, but this is not a line upon which you will forever be permitted to balance. There are no half measures, something Alban has come to be reminded of, of late. In the end, you will choose your own world or ours. Don’t,” he added to her indrawn breath. “You’re about to tell me you have, but you haven’t. You believe you’ve chosen us because you’ve lied and sacrificed and put our needs above your own, but there’s a martyr in that, and it is not a choice. You’re still bedazzled, though not as badly as you were before you watched three of us fight and one of us die. There will be a moment, Margrit Knight, when you will make your choice, and that moment will be unmistakable. Don’t cheapen it by thinking you’ve already made it.”

  Margrit’s hands had curled into fists as he spoke, nails cutting into her palms. Color burned her cheeks until her eyes were hot with tears and her breath felt harsh and cold in her throat. “You think the last three months have been a game for me? Russell, my boss, my boss for the last three years at Legal Aid, is dead, Janx. My boyfriend dumped me. I’ve been nearly killed more than once and today I went to try to stop your people from getting into a war instead of doing my own job. You think I’m kidding around?”

  “No,” Janx said, unexpectedly sympathetic. “I think you underestimate the point at which you can walk away. You still can, and until that threshold is crossed, you should remember that you have a way out. I didn’t mean to anger you or belittle what you’ve done for us. Or to us,” he added more wryly. “But the truth is that if you had chosen our world, you would without hesitation join us if we left this city. Not without regrets, perhaps, but without hesitation. It’s the cost of our friendships. It always has been.”

  Insult still heated her face, but curiosity leapt to throttle it. Margrit bit down on asking about a woman she shouldn’t know anything of. Sarah Hopkins, who had been pregnant with Janx’s child, or Daisani’s, and had turned to Alban to escape the seventeenth-century fire that had burned London. She wondered if Sarah had been unwilling to pay the cost, and had been able to walk away far, far later than Margrit imagined possible.

  “Is that what happened to Chelsea Huo?” The words came hard, tight voice putting Chelsea in Sarah Hopkins’s place. “Did she choose the Old Races? She’s this nice, ordinary woman, but she was able to stand there today and give me legitimacy. Because she chose you?”

  Laughter glittered in Janx’s eyes, and he unwound himself from the couch, leggy and comfortable in his own skin. “A nice woman,” he echoed, clearly delighted by the sentiment. “How charming. I shall have to tell her. Would you call me a nice man, Margrit?”

  “You’re a bad man, Janx.” Margrit deliberately unknotted her hands, shoulders slumping as she recognized that he had no intention of answering her question. That, more than anything, seemed to be the legacy of dealing with the Old Races. She could only learn enough to realize how little she knew, and how unlikely it was she would be told more. “You’re a bad man, and you know it.”

  Janx spread his hands, an expansive cheerful gesture. “I know. Evil shouldn’t look this good.”

  A jarring memory seared Margrit’s vision, showing her the sneering, angry face of a man she’d once defended. He’d raped three women, murdering one of them, and had watched Margrit with open, domineering scorn. Watched her as if she were a victim, waiting for him; watched her much as Malik al-Massrī had watched her. Angry, threatened and threatening, proprietary, making her an object not of desire, but of subjugation. Janx had treated her that way once, and faced with her ire, had treaded a line of caution with comic exaggeration since. Margrit spoke slowly, words more weighted than she intended: “Evil doesn’t.”

  Something unexpected happened in Janx’s green eyes, disconcertment fading into surprised pleasure. He held his pose a moment longer, studying Margrit without guile, then brought his hands together and shifted his weight so he could offer a flourished bow from the waist. “What peculiar honors you do me, Margrit Knight. For
your kindness, I’ll give you what you haven’t asked for—advice.”

  “Are you going to tell me to walk away?”

  “No.” Janx gave her a toothy smile, letting it linger so her gaze was drawn to too-long canines. Daisani should have those teeth, she thought for the dozenth time. The vampire should have a mouthful of weaponry, not the dragon. “No, my dear. You’re a lawyer. I’m going to tell you how to handle Alban’s forthcoming trial.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Margrit’s cell phone trumpeted the William Tell Overture, startling her into a flinch and earning a shift of surprise from Janx. Habit drove her to her feet as she searched her purse for the phone, and sent her walking a few feet away, as though doing so would render Janx incapable of hearing her.

  “I wouldn’t, if I were you. If you’re getting reception, you’ll probably want to stay exactly where you were.” Janx nodded to the chair she’d abandoned and Margrit came back to it, thumbing the phone on.

  Her mother’s voice, distorted with static, came through. Margrit put a finger against her opposite ear, trying to hear better, then muttered a curse as the connection dropped entirely. “It never rains but it pours. If I don’t call her back, she’ll think something terrible has happened. Can you show me the way out of here?”

  “I can,” Janx admitted languidly. “Whether I will…”

  “Well, your other option is keeping me locked up like Bluebeard’s wife.”

  “Like Beauty, I should think.” Janx collected Malik’s cane and pushed to his feet, still more stiffly than she was accustomed to. “Are you certain you have to go now? We were doing so well.”