Heart of Stone

by C. E. Murphy

  She rarely recalled that, toward the end. Sparks of panic rose up with no explanation behind them, making her fear and weariness that much worse. And then new life came forth, screaming, frightened, cold, entering the world with the last of her mother’s strength and all of her mother’s madness.

  The memories became Ausra’s own, a solemn child playing before the fireplace. “Tell me about Mama, Papa,” she begged, and Hajnal’s captor smiled tolerantly and told her a story that gave lie to the little girl’s nightmares.

  “I thought everyone played all night and turned to stone in the day,” Ausra whispered beneath the rush of memory. “I was seven when I learned otherwise.”

  Taunting laughter, edged with fear, and a blue-eyed boy at church hissing “Nightwalker!” to her during the evening service.

  “You aren’t like the other children, no,” her father told her later that night. “You’re different, but you’re strong because of those differences. When you’re older, we’ll try to help you seem more like the others, but remember, my girl.” He crouched, smiling at her. Ausra’s reflection shone in his eyes, dark-eyed child looking back with equal parts trust and hope. “Remember your strength.

  “It’s dawn,” he murmured to her years later. “Hold yourself, daughter. Face the sunlight. It is in you.”

  And Ausra, leaning into the dawn, did. Watched the sun break the horizon, coloring the sky gold and red, its light searing her eyes. She flung her hands up, crying with pain, and stone swept over her.

  But the next morning she did it again.

  Alban made a strangled noise, stretching out his hands as if he could touch the sunrise himself. “It isn’t possible,” he whispered into memory. Ausra laughed, bitter sharp sound.

  “Maybe not for you, but I have strength, Father. More than you. More than my mother.”

  Her father, dying, caught her hand, surprising strength in the old man’s hands. “I’ve never known,” he told her, “what your mother was. All I have of hers is her name, and this.” His hands shaking suddenly, he dug out the sapphire stone, dropping it into her hands. “Find your heritage,” he whispered. “Go with a mortal father’s love.”

  “I searched,” Ausra said, voice brittle. “I searched for decades, Father, before I learned about the gargoyles.”

  “You should have been able to enter the memories,” Alban murmured, sorrow and bewilderment mixed in his voice. Margrit shivered with the sound of it: centuries of regret seemed to wash through his words, as if he yearned to heal the younger gargoyle’s scars any way he could.

  “Mother couldn’t. The iron crippled her, and I was born cut off from your precious histories. I was alone until I finally found someone like me. Another gargoyle, who told me my father’s name. Alban Korund, too yellow to face death with my mother, too feeble to protect her.”

  “Who?” Alban’s voice was soft with expectation.

  Ausra curled a smile and spat the name with cold pride: “Biali. I went with him to the new world, following rumor that said you’d fled there.”

  Alban rocked back as if he’d taken a blow, solid stony form suddenly seeming fragile, though no surprise marked his features. “I had not thought he hated me so much. He did you a disservice, my daughter. He should have brought you to our people, where you would have been welcomed.”

  Ausra sneered, contorting any trace of beauty out of her face. “He did what I wanted. I’ve been waiting since then. Hunting the women you watched, and waiting.”

  “Oh, God.” Margrit’s voice sounded thin and pitiful in the cold air, clutching her arm to her side, memory no longer a distraction from pain. “You killed all those women over the last two hundred years. The ones who’d seen Alban. Jesus. What were you waiting for, if you were already killing them?” Ausra turned and smiled at her.

  “On your knees already. I like that. Waiting for you, Margrit. Waiting for Father to risk himself in conversation with a perfectly ordinary woman. He never did that before you. I wanted to make sure he cared before I took it all away. I’ve been very patient,” she said petulantly.

  “But why?” Margrit lurched to her feet, gasping for air through spikes of pain in her arm. “What good will it do? There must be easier ways to destroy somebody.”

  “Mother died from exposure,” Ausra snarled. “She died from discovery. I would have it the same way for him.”

  “Are you crazy? That was two hundred years ago, Ausra! There wasn’t CNN on the spot then! This won’t just ruin him, it’ll destroy all of you!”

  “It’s all right,” Alban said quietly.

  Margrit’s head snapped around. “What the hell does that mean? Of course it’s not all right!”

  “It is. If nothing else, I can do this for my child.”

  “What, die for her?”

  Alban turned a gentle smile on Margrit, solid determination in his eyes contributing to the fear rising in her. “The sacrifice is more than worthwhile.”

  “You’re both nuts!” Margrit shouted. Yelling distracted her from the pain, she realized, so she kept doing it, desperately relieved for anything that pushed the sick throbbing in her arm away. “You really think one dead gargoyle’s going to be the end of it? Know what humans like more than almost anything? Finding stuff out! Whether you’re dead or just exposed, Alban, it’s not going to stop there!”

  She whirled on Ausra, eyes crossing as she banged her arm against her torso. “You think destroying him’s the answer to your problems? Chickee, I’d be looking at serious therapy, if I were you! Look at me! Look at me, Ausra!” Margrit thrust her bruised right hand out, unable to move the left to do the same. “Humans are still killing each other over shit like this! Over the color of somebody’s skin! Do you really think we’re just going to shrug and look the other way if a gargoyle turns up in the middle of New York City? You’re committing suicide! Genocide! And I’m not going to let you!”

  “How are you going to stop me?”

  “You can’t, Margrit.” Alban smiled again, distant and kind. “Ausra doesn’t want all of us, only me, and I’m not one who’ll be missed by our people.” Weariness colored his words, his shoulders dropping, and Margrit barely heard the next words: “And some kind of peace will be welcome. I’ve been alone long enough.” His gaze shifted to Ausra. “What matters is that my daughter will survive.”

  “At the cost of your life?” Margrit shouted. “That’s not good enough, Alban!”

  “It is.” Alban took a step forward, his wings flexing gracefully. “We breed so rarely, and I have so much to atone for. I’m sorry,” he said to Ausra. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there, Ausra. I truly believed Hajnal to be dead. I would never have given up hope if I’d known about you. If the price for that failure is to die in your place, then I pay it gladly.”

  Margrit jerked herself between the two gargoyles, bellowing at Alban. “Who the hell says that’s the price? One psycho gargoyle chick? I don’t think so. She’s not judge and jury, goddamn it, Alban!”

  “She is if I accept her as such.” Alban touched Margrit’s cheek. “It has been an honor to know you, Margrit Knight.” He smiled a little wryly. “I only wish we’d had more time.”

  “If you’d stop being such a fucking idiot, we would!”

  “No, Margrit,” Ausra said pleasantly, behind her. “You wouldn’t.”

  “What!” Margrit whirled around, falling a step to the side. “What?”

  “You wouldn’t have more time, even if Father wasn’t throwing himself on his sword.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  Ausra’s fist slammed out, knuckles cracking against Margrit’s cheekbone. White pain crashed through Margrit’s eyes and she collapsed, trying to catch herself with her left arm. The broken bone gave further under her weight and she screamed, a thick animal sound that turned to choked sickness. Ausra pounced after her, glee written across her delicate features. “Because I’m going to kill you.” She took a fistful of Margrit’s shirt and pulled her up, hand lifted again.

&n
bsp; Margrit stared up at her, muscles locked with pain and disbelief. She tried to close her eyes, filled with the irrational conviction that it would somehow hurt less if she didn’t see it coming. Her eyelids wouldn’t respond, any more than she could convince her legs to get up and carry her away as fast as she could run. An inhuman roar tore against her eardrums, and she thought, so that’s what dying sounds like.

  Alban appeared above Ausra, behind her, jaw dropped to let his roars escape, and his massive hands closed on Ausra’s head. He twisted, one violent motion that turned her head around the wrong way, the sound of fireworks popping off accompanying the action. Ausra’s body turned to jelly, her own weight pulling her head from Alban’s hands.

  Police sirens wailed in the distance.

  THIRTY-ONE

  MARGRIT STARED UP at Alban, her chest heaving. He stood above her, hands cupped loosely, as if he still held Ausra’s head. The sirens grew louder, and Margrit shook herself, swallowing against bile. “You’ve got to go,” she whispered hoarsely. He blinked at her without expression.

  “Alban!” she said again. “You’ve got to get out of here. You’ll still be at the station at dawn if you don’t. Go. Go! I’ll be…” She laughed, a funny, high sound of pain. “I’ll be okay,” she promised. “Go.”

  Memory, exhausting, washed over her: Hajnal’s voice, saying the same words that she herself spoke now. Margrit laughed again, thinly. “I’m not Hajnal. Go, or it’s all for nothing. Go!”

  Alban nodded once, jerkily, wheeled and ran. Margrit’s eyes finally closed, and she didn’t see him disappear into the sky. Lights flashed, blue and white, through her eyelids, and someone shouted, “Put your hands up!”

  Margrit put her right hand up, a slow painful motion.

  “Both hands!” the cop barked.

  Margrit shook her head. “I can’t,” she whispered, and lay still.

  Tony was beside her bed when Margrit opened her eyes again. Tony, and more vases of flowers than she could count in a glance. She blinked slowly, then sneezed. Every muscle clenched and she flinched, expecting agony.

  There was none. She opened her eyes again, cautiously, and looked around until she found an IV drip feeding into her right arm. “Ooh. They gave me the good stuff. That’s good.” Her eyes drifted shut again, then she frowned. “…Tony?”

  The policeman gave a quiet, nervous laugh. “Yeah. Hi, Grit. Glad to see you back among the world of the living.”

  Margrit absorbed that. “How long’s it been?”

  “About eighteen hours. They weren’t real worried, said you were just sleeping. I didn’t believe ’em.”

  She pried her eyes open. Tony had days’ worth of stubble, and circles under his eyes, though the bruise she’d given him had faded to faint yellow. “So I’ve been sleeping and you’ve been watching me?”

  He pursed his lips, looked around, found no escape, and nodded. “Pretty much.”

  Margrit nodded slowly. “You look like hell.”

  He spilled worried laughter. “Thanks. You should see the other guy.”

  “Would that be me?”

  Tony nodded again. “Pretty much, yeah.”

  Margrit absorbed that. “Is there a mirror?”

  “You think that’s a good idea, Grit?”

  “Do you?”

  He studied her, then let out a noisy breath. “Yeah, I guess. You’re tough. You’re not pretty right now, though.”

  Margrit chortled, pleased with how it didn’t hurt. “I’m insulted. What’s the damage list?”

  “Broken arm, broken cheekbone, hairline fractures in your right index and middle fingers, stitches across the cheekbone and, how the hell did you do that with a broken arm?”

  She wet her lips. The echo of Ausra’s neck breaking sounded loud in her ears, sending goose bumps over her arms, even the one bound in a cast. “I had to,” she whispered. “She was going to kill me.” The lie came more easily than she’d expected.

  Tony’s gaze weighed her. “Her head was twisted around the wrong way.”

  Margrit stared at him without comprehension. “Isn’t that what happens when necks get broken?” Her own head seemed to be floating several inches above her body, balloonlike. Uncertainty made a bubble of illness in her stomach, compounded by the painkiller. She shuddered as Tony exhaled wearily.

  “Like you were standing behind her.”

  Margrit’s tongue thickened, filling her mouth and throat. “I don’t know.” The words sounded as clumsy to her ears as her tongue felt. “I don’t really remember…doing it, Tony.”

  It was a half-truth, at best. The memory of Alban standing above her, the powerful jerk of his arms taking Ausra’s life, was all too clear. Too clear, the shocking pop of bone. Even if it hadn’t been her hands making the twist, she could never forget the sound or the way Ausra’s body had turned boneless, slithering heavily from Alban’s grip. Margrit shuddered again and swallowed against sickness.

  Tony’s hands came into her line of vision, palms out. “Sorry. I’m not trying to put you on the spot. You okay?”

  She swallowed down bile a second time and nodded. “Under the circumstances, I’m great.”

  “You’ve got that right. You’ve got more structural damage than the other women, but I figure you had a chance to fight back and they didn’t. I’ll need to get a statement when you’re feeling better.”

  “Sure.” Margrit let her eyes close again.

  “Damnedest thing,” Tony added. “They packed up her body and brought it to the morgue. The boys went to work on it the next morning and it’d calcified.”

  Margrit’s eyes popped open despite the apparent weight of her lids. “It’d what?”

  “They never saw anything like it. They called it sudden something or other calcification, I forget, but I think what that means is they don’t know, and they’re going to try hard to forget about it. I saw it. Looked like a marble statue that’d been pounded half to dust.”

  Your people are good at ignoring things they don’t want to see. Margrit remembered Alban saying that. She shivered again. “Remind me not to use the drugs she was on.”

  Tony grinned ruefully. “No kidding. Look, I’ll let you get some rest. It’s good to see you awake, Grit. Really good.”

  “It’s good to be awake. I wasn’t sure I was going to be.”

  Tony nodded somberly. “You got lucky. Real lucky.”

  “How’d you boys in blue manage to show up in the nick of time?” Margrit frowned, then shrugged. “Almost in the nick of time, anyway.”

  “Half the department was in the park, Grit, with the fourth murder down on the southern end. Even city cops come running when people start screaming.”

  Margrit huffed a laugh. “Thank God.”

  Tony reached out to touch her shoulder carefully. “I’m glad you’re okay, Grit. I’ll—call you?”

  Margrit met his gaze a moment, then dropped her eyes. “Yeah. Give me some time to get back on my feet, Tony. I don’t know what’s going on in my head yet.”

  “Sure,” he said quietly. “You take care, Grit.”

  “You, too.” Margrit closed her eyes and listened for the door closing before she let herself slump back into the pillows.

  Daisani sat by her bed the next time she opened her eyes. He looked older than he had in his offices, with lines around his mouth that she hadn’t noticed before, a few silver hairs threaded through the black at his temples. He rolled up his right sleeve with tidy, small movements, entirely focused on the task at hand. Margrit watched him through a distant haze of morphine for a few seconds before rasping, “Hello.”

  He looked up with a faint smile, then completed the last fold of his sleeve, his arm exposed to the elbow. “Good evening, Miss Knight. I’m very pleased with you.”

  “Oh good. What for?” Sudden panic cramped Margrit’s stomach with sickness as she remembered the copycat killer. “Oh God. Please tell me they caught him.”

  “In fact, they did. Getting off the plane at Heat
hrow. I admire your resourcefulness. I could use a woman like you.”

  Margrit’s head went balloonlike again, floating from relief, even as the rest of her body seemed to sink through the bed from the same emotion. “I think you said that before,” she managed. Daisani smiled.

  “I believe I did. I still mean it. But I’m not here to talk business right now, Miss Knight. I wanted to extend my sympathies on your illness and wish you a speedy recovery. And,” he added, eyebrows lifted, “to make good on my part of the bargain.” He turned his head, nodding at a neatly tied package sitting on her bedside table. “You delivered. The fur is yours. I trust the first one was returned to its owner in a timely fashion.”

  Margrit let her eyes close again. “It was. You took it knowing she’d die, didn’t you. Put it up in your office as a prize. You’re just a right bastard, aren’t you?” The lack of wisdom in the words hit her only after they were spoken, and she swallowed.

  Daisani chuckled, his voice light with humor as he spoke. “In my defense, one of my workmen delivered the skins to me without knowing what they were. I have a standing order, you see. Bring anything that seems precious or unusual directly to me.”

  “It was a derelict building that people were living in, Mr. Daisani.” Margrit’s voice was scratchy. “Taking things from people is called stealing, even if they’re not supposed to be living there in the first place.”