Heart of Stone

by C. E. Murphy

  Alban’s warning growl made a deep counterpoint to Margrit’s astonished laugh. “I’m not a gambling woman, Janx. I try to play games I can win.”

  “And yet here you are,” the red-haired man murmured. “Who does that say something about, I wonder.” He turned away from her abruptly, moving with the loose-jointed fluidity that marked Alban’s actions, as well. “O’Malley is less of a goose chase than you think. Look deeper, Ms. Knight, if you want the heart of that matter. As to the rest of it.” Janx produced a shot glass so quickly Margrit blinked, certain it hadn’t been up his sleeve. A second swift motion brought forth a clear flask, from which he poured rich amber liquid into the glass. The smoky aroma of whiskey spun through the air for a moment before he drank it in one swift swallow, then turned back to her. “You have canceled no debt. I owe you nothing more. Go.” He curled his lip in a snarl and gestured with the shot glass. “Go, before I test djinn against gargoyle and take you as the prize.”

  “You owe me a name.” Margrit’s voice was steadier than she expected it to be, low with confidence. “You promised me more information tonight, Janx. Don’t jerk me around.”

  He looked at her without expression, then gestured again with the glass and turned away. Margrit stood motionless, studying his silk-clad shoulders as she let out a near-silent sigh. Malik coalesced in the corner nearest the picture windows, fingers curving, as if he was drawing Margrit nearer. Instead she turned away, touching Alban’s elbow to bring him with her. He held the door for her, one arm stretched over her head as she paused in the frame and looked back over her shoulder.

  “Ausra,” Janx said, without turning. “The name you want is Ausra.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “WHAT WAS THAT?” Alban managed to hold his tongue until they reached the street, leaving Janx’s…alcove, Margrit thought, deliberately wiping the word lair from her mind…behind.

  “That was his honor getting the better of him. I set out an expectation last night. He couldn’t not fulfill it.”

  Alban looked down at her, full mouth set in a thin line. “Why not?”

  “Because men like him have nothing but their honor.” Margrit shook her head. “I’ve defended guys like him. You might not agree with their moral code, but they’ve got one. Without honor he’s just another two-bit criminal. He’s got too much pride to let himself go that far. He’d sell you out for a nickel, but if he makes a promise he’ll keep it.”

  “He’s not a man at all, Margrit.” Alban spoke quietly.

  Margrit frowned at the river across the street, black and smooth, reflecting the city lights. The comment resonated too sharply with her own thoughts, with the rising conflict of emotions she felt when she looked at Alban.

  “I don’t know,” she murmured, more to herself than the gargoyle at her side. “He isn’t human.” She folded her arms around herself, still watching the water. “But he’s a person.”

  “Be cautious, Margrit.” Alban’s voice rumbled with warning. “Janx is not human.”

  She turned toward him, spreading hands whose café latte skin was soured to yellow beneath the streetlights. “A hundred years ago people your color wouldn’t have thought someone of mine was human.” Intensity filled the words, their importance enough that she felt her hands trembling as she held them out.

  “My color.” Alban sounded startled, spreading his own pale hand above hers.

  She nodded shortly. “Don’t kid yourself, Alban. In this form, you’re a white man. Politically advantageous, economically powerful, socially acceptable. A hundred years ago if someone saw you and me standing here like this, you’d be the human and I’d be something less. A century before that, you and I standing here would have been master and slave. Or I might’ve been lucky. Two hundred years ago I might’ve been a free black, a placée. Know what that is? It’s a rich white man’s dark-skinned mistress. Somebody my color would’ve been a quadroon, very exotic. Light enough to be almost acceptable.” Her heart hammered in her throat, thick and choking. “So forgive me if I’m having a hard time with what makes someone human or not.”

  “Margrit, we’re different races. Different—”

  “They call it racism, Alban.” Her voice rose, growing sharp. “All the shades humans come in are defined as races, like we’re alien from one another. It doesn’t matter that we can all interbreed and make pretty brown babies.” She clenched her hands, emphasizing their color, then turned away, shoving them into her pockets. “I don’t like the word race,” she added to the street. “If we have to be defined in smaller groups than just the human race, it should be by ethnicity.”

  “What are you, ethnically?”

  She swung around on her heel, snapping, “American. On both sides, my people have been in the United States since the seventeen hundreds. I don’t know what else it takes to be just an American. What do you see when you look at me?”

  “A human woman.” Alban sounded surprised.

  Margrit grunted, surprised herself. “Not a black woman? Not just a woman? A human woman? I couldn’t pass for one of your people?”

  Amusement flickered over Alban’s face. “You lack the grace. Forgive me. I don’t mean it as an insult. But humans are more solid, more grounded in their movements, than the Old Races usually are. Even your greatest athletes are so very—” He broke off, struggling for a word, and opened his hands helplessly. “Human. In their grace. So connected to one form, to one way of being. There’s breathtaking magic in it, but it is not the magic of the Old Races. It’s wholly your own. What do you see when you look at me?”

  “A white man,” Margrit said, but even as she spoke Alban changed form, trusting the alley shadows to hide him from passersby. Margrit stared up at his heavy-shouldered figure, the wings folded against his back to make him smaller than he actually was, and hesitated. Alban smiled again, barely creasing the stony crags of his face.

  “Am I a person?” At Margrit’s nod, he added, “Are the gorillas your people have taught to communicate also people?” She nodded a second time and he shimmered back into his human form, looking down at her. “And are they human?”

  Margrit looked away. “No.”

  “Neither is Janx, Margrit. Tread lightly.”

  “It shouldn’t matter.” She spoke quietly, recognizing too clearly echoes of the conversation with her mother.

  “It should.” The disagreement was startling enough to jog Margrit out of her thoughts, making her glance up at the gargoyle again. His expression was unreadable, cast—Margrit flashed a brief, frustrated smile at her choice of phrase—cast in stone.

  She lifted her hands, pulling her hair free and remaking her ponytail before sighing. “This isn’t the time to argue about it, one way or another.” The statement had a familiar ring, familiar enough to make her cringe internally when she recognized it. It was the same kind of phrase she and Tony often used before taking a break from one another. For an instant Margrit wanted to take back the words and pursue the conversation, argue the semantics of humanity and racism. Instead she dropped her shoulders and stared at the ground a few seconds before choosing her course. “It’s getting late. Janx said something yesterday about it being dangerous for you to be out near sunrise.”

  Alban’s nostrils flared with dislike. “Dawn is a long way off at this time of year.”

  Margrit huffed a humorless laugh. “Which doesn’t answer the implied question, Alban. What was he talking about?”

  Alban bared his teeth, then shook his head and stepped back into the alley. “Physically, my people are not easily damaged. But we have times of vulnerability. Dawn, most particularly.” He was silent, his jaw thrust out as he stared across the alley. “If we are chained at dawn, in the moments of transformation…iron binds us.”

  Margrit stared up at him. “Seriously? How?”

  He dropped a hand, opening his fingers. “It becomes part of the stone when we transform. Once it’s been absorbed, we can’t rid ourselves of it. The chains can be unlocked, but not broken.�
�� He glanced down at her. “I believe gargoyles are the only of the Old Races to have ever been enslaved.”

  “But—”

  Alban shifted his shoulders. “Margrit, it can wait.”

  “But what about the other Races? Don’t they have—”

  “Margrit.” He shook his head once more. “Dawn comes late this time of year, but it still comes. If you want to talk to Biali before tomorrow night we need to do it now.”

  Margrit closed her eyes. “All right. And what about the other one? Ausra. Who is she?”

  “I don’t know her. The name—” Alban broke off, silent for a moment or two. “It means dawn. Just as Hajnal does.” He sighed. “She’s probably another gargoyle. We tend to have a rather limited number of names we choose. We’re fond of words that mean dawn and sunset. Our hours of transformation.”

  “What does Alban mean?”

  Sheepishness crept over Alban’s face. “Dawn.”

  Margrit laughed. “I see.” Her good humor faded and she gnawed the inside of her cheek. “So she’s another gargoyle.”

  “Probably. Although if Janx is giving out her name, she may work with Daisani, which means she could be a vampire, as he is.”

  “A vampire?” Margrit’s voice rose and broke.

  “Yes.” Alban arched an eyebrow, looking down at her.

  “Eliseo Daisani is a vampire?”

  “Yes.” Open amusement creased the gargoyle’s face.

  “Vampires don’t come out during the day, Alban!”

  “Oh,” he asked mockingly, “they don’t?”

  “No, they don’t! Everybody knows that! Vamp—” Margrit bit the word off, staring up at him.

  Alban spread his hands, smiling. “I don’t know how the legends got mixed up, but vampires have never been night-bound, Margrit. Only my people. You are not so safe from the monsters as you think you are. You’re pale,” he added in surprise. “A few days ago you didn’t believe in vampires at all. Is it so bad to hear your myths are wrong?”

  “Apparently,” Margrit said in a thin voice, “there was some part of me that believed. Yes. It’s that bad. A vampire? I went and talked to a vampire? In an office building?”

  Alban tilted his head, eyebrows wrinkled in curiosity. “You just faced down a dragon. Why would a vampire worry you?”

  “Dragon.” Margrit closed her eyes, remembering the way blue smoke had clung around Janx long after the cigarette was out. “Of course he was a dragon. What else could he be. Fine.”

  Alban, very mildly, asked, “You made a plea on his status as a man without even knowing what race he came from?”

  Margrit thrust her jaw out. “Does it really matter?”

  “Yes,” Alban said again, more sharply. “It does.”

  She ground her teeth, then relaxed her jaw deliberately, though she couldn’t keep rancor from her words. “All right. Fine. Biali, then. Where do we find him?”

  Alban shimmered into gargoyle form, again trusting the darkness of the alley to hide him from any watching eyes, and nodded toward the sky. “Up there.” He offered her an arm in an oddly submissive gesture.

  Margrit stepped into the embrace with an anticipatory grin, curling her arms around his neck. “What’s wrong? You’re kowtowing.”

  He laughed, the sound low and rumbly by her ear. “You would kowtow, too, to a woman who looked like she’d bite a dragon’s hand off at the wrist when he touched her without permission.” Alban crouched, power surging through his muscular legs to send them into the sky, his wings snapping open without the slightest jarring.

  Margrit laughed breathlessly, partly in response to the gargoyle’s words and partly in response to the thrill of leaving the earth behind. “I didn’t know he was a dragon.”

  “Would it have mattered?”

  She twisted to watch the House of Cards recede below them. “I’m going to be cocky and say no.” She grinned as buildings below began to blur into one another as the two of them gained height. “I could get used to this.”

  “I wonder if you could,” Alban said, more to himself than her. An ache of sympathetic loneliness ran through Margrit’s heart, weakening her arms, and she slipped a little. Alban’s grip tightened, solid and safe. She drew herself up again, nose buried against his neck, but she remained silent.

  “She’s a pretty little bit. For sale?” Biali squatted on an eagle’s head at the Chrysler Building, hunched and broken. Like Alban, he had nearly white hair even in his human form, which he wore now, but the resemblance ended there. He was short and thick, muscles on his muscles, like an aging prizefighter. His left eye was scarred over. Margrit wondered what that damage looked like on his gargoyle face. In the moments between his landing and his transformation, she hadn’t been able to tell.

  “No,” Alban said before Margrit could squawk a protest. “She’s my attorney.”

  “The law.” Biali growled in revulsion and spat to the side. “You’re better letting me dump her off the building, Korund.”

  “I think not right now,” Alban said, then left English behind, speaking a guttural language that sounded like stones scraping. Biali shifted backward on the eagle’s head, eyeing Margrit suspiciously, then snarled and squinted his one good eye at Alban.

  “Last time, Korund. This is the last time.” He waited for Alban’s faint acknowledging nod before continuing. “I saw your face all over their news, but I’m not the one who put it there. You’re not worth the trouble.”

  “You thought I was, once.”

  “Pah!” Biali tossed a hand in disgust. “You were a warrior then. Good enough to give me this.” Heavy fingers indicated his face. “Good enough to kill me.”

  “I didn’t, though.”

  “Mercy is a strength.” He almost sang the words, his voice full of ridicule. “Mercy has brought you low, Alban. You could have led us.”

  “To what? A glorious sunrise defeat at the hands of the humans? By the time we thought of it there were too few of us to wage war, even among ourselves. I had no wish to see another of our kind die.”

  “Mercy,” Biali said again, scathingly. “Go away, Korund. I’m not the one murdering women in the park, and if I were, I wouldn’t be trying to make it look like it was you. I choose my fights in alleyways, with men who stand a chance.”

  “No single man could defeat one of us, not without weapons. Is this what you are now? One of Janx’s thugs?”

  Biali smiled, an ugly one that wrinkled his scar. “We’re all of us thugs and killers. You’ve just forgotten your nature in your long years of isolation.”

  “We don’t have to be.” Alban turned to Margrit. “He’s telling the truth. We can go.” He slid an arm around her waist as she looked back toward the other gargoyle.

  “Biali?”

  “It speaks!” He rose from his crouch, stretching his thick shoulders. “What?”

  “Who is Ausra?”

  Surprise flickered across the scarred gargoyle’s face, his eyebrows drawing down before he shook his head, one short abrupt movement. “Never heard of her. Sorry.” He stepped back, then lifted his arms above his head and fell, graceful for all his width, off the eagle’s head into darkness.

  “I don’t believe him. He knows Ausra.”

  “You speak,” Alban murmured dryly. Margrit shot him a sharp look, then pulled away to see him better. She’d held her silence for long minutes after they’d returned to earth, watching the city begin to come to life around them.

  “At least I’m a you instead of an it. He’s a real charmer, isn’t he?”

  “We Old Races rarely have reason to charm humans, Margrit.”

  “Tell that to Janx and Daisani.”

  “Janx and Daisani are not usual.”

  “Are you?” Margrit asked sharply, then dismissed the question with a short brush of her hand. “What makes you think he was telling the truth?”

  “We don’t lie.”

  Margrit laughed out loud. “Oh. So you’re all thugs and killers, then? He was t
elling the truth?”

  “Margrit,” Alban said with exasperation.

  “No! Don’t Margrit me, Alban. Either he never lies or there’s a possibility I’m right. Which is it?”

  “Exaggeration and lies aren’t the same thing.”

  “You’re not answering the question.” She stalked a few yards ahead of the gargoyle. “Do you exaggerate?”

  She heard Alban’s hesitation in his intake of breath. “I don’t eat small children,” he finally said.

  “Still not an answer. That was a joke. It’s a different realm of communication entirely. If he’s lying, Alban, how would we make him tell the truth?”

  “Gargoyles don’t lie,” Alban repeated, frustration replacing hesitation. “It’s not in our nature, Margrit. No more than growing wings and flying is in yours.”

  “I think you’ve been alone too long.” Margrit turned to face him again, scowling. “Nothing stays the same forever, Alban, not even stone. The weather wears away at it, if nothing else. I think living night to night in a human world for centuries on end probably changes you more than you know. I think you’re stuck in a way of life that ended decades ago.”

  Alban stepped closer, his size suddenly evident as he frowned down at her. Margrit’s temper flared again, giving her the nerve to hold her ground, hands on her hips, as she glowered back at him.

  “In less than a week, you think you know the Old Races so well?” he asked.

  “I think I know people pretty well, Alban, and I think people adapt to survive in the environment they’re forced to live in.”

  “We’re not—”

  “Don’t!” Margrit snapped a hand up, cutting off his argument. “So you’re not human.” The words sent a shudder through her, a sudden acknowledgment of Alban’s alien nature that lifted goose bumps on her skin. “You’re still people,” she muttered. “And people do what they have to. They change.”