Hands of Flame

by C. E. Murphy

  Then thought was gone again as they bowled over, flattening everything in their path. Alban’s feet hit the floor and he drove talons into concrete, forcing all his strength into the sinuous coils to stop their roll. There was too much dragon to stop so easily, and he howled frustration, words far beyond him.

  Another impact shuddered Janx’s long body, a sudden flash of white stone shoving and slamming with the same vigor Alban put into the effort. Flame sprayed everywhere in a hiss of outrage, and Biali came through it unscathed, a broad smile splitting his scarred face. Alban understood in an instant: it wasn’t for Margrit’s sake Biali fought, or for Alban’s, but simply for the joy of pitting himself against the one breed in the world who could fight a gargoyle to the ground. Without him, Alban wouldn’t have stopped the tumble before Margrit’s fragile body was crushed.

  For all that his own purpose was to die in battle, Alban acknowledged the other gargoyle with a nod of thanks in the eternal moment before Janx slithered around and roared fury as he pounced again.

  Alban went down under the dragon’s crush, knocked breathless as Janx scrambled over him. Insulted, he grabbed the dragonlord’s hind leg and hauled.

  Janx dug his nails into the floor as he was yanked backward, the shriek of torn concrete echoed by his full-voiced rage. He strained with the effort of moving forward, utterly ignoring Alban and Biali, all his attention focused elsewhere. His enormous wings buffeted the air, sending cyclones of heat burning through it, and djinn, sent panicking from their native element, began to flee the garage. Alban had never seen them endangered by anything other than salt water and, more recently, vampire blood: the idea that they could be burned out, guttered by flame, was in equal parts fascinating and horrifying. But a handful of them lay broken beneath Janx’s talons, spattered with blood and crackling with flame.

  Profound wrongness twinged under Alban’s skin, as bone deep and discomfiting as iron bound to flesh had been. Janx was a thousand things, a killer among them, but to so ruthlessly end the lives of his fellow Old Races was unlike him. Faint humor twisted the sense of transgression: only a handful of seconds ago that was exactly what Alban had sought from the dragonlord.

  Another serpentine form slithered in front of Janx and he redoubled his efforts, flame gouting as he surged forward. Alban didn’t know when all the gargoyles came to his side, but now half a dozen of them held the infuriated dragon back as he lashed at his smaller counterpart. It danced out of his way, taunting his captivity.

  A black cloak settled around its shoulders, then became a woman, black-haired, dark-eyed, blood drooling down her jaw and coating the insides of her arms, as though she’d slashed her wrists. She dangled a bundle from one hand, and it took long dreadful moments for Alban to recognize it as a head, as smeared with blood as the woman was.

  Much too late, much too late, understanding came.

  Janx drew himself in, dragging gargoyles to his center, then burst upward in an explosion of power, wings flung out to clap the air. He dislodged Alban and the lanky gargoyle youth, the latter from surprise and Alban through inattention; his gaze was on the murderous twins before him.

  If murderers they were. Janx launched himself forward again, this time smashing into the pair with the same strength he’d tackled Alban with. They rolled roughshod through the melted door, landing in the parking lot with an eruption of flame and fury that lit furious panic in Alban’s breast. He charged after them, voice lost beneath the sounds of battle even as he screamed warnings. Nothing stopped them, not even flinging himself into their midst, grabbing desperately for muzzles and claws, anything to pull one off the other and alert them to their danger. To all their danger, for at the most they had a handful of seconds before humans discovered their battle, and should that happen, it was a blow from which they would never recover.

  A gunshot ripped the air, a desperately human sound, and their time was up.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  AIR IMPLODED WITH the rattle of grenades going off. Janx collapsed under the weight of half a dozen gargoyles, his muffled cursing accompanying useless heaves as he tried to push them away. Alban climbed to his feet, offering his nearest compatriot a hand without seeing him, then said, “Keep Janx down,” in a low voice.

  Tony Pulcella stood at the parking lot’s head, his duty weapon clasped in both hands and held steady on the mass of Old Races a few dozen yards from him. Grace O’Malley was at his side, leather-clad and clinging, one hand on the detective’s biceps as if to stay him from further shooting. Alban wondered where the bullet had gone, though it could easily have struck Janx without the dragonlord so much as noticing.

  Torn between choices, he finally said, “Grace,” in the same low voice he’d employed with the gargoyles. Behind him, Janx was still struggling and swearing, a fact that might have made Alban smile in any other circumstances. “Grace, what are you doing here? Why is he here?”

  Tony barked a laugh that had more to do with covering fear than humor. “I might ask you the same question, Korund, except then I got a whole lot of others I wanna ask first.” His voice was rock steady, and he couldn’t know his heartbeat betrayed him. Still, Alban admired his facade of calm.

  “Sure and it didn’t take a lot of cleverness to realize you were all spoiling for a fight,” Grace said. Unlike Tony, she was calm, even derisive. “Something had to be done to stop you, and you wouldn’t be listening to Grace alone, now, would you?”

  Janx’s voice shot out of the background, a garbled threat that ended with the sound of flesh hitting flesh: a hand being slapped over the dragonlord’s mouth. Alban wanted to admonish his people not to be careless: six of them could easily hold Janx in his mortal form, but he would eventually be let free, and a grudge-holding dragon was a bad enemy.

  “She told me Margrit would be here.” Tony met Alban’s gaze. Then he whitened, and Alban knew that his own expression had given away Tony’s worst fear.

  “I’m sorry, detective. Margrit Knight is dead.”

  “What?”

  To Alban’s surprise, it was neither Tony nor Grace whose voice came out gray with disbelief and horror. It was Janx, and as though his tone told his captors the fight was gone from him, he came forward unfettered by gargoyles, shock wiping away his inhuman grace. “What did you say, Alban?”

  “The djinn,” Kate Hopkins said with no care for the human standing in their midst. Ursula joined her, winding an arm around her sister’s waist, as Kate continued, coldly, “In retaliation for Malik’s death. We came to protect her, but we were too late.”

  “You.” Janx’s lip curled. “And who are you, daring to transform in my demesne? Challenging me in such a cowardly way, without even declaring yourself first? That will be met, little girl. That will be answered.”

  Kate gave him a look burdened in equal parts with pity and exasperation, then turned back to Alban and Tony. “Forgive us. Ursula’s been following her all day, but Tariq snatched her and even my sister takes time to track a djinn.”

  “I want to see her.” Tony finally spoke again, strain now sounding in his voice. A wave of sympathy caught Alban, nearly shattering the calm that had settled, unnoticed, over him. He reached for it again, afraid to feel Margrit’s loss, then released whatever hold he’d had on it and shuddered to find blank horror in its place. Lifting a hand to gesture back toward the loading dock hurt; breathing hurt. His insides had been drilled away and filled with regret and sorrow, but beyond a senseless hope of denial, all he could think was how much more bewildered and lost the human detective must be.

  Tony holstered his gun and stalked forward, his entire body radiating tension and fear and bewilderment. He had no frame to put around Margrit’s death, no explanations for the things he had seen in the last minutes, and in a very human way, seemed to be thrusting the alien out of his thoughts to focus on what was comprehensible: love, life, loss. Alban had little doubt there would be time for the rest later: Tony Pulcella did not strike him as a man willing to let the inexplicable fad
e to the back of his mind and be dismissed under the best of circumstances, and now, with Margrit’s death, he imagined very little would stop the detective from fully exploring what he had seen.

  The Old Races parted before him, and Grace walked a step or two behind him, offering solidarity without quite being at his side. Janx let them pass and then, with as much stiffness and grief as Alban had ever seen in him, fell into step behind the two humans, following them through the silent gathering to visit Margrit’s body. Alban brought up the rear, though he became aware that the others had followed them back into the loading dock, and that they stood vigilance against the night.

  Always petite, Margrit looked smaller and more fragile than ever lying in a wide crimson pool. Her hands were still folded at her throat, hiding the wound there and making her seem an artistic rendition of death. Tony, with far more grace than Alban himself had shown, knelt in the blood and first touched her throat for a pulse, then bowed his head over her body. Long minutes passed before he spoke, voice cracking with rage and grief. “What the fuck is going on here?”

  “We are the Old Races.” Unexpectedly, it was Janx who spoke again, breaking a silence that of all those gathered, only Eldred might have more right to end. Might: Alban suspected the dragonlord had more years than even the gargoyle elder, but could no more imagine asking than—

  Than he could imagine Janx giving answer to Tony Pulcella’s question. But Janx went on, tenor voice sweet with sorrow and regret. “I’m afraid Margrit Knight told you the truth at Rockefeller Center, detective. Selkies and dragons and djinn, oh my,” he said softly, and then more prosaically, “And gargoyles and vampires. We have lived among you for all of history, some of us becoming your legends and others fading into obscurity. Your Margrit became our Margrit, and though you will not believe me, I, too, mourn her passing.”

  Tony turned his head, showing a grief-stricken profile to the gathering. “Janx. I shot you.”

  Actual sympathy tempered the dragon’s response. “Do you really think one tiny bullet would bother me? A .45 won’t stop a grizzly or an elephant, detective, much less something like me.”

  “A dragon.” Tony spat the word, clearly no more able to believe it than deny it.

  “A dragon,” Janx said gently.

  Tony shoved to his feet, sliding in blood as he turned to face Alban. There was no fear in his scent, and only anger more powerful than despair in his face. Both were held in check by a kind of desperation; by a need, Alban thought, to understand. The rest could come later. Would come later, if the detective was allowed to leave the loading dock alive.

  “A gargoyle,” Alban said, before Tony asked. “You’ve seen my other form.” He transformed as he spoke, letting one shoulder rise and fall. “The ‘mask’ in the Blue Room was my true form.”

  Tony flinched as Alban changed shape, then shot challenging glares at the rest of them. “What about you? What do you look like? C’mon,” he added bitterly, as glances were exchanged. “It’s not as if you’re going to let me walk away. You don’t keep this kind of secret by letting people who blow your cover live.”

  “No.” Janx turned his attention to Grace thoughtfully, air heating with the weight of his regard. “We don’t.”

  The faintest smile quirked one corner of Grace’s mouth and she sauntered to Janx, stopping bare centimeters from him. She stood on her toes, tipping her face up as though she’d steal a kiss, and instead whispered, “Be my guest, dragonlord. Try it.”

  Interest glittered deep in Janx’s eyes, but he only inclined his head in acknowledgment of the challenge before lifting his gaze beyond Grace to look at Tony again. Smiling, the vigilante stepped back, taking up a place at Tony’s side as Janx asked, “Is this your final wish, detective? That you should see us in all our glory before you die?”

  “My final wish would be to die of old age in my bed, if you’re granting them.”

  “Sadly,” Janx said, “the djinn have fled, and they’re not of a bent to grant wishes even on their best days. I’m afraid it is this or nothing.”

  Like Alban, he transformed as he spoke, the last words deep and distorted as they were spoken by a throat not intended to form human words. Only the gargoyles remained rooted through the enormous force of his transformation, air banging out as mass forced it away. Tony fell back; even Margrit’s body was knocked askew, flung over to face the rear wall. Selkies scattered, while Kate and Ursula knotted arms around each other to retain their feet. Contortions ran over Kate’s body, as though she struggled to hold back her own transformation, and Janx whipped his head around to hiss at her.

  More than hiss: he spoke in a language of whispers and sibilance and song, rising and falling hypnotically. Kate stared at him, increasingly nonplussed, until Ursula finally said, “She doesn’t speak dragon,” and Janx broke off with a splutter of offended surprise. He lifted one gold-taloned foot, new threat whose translation couldn’t go unmistaken.

  Kate, far from afraid, exploded into her dragon shape and hunched her long, slim back like a cat preparing for a fight. Clearly disgusted, Janx swatted her and she bounced, wings over tail, out the door.

  Tony’s harsh laughter cracked across the loading dock. “Kids, huh? Can’t live with ’em, can’t kill ’em.”

  Anything further he might have said was lost beneath a rush of movement, Janx’s wings whistling through the air as the dragon pounced on him. One clawed foot pinned the detective to the ground easily, talons making a cage around him, and Janx’s tail lashed, sweeping the room dangerously. “For Margrit Knight’s sake, I spare your life for the crime of having learned the truth of our people.” His words rode on smoke and heat, reddening Tony’s face as Janx brought his muzzle close to the detective. “Be grateful.”

  Alban closed his eyes briefly, discovering that he, at least, was grateful. Condemning Margrit’s onetime lover in the face of her death seemed an unusual cruelty, one he had no stomach for.

  He opened his eyes again as Ursula and Kate crept back into the loading dock, coming to stand on either side of him and slip their hands into his. They felt fragile and small: very human, though he had seen clearly where the boundaries of their humanity lay, and how far apart from the strictures of the Old Races those boundaries put them. They knew the laws of their fathers’ peoples, and yet devastated bodies lay around the concrete room as evidence of how little regard these two half-human children had for the edicts which ruled the Old Races. And perhaps they should have no more care than they’d shown: after all, they had lived human lives for a dozen generations, condemned by the immortal halves of their heritage. In their place, Alban thought he might well have fought for humanity, which had at least embraced them, rather than the Old Races, who had forbidden them.

  In his own place, he had.

  Tony, through gritted teeth, acknowledged hard-pressed gratitude, though under the crush of Janx’s claw it could hardly be anything else. Alban squeezed the girls’ hands and released them to approach the dragon, suddenly tired of posturing.

  Janx’s tail snapped into him, a lash with so much power it could only have been deliberate. Alban, taken off guard, flew through the air to smash into a wall. Other gargoyles flinched forward as he recovered, but Janx slid a golden talon to rest against Tony’s throat. “Unfortunately for you, detective, I bear another grudge. You led the human raid against the House of Cards, and I have been denied my vengeance on that matter on all fronts. No longer.” A dragonly smile split his face as he arched up, ribs expanding to prepare a blast of fire and wrath.

  And then came a low, distorted voice, too quiet to be heard, and yet somehow Alban heard it. They all heard it, Janx arrested in midaction by Margrit’s cold command: “Dragonlord, you will not.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  MARGRIT AWAKENED WITH a pounding head and the befuddling idea that she’d heard a gun.

  Instinct drove her to sit up, but her muscles were rubbery and she faltered, barely able to lift her head.

  Crimson spread out in
front of her, the only clear thing in her foggy vision. It was warm, though cooling rapidly, and sticky, and she thought it should mean something to her, all that red liquid so close to her. It smelled of copper, only discernible because she lay so close to it. Other smells were far more overpowering: fire, smoke, barbecue. Her stomach rumbled and she tried to clap a hand against it, but her movements were too clumsy, and all she did was smear a hand in the blood.

  Hunger twisted into nausea as she realized her unthinking recognition was right and that she lay in a pool of blood.

  Recollection slammed into her, a shock of adrenaline giving her the energy necessary to jerk upright. Her vision cleared as she twisted to face the room, the world sharpening into hyperdefined focus.

  The first sound she made after coming back from the dead was a laugh.

  No one else heard it: it was too low and raw a sound, as she took in the impossible things spread out before her. Her blood in the foreground, yes, and the air thick with smoke and flame. Bodies, some charcoaled, some flayed, some gnawed upon as though an animal had gotten to them, lay scattered around the floor, and amongst them stood gargoyles and a dragon in their elemental forms, and selkies and a vampire who looked human to an untrained eye.

  And under the dragon’s claw lay Anthony Pulcella, who didn’t belong there at all and who was about to pay for his audacity with his life. Beyond him was Grace O’Malley, only slightly less out of place, her peaches-and-cream complexion paled to ghostly white. Janx was speaking, something Margrit hadn’t known he could do in his dragon form, and then he coiled upward, clearly preparing for a final strike.

  “Dragonlord,” Margrit said, and her voice was a disaster, “you will not.”