Hands of Flame n-3

by C. E. Mutphy

  A sharp gust of wind twisted around her as she finally stepped back from the gate, leaving the brownstone behind. Margrit tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, then slowed, suddenly too aware that the morning was still. Too aware that she’d felt a breeze’s touch repeatedly in otherwise quiet areas: cooling her in the subway, whispering around her in the twins’ home. Her voice cracked as she whispered, “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” and turned, watching the street as though she might be able to pick out an airy form nearby.

  Then she was running, toes curled hard against the soles of her heeled shoes to keep them on her feet. Back toward the twins’ home, not because a solitary djinn—and she believed it was only one, too little shifting of air for more—not because one could endanger them physically, but because if she had been followed, if their location was known, then the balance had changed and there would be no hiding, not anymore. They would be tracked wherever they went, and perhaps used or manipulated, and the point, the whole point, it seemed to Margrit, was to allow these two women to enter the Old Races on their own terms and as their own people. Anything less was a failure.

  She vaulted the fence rather than stop to unlatch the gate, and her heel dug into the dirt, clinging and threatening her ankle. Impatient with the human frailty that was her only natural legacy, she jerked her foot free and felt her ankle shriek in protest. For the first time she ignored it, trusting wholly in Daisani’s gift: there was no need to walk it off, no need to pretend that the injury wasn’t as bad as it felt.

  Momentum, nothing more, lent Daisani strength. Her own speed was nothing like enough to knock down a sturdy front door, though the ruckus of her arrival drew both twins to the door fast enough. Kate jerked it open so hard the hinges protested.

  “Djinn. Someone followed me, knows where you are—” Urgency, not breathlessness, spluttered her words: the race down the block was nowhere near enough to wind her.

  Fire blazed in Kate’s eyes, deepening hazel to jade and then through to crimson. Her throat and ribs expanded, contorting impossibly as she drew in more breath than human lungs could conceive of. Wisps of blue smoke appeared, streaming around the corners of her mouth: inhaled, as though she drew heat from the air and turned it deadly. Janx’s, Margrit realized in a bolt of triumph. She had no agenda tied to learning their parentage, but knowing, being the first to know, carried its own thrill.

  Humans, she found herself thinking, were strange creatures.

  Then, in a blur of speed, Ursula smacked a fist into Kate’s stomach. The redhead’s eyes bugged and she made a sound mixed between a burp and a hiccup that left her discombobulated. Ursula drew her lips back from her teeth, pure animal warning for her sister, then simply disappeared, leaving Margrit agape and Kate still wheezing for air.

  Wind whipped behind Margrit. She twisted around, watching a dervish dig a hole in the front lawn, as though a miniature and highly directed tornado had been given the task of landscaping. Flashes of color moved within the whirlwind, moving far too quickly to actually be seen. Kate jolted forward, coming as far as Margrit’s side. Without thinking, Margrit lifted a hand, stopping the other woman. Only after she’d acted did she glance at Kate, who lifted a sharp eyebrow at Margrit’s audacity, but didn’t continue on.

  The funnel erupted, expelling a slender body so quickly it had smashed into the brownstone wall before Margrit could fully register that something had moved. A column of air shot skyward and dissipated, and Ursula slid down the wall of her house to land in flower beds with a dull thud. Kate flowed to her side, the same graceful shift of a large creature’s attention from one place to another that Margrit had seen repeatedly with Janx.

  “Nothing to hold,” Ursula said groggily. Contusions were rising along the arm that had hit the wall and an already-purpling bruise ran down her cheek like overly dramatic goth makeup. “I couldn’t get hold. He got away. Sorry, Kay. Sorry. I wasn’t fast enough.” She put one hand against the brownstone and the other into Kate’s, then shoved herself upward. Her eyes swirled in their sockets, dizziness overcoming her, and Kate caught her easily as she fell, scooping her into a bride’s carry as though she weighed nothing.

  “Nobody’s fast enough to hold the wind.” Margrit heard wry sympathy in her voice as she stepped forward to offer a hand, though Kate clearly needed no help. “Are you all right? Should I—” Her own words caught up with her and she broke off, staring, then said, “Shit!” with so much enthusiasm she clapped her hands over her mouth. No one was fast enough to hold the wind, but Ursula Hopkins had done one hell of a job trying.

  Kate gave her a steady look over Ursula’s head. Margrit parted her fingers to whisper, “You’re not twins.”

  “Of course we are,” Kate said derisively. “We just have different fathers.”

  The scornful comment followed Margrit the rest of the day. She’d accompanied Kate back into the house to make certain Ursula was all right, but the twins had resisted her prying into their heritage. Margrit was torn between understanding and disappointment: even if the prurient details were nearly four hundred years old, they still made a good story. They left at the same time Margrit did, none of them under any illusions: the djinn knew both where the twins were now, and whose children they were. They would be unlikely to disappear again, and so their only choice was to decide quickly how to establish themselves, and to do so.

  Margrit tried to put those questions out of mind as best she could for the morning, taking second counsel on the trial she’d missed the first full day of. She’d been right: her coworker was well prepared, her presence more psychological reassurance than necessary. Watching him, she was more than aware that her failure to attend the day before had wiped out any confidence she might have provided. Guilt stung her, bringing a wash of tiredness that fed into a cycle. Part of her mind rang with recriminations: she should have been there to do her job. More profoundly, though, lay the awareness that, though she wasn’t entirely comfortable with it, she felt more strongly about protecting and guiding the Old Races than she did about doing good for her own people. The two might be one and the same at some juncture, but for now, she had chosen Alban and his people’s battles as her own, and had to trust that her coworkers and others like them could fight humanity’s wars.

  She had wanted to change the world. She’d simply never imagined she might do it in the ways she’d been offered.

  Her cocounselor was one of several who took her to a celebratory, bittersweet lunch when the judge called recess. Assuring her he could handle the case, after lunch he sent her back to the office to finish packing and to find a small bouquet of daisies and pink flowers. A card lay at the vase’s base, and Margrit read it, then went back to the front desk to smile at the receptionist.

  “The pink ones are sweet-pea flowers,” he said, before she asked, then smiled sheepishly. “Sweet peas and Michelmas daisies. They’re for farewells.”

  “Sam,” Margrit said in genuine surprise and delight. “I didn’t know that. You know flower symbolism?”

  Sam’s smile grew even more sheepish. “Me and Google, anyway.”

  Margrit laughed and pulled him from behind his desk to steal a hug. “Thank you. They’re beautiful, and I’m going to dry them when I get home so they’ll last.”

  “That’s not very farewell-like.” Sam grinned and returned the hug. “We’re going to miss you.”

  “I’m going to miss you, too.” Margrit sighed and passed a hand over her eyes. “I’m going to miss this job. This new thing for Mr. Daisani will give me a lot of opportunities I wouldn’t otherwise have, but I’ll miss this place.”

  “Well, we’ll take you back if you decide the air up there is too rarefied for your Legal Aid lungs.” Sam bumped his shoulder against Margrit’s, sending her back to her packing. “You are coming out tonight, right? The party’s planned. We’ll see you off in style.”

  “I’ll be there for a while, at least. I’ve got another thing later tonight.” And there were waters to smooth with her
housemates, if that was at all possible. Margrit shook herself and said, more firmly, “Right after work. I’ll be there.”

  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.

  CHAPTER 24

  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 breath-taking 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 disappeared 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 t
he 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.”