Heart of Stone

by C. E. Murphy

  “That only works on vampires, Cole,” Margrit muttered beneath her breath, then shot a look over her shoulder at Alban. The corner of his mouth twisted upward and he shook his head, a tiny motion. Margrit felt herself bare her teeth, aware that it was a very human and aggressive response to yet another myth shattered. “Cole, you’ve got to trust me. Alban needs a quiet spot to—to meditate—for a while, and this is the only place I can think of to go.”

  “Excuse me,” Cole said through his teeth to Alban, and wrapped a hand around Margrit’s biceps, pulling her into the apartment. He closed the door on the gargoyle as she jerked away, offended at the manhandling, and glowered up at him with a temper only slightly offset by knowing his behavior was born of concern for her.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Grit?” Cole demanded quietly. “It’s eleven at night and you’re running around New York with a suspected murderer? You’re bringing him to your house? Cam’s and my house? You’re—Margrit, your shirt is undone!”

  She looked down to where her blouse fell open beneath her coat, her lacy bra clearly visible. She knotted a hand in the silk, closing it again. “I need you to trust me, Cole.”

  “What about Tony? I thought you two—”

  “Cole!” Margrit let go of her shirt, her hand cramping from tension. “Cole, I don’t have time for recriminations right now. We won’t be here long. We’ve just got to do something—”

  “Yeah.” He sneered, shooting a too-obvious look at Margrit’s open blouse. “I bet you do.”

  Rage surged through her, so hot she didn’t know she’d moved until her hand cracked across Cole’s face, leaving a palm print that first bleached white, then curdled red. It took a will of iron to not follow with another blow, this time with a closed fist. “How dare you.” Her voice was so low it sounded distorted to her own ears. “How dare you.”

  Unable to trust herself, she turned away and opened the door, noting Alban’s distressed expression in one glimpse before carefully, so carefully, closing the door quietly behind her. She was afraid to give in and slam it, afraid the release of fury would shatter the tenuous control she held on herself. She couldn’t remember hitting anyone since she was a child, and had now struck two men inside a week. An accusation hung on her lips: What have you done to me? as she stared up at Alban, hardly able to see him for the white rage still dancing through her vision.

  “We’re leaving.” Margrit began walking toward the staircase, a blind, automatic action that had no purpose beyond getting them somewhere else. She went up, not down, an unconscious choice in deference to the gargoyle with her, though as they approached the rooftop door she asked, “Is this what happens? Is this what happens to people—humans—who get involved with the Old Races? Their ordinary lives just fall apart?”

  The accusation was unfair and she knew it; she’d chosen to take Alban’s part. Fair, though, didn’t hold weight against her anger.

  “Margrit, I’m sorry.” The words seemed to take all of Alban’s strength. “I shouldn’t have involved you. I am sorry. I’ll leave you. Whoever is behind this, it’s not your affair, and I shouldn’t have turned to you for help.”

  “Oh, no.” She stopped a few feet from the access door, turning to look down the steps at the gargoyle. It seemed hardly possible that only minutes ago they had been entangled in passion on these same stairs. “I don’t think so, Alban. If my normal life is going to fall apart, I’m goddamned good and sure going to see through to the end what’s sending it to hell. This is not…” She reached for the railing, curling her injured fingers around it for support as she gritted her teeth. “This is not your fault. I’m sorry. I’m completely fucking furious at Cole right now, and you’re here, so I’m taking it out on you.” Her speech was too careful, the vestiges of anger still coloring it, but it was the best she could do. “This is my way of not bursting into tears because I’m so pissed off,” she added with a thin smile. “Sorry. Look.” She tightened her fingers on the railing until the ache in them began to overwhelm the boiling anger that seemed to make up her insides. “Look, I don’t know where else to go for privacy. What about your apartment, the one you took me to when the car hit me?”

  “It is my fault,” Alban disagreed quietly, but passed a hand through the air as irritation distorted Margrit’s features again. “I thank you,” he murmured. “For choosing my path despite the cost to yourself. I am sorry for that cost, Margrit. I…didn’t think.” He exhaled then, glancing down the stairwell. “If I’d only thought of that apartment first,” he said a bit dryly.

  Unexpected even to herself, Margrit released a short staccato laugh that helped shatter some of the discord within her. “If you had, we’d be having a lot more fun right now. Should we go there?”

  Alban’s gaze flickered to hers, wry as he understood too clearly that she was not making a proposition. “If you wish. It’s likely here is as good a place as any, though.” He indicated the stairwell with a graceful sweep of his hand. “Unless many people use the stairs this late at night.”

  “Most people use the elevator at any hour. If the stairs are quiet and private enough, why didn’t you just say so in the first place?”

  “Margrit.” Alban turned a steady look on her. “When a beautiful woman invites you to her apartment, only a fool says no. I may not be a man, but I’m also not a fool.”

  Another laugh broke free, a choked sound of surprise and confused pleasure. Margrit took one step down and Alban slipped his arms around her, sighing against her hair. “I am sorry,” he said once more. “The darkness and quiet of a private room would have been pleasant, but this will do. Better here than outside, where the cold would harm you, or wasting the time to return to my other apartment. Keep watch, Margrit, and I’ll see what memory can tell me.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  IT WAS NOT as he remembered it.

  He recalled a peak thrusting toward the stars in a clear, midnight blue sky. Now that peak was hidden by dark clouds that roiled with the movement of his wings. Fog stirred around him, a fine mist against his skin, almost rain. There was no easy passage, no welcoming sense of being a small part of a greater whole. He’d given that up centuries earlier, yet still found the lack unexpected.

  No matter. Memory could be clouded, but never forgotten. He knew his own path there, and for over a century, Hajnal’s had run beside it. They were intertwined, and no mere fog could keep him away from her.

  He banked and rolled in the air, closing his eyes against wind and spitting water, letting old familiarity guide him where vision could not. Shadows closed around him, mountains of memory belonging to those whom he had grown up among. Those peaks were to be trusted, no more changeable than the sun’s path in the sky.

  But there was a bleakness to them that he didn’t remember. A sense, unfamiliar to him, of being worn down by time. Too many of those mountains no longer grew, he realized, their reaching peaks stunted by their creators’ deaths.

  How many? The question lanced through him, a pang of regret. Deliberately avoiding his own people for so long had left him less knowledgeable about their numbers. Aside from the recent meeting with Biali, Alban could not clearly remember the last time he’d spoken with one of his own.

  Which had been the point of exile. “The Breach,” Grace had said accusingly. Alban drifted in memory, tasting the wound of that word. It, too, was something he couldn’t clearly remember last hearing, though that may have been due more to a deliberate reluctance on his part. Biali was not above throwing cutting words, working to provoke a fight wherever he could.

  Blackness boiled up in the clouds, a wall forming out of the fog. Nearby memory-mountains darkened, seeming to move closer, until the space in which he unfurled his wings felt tight and constricting. Alban inhaled, filling his lungs and broadening his chest, an act of defiance against claustrophobia.

  “You don’t belong here, Korund.” The voice should not have surprised him, though it did: Biali’s gravely tones. The one gargoyle with
whom he’d had contact was now the one to stand in his way. For the first time Alban wondered if the scarred gargoyle had been asked to stay near him, in order to provide just this kind of barrier from the memories. Certainly no one else of their people would be as enthusiastic about the prospect of thwarting him. It was not the nature of gargoyles to hold grudges, but then, neither did stone forget easily.

  Clouds whirled in circles, black and gray streaming together with the beat of wings, and Biali’s thick form came out of the mist, his scarred face curled in a sneer. Weight came behind him, the ponderous weight of time and memory; of disapproval, as heavy as mountains. As the closest to him physically, Biali stood guardian against Alban’s intrusion into the memory of their people, but he carried the support of others with him. All around him, mist dripped and formed into solid streaks, building a granite wall between Alban and his destination.

  “She was my mate, Biali. Don’t I have the right to visit her memories?”

  “No.” The gargoyle gave no quarter, the sound of rock slides thundering in his voice. “No longer.”

  Alban flexed his wings, feeling dampness catch and trickle down the membranes. “I defeated you once before.”

  “Centuries ago. You were young. You had passion. You have nothing now, Korund. Turn back. You’re not welcome among us any longer.” Biali’s wings flickered, keeping him aloft in the memory of mind as the wall grew higher behind him.

  “I would walk the path my mate knew,” Alban whispered. “I would see her last moments.”

  “You could’ve done that two hundred years ago. Instead you made yourself something we had no word for. Your chance is lost. Leave this place.” Biali’s massive chest flexed, his hands curving into dangerous talons, every action a prelude to battle. “Leave, or make me force you out.” Dark hope infused the last words, so raw Alban backwinged, moving a short distance away.

  The scarred gargoyle was right. Three hundred years ago he’d had passion and youth on his side. Two centuries of exile now made him a poor match against a gargoyle whose employ for the past fifty years had been thuggery. For a few seconds Alban hesitated, caught in the swirling mists and watching the wall betwixt himself and his goal grow taller. Easier, surely, to let it go.

  And let Margrit die.

  There was no surety in the thought; Margrit had not been threatened. Other women, yes, but not even women Alban had watched, making the connection tenuous at best. Tenuous, and yet they’d had a look about them…Dark hair, often marked with curls; flawless skin, pale to olive in tone. Vanessa Gray, with her straight brown hair, had been the least like the others, and she’d died for the game between Janx and Daisani. But more, she’d died because the killer who haunted Alban’s steps had created a circumstance in which Vanessa might be removed. For the one, Alban could have let it slip by. But for the other, and for the determination in Margrit’s gaze, he raised his eyes to look across heavy fog at his rival.

  “I will pass.” Simply spoken, the phrase had the weight of ritual to it. Pleasure glittered in Biali’s gaze, the only acknowledgment that battle had been agreed upon.

  He exploded forward, leaving behind the protective wall. Alban folded his wings and dropped, not a dive, simply a plummet that took him out of Biali’s space inside an instant. Wind and the weight of his falling body made his wings scream in protest when he snapped them open again, climbing below Biali, his goal the foreboding wall.

  Biali slammed into him from behind, driving them both into the black barrier. It gave with the impact, shuddering around them. Memory, the stuff of its being, fragmented, shards flying loose to embed themselves in Alban’s being.

  A woman’s presence shattered through his mind. Worn with travel, but proud, she had translucent skin, tinted gold and delicate features half-hidden by hair blackened and heavy with rain. Beautiful, delicate, she was a creature of obsidian and amber, carved by a master.

  “Hajnal.” Alban’s voice broke even in the depths of memory. The woman lifted her eyes, meeting his with a dark gaze cold and empty as a winter night. There was no recognizable music to her memory, no hint that her path had lain with his for over a century. Only rage and betrayal shimmered in her eyes. She lifted a hand to strike, and Alban waited for the blow, too astounded at the bleakness within her to resist.

  Memory shredded and tore away with Biali’s howl of anger. Wakefulness came back to Alban, rain lashing his skin as the fog seemed to respond to Biali’s cry, intensifying into a storm. Alban reached for the wall, clawing at it as if doing so would grant him access to the recollections that had been torn away. Biali’s weight hit him in the back and he roared, snapping into a ball—a vulnerable, dangerous position. He dropped again, skidding and bouncing against the wall of memory. On the third bounce he acted, straightening his legs as he hit. Momentum shoved him upward, hands clawed to sink into Biali’s shoulders as the other gargoyle dived toward him. Flesh gave more easily than he expected, Biali bellowing with pain as Alban tore skin and sinew, releasing not blood, but a flood of memory.

  Amber skin and pale, locked together in the sky.

  Rage and betrayal exploded in Alban’s breast, fury at the inconceivable. The laughter of pleasure rode on the wind, and for an instant Alban saw through memory to recognize a vivid sneer of triumph smeared across Biali’s scarred face. Then remembrance swept over him again, a barrage of impossible truths.

  They stood on a precipice, circling one another warily, no longer the men they could pretend to be, but primal creatures of earth and stone. The sky above was the same slate-gray, nighttime clouds lit from behind by a determined moon. The embattled gargoyles stood out, slashes of blinding white against duller tones. Others gathered to watch; foremost among them stood Hajnal, her delicate features creased with concern and anger. Her skin beneath the diffuse moonlight was milkier than in Biali’s more recent memories, both creatures now coloring history with their own perspectives.

  Three centuries on from that fight, Alban still felt the talon-ripping horror of stone shattering beneath his blow, Biali’s face half torn away. Alban shuddered, old pain remembered anew, and Biali leaped forward again, landing a blow as crippling as that one had been, hundreds of years earlier.

  It was difficult to remember that the battle was not in truth physical, but fought in the corridors of memory, with strength of the mind instead of strength of the body. Alban shouted in pain, feeling moments of his own, hoarded close, torn loose from him. There was no telling, from his side, what slipped free; no way to know what exploded from his close-kept secrets into Biali’s consciousness, and from there, when the sharing came, to the greater memory banks.

  So many things. Regret lanced through him, a pain as real as bodily harm. So many secrets kept, to risk being lost here and now. Alban pulled his lips back from his teeth, snarling as he bent to the attack again. They’d lost flight somehow, rolling and sliding across the surface of the memory wall, as if it had come to encompass the two of them in a sphere safely away from the stony mountains that made up the greater gargoyle memory.

  He did not remember landing the blow that opened a new wave of memories for him to sift through. His own hands—Biali’s hands—covering smaller ones, the golden tint to her skin played up brightly against the near white of his own. Carving soft stone together, making tiny figures that settled into a peg-holed board. His hands guided hers, a sense of proprietary pride in each small cut of the knife. First gargoyles, carved to perch on the high places of a city built onto the board, then human figures. Women, all of them, as frail in reality as the figures seemed in massive gargoyle hands. Then wings through the air, the creak of scaffolding, and the carvings left behind to brave cold New York nights.

  He felt his head crack to the side, his cheek split open to release another smattering of recollections. Even in the midst of battle he curled his fingers, as if doing so would call memory back to him, keep it safe and protected within him. It couldn’t, didn’t, happen that way, and a howl of protest broke free from h
is throat. Biali’s laugh, rough and sour, cut through it, as if the other gargoyle considered Alban’s cry a weakness.

  Outside of memory, outside, it seemed, of time, Alban saw Biali lift his hands, doubled together to make a stony hammer, and swing them toward his skull.

  Silent as stone, still as stone. Margrit watched the gargoyle and the stairs, one more than the other; footsteps would echo if anyone used the stairwell, and Alban’s immobility was fascinating. He breathed, if only just. Margrit held her own breath in order to be still enough to see the incremental lift and fall of his chest.

  Mist floated around her and swirled away again, the experience clearly not her own. There were glimpses, nothing more, of what Alban saw: a mountain range wreathed in fog, each peak carved into a rugged, stony gargoyle form. She struggled among the frozen statues, trying to find her way. A surge of determination rose up through the struggle, pushing her back: Alban, rejecting her from the gargoyle gestalt as surely as he thought he himself might be rejected. There would be no shared memory between them if he had his way, and as the gray walls of the stairwell reasserted themselves, it seemed he would.

  A vivid pulse of color broke through fog and gray walls alike: a slender redheaded man with laughing jade eyes, his gaudy crimson cloak thrown back to show a high-collared shirt with a ruff at the throat. A second man, smaller and swarthy, with his black hair tied back in a ponytail, made a dour counterpoint to the redhead, his own clothes dark and well-fitted, a long black coat worn over them. Both were dwarfed by the size and power of Alban’s human form, almost as pale as his gargoyle shape. He, too, wore fashionable clothing from another era, his own long hair held by a sapphire ribbon matching a cloak that only emphasized the breadth of his shoulders. The three stood facing one another, an agreeable standoff that ended with a sweep of crimson cloak as the redhead bowed sardonically to the other two.