by C. E. Murphy
“Alban! The sun’s coming up!”
“Yes.” The word was hardly more than a whisper, his acknowledging nod just as faint. Acceptance filled the single word, no fight to it, sparking anger in Margrit’s breast. It sent her running toward him, shoving him with her momentum.
“Go! Get somewhere safe!”
“Margrit,” he repeated, and she pushed him again.
“We can argue later! Go! Go!”
Alban inclined his head and turned, a few long-legged strides taking him down an alley. The last step became a leap, air and light imploding around him as his form shifted. Crimson light colored alabaster skin as he reached the rooftop and disappeared from Margrit’s sight.
CHAPTER 22
SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE, WAS playing the William Tell overture very, very badly. It echoed in flat tonal beeps around the curved walls of the hidden speakeasy, bouncing off the stained glass windows until they bled together and shattered into a cacophony of falling glass.
The chess pieces, ebony and ivory, swelled into life, facing off against each other with drawn-back lips and clawed hands, hissing silently at one another with the increasing pace of the music. Margrit shrank back from them, trying to hear her own labored breathing, feeling as if she were caught in a test tube. The light bent around her, making a fishbowl of the speakeasy. A rook on the ebony side ballooned larger, solid and misty at the same time. He slid forward, reaching for an ivory pawn, which was small, delicate, wide-eyed with fear. Margrit pounded on the wall of her glass cage, shouting a soundless warning that went unheeded. The pawn shrank in on herself, arms wrapped around a tiny bundle as she cowered.
An ivory knight crashed forward, blocking the rook’s progress. For an instant the chessboard went still, rook and knight facing off against one another, against all the rules of chess. The rook flashed a malicious smile and leaped toward its opponent, sending them both tumbling across the floor. A knife rose and fell in a flash, and the rook shrieked, a silent cry that shook the walls of Margrit’s glass prison.
The ivory king stood above the wrestling pair, his shimmering blue staff thrust through the rook’s back. The rook convulsed a final time and collapsed on top of the knight, who panted out a thanks and shoved the corpse away. The rest of the chess figures were strewn about the speakeasy lounge amid shattered glass and broken furniture. Both sides, ivory and ebony alike, were watching the ivory king, who made a gesture of fluid, weary grace. Without argument, the pieces turned away from him and began picking up pieces of the ruined stained glass windows. They fit shards together without paying heed to which window they’d come from. Margrit found herself pounding against her prison walls again, in time to the beep of the overture. She felt her mouth forming words, felt the vibrations of her shouts in her throat, but heard nothing. You’re doing it wrong! she yelled silently. You’re-
“-doing it wrong!”
She jolted awake, throat raw from shouting, one hand clenched around her cell phone, which was repeating the overture tones yet again. Margrit flung it away violently, then winced and scrambled after it, looking for the right button to turn the alarm off. The beeps finally silenced, she dropped her head to the floor and made a fist, smacking the wood. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit. And good morning to you, too, Margrit Elizabeth.” She rolled onto her back, staring up at the bumps and lines of her bedroom ceiling, until a knock intruded. Margrit pushed up on an elbow. “Yeah?”
“It’s Cam. Are you okay?”
“Damn, and I thought it’d be Jude Law come to take me away from all this.” Margrit lay back down, staring at the ceiling again. “C’mon in.”
The door creaked open, Cam peeking her head in. “I heard swearing. Are you okay?” The door opened farther as curiosity got the better of her. “You’re on the floor.”
Margrit nodded.
Silence reigned. Then Cam said, “You smell like a sewer.”
Margrit nodded again. “I fell in one.”
“You what? ”
“Actually, it was a storm drain. Still didn’t smell good.” She wondered if Janx’s nose was more sensitive than hers, and if her visit had offended him. The idea was both alarming and amusing. She grinned at the ceiling.
“How? No.” Cam cut off Margrit’s answer before she began it. “Shower first. Cole’s already at work, so you’ll have to suffer through my breakfast while you tell me what’s going on.”
“I can’t, Cam.”
“You didn’t come in until dawn, Margrit.”
Margrit closed her eyes. “I know. And what you’re thinking is-probably right. But I can’t tell you.”
“Nobody else can, either, Grit.”
“I know.” Margrit sat up, wrapping her arms around her knees and dropping her head against them. “But I can’t.”
Cam stood silent for a moment, leaning heavily on the doorknob. “Can you tell me why you can’t?”
She lifted her head, but closed her eyes. “Because somebody’s life depends on me not telling.”
“People like the women who’ve died?”
Margrit winced, shaking her head. “Someone else.”
“Alban,” Cam said. Margrit nodded. “His life is more important than the people who are dying?”
She opened her eyes again reluctantly. “All I can say is it’s complicated, and I know that’s not a good enough answer. But it’s the only one I’ve got. We’re trying to find the real killer, but I can’t tell you anything else. I promise that if I ever can, I will tell you. Okay? I’m sorry I can’t do better.”
Cam sighed and came into the room, to crouch at Margrit’s side before pulling her into a hug. “I guess it’ll do. Are you okay, Grit? For real?”
Margrit wrapped her arms around her housemate gratefully, returning the hug. “I’m all right. I’m in way over my head and I have no idea how this is going to end and I smell like a sewer, but I’m basically all right.”
“You have a weird definition of all right, Grit.” Cam tightened the hug briefly, then let her go. “All right. Go shower. I’ll fix you breakfast. You look like you need it.”
“Yeah.” Margrit turned her cell phone over, staring thoughtfully at the screen. “Okay.” She clambered to her feet and followed Cam out of the room, earning a raised eyebrow when her friend realized she was being followed.
“Shower that way, Grit. Kitchen this way. Remember?”
“Uh-huh.” She edged past the taller woman to the dining room table and dug her laptop out of a briefcase.
“Margrit, what are you doing?”
“They put the pictures together wrong,” Margrit said absently. “Hang on, I’ll shower in a minute.” She got a cup of yogurt out of the fridge while the computer booted up, and dialed her e-mail address with her cell phone, paying no attention to Cam’s bewildered expression.
“Do you still want breakfast?”
“Breakfast?” Margrit spoke around the spoon, then smiled as Cameron’s question registered. “That’d be great. You just know me and yogurt. Oh, they turned out. Good.”
“What?” Cam came to stand over her, resigned to her behavior.
“The pictures I took at the speakeasy. The windows.” Margrit saved photos from her e-mail to the desktop as she spoke. “They put them together wrong.”
“Stop talking and do your thing here, Grit. You’re not making any sense.”
“Watch.” Margrit amalgamated the three photos, setting different transparencies and adjusting their placement. Cam drew in a sharp breath and leaned down to get a better look at the screen.
“Holy cow. Lookit that.”
“I dreamed the windows got broken and they put them back together wrong,” Margrit said quietly.
Set correctly, the abstract colors of the three speakeasy windows made a whole and complete picture, each photo giving depth and structure to the other layers. Grays no longer made random splotches in the brilliant shades of crimsons and teals; sand dune yellows built clear shapes, none of them complete without the others.
“That looks like a dragon.” Cam pointed to the dominant crimson, coiling around the combined frames into a sinuous whiskered creature of power and grace.
“Gargoyles,” Margrit whispered, touching the grays on the screen. The gargoyle pictured seemed more delicate than Alban, as if it was perhaps female, but the breadth of wing and the comfortable crouch were unmistakable. She traced blues in the picture, picking out the graceful outlines of a half human, half seal creature.
“Mermaids,” Cam offered. Margrit nodded, not wanting to admit how she knew otherwise.
“Like the chess set. There was a set with mermaids and desert creatures in the club.”
Cam traced another shape with her fingernail. “Like this? It’s the right color, all sandy, for the desert. It looks wispy, though. Like a genie. Want to make a wish?”
“I wish I could figure out what the hell was going on,” Margrit said. “And then there’s this.” She touched the one human-looking figure among the others, picked out in blacks, a cloak flaring behind it like the gargoyle’s wings. “I wonder what it is.”
Cam grinned. “Man conquering the monsters, obviously.”
“Obviously.” Margrit slid down in her seat, staring at her screen. Not man, she thought. The fifth figure’s cloak was subtly segmented, more insectoid than Alban’s wings, or the representational gargoyle in the picture.
Five. The Old Races.
Her wish had come true. Staring at the consolidated photographs, Margrit understood at least another part of what was going on. The selkie living in Eliseo Daisani’s building was happenstance, a bonus to gild his real goal with. He didn’t care about destroying a rival member of the Old Races. It was pettiness that drove him, sheer childish pettiness. He was taking the building down in revenge.
Because Grace O’Malley had discovered and exposed his hidden speakeasy.
Margrit stood on the spot Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II had stood upon the occasion of her visit in 1976. Tourists and congregation members came and went, never leaving the Trinity courtyard quiet. The noon service had become a two o’clock tour, and there hadn’t been a long enough break in activity for Margrit to make a dash to Alban’s hidden chamber. Not so hidden anymore; the door was closed, but yellow police tape cordoned off that corner of the church, warning Do Not Cross.
Frustration had driven her to come lurk around his daytime refuge. Even if he wouldn’t be awake-or there, for that matter; he was unlikely to have snuck across police lines just before sunrise-it was possible she might find a hint somewhere in his room as to where he might be when his first home was compromised. Maybe nowhere, maybe hidden on a rooftop somewhere. The memory of his headlong flight into sunrise sent a wave of worry sweeping through her. He’d risked too much by being with her. Risked exposure.
Risked more than that. Risked exile, for telling her the Old Races existed. Though he was outcast already, according to Cara. Not, Margrit thought, the most reliable source of information, if her own people were considered anathema among the Old Races. But the selkie girl had been as casually dismissive of Alban’s status as she’d implied others might be of hers.
It was a topic that could wait. Would have to wait. Margrit bounced on her toes again, impatient with the need to deduce where Alban might have hidden. The room he’d brought her to when the car had nearly hit her, maybe; even now she couldn’t clearly remember where it had been. That she’d been almost too dizzy to walk when she’d left seemed irrelevant.
It was also unavoidable. She rocked back on her heels, glaring futilely around at the congregation. If she could get into Alban’s chamber, it’d be the work of a few minutes to look, and then she could use up some of the energy building in her by running to the new location. Alban still wouldn’t be awake, but at least it would be action. Forward motion. Margrit felt as if she hadn’t moved forward in days. She knew intellectually that she was wrong. New information kept coming to light, but for a woman whose greatest joy was plunging headlong through park pathways at an all-out run, inching toward resolution felt irritatingly slow.
A smile flashed over her mouth as she recalled Luka Johnson’s disbelieving joy at clemency being granted. There was something to be said for the snail’s pace, even if Margrit preferred the hundred yard dash. She just had to keep that in mind.
“May I help you?” someone asked at her elbow. Margrit jumped off the plaque guiltily and shook her head.
“No, I’m just-” She broke off to gape at her questioner, whose beard was as erratic in daylight as it had been the night before.
“Just waiting for an opportunity to slip into the bowels of our church?” he asked with the slightest of smiles.
Caught, Margrit gaped another moment, then ducked her head. “Something like that.”
He nodded, then tilted his head in an invitation to walk, waiting until they were away from the church to say, “I had an active imagination as a child. I loved the idea of good conquering evil, of God conquering the devil. I thought churches were more than just houses of worship. I imagined them as so strong in faith that they might pin down dragons and demons, evil captured and imprisoned by goodness. I grew up in this parish. Trinity was my church. It was stained black, you know. From the pollution. I thought it was from the evil it kept from the world, that it had become tarnished in order to protect its people. I heard my calling and spent years abroad, all around the country and the world, until I finally came home to New York and to Trinity.” He paused, turning back to look up at the graying sandstone. “They cleaned it while I was gone. My black, Gothic church proved to be pink.”
“It’s still beautiful,” Margrit said.
“Oh, yes,” he agreed. “But different. A great evil might be kept below a black church, but beneath a pink one?” He chuckled. “So the first time I saw Alban, I understood what I wouldn’t have understood as a child.”
Margrit swallowed on a dry throat. “What’s that?”
“That God and his creations are more wonderful and mysterious than I could hope to comprehend. That for a creature such as he, the safest home possible would be in a church. Did you know, Ms. Knight, that once upon a time, men could claim sanctuary against the world inside a church? A sort of religious non-extradition treaty.”
Margrit gave a start, then grinned with embarrassment at her shoes. “I kind of knew,” she admitted, “but only because I saw Disney’s Hunchback.” She looked up again. “You know my name.”
The priest laughed. “Knowledge is where we find it. Even in Disney.” Laughter tempered to a smile and he shrugged one shoulder, a somehow cheery gesture. “You made a splash on the news the other night. I like to think I pay enough attention that a pretty young woman’s name wouldn’t fall out of my head in a matter of days.”
Margrit’s forehead wrinkled with amusement. “Are you flirting with me, Father?”
The priest waggled his eyebrows, good humor in his eyes, then shot a glance at the cordoned-off corner of the church. “I’ve never spoken to him, Ms. Knight, but I believe he is our protector. Church sanctuaries are no longer recognized as such, so I helped the police as best I could. But tell me.” He turned to face her, blue eyes bright in the afternoon light. “Am I right?”
Tears stung the backs of Margrit’s eyes, prickling her nose and making her sniffle. She smiled around them and nodded, clearing her throat. “You are. I think he’s been kind of a quiet guardian, but…” She paused, turning to look at the empty space in the sky where the towers had once stood. “But he’s one of the good guys, Father. Sorry if that’s not the right word to call you. I’m Catholic.”
The priest grinned through his beard. “Everyone has their flaws.” He glanced at the church, then nodded toward it. “Good luck in finding the truth, Ms. Knight.” He walked away, his purposeful strides calling attention to himself. Margrit slipped through the hidden door under cover of his dramatic departure, and let it close behind her.
The chamber below still glowed with torchlight, dim but steady. Margrit jogg
ed down the steps, afraid to see a disaster left by the police force. A dull thud echoed as she came down the stairs, and she startled. “Alban?”
“Not exactly.”
Margrit rounded the corner at the base of the stairs. Detective Anthony Pulcella sat in the chamber’s single chair, elbows on his knees, a leather-bound book open in his hands. Beyond him, the books stood in tidier rows than they’d been left, straight in the shelves and piled neatly on top of each other. The cot was back in its corner, the cedar chest at its foot rather than under it. Books that hadn’t been on the floor before were now, although the stacks were orderly, and the wardrobe stood several inches away from the soot-blackened walls. The patch behind the wardrobe was pale, the same color stone as the church above. Tony, still in uniform, looked as out of place in Alban’s home as Margrit imagined she must: both of them modern pieces in a refuge meant for classics.
“So no Superbowl this afternoon?” The casual question came at a price, sorrow draining into Margrit’s chest as if a faucet had been opened. Tony looked up sharply, eyebrows drawn down over dark eyes. He looked, Margrit thought, like a policeman ought to, his strong jaw set with concern and maybe a little righteous anger. She felt as if she were watching him through a window, a distance that allowed her to see the world he lived in without being able to step through and rejoin it herself.
Heat flashed over her at the thought that she might not want to belong to that world anymore. Margrit shivered despite the warmth she felt, pushing the idea away. It was too large and too uncertain to wrestle with just then, especially with Tony literally in the picture.
“I won’t be able to get the afternoon off,” he said after several long moments, his voice steady. “Even if I could-”
“I wouldn’t be there,” Margrit agreed. A smile played across her mouth, more pointed than she wanted it to be. “I mean, really, Tony. Is there any way for us to get through this?”
“I don’t know.” The detective’s voice dropped. “Grit, none of this was supposed to go this way. I really wanted to make it work. I wanted us to be together.”