Hands of Flame n-3

by C. E. Mutphy

  “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 fade 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 acr
oss 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.”

  CHAPTER 28

  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.”

  Not if she lived a hundred years would she become accustomed to the lack of movement that came over the Old Races when something surprised them. Every being in the room save Tony went deadly still, bewilderment spasming over the detective’s face. Margrit thought he hadn’t heard her: the ruin of her voice was so quiet she’d barely heard herself, but the Old Races had better senses than humans did.

  Janx, with terrible precision, turned his long face toward her, complex double eyelids shuttering over eyes that burned emerald with challenge. His gaze was weighted, heated; all the things she had come to be accustomed to from the dragon. For the first time she felt no fear at all; could, indeed, barely remember why it was he’d frightened her. “You will not,” she said again, and air imploded as Janx returned to his human form.

  “An unexpected surprise, Margrit Knight.” The dragonlord looked furious, hands repeatedly clenching into fists.

  Relief swept Margrit as his change agreed to her demand, or at least gave her further time to negotiate. She sagged toward the floor, then ground her teeth and forced herself upward. Not just to sitting, but to her feet, a distance she wasn’t at all sure she could travel. But then there was a hand at her elbow, supporting her, and Alban was at her side, his eyes round with hope and astonishment.

  Margrit laughed, so breathless it would have been fragile had her throat not been ruined. As it was it scraped, a gurgle as dreadful as her last breaths had been, and she whispered, “Hi.”

  “I thought you were dead.” Alban’s hand on her arm was delicate, as though he doubted what he saw and touched. As though she might shatter under his grip, a possibility that felt alarmingly real. The nausea she’d felt before remained in place, symptomatic of light-headedness and blood loss, but she managed another broken laugh.

  “I think I was. Mostly dead, at least.” Sick and trembling or not, she felt filled with laughter, its music bubbling up in her as a form of relief. “Daisani saved me. I think Tariq didn’t cut quite deep enough, and Daisani’s blood saved me. I was so sad I wouldn’t get to see you again.” She swallowed and stopped speaking, every word a strain. The room was unbelievably silent, her harsh voice and Tony’s labored breathing the only sounds in it.

  Every one of the remaining Old Races stared at her in the same astonishment Alban did. Overwhelmed by their gazes, she turned her face against his chest and held on with all the trembling strength she had at her disposal, grateful for his cool, stony scent and solid presence. Exhaustion held her too thoroughly for joy to turn to desire, but she could feel its call deep within her, wanting life to be celebrated.

  “Margrit?” Tony’s voice sounded almost as hoarse as her own did. Margrit released Alban, uncertain she could keep her feet without his support, but there was no need: Tony was there, crushing her in his arms and mumbling disbelief into her hair. “You were dead, Grit. You were dead.”

  Another raw, shaking laugh broke free. “I got better. Do you remember—” Speech hurt, and she was grateful when Alban took over, words deep and tempered with sympathy.

  “A gift from another of our kind, detective. One sip of a vampire’s blood offers health to your people. You recall how quickly she recovered from her injuries in January.”

  Tony looked up at Alban, then set Margrit back a few inches, his hands on her shoulders hard with relief and concern. “So fast the doctors thought their X-rays must’ve been wrong. But this, Margrit, I mean—your throat…”

  Margrit put her fingers a
gainst the cut, shuddering to discover it wasn’t yet fully closed. “I think every time I get hurt it steps up the recovery time. I got the shit beat out of me last night.” She looked beyond Tony, finding Grace, who looked strangely insubstantial amongst the Old Races. Even Tony’s strong coloring helped make the tall vigilante look less real than those around her. For a moment an answer swam behind Margrit’s eyes, but it slipped away again and she whispered, “I could feel myself healing, then. I think I might not be alive if it weren’t for you.”

  Grace executed an elegant bow, flourishing with her fingers as Margrit looked back to Tony. “What are you two doing here?”

  Janx grumbled a warning that Margrit silenced with a look, while Tony fell back a step and shook his head. “Wish to hell I knew. She came out of nowhere and said I had to come with her.”

  “When a cadre of gargoyles goes off looking for trouble, Grace knows to call in a ringer. I didn’t know we’d find a mess as bad as this one, but sometimes it takes old-fashioned human ingenuity to get people’s attention. I figured the copper shooting off a round or two would do it.”

  “You have a gun,” Margrit said blankly.

  Grace wrinkled her nose and slipped the weapon from the small of her back, then knocked open the chamber to shake its contents onto the floor. Nothing fell, and with a semiembarrassed shrug, she said, “No bullets, love.”

  Margrit stared at Grace, remembering too vividly the way she’d pressed the gun’s barrel to her forehead. Her stomach lurched with the dismay of discovering old fear had been useless, but before she found words to protest with, Kate, quiet and sullen, said, “I thought we were the ringers,” to Ursula.

  Janx turned on them both, clearly glad to have a target for his ire. He was nearly purple with indignation, and a purposeful pair of gargoyles stepped forward to prevent him from launching himself at the girls. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice?” he demanded. “Did you think you could come into my city, my territory, and proclaim yourself without challenge? Did you—”