Hands of Flame n-3

by C. E. Mutphy

  “You can give him the benefit of the doubt if you want,” Margrit growled. “I’m looking at you standing here in unbreakable chains, and I think he’s batshit nuts and dangerous. Maybe not like Ausra was, because he probably doesn’t want to expose every single one of you to the human race, but he encouraged her to go after you, and now he’s come after you himself. You said gargoyles don’t go crazy, but you’re wrong, Alban. Whether it’s mad with grief or just plain bonkers, it doesn’t matter. This is insanity.”

  “I agree.” Grace’s voice came from behind them, startling Margrit out of her passion. She’d forgotten the other woman had walked her to Alban’s cell, and now turned to see Grace leaning in the doorway. “Which is why I called for a jury.”

  “The conclusion is foregone, Grace.” Alban sounded calm, but Grace snorted.

  “You think I’ve called them here to hang you. It’s the both of you I’ll see up on trial, Korund. You’ll stand the test of ages, and we’ll see who’s in the wrong and who’s in the right.”

  “The test of ages.” Alban shook his head, echoed words spoken softly. “How do you know the things you know, Grace O’Malley? That test belongs to my people, not humanity.”

  “As if you’re the first or last to judge a man by a trial of hand, heart and head. Grace trades in information, Stoneheart. You should know that by now. I know a lot I’m not supposed to.”

  “Grace, I have broken laws we hold dear. I am guilty. I will not stand the test.”

  “God save me from puritanical heroes,” Grace muttered. “I’ll ask for it anyway, and you’ll stand it or you’ll stand a fool.” She thinned her mouth, glowering at the gargoyle. “I’d like to say I think you’re not one, but I’d also not like to make a liar of myself.”

  “Excuse me.” Margrit broke in, voice high. “Would either of you like to tell me what the hell you’re talking about?”

  Grace waited on Alban, but when Margrit turned to him, his expression was impassive as he stared at the vigilante. Margrit made a sound of exasperation and turned back to Grace, who spread her hands.

  “He’s to prove himself worthy in a three-stage battle. Strength, wit, compassion. The one who wins is honest or innocent in—” Grace made a throwaway gesture, as if knowing she spoke inaccurately, but choosing the simplest phrasing to convey her thoughts. “In God’s eyes.”

  “A witch trial?” Margrit’s voice shot up again, incredulous. “This isn’t the fourteenth century, Grace!”

  “It’s gargoyle tradition. Ask him.” Grace cut a nod at Alban, who shifted enough that Margrit recognized an uncomfortable admission in the movement.

  “I don’t care if it’s tradition, it’s stupid. Nobody in their right mind would settle—”

  “You’re the one who thinks Biali’s lost his mind,” Grace said, suddenly chipper.

  Margrit curled a lip and tried again. “No one in this era—”

  “My people are not from this era, Margrit.” Alban broke in, voice a low rumble. “But it makes no difference. I will not participate in the test.”

  “Then you lose by default, Korund, and you’re condemned.”

  Alban lowered his gaze. “So be it.”

  “Alban—” Margrit broke off, struggling for composure. “I don’t understand you,” she finally said, low-voiced. “You couldn’t have always been so willing to let things roll over you. You fought for Hajnal. You protected—” She cast a glance toward Grace, then chose her words carefully. “You chose to stay outside the gargoyle memories to protect someone else’s secrets. Why won’t you fight now? I mean, it’s a stupid, stupid way to settle a rivalry, but you’re the one who’s been so hung up on tradition all this time. If this is traditional, why turn your back on it?”

  “Because I’m in the wrong, Margrit.” Alban lifted his eyes to her, pale gaze steady. “Because two of the Old Races have died at my hands—”

  Margrit made a strangled sound, hands curving to a throttling shape. “Because of me, both times!”

  “You should know by now that motive doesn’t matter. We act on results, not intentions. Margrit, I know this is difficult for you, but I don’t see accepting our ancient laws as correct as being passive.” Alban exhaled quietly. “And an exile placed on me by my people might ease my…”

  “Guilt?” Margrit demanded. “Mea culpa, thank God, somebody else is blaming me, so now I don’t have to lay it all on myself? Alban, you’re going to carry this with you forever. I’m going to carry it forever. I can’t sleep from the nightmares. I’ve been a criminal defense lawyer long enough to know that other people might determine your sentence, but you’re the one who determines your guilt.” Her anger lessened and she sat down on the cold floor, clutching the sides of her head.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have pulled back,” she said more softly. “I thought I needed the time to deal with it myself. Maybe I was doing my share of running away, or not facing it, myself. But not taking advantage of this trial, Alban, not using it to see if your people will accept you as innocent, I can’t understand that.” She lifted her gaze, feeling tired. “The guilt’s not going to be eased either way.”

  Alban sighed. “Margrit, if you had knowingly taken a life, would you stand against your laws to try to free yourself?”

  “If it was an accident or self-defense, yes!”

  “But Ausra’s death was not an act of self-defense,” Alban murmured. “I was defending you, not myself.”

  “So what am I, a second-class citizen? Not worth saving because I’m human?” Bitterness filled Margrit’s tone and Alban’s broad shoulders slumped.

  “I clearly felt your life was worth preserving over Ausra’s. But my people are not human, Margrit, and would not see my choice as the correct one. What if we lived in a world where the Old Races were known, and the positions were reversed? Would humans regard my life as more or less important than the human life I’d taken?”

  Margrit folded her head down to drawn-up knees. “You know the answer to that,” she replied dully. “You don’t even have to be not human to be less important. You just have to be different in some way.”

  “So allow me this acceptance. It changes nothing for us. My position amongst my people will be as it always has been since you’ve known me.” Rue colored Alban’s voice. “And yours, I imagine, will also be as it has been since you’ve known me. Instigator, negotiator, troublemaker.”

  Margrit looked up with a quiet snort, then rolled forward to crawl toward Alban, tucking herself against his chest. Despite frustration, she felt her shoulders relax, his nearness almost as much salve to her frayed emotions as his arms would be. “I’m not a troublemaker. It just comes my way naturally when I hang out with you. I don’t like this, Alban.”

  “I haven’t asked you to like it, only to abide by my wishes.”

  Grace chuckled, startling Margrit into remembering a second time that the vigilante was there. “Good luck with that, Korund. Will you be staying, then?” She arched an eyebrow at Margrit, then chuckled again as Margrit shot a hopeful look toward Alban. “That’s what Grace thought. I’ll come back for you at sunbreak, lawyer. Sleep well.” She slipped away, leaving the sound of tumblers falling into place behind her.

  Margrit turned her face against Alban’s chest another long moment before dragging a rough breath. “I feel like I should make a joke. Locked in a room together, the whole night before us…there must be something clever to say.”

  “Margrit…” Alban shifted and iron scraped, as if to remind her of his handicaps.

  “No, I know. It sounds silly, but I just want to be here, Alban. I want to be the one who watches over you tonight. To be the protector. You must be exhausted.”

  Alban’s silence said as much as his eventual admission of, “I am. The iron is far more wearying than I imagined, and I can’t transform and escape it.”

  Margrit pressed her cheek against his chest. “Then rest. I’ll be here.” She heard her own silence draw out a long time, too, and only broke it with a
whisper when the gargoyle’s breathing suggested he might have found respite in slumber. “I’ll always be here.”

  CHAPTER 7

  She had dozed, if not slept, too aware of Alban’s frailty and her own fears for the coming days. Half-waking thoughts had skittered all night, replaying Alban’s capture, replaying his impossible remove to Grace’s chambers below the streets. The vigilante woman had never shown any resources of the nature Margrit imagined necessary to steal two gargoyles from a rooftop in broad daylight, but when Grace came to fetch her in the morning, she shrugged off Margrit’s questions again, ending the conversation with a sharp, “Does it matter, lawyer? He’s safe enough now, isn’t he, and you don’t owe anyone for his safety. Count your blessings and let it go.”

  Chastened, Margrit did so, and emerged into the city morning to the realization that dawn came much too late in April, at least if she wanted to shower, change clothes and get to work on time. Barely beyond the tunnel entrance, her cell phone sang a tune to tell her she had voice mail. Expecting the trial time to have been moved—probably up, making it unlikely she’d get to the office at all—she hit the call-back button and hurried down the street with the phone pressed to her ear.

  The recorded mailbox voice told her the sole message had been left at 4:45 a.m. on Thursday, just a few hours earlier. Margrit resisted the urge to shake the phone; it wasn’t its fault she’d been hidden beneath the city, well out of reception range. At least the mailbox had picked up the crisp-voiced woman who said, “Ms. Knight, this is Dr. Jones at Harlem Hospital. A client of yours, Cara Delaney, has been injured and she asked that we contact you. We’d appreciate it if you came over.” The doctor left a number that flew through Margrit’s mind and disappeared under a range of concerns.

  Foremost was the horrifying idea that a hospital would probably do blood work on the young selkie woman. Margrit had never considered how the Old Races dealt with injuries in the modern world, especially severe ones. Even with selkies numbering in the tens of thousands, it was unlikely they could litter enough hospitals around the world to keep their own secrets safe. For all that they’d interbred with humans, there had to be anomalies in a selkie’s blood, very likely curious enough to pique a physician’s interest.

  It was only as she ran to the subway that worry for Cara’s injuries surfaced, both their severity and how they’d happened. The latter was too easy to guess: Cara was likely to have been down on the docks, part of the struggle between selkie and djinn. Gargoyles, Margrit remembered uncomfortably, calcified at dawn when they died in their human form. She had no idea if selkies might have some inexplicable conversion, too.

  Her thoughts spun down the same lines no matter how many times she pulled them back. She was relieved to leave the subway and hail a cab, though staring out the window at passing traffic did no more to distract her than looking at her reflection in black stretches of subway tunnel had.

  A matronly woman at the hospital gave the visiting-hours sign a significant glance when Margrit asked about Cara. Margrit said, “I’m her lawyer,” as though the words were a magic pass, and with another sour look at the sign, the woman directed her toward the emergency department. Margrit nodded her thanks and hurried there to catch the first unharried-looking nurse she saw and asked, “Dr. Jones?”

  The nurse gave her a pitying look, and spoke clearly, as though Margrit wasn’t expected to understand. “I’m a nurse. Dr. Jones went home at seven. Dr. Davis took over her patients.”

  Color heated Margrit’s cheeks. “No, I know you’re a—” She drew a breath and held it, then made herself let both it and the explanation go, instead putting on an unintentionally tight smile. “Dr. Davis, then, please? Where would I find her?”

  “He,” the nurse said in much the same tone of pity, and pointed, “is down the hall. The good-looking one.”

  “Thank you.” Margrit, fully expecting to have to find someone who would be more specific than the good-looking one, turned to look where the nurse had pointed. Halfway down the hall stood a tall man in a doctor’s coat, surrounded by half a dozen clearly doting interns. Margrit shot a sideways glance around the ward, looking for a television camera. The man had a perfect profile, so flawless it seemed unlikely he could be equally handsome face-on.

  He was, with dark eyes and a broad, white smile. Margrit edged her way through the interns, hoping her voice didn’t squeak as she asked, “Dr. Davis? I’m Margrit Knight, Cara Delaney’s lawyer. She asked for me.”

  Davis dismissed all but one of the interns as he offered Margrit a hand. “Dr. Jones hoped you might be coming. Miss Delaney’s going to be all right, but she’s concerned about her daughter. We can check to see if she’s awake. This way, please.” He led her down the hall, Margrit swallowing a giggle of pure high-school giddiness. He wore a wedding band, and she hoped, for the good of the species, that he and his wife were planning on having a significant number of beautiful children. The wish felt startlingly ordinary and very human. A shiver of regret slipped through Margrit at recognizing it as such, as though she’d become something new and different herself.

  A moment later, Davis pushed a room door open and ushered Margrit in. Young women lay in beds down the room’s narrow length, Cara in the one farthest away. She opened her eyes as Margrit entered, then gave a pained gasp of relief and pushed up on an elbow. “Margrit. You came.”

  “Of course I did.” Margrit hurried down the room to pull a stool up beside Cara. Davis remained at the door, murmuring, “Not too long, please, Ms. Knight. My patient needs her rest.”

  “Of course.” Margrit smiled over her shoulder at him, found herself gazing too long, and, blushing, looked back at Cara as the door closed again. “There can’t be anything people wouldn’t agree to do for him. Oh, my God. I think I could be paralyzed from the eyes down and if he said get up and do a salsa I would.”

  Cara smiled faintly. “I guess he’s not my type. He said, ‘Feel better,’ but I don’t yet.”

  “Damn.” Margrit took Cara’s hand cautiously. “What happened, Cara? Are you all right?” She wrinkled her nose as she asked the question; all right depended on how it was defined. Cara was alive, but the delicate lines of her face were swollen and bruised, making dark blots of her eyes. Her right arm was in a cast, and the stiffness of her body suggested more restraining bandages in other places.

  “I got shot.” The flat statement struck Margrit as badly out of place, coming from a selkie. Mundane humans got shot, not mystical Old Races. Cara freed her hand from Margrit’s and drifted her fingers to below the ribs on her left side. “In the back, above the kidney.”

  “Who…? Not a…?” Margrit didn’t want to voice the word djinn aloud, but Cara, understanding, shook her head with a faint smile.

  “No, we haven’t been trying to kill each other. We have a common enemy.”

  “Humanity.” Margrit ground her teeth. “So it was one of us who shot you.”

  “I didn’t see who it was. But I was too far from the water to escape, so an ambulance came and picked me up. I have to get out of here, Margrit. I have to…” Passion left the slight woman and she sank back into the bed, even her bruises graying with exhaustion. “I would heal faster if I could transform. It helps put things to right.”

  “Cara, the only way I can think of to get you out of here is to ask Daisani to have you transferred to a private hospital.”

  “I don’t want to owe him anything.”

  “I know, but you also don’t want anybody looking at your blood work too closely. Do you even know what they’d find?”

  “We do our best to tend to our own sicknesses,” Cara replied, answer enough. “But I didn’t ask for you to help me get out of here. There’s something else.”

  “Deirdre?” Margrit’s stomach tightened in concern.

  “She’s safe. I sent her away when the fighting started.”

  “Why didn’t you go when the fighting started?”

  “Kaimana asked me to be here.” Admiration bord
ering on reverence colored Cara’s voice, reminding Margrit of how the interns had looked at Dr. Davis. Kaimana Kaaiai hadn’t struck her as the sort of man to inspire such loyalty, but on the other hand, he’d engineered the selkies’ acceptance back into the Old Races. That he’d done so in part by ruthlessly manipulating humans had soured Margrit against him. Cara, though, had no reason to feel that same disappointment. “I know you see me as young and weak, but Kaimana acted on my advice when he brought the quorum together. I’m stronger than you think.”

  Margrit began a protest, then bit it down. “You’re right. It’s hard not too think of you as a girl in too deep. Maybe because that’s how I feel a lot of the time, and you’re younger than me. So what are you, his lieutenant?”

  “I’m the one holding this treaty together, here in New York. Without me to remind them who our enemy is, I’m afraid they’ll start tearing each other apart, laws or no laws.”

  “Cara, no offense, but how are you managing that?”

  Cara’s gaze shifted away, then back again. “I have help. An adviser. But there’s something else, too. This treaty is causing another problem.”

  “Worse than open fighting on the streets?”

  “Much worse. Margrit, I need to know if you’re our ally.” Whatever Cara had hidden when she looked away now faded beneath resolution that turned her bruises into streetwise makeup and attitude. “I’d thought you were. You helped us shake up the world, and then you disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” Margrit echoed, startled and stung. “Everything kind of went to hell. I’m just trying to get my head on straight. It’s not like I left the city.”

  Something scathing darted through Cara’s expression, hardening her beyond anything Margrit had seen in the past. For an instant she no longer looked like a battered young woman on a sickbed, but rather an embattled warrior, too marked with scars to have pity for anyone else’s. “When a human walks away from the Old Races, she’s gone whether she’s in the next room or a thousand miles away. I thought you were on our side.”