Hands of Flame (23 page)

 

There
should have included dinner. Margrit shot a glance toward the door, thinking longingly of the hot-dog stand up the street. It had already shut down, but the idea was appealing after an evening meal made up entirely of red wine. She'd been trying to nurse them, not wanting to face the Old Races at anything less than her best, but the best-laid plans had fallen in the face of raised toasts, and she'd lost track of how much she'd had to drink.

The alcohol, though, hadn't gone to her head the way it would've done even a few weeks before. As with the fight against Grace, she could almost feel her body responding to the wine, metabolizing it and shunting its effects away. It seemed very much like a conscious response, as though because she didn't want to be drunk, she couldn't become drunk, even with wine flowing freely and friends doing their best to see her under the table.

Cameron and Cole had arrived around six-thirty, Cam waving a greeting and Cole at least making an attempt to wipe away a scowl when he met Margrit's eyes. She caught a glimpse of them again and, smiling in unmeant apology to her coworkers, slipped away to try to catch up with her housemates. Someone thrust a fresh glass of wine and an uproarious congratulations at her, and she accepted both with as much grace as she could, then found herself distracted as she searched for somewhere to put the glass down without drinking from it.

Cole cut in front of her unexpectedly, dropping his voice below the general uproar of the party. “So you're really going through with it.”

Suddenly glad she still had the wine, Margrit took a fortifying swallow and then handed it to the nearest
passerby, who looked startled, then grinned in thanks, toasting her before he moved on. Margrit's returning smile felt pained, and fell away entirely as she looked back at Cole.

“I really am. I thought that Upper East Side apartment would be such a nice move up for all of us…” She'd always anticipated losing her housemates when they got married and moved to a place of their own, but the possibility of losing them more permanently loomed too large now. “Cole, can we get out of here and talk?”

“What are we going to say, Grit? I'm not going to change your mind and I don't think you're going to change mine. I want you to be happy. I just don't think I can watch it, if this is how you're going to get there.” Cole sounded tired. “I don't think I bend that far.”

Every argument Margrit had died in the making, all of them metaphors that failed on a fundamental level. Humans struggled with skin colors and cultural differences, but it was too easy to see how those could at least be filed under the vast range of human differences, and perhaps accepted and understood. Alban, though, was very literally of another
race.
Inhuman.

She looked up at Cole, trying to find a way beyond the barrier Alban had created between them. “He's a sentient, caring person. Isn't that what should matter?”

Cole sighed and pulled her into a careful hug that felt full of regret. “Maybe.” He was quiet a long moment before shaking his head. “That's about the best I can do. Good luck, Grit.”

“Thanks.” The whisper hurt her throat. Margrit disengaged from the hug and slipped out of the bar alone.

ALBAN REMAINED STILL
in the first minutes after sunset released him, savoring a subdued sense of belonging that had not been his for well over three centuries. As a youth he would never have noticed the quiet sense of connection that lingered in the back of his mind: the awareness of his people, both physically and mentally. They shared their lives and their thoughts easily, an endless background murmur, and not until he'd cut himself off from it had he realized that it had a sound of its own. Not until he could hear it again did he understand how alone he had been with his own memories.

They still weighed him down. Would always weigh him, as they should. There was still despair when he thought of Ausra's death, though that was tempered with inevitability now. There was still horror at Malik's death, and an awareness that his acceptance within the gargoyle overmind might be short-lived: there had not yet been a reckoning on the matter of the djinn. Only confession, spilled messily into the minds of all the trial attendees through Margrit's dangerous inability to control her thoughts and memories.

Unfair, Stoneheart
. Alban's silent chiding came the way Janx would form it, as if he played up the stoniness by scolding Margrit for lacking a skill she had no reason to have. No one, least of all Margrit, could have suspected what would happen if she attempted to share memory with the gargoyles.

And there was a certain relief in all secrets being undone. He wasn't made to keep them, not the kinds he'd accumulated in the past few months. Kate and Ursula, yes; Sarah's life; that secret he had been willing to keep for the sake of children and for the sake of friendship. Killing, done in defense of another or not, done accidentally or not, was too burdensome to bear.

Biali's grumbling presence was nearby, awake and tinged with bitterness. Alban welcomed the familiarity as much as he regretted the divide that parted them. Regretted, but doubted he would try to cross: too many lives, too many deaths, lay between them, and Biali was not by nature a forgiving soul.

Sour humor pulled his mouth long and Alban stretched out of his crouch, admitting the truth behind that thought:
gargoyles
were not by nature forgiving. Stone did not forget easily.

Beyond Biali in Alban's mental awareness, if not actually in physical distance, were the gargoyles of the tribunal. Eldred was the steadiest of those, his sense of self and his roots in the memories reaching down until they became bedrock. Amongst those memories were the last encounter any of the Old Races had had with the selkies before they'd slipped into the sea, becoming, as far as their ancient brethren were concerned, extinct. Eldred had, all those centuries ago, expressed disgust for
the selkie attempt at saving themselves; at their decision to breed with humans. It had seemed futile at the time, and the elder gargoyle's opinion had been widely reflected throughout the Old Races.

Their world had changed profoundly since then. Alban had, as he'd foreseen in his youth, watched humanity restructure the world to its liking, and had held fast against those changes, believing tradition to be the only way to survive. That long-held conviction had been shaken under the tidal wave that was Margrit Knight.

Margrit. A smile curved his mouth. She pervaded his thoughts the way Hajnal once had, her actions affecting him so deeply that he could barely imagine his life without her. He'd lost passion to solitude centuries earlier; rediscovering it in her arms was a breathtaking adventure. For all that he couldn't always agree with her, her fire was welcome, warming him after lifetimes of loneliness. Her memory, and the long-lost echo of the gestalt whispering at the back of his mind gave him courage, and with it in hand, he left his chamber to greet his own people at sunset for the first time in centuries.

 

“Korund.” Grace's voice cut down the tunnels, sharp with alarm. Alban turned, surprised, and Grace strode toward him through flickering lights and tall, round walls. “What in hell are you doing?”

Alban glanced down the tunnel, then back at Grace, eyebrows lifted in confusion. “Searching out a meal and the tribunal before finding Margrit.”

“Like
that?
” Grace gestured as sharply as she'd spoken and cold curdled Alban's heart. He flashed to human form, hands lifted to stare at them. Talons disap
peared into well-formed nails, the one delicate compared to the other, though even in mortal form he had strength beyond anything men could conjure.

“I have never forgotten that before.” Disbelief strained his voice. “In all my years, I've never forgotten.”

“You're getting complacent,” Grace snapped. “Too many things have gone too well for you lately. You're forgetting what you are and what the world would do to you.”

“Never,” Alban murmured without conviction. “But thank you, Grace.” He finally took his gaze from his hands, training it on the curvaceous vigilante instead. The impulse to follow Margrit's curiosity—and his own—caught him for a moment, but he swallowed it with a reminder to himself as much as an acknowledgment to Grace: “It seems the debt I owe you is growing by the moment.”

“And I'll call it in some day,” she promised. “In the meantime you can get your Margrit to call in her last favor with the dragonlord and get him out of my tunnels.”

Alban lifted an eyebrow. “And that's not calling in my debt?”

“That one's Margrit's promise to keep, not yours. Besides, you're the one walking around human territory in your natural form, love. Even if I'd never done you any other favors, you'd owe me large for that one.”

“I would.” Alban studied the door he'd almost taken, then looked at Grace again. “Tell me what my welcome will be, Grace O'Malley. I was confident a moment ago, confident enough to forget myself. But now I find myself remembering that these men and women were called to pass judgment on me, and while they have granted amnesty and I can once more walk among the memories, I know very little of them, or how they think of me.”

“And you think I know?”

Humor quirked Alban's mouth and he quoted, carefully, “‘Grace knows more than she should, love.'”

Surprise brightened the woman's dark eyes and she laughed. “There's a spark of cleverness left in there after all. All right, Korund. They're curious, is what they are, which I think you could learn quick enough from the memories.”

“I could.” Alban hesitated over continuing, and Grace hopped on his pause with a spark of humor in her eyes.

“But it seems like prying, does it, after all this time? Ah, Korund, you're not one of them anymore, but you can't be human, either. Maybe you're well matched with Margrit after all, the both of you forging ahead into new territory.” A shadow passed over Grace's face, aging her unexpectedly and making Alban realize he had no idea how old the platinum blonde was. She'd been part of the city's underground for years, according to Margrit, but it hadn't left its mark. Just then she looked far older than even the greatest number of years he could accord her, though it faded and left her as she had been, young in form and face, but somehow ancient in her gaze. “Go on, then, Stoneheart. Join them. See who you are among them, and then move on to see who you are in the world.”

“What about you, Grace?” The question held him in place even when he might have wanted to move at her command; to embrace the world as it had become and learn his place in it. “Will you stay where you are while the world changes around you? Will you not move on, too?”

“Ah, sure and you know the answer to that,” Grace said
with a sighed smile, and a ghost of humor turned Alban's mouth up at the corner.

“You'll move on when you've been given the kiss of angels, isn't that what you say? What does it mean?”

“Grace'll let you know when she finds out.” She nudged him toward the door with a bump of her hips, encouraging him to move without touching him. Alban chuckled again and went where he was bid, putting weight onto the heavy iron door handle that opened the way into the below-streets central refuge.

It opened silently. Grace's territory was inevitably well oiled and smooth-running, far more so than might be expected of a ragtag bunch of teens led by a leather-clad den mother. The group within, though, was wholly different from the youthful faces and chip-on-the-shoulder attitudes Alban had come to recognize and admire over the past months.

Instead an older man straightened from his crouch and turned to look at Alban. He was stocky, not gone to fat, but broad and jowly. White touched otherwise steel-gray hair at the temples, and deep-set eyes were much the same shade as his hair. Alban wondered suddenly if it would be as clear to Margrit that this was Eldred in his human form, or if the ability to recognize one another in any shape was part of what made them unique.

Looking over the others, he thought it took no more than an ability to extrapolate. The lanky youth—younger, certainly, than Alban himself—had a touch of strawberry to his white-blond hair and was as leggy and elbow-ridden in human form as in his gargoyle shape. The two women were as much Valkyries—Margrit's memory intruding, that; Alban wouldn't have chosen the word himself—in
mortal form as in immortal, both broad-shouldered and blue-eyed with long, pale hair. They looked like themselves, all of them.

And they were all riding judgment on him. Nervousness that hadn't been present the night before fluttered in Alban's gullet, a reaction that seemed inordinately human. He bowed, as much a slight offer of respect to the elder as a way to hide his own sudden nerves. After an instant Eldred tipped his head in response, gesturing Alban to join them. A mockery of outrage rose to replace worry: this was, after all, Alban's home, and it should be he who offered a place at the table to the newcomers. Only a mockery, though, the thought seeming laughable even as he felt its sting. There were far more pressing matters to be concerned with than whether he was welcomed or welcoming.

“Alban Korund.” Eldred's voice was as deep and rich in his mortal form as it had been the night before. “Welcome home.”

What had been a trickle of mental touch suddenly became a flood, emotion ranging from reserved to angry and, as Grace had said, to curious. Unprepared, Alban shuddered under the onslaught, the round walls and concrete seating around him disappearing and staggering mountains replacing them.

There was vitality in these mountains, unlike the memories he'd slipped through over the last months. Those peaks had been worn with time, too many lives lost to grow them taller. They had been his family, his closest friends, and they had reflected a dying race.

No longer. Now mountaintops were jagged with change, snow patches glowing blue in moonlight beneath
clear skies. The tree line burst with the promise of spring, hints of green in the night, and echoes of voices rang the stone, shivering loose rock into short slides.

Stunned, Alban turned, taking it all in, and when he'd completed a full circle, he faced a campfire, the half-dozen gargoyles in the room with him seated around it. Beyond them rippled hundreds of others, faces and minds joined in the gestalt but not physically present. Challenge was written on those faces; challenge and interest, anger and hope.

“What has happened?” Astonishment pushed his question out before he knew he intended to form it. “We live. We…live.”

Biali thundered in, door clapping shut behind him in the real world and carrying ricochets of sound into the mind of memory. He muttered, “You happened,” and sat down at the fire, making himself comfortable in a way that seemed beyond Alban to accomplish himself. “You and that lawyer of yours,” Biali added, clearly not expecting Alban to put it together himself. “You and that quorum.”

“You sat for the gargoyles at the quorum,” Alban protested. “Not I.”

“Pah. You started it, Korund. Talking to the lawyer. Telling her what you were. Deep quakes send waves across the world.” Biali shoved a thick hand into the fire, rearranging branches, and Eldred, looking wry, picked up where he left off.

“We have been dying, all these centuries. You know this.”
You
encompassed far more than just Alban: a shift of agreement ran through a thousand faces, swirling back through crowded memories until it had touched them all. “We are slow to change, and have always chosen the safety of tradition over the risk of innovation.”

At that, Margrit's image, rife with exasperation, swam before Alban's eyes and made him chuff laughter. That thought splashed through the linked gargoyle minds, making Eldred lift a heavy eyebrow. Alban ducked his head in apology, finding a smile still stretching his face. “I've always held that we were right to stand by our traditions.”

“And yet you have disregarded them broadly through your entire life.”

Fresh astonishment burned away Alban's humor and he straightened again, agape as he met Eldred's gaze. The elder gargoyle's expression was cool, though beneath it lay a pool of warmth, even admiration, welcoming enough to startle Alban anew. Eldred's sense of self carried a hint of envy, memories shifting and exploring the choices he might have made, all of those thoughts visible to the gargoyle overmind. Hundreds of years earlier he might have embraced the selkies and their decision to save themselves by breeding with humans. Instead he had been repulsed, holding tight to tradition. Now, for all that gargoyles were not creatures in the habit of second-guessing themselves, it was clear that Eldred wondered what changes might have been wrought in the world if he had admired the selkie daring and accepted their choice rather than turned his back on a man who had been his friend for centuries.

“You left our mountains before your hundredth year,” Eldred said. “You went to live among humans, to explore the world that they were creating. To try to understand it. Only one of us was bold enough to join you.”

“And she paid for that choice with her life,” Biali snapped. For an instant tension sang through the gargoyles, Hajnal's loss fresh and painful through the intimacy of memory.