Hands of Flame

by C. E. Murphy

  Chelsea pursed her lips, but nodded, and despite looking far from convinced, the young selkie who’d spoken subsided. Margrit wondered briefly if their society was heavily matriarchal, though Kaimana’s position as a powerful leader amongst them suggested otherwise. Regardless, she was relieved at the lack of argument.

  “We will have to discuss this,” Tariq said. “Malik al-Massrī’s death is not something we take lightly.”

  Margrit inclined her head, the motion coming close to a bow. She hoped it hid the shiver of nerves that ran under her skin, lifting goose bumps. She could—and would—make good on her threat if the djinn didn’t comply with her terms, but any investigation of Malik’s death would end badly for her. If the Old Races accepted accident as a forgivable circumstance surrounding a death, she would confess to the part she’d played, but they weren’t inclined to show clemency to their own kind, much less a human. Voice steady, she replied, “Nor should it be. Is a day long enough for deliberations?”

  “We’ll send a messenger when we’ve decided.”

  “Fine. Not more than forty-eight hours, though. This needs to be settled.” Margrit nodded again, and trusting there was no ceremony for departures, took the opportunity to escape.

  Chelsea exited a step ahead of her, blocking her on the grate landing as the door banged shut behind them. Accompanied by the rattle of windows, Chelsea asked, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Of course not, but never let them see you sweat, right?” Margrit wrapped a hand around the stairway’s cold, metal railing. “I couldn’t think of another way out of it. They can’t go to war amongst themselves. If they’re lucky, they’ll just half wipe each other out. If they’re not lucky, we’ll learn about them.”

  “So the sacrifice you chose was your own people.” Chelsea sounded more interested than condemning, as though Margrit had proven thought-provoking.

  Margrit dropped her head, weight leaned into the railing. “The needs of the many over the good of the few. In one way, it doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to come in and clean up Janx’s empire. Whether the djinn run it or a human does…” She shrugged. “Either way, it’s still going to be criminal. People are going to die in the long term. Maybe this will keep some of them alive in the short term. Do you have a better answer?”

  “If I did, I would have suggested it earlier.” Chelsea let silence hang for a judicious moment, then conceded, “The caveats were well done. I don’t know if the djinn will agree, but your threat was a good one. Can you back it up?”

  “I think so. I hope so. It depends on if Tony’s willing to believe me.” She motioned at the warehouse, evoking another one with the gesture. “He’s still angry, but he thinks all my weird behavior was trying to help set a trap for Janx. If I told him fire trucks full of salt water were the only way to quell the violence down here, he might listen to me.”

  “I was more thinking of the vampire’s blood.”

  “Oh.” Margrit straightened away from the railing. “Actually, that part I’m more certain of. Daisani was pretty annoyed with me for making him let Tariq go. I think he’d like a chance to snag another djinn. Or thirty.”

  “Slippery ground you stand on there.”

  Margrit shot the smaller woman a sharp look. “I think I’m bending over backward here to give the djinn a fair chance. Especially since Tariq was the one who nearly pulled my mother’s heart out. So if they don’t hold up their end of what I’ve set out, I don’t have many qualms about knocking this game board over. I’d like to have the moral high ground, but it’s hard to find, much less stay on. I’m doing my best, Chelsea. It might not be good enough, but I’m doing my best.”

  A smile passed over Chelsea’s face. “Good. The fire’s still there. I just wanted to make sure.”

  “Oh, now you’re manipulating me, too? Thanks.” Margrit pulled a face at Chelsea’s cheerful nod. “So how did you do it?”

  “Mmm?” Chelsea’s eyebrows rose in modest curiosity.

  “You gave me legitimacy in there. Why didn’t they fight you? No offense, but you’re just a bookshop owner.”

  “Oh, that.” Chelsea shrugged it off. “Even the Old Races can be taught to behave if you’re firm enough with them. I think you may be learning that yourself.”

  “That’s your story and you’re sticking to it?”

  “I am.” Chelsea gestured. “Shall we?”

  “Yeah.” Margrit took the lead, trotting down the stairs.

  White-hot noise met her at the bottom.

  NINE

  SHE COULD TELL she screamed because the tang of copper tainted her throat, and with it came the raw, red feeling of too much force. Her ears, though, rang with a profundity that outweighed any hope of hearing her own voice. She knew her eyes were open because she touched them, felt the lashes parted and the sting of salt and minute dirt from her fingertips against their orbs. Fingertip pressure, as light as it was, sent bloody waves through the snow-blinding whiteness that had become her vision. She closed her eyes, instinct whispering that the comfort of expected darkness was better than the wide-eyed blindness. Red overwhelmed white, but reassuring black lay out of her reach.

  Her chest heaved, telling her she still breathed as the brackish black taste of smoke began to overwhelm the flavor of blood at the back of her throat. Margrit coughed, then doubled over with her arms wrapped around her ribs. Didn’t double over: curled on her side fetally, the scrape of concrete against her cheek advising her more about her position than intellect could. That made no sense, but she couldn’t rewind her thoughts far enough to understand what was happening. A wall rose up every time she did, concussive force of light slamming into her and ripping coherency away. She opened her eyes again, as if doing so would force comprehension. Stars spun in her vision, then began to clear away in orange whorls of dust and grit. Daisani’s gift, she thought, rather than human adaptability kicking in.

  She pushed to her feet awkwardly, aches fading from her bones, but dizziness still swept her as the song in her ears rang louder. A clear thought cut through the sound: she had been in the city when the towers fell. The noise had been overwhelming, and then entirely gone, eerie silence broken only by crying voices and the wail of emergency vehicles struggling through the broken city. She could not remember head-pounding tinnitus accompanying, or following, the attacks.

  Attacks.

  Only then did the chaos around her resolve into something that made sense, insofar as an all-out fight in a warehouse could make sense. Smoke and dust billowed around her, making ghostly shapes in sunlight that shouldn’t spill through the warehouse the way it did. The better part of a wall was missing, light filtering gold and blue through the grime in the air.

  Those welcoming colors fought a losing skirmish against the more dangerous shades of red and yellow as flames began to eat the warehouse’s sides and reach toward its roof. People rushed to escape, bumping past Margrit. She jolted with each contact, stumbling, but never moving far from where she stood.

  They were all human, the ones who ran. To see that so clearly tore a sound from her chest, so deep it bordered on a sob. They were human, sharing Margrit’s earthbound, compact grace, and within seconds they were gone, abandoning the warehouse for the safety of the streets.

  But innumerable people remained, a whole line of men and women, a line of selkies, advancing on the smoking, swirling chaos. Margrit lifted her eyes, looking past the line of warriors to the blown-out wall.

  A man walked through its remains, preacher-collared shirt and Chinese-cut silk pants making the line of him tall and slim. He pulled sunshine with him, its glint playing in auburn hair and its shadow darkening his eyes past jade into blackness. He laced his hands together in front of him, looking about the chaos of Cara’s warehouse with a mild, curious smile.

  “Janx.” Margrit whispered his name out of compulsion, as though voicing it was the only way she could keep herself from stepping toward him. He could not possibly hear her, not over the di
stance, not through the sound she imagined must be roaring through the ruined warehouse. Could not possibly, and yet an eyebrow lifted sharply and he turned his gaze from examining the warehouse to unerringly find Margrit.

  For the briefest moment, she thought she saw surprise, and then regret, cross the dragonlord’s face.

  Then for the second time in a matter of seconds, an impossible concussive force slammed through the warehouse, taking all the air with it as Janx transformed.

  Margrit kept her feet by dint of distance, not willpower, but lost her breath as much through awe as the massive implosion of air as Janx’s mass shifted from a man to a monster, vastly larger than he’d been an instant before. She hadn’t seen him transform before: when he and Alban and Malik had fought, she’d been literally knocked aside by the process, too close to observe. Only close enough to be empirically affected, and terrified witless. Her heart hammered now, and her breath came quick, but the raw mindless fear she’d felt when she’d watched Alban and Janx fight seemed weaker. Watching Janx now was less shocking, though no less impressive.

  As a vampire, Daisani moved impossibly quickly. Janx, too, was terribly fast, but his movements had the sense of a vast attention being moved from one place to another, rather than Daisani’s blurring speed. His transformation was like that, too: it seemed to Margrit that she’d simply been unable to see him properly before, and that his shift from man to dragon threw off the illusion that she’d been tricked by. It was as though he always carried his weight with him, and the blast force of transformation was the dropping of a cloak. Alban’s change to and from his gargoyle form was so modest in comparison as to be a different process entirely.

  Janx had filled the office he kept in the House of Cards, seeming to take the very air from the room even in his human shape. But as a dragon he’d wound and twisted through it, nearly an oroborus out of necessity. In the unconstrained open floor of Cara’s warehouse, he stretched sinuously, making himself long and dangerous. He was the color of burnished flame in the sunlight, deep red and glittering with silvery whiskers that floated about his face with the capricity of Einstein’s hair. Short, powerful legs that ended in gold-tipped talons scraped gouges into the floor as he wriggled himself and leapt forward, crashing into the line of advancing selkies with catlike glee.

  The selkies scattered, moving with the beautiful, flowing poise of creatures born to water. Janx whipped his head around, long muzzle turning to a gaping maw, and spit fire after them. The roar of heat and sound came up from below the ringing in Margrit’s ears and reintroduced hearing, something she wasn’t certain she was grateful for. Hands clutched against her head, she stared wide-eyed as Janx lifted his wings. They were long and slender and spiny, and buffeted flame into swirls, sending it after the selkies. As quick as the flame itself, Janx twitched around for a second attack, exhaling fire at the walls. Destructive heat made girders squeal in protest and turned sheeted metal into puddles of silver.

  The selkie army came back together, making a target of themselves without faltering in their advance. Janx, to Margrit’s startlement, fell back a step, swinging his head to bowl the nearest handful of warriors over. Flame rumbled after them, but its bulk was concentrated on the pallets and boxes that made up the warehouse’s contents.

  Astonishment pulled a crackling sound of disbelief from Margrit’s lungs. When she’d put the question to a quorum of Old Races elders, only Janx had sided with her in supporting the idea that killing another of the Old Races no longer be an exiling offense. She didn’t believe that a fear of exile stayed the dragon’s hand now, but despite his visible advantages over the selkie fighters, he shied away from killing.

  Honor among thieves. Margrit had argued extensively with Alban over the dragonlord’s code, but now, watching him, knew she was right. Janx had his own honor, and it stretched so far as to bow to the laws laid down by the Old Races.

  A fresh gout of flame blossomed, heat sizzling across the warehouse. Margrit finally shook herself into movement, backing away and stepping through rubble. A thought caught up with her and she turned, squinting through the smoke and heat in search of Chelsea. She, like the other humans, had to have run: there was no sign of her in the chaos. As there should be no sign of Margrit, she realized, and took a breath of overheated air that she hoped would hold her to the street’s comparative safety.

  Cool, ash-free air splashed across her face, making her inhale again, sharply, her relief at finding a source of clean air stronger than the confusion as to its source. It whipped around her, gaining speed and direction, then plunged forward to attack Janx as he wound across the warehouse floor between burning pallets and unmanned forklifts.

  The wind ripped the next breath of flame away from him, increasing its size for the merest moment, then tearing it apart and sending it into nothingness. Margrit gaped and started forward, but the gales pushed her back again. Selkies slid across the floor, as well, shoved away from Janx by the ferocity of an element with its own mind. Smoke and grit, caught by the wind, formed a vortex, shrieking with speed and tearing fragments of material free around the warehouse. Janx clamped his wings against his sides, hissing as he backed away from the attacking wind. Rubble snapped and broke beneath his weight, the pieces snatched up by the tornado as it pressed toward him.

  A wall stopped his retreat and the wind’s assault screamed victory. It tilted on its axis as if it were a living thing with intent, an impossible whir of debris and air angling itself to encompass the dragon entirely.

  It was a living thing, Margrit realized abruptly. Janx seemed to realize it at the same moment, letting go a bellow of fear-tainted rage. The wind sucked the sound away, whipping around Janx’s head with deadly aim. He slithered farther back, rising onto his hind legs like a cat trapped in a corner, and the shrieking wind followed him. It was too late to transform: the tornado would only snatch up his human form and tear it apart. Margrit vibrated with indecision, too fragile herself to charge into the vortex and rescue the dragon.

  The selkies gathered together again, picking their way around torn-up flooring and overturned heavy equipment. The youth who’d spoken upstairs stood at their head, watching without expression as the wind tore and ripped at Janx. He staggered under its onslaught, breathlessness beginning to take its toll. Margrit ran forward, putting herself amidst the selkies, and caught the youth’s shoulder. “You have to do something!”

  He looked disdainful. “Janx attacked us. This is the cost.”

  “You condone murder to protect your work?” Margrit flung the accusation, but turned away before it hit home, recognizing implacability in his eyes. She couldn’t disrupt the whirlwind on her own, even with Daisani’s gift of healing in her blood. She was too small, too delicate, but there had to be something that wasn’t, something she could move.

  Her shrill laugh sounded as though it belonged to someone else as she found what she sought, intellect finally catching up to her panicked thoughts.

  A handful of seconds later she rode a forklift across the devastated warehouse floor, waving frantically at Janx and bellowing, “Down! Down! Get down!” at the backed-up dragon. Whether he heard her or whether the wind stealing his air had done its job well enough, he slithered down the wall as Margrit crashed the machine into the wall, literally around him. She had enough time to be startled that his sinuous form was slim enough to fit between the lift’s teeth. Then the screaming vortex lost its strength, disrupted by the forklift in its midst and unable to lift its weight.

  Like rain pattering around her, bruised and angry djinn fell from their howling whirlwind, and gathered around Margrit in a cloud of fury.

  There were more than had been gathered upstairs, all men. Most of them wore human clothing, but two were dressed as Malik had been at Daisani’s ball: flowing robes in the colors of sky and desert and blood, Middle Eastern in flavor but somehow distinctly not human in style. A touch more wing to the shoulders or a flow to the line of sleeve; it drew the eye and made it slide away
again, as if the edges of cloth were woven with wind, not silk or linen.

  Tariq wasn’t among them. Margrit couldn’t lift her gaze to search the warehouse for him, fear holding her in place. Her hands were knotted around the forklift’s controls so tightly her fingers cramped. She hadn’t thought through what to do next: keeping Janx alive had been an endgame, not just one more move on the board.

  The need to act further disappeared beneath a peculiarly familiar rasp, and for a distant, bewildered moment it occurred to Margrit that a woman of the twenty-first century shouldn’t so clearly recognize the sound of a sword clearing its scabbard. Maybe enough movies had ground the soft scrape of metal against leather into her mind; whatever it was, she had no doubt of it, and jerked her eyes to find a scimitar drawn and held by a pinch-faced man who looked as though he not only knew how to use the blade, but was eager to do so. She hadn’t even seen that any of them were carrying weapons, and now stared down a curved length of metal with the vivid awareness that it was probably the last thing she’d ever do.

  “I would not, if I were you.” Janx’s voice cut through the sound of air imploding around him as he shifted back into his human form. The djinn nearest him turned away from Margrit, baring teeth. Janx ignored him with aplomb, addressing the group at large. “Enough of you may defeat me,” he went on blithely. “But Margrit Knight belongs to Eliseo Daisani, and a vampire has no natural enemies among the living Old Races. I would not, if I were you.”

  The irrational, absurd urge to protest at the phrase belongs to Daisani bubbled up in Margrit. She did not belong to Daisani. She’d thrown Janx’s possessive touch off and challenged him on that very front more than once, unexpectedly earning his respect by doing so. The idea was offensive on a fundamental level.

  Being dead would be much worse. Margrit bit her tongue and fought off hysterical laughter. She still couldn’t uncramp her fingers from the forklift’s controls.