Hands of Flame n-3

by C. E. Mutphy

  Luka Johnson folded as the jury declared her guilty of murder. Margrit caught her, prepared for the possibility of both the verdict and the fall. Her youngest daughter, a babe in arms, darted through Margrit’s memory like an old hand-cranked film, flickering and jumping from one age to another until she was three years old and her mother, finally granted clemency by the state governor, swept the little girl into her arms.

  Glass fragmented, shards of stained color shattering out. One twisted as it fell, showing a dark-haired woman whose hand curled over her belly protectively. When the piece hit the floor, it broke in three, splitting apart a trio of men whose colors were those of life and death and blood: white and black and red.

  Panic surged through Margrit, so raw it barely felt like her own. She kicked the shards aside, knocking them under a brightly woven tapestry that lay crumpled on the floor. The tapestry exploded with the sound of glass raining, and in each colored droplet lay a memory. Like came to like, bundling school together in a blur of youthful dreams and heartfelt promises; in hours of heavy-headed studying and searing moments of freedom found in long runs. Beyond school, Tony Pulcella, gloriously cast in warm, rich color, sent daggers through her heart for chances lost and promises broken.

  She flew again, high and free, with someone else’s warmth cupping her body. Heat surged in her as she reached for that memory, eager for a strong touch and loving hands to encompass her and take away thoughts of the world with sensual, exciting exploration. She arched beneath the gargoyle’s body, and then, unwelcome in the midst of growing need, she heard his voice.

  Concentrate, Margrit. Focus your thoughts. He sounded strained, as though he spoke from a great distance and through a barrier of immense proportions. Think of Ausra.

  Fear and anger razed any memory of desire. Ausra, petite and loamy and beautiful, raged through Margrit’s memories. Every moment of her brief encounter with the half-gargoyle woman played through her at once, sparking pathetic whimpers of pain that reverberated as harsh, black streaks through stained-glass color. Terror bled orange and red, like fire, and then glassy flame consumed her, the blaze reflected and refracted everywhere she turned.

  As in her nightmares, Malik died in the flames. Images fragmented again, the ridiculous first-person view of a neon-green watergun being fired; a wounded dragon in profile, roaring, frozen in time. A pale streak within the flame, crushing weight collapsing a djinn bound to his physical form. The bits of memory melded together, rewound, replayed, with acrid heat and the scent of hot steel filling Margrit’s senses. It was more inescapable than her dreams, a waking horror she couldn’t run from.

  She scrambled backward, trying to hide within the white noise generating inside her own head. Flame was doused by static, the rush and color of hissing snow reminding her again that her focus was the gargoyle; was Ausra. Memories of the woman formed in the whiteness, stalking toward Margrit as she felt her left arm snap again, pain howling through her body. Memory flashed forward to the hospital: Daisani rolled up his sleeve in tidy motions, and the sugar-sweet coppery taste of his blood clogged Margrit’s throat. She would never be quite human again.

  And back, reminded of Ausra once more by not quite human. The memories that barraged her this time were the gargoyle’s own, histories of a broken mind. So many human women dead at Ausra’s hands, so many women whom Alban had dared to watch over, dead for a vengeance that was never Alban’s to pay. Pain crackled through Margrit’s body as she remembered, experienced, the first morning Ausra had stood against the sunrise and seen gold fire glimmer over the horizon before she succumbed.

  That image caught in glass, so gorgeous and deep Margrit gasped with it. Pity surged in her for the first time and she reached toward the frozen memory. But the glass began to crack, thin lines of strain a too-clear representation of Ausra’s mental state. Perhaps it hadn’t been her fault; Hajnal had died birthing her, and a family’s worth of memories had cascaded into an unformed, unready mind. Madness had been the only path open to her; revenge against the gargoyle she believed must be her father, who had abandoned her and her mother, the only choice she could see that she had. So many flavors of despair, all prismed in glass so they could reflect and shine on roads taken and decisions made.

  One bright shard lit Biali, who stood at Ausra’s side and did not stop her from becoming what she was. Perhaps he had helped shape her; perhaps he couldn’t have saved her. The memories Margrit held of the gargoyle woman ran too shallow to answer that question. For the first time, she felt pity for the creature who’d tried to kill her, but as she touched the glass, it fell into slivers, cutting deep into her fingers.

  Drops of blood scattered, carrying with them moments of her life. Afraid she would give herself away, Margrit scampered after them, trying to collect droplet-shaped bits of crimson glass. They fell through her hands instead: a first Communion and the turning of her tassel as she earned her law degree; her first kiss and her most recent, twining together so one became the other. Frantic, she tried harder to pick them up, losing bits of her life in the process.

  Ausra reared up above her, a promise that those precious seconds would never be regained. One blow; that was all it would take to end Margrit’s life. She would watch it fall, not out of bravery, but because she couldn’t make her eyelids close, and when a roar cut through the static, her only thought was, so that’s what dying sounds like.

  And then her life was spared and Ausra’s ended, a reversal of fortune against every law the Old Races held dear. A human life over an ancient one; human awareness of their people allowed to persevere where immortal hope ended; a child of two worlds destroyed because there was no other choice.

  Sarah Hopkins, dark-haired, pregnant, afraid, alone, became a cutting edge of color, wedging her way through memories Margrit was only too glad to let go of. That same triumvirate of men surrounded her: Alban, tall and calm and dressed in quiet colors complementary to his paleness; Janx, gaudy and bright and gorgeous as he always was, a peacock in supersaturated shades; Daisani, small and lithe and exquisitely outfitted in sober tones, and all of them in the fashion of Sarah’s century, nearly four hundred years gone.

  Then heat shattered the glass, breaking away Sarah’s image. Beautiful colors blurred together and turned to brown in the wake of the fire that burned London down and down and down. She was gone from them, lost to fire, lost to flame, and each day it burned higher, fueled by rage and grief, as she was nowhere to be found. Janx and Daisani stalked the city together by day and by night, never followed by a pale shadow, too united in their sorrow to trouble themselves with the absence of their third.

  And so all unknown that third slipped away so easily, a human woman borne in his arms, her belly cradled in her hands as London burned beneath them.

  Margrit, steady and ready as she always was, touched her palms to Eldred’s, and chaos erupted in Alban’s mind.

  Gargoyle memory stretched back inconceivable years, touching the minds and hearts of the Old Races. Their discipline retained histories that no other recording method could so faithfully keep. Often it was by stories shared, but the ritual invoked by Eldred was one well known to all their peoples, and it let breath and bone and body become one with the memories.

  Not in all the history of five races and more now lost to time had opening a path from one heart to another torn the roofs off all the minds in contact with the story-giver.

  Not in all the history of five races and more now lost to time had a gargoyle ever tried to join minds with a human.

  He should have known. Beneath the screaming blur of emotion and memory that poured from Margrit, Alban’s self-directed recrimination bit hard, then lost its teeth. He couldn’t have known; there was no way to know a human mind didn’t hold information in the same structured, stylized way the Old Races had learned to retain their own memories. Humans had so little time to learn, so little time to remember; it made sense that they had less need of the formalities of recollection that allowed the oldest of the im
mortals to remember their own lives without resorting to gargoyle tales. It made sense, but Margrit’s easy ability to ride gargoyle memory had made the possibility of the reverse seem easy, too.

  Details of her life washed over him, intimate and sweet, a gift he wanted to savor. An early memory, child’s irrefutable logic wearing down her mother, who in her youth had been luminous, and who in maturity was, to Margrit’s adult mind, mixed with the childhood memories, intimidating. Her father’s rich laugh mingled with it all, warm voice promising, “She’ll grow up to be a lawyer if we’re not careful.” The memory’s soft edges told Alban that Margrit didn’t consciously remember the comment, but the way it hooked and pulled and weighted other memories, becoming an epicenter, said that it had affected the choices she’d made in her life.

  Alban flexed his shoulders, feeling wings stretch and fold, reminding him of who he was. Helping him to break out of the phenomenal static rush that Margrit’s life, pictured in moments, made up. Only just then aware his eyes were closed, he forced them open, and let go a rough, low sound of astonishment.

  The gargoyle tribunal had joined with Eldred before he’d completed the ritual to enter Margrit’s thoughts. That they should be enthralled was to be expected.

  That Janx and Daisani, that the gathered selkies and djinn, that even Grace O’Malley, should all stand slack-jawed and silent, was not expected. Mutable expression slid over vacant faces: fear and anger, dismay, outrage, hope, delight, all tangled with the endless rush of memory pouring from the dark beauty at the room’s center. A shard of panic sparked powerfully, not from Margrit at all, but, if Alban read its flavor correctly, from Janx or Daisani. Of the two Janx was the more likely to revel in such raw emotion, strong enough to alter the path of recollection Margrit followed.

  Keeping his own thoughts unclouded was difficult. Margrit’s memories were as forceful and brisk as her personality, and the new thoughts she lingered on were deliciously seductive.

  And hardly to be shared with others. Concentrate, Margrit. Focus your thoughts. Think of Ausra. He formed the thoughts with caution, uncertain if she would hear him in the chaos. Her mind was alight with fire, leaping easily from one scene to another, as quick and light as flame jumping a river. There was too much to take in, too much to hold on to in the quicksilver way her human mind processed images and discarded them.

  Flame went still for a few long seconds, as if caught in ice. Caught in glass, he realized, seeing Margrit’s metaphor more clearly for an instant. The brief moments he and Ausra had encountered one another encompassed him, entangling Alban’s own memory with Margrit’s so thoroughly he staggered, uncertain whose life he was experiencing. Margrit poured detail into the gestalt, moments seen from two places at once and none the easier to bear for having been shared. They ended with the hideous firecracker noise of Ausra’s neck breaking, a sound that sickened Alban even in memory, and one which would never let him go.

  But Margrit’s thoughts whirled again, dragging down through time and promises to unearth other moments of shared truth. Noise rushed up around him again, though whether it was his own attempt at protecting old secrets or simply the chaos of human memory trying to pull him down with everything else, he could no longer tell. He gave up trying to process her thoughts or guide her memories and instead worked his way forward step by slow step, reminding himself with each movement that he was a gargoyle, a creature of stone. Gargoyles did not lose themselves to mercurial passions so easily.

  At last, at long, long last, he reached her and dropped to his knees beside the table. Cupped her face and turned it toward him, whispered her name to eyes gone white with the weight of memory, and then offered a kiss, soft and simple and sweet, to break the spell.

  Margrit came awake with an indrawn breath bordering on a shriek and yanked her hands from Eldred’s before she even knew Alban was at her side, holding her, protecting her. Her skull raged with pain, as if someone’d poured glass shards into her brain and stirred vigorously. She stared at Alban, wide-eyed, then heard a high-pitched giggle that went with wondering whether Daisani’s gift of healing blood could cope with a brain razored to bits. Only when the sound repeated, piercing her headache and sending it to a new height, did she realize it was herself making it. With a cry half of embarrassment and half of pain, she tumbled out of her chair and collapsed against Alban, fingers curled in his shirt as she struggled not to whimper.

  Even the beating Ausra had given her hadn’t hurt as badly as her head did. Needles of ice slid in her ears and under her nape, stabbing inward and creating more too-loud static that lifted hairs all over her body and made them feel pain, too. Margrit folded her arms over her head, trying to protect herself from herself. “What happened?”

  The silence that followed was filled with shrieking static. “It seems human memory is not meant to be read by gargoyles,” Eldred finally said, so dryly Margrit let another too-high giggle of pain escape. If she could only hold her head hard enough, she thought she might squeeze the ache away.

  “Tell me you got what you needed.”

  “We did,” Eldred began, but Janx, sibilant and angry, breathed, “Oh, yes, Margrit Knight. We did.” He glided up behind her, great weight and heat making the air so heavy she couldn’t breathe. Her head throbbed harder and she stuffed a fist in her mouth, trying to hold back a cry as she bit down, then gasped raggedly for air and twisted to look up at the dragonlord.

  Daisani accompanied him, expression bleak with anger so old it looked as though it had been banked for centuries and only now brought to the fore. “You let us believe she had died, Alban.” The vampire’s voice was impossibly soft, barely disturbing the static in Margrit’s mind, and then rose to a sound so sharp she thought she couldn’t hear it with her ears: “You let us believe she had died!”

  CHAPTER 19

  “It was what she wished.” Alban’s sorrow was heavy enough that Margrit felt it as her own. She sagged against the gargoyle’s broad chest, relieved to tears that the two immortals’ anger wasn’t directed at her. Through a headache renewed with every heartbeat, she listened to Alban’s soft words, heard reassurance in his voice and felt exhaustedly, inexplicably safe. “After you fought, after the fire began…” The gargoyle shrugged, large motion that shifted Margrit against him and made her feel tiny and fragile in his arms. “She could not live with what we were.”

  Margrit could almost hear the words Alban didn’t say, the choices he made to spare Daisani and Janx what Sarah Hopkins had said centuries earlier. Not what we were, because Alban had been fond of the woman, but had never loved her as his friends had. What they were; what they are: those were the words Sarah had spoken all those years ago. She could not live with what Janx and Daisani were, for all that she had loved them, too. Alban’s memories flowed unchecked now, a quiet river of regret. Despite her pounding head, Margrit gathered them up and held them close, seeing deep parallels between a woman born almost forty decades earlier and Margrit’s own family. Rebecca Knight had turned away from learning Daisani’s true nature, a cut that wounded the vampire more deeply than reason explained. Perhaps it stemmed from a love lost in a far-gone era.

  “What of the child?” Janx’s voice scraped low, each word so precise it stood on its own, a threat instead of a question. “Did the child live, Stoneheart?”

  Alban sighed and folded his head over Margrit’s, new and ancient grief welling inside him. She closed her eyes, feeling the answer within him, and the weight of the promise he’d made to Sarah Hopkins: a promise of silence, no matter what the cost and no matter what truths might be revealed or hidden. And yet, after nearly four hundred years of keeping that silence, he drew breath to answer.

  Tariq, hissing fury, burst in to steal Alban’s chance. “Forget your ancient grievances. Is what was seen in the human’s memory truth?”

  Margrit, numb with foolishness, opened her eyes and said, “Yeah,” even as Alban tightened his arms in warning.

  As one, the djinn exploded in a whirlwind
of outrage, their combined strength enough to knock the strong-bodied selkies and slender vampire from their stances. The gargoyles remained unmoved, and Margrit, safe in Alban’s arms, did, too. Janx, even weightier than the gargoyles, looked unimpressed and insulted. Margrit shot a worried glance toward Chelsea and Grace.

  Both returned her gaze with unruffled calm. Chelsea still sat in her council chair, looking tidy and patient and sad, and Grace stood with her legs wide and arms folded over her breasts, a platinum superhero in black leather. Static rushed up to fill Margrit’s head again and she turned her face against Alban’s chest in confusion, certain that if she wasn’t safely ensconced in his arms, she’d have been whipped around the room. The djinn were settling now, their display having earned too little awe, or maybe they simply couldn’t talk in their air forms, and, like angry children, wanted to be heard more than they wanted to indulge in excess.

  “Then we know who Malik’s killer is.” Tariq spoke almost before he’d finished forming, making his words airy but full of spite. “No wonder you offered us so much, mortal. You bargained for your own life.”

  Margrit lifted her eyes, oddly relaxed in the face of his challenge. It was partly Alban’s presence that gave her confidence. His gentle strength was a well to draw from when her own ran dry, and his compassion ran ever deeper than she’d known. She could feel his breath, her own so slow as to match it, making the two of them one.

  More prosaically, her head also hurt too badly to allow for fear or anger or any high-pressure emotion, and so she felt only detached reserve as she met Tariq’s eyes. “I offered you as much as I did because I believed it was right. I still do, and the offer still stands. You have another day to consider, and then if you insist, my lord djinn, we’ll take it to the mat.” The last words rather lacked the dignity she’d hoped for, but they were at least spoken with the same tranquillity as the rest of her statement.