again, her head snapping back and cracking against…something too hard to be Alban’s chest. A hollow sound popped in her ears, and she doubled over, vomiting through the fire escape grate. Bile spattered on the walkway below. The arm around her waist held her steady, then pulled her back in the window she’d made her escape through. Once on the shambles of the cot again, Margrit whimpered and slid out of the embrace, into the blankets.
“Are you all right?” Alban, standing above her, looked down with concern in his eyes and blood trickling from a crescent-shaped cut on his temple. Margrit scrambled into the corner, using the walls for support as she shoved herself to her feet.
Someone from the bar below pounded savagely on the little apartment’s door, cursing them both for the vomit. Neither of them moved, staring at one another. After several minutes, the pounding ceased and the irate bartender stomped away.
Only then did Margrit trust herself to so much as swallow, a hard raw gulp. “What,” she rasped, “the fuck. Are you?”
Alban hesitated. “That would be easier to-”
She shot a hand up, stopping the words with her palm. Her heartbeat pounded in her throat, thickening her voice with anger that overrode fear. “Not later. Now. Tell me now.” Her fingertips tingled as adrenaline rushed through her body, buoying her up despite the redoubled pain in her head.
“Easier to show you than explain,” Alban murmured. Margrit stared at him, her nostrils flared and her jaw thrust out in fury and distrust. She nodded once, shaking with too much flight-or-fight energy to speak.
Alban stepped backward, as if to give her space, and inside that step, transformed.
Margrit saw it, yet couldn’t see it, all at once. Space contracted around him, and he grew to fill it, like a sudden deep breath that strained the lungs. The blue light that had bleached fair skin to a sickly white now corroded pockets of gray with purple shadows. He dropped into a crouch, his weight on three points, right hand resting on his knee.
The harsh neon light made hard planes of his face. He shifted one shoulder, changing his weight, and spread wings with long narrow tarsals at peak and edge, like elongated fingers with paper-thin skin stretched between them. Slender blood vessels made black lines through fragile-looking skin, like etchings in silver. For a few seconds he held the pose, breathlessly larger than life, so very still it seemed there could be no life in him. Impossibility blurred into aching beauty, a sculptor’s Pygmalion dream made real by the gods as he settled into place, wings folding down so smoothly Margrit had to look twice to see them, even knowing they were there.
His shoulders were massive, his skin almost white. Not human white, but pure and rich, like carved alabaster. Literally, Margrit thought with a twinge of hysteria. This wasn’t the mock thrill of a late-night run through Central Park. Alien fear clenched her heart, making her feel every beat slamming through her lungs and chasing air away. She laughed, the sound high-pitched and frightened. Alban’s head came up, his lips pressed together. The wide mouth was beautifully shaped, even in the incredible new form he wore.
He looked like himself and he didn’t. The narrow line of his nose had broadened, as had his cheekbones and the set of his eyes. Pale hair fell loose and long over his shoulders, color bleached from it until it was unmistakably white, even in the garish neon lights. When he shook his hair back, his ears swept into distinct points, so fine and delicate Margrit thought a good thump with a fingertip might shatter them. His eyes were colorless, pupils large and swallowing all the available light. It was unquestionably the man Margrit had seen in the park.
It was incontestably not.
She backed up a step. “What the hell are you?”
Alban didn’t move, though light played on muscle as if he had, breaking shadow into points and curves. The width of his shoulders clearly tapered to a slender waist. The hand that rested on one thigh was overlarge and the nails taloned; the thigh beneath it was muscle so solid it could have been carved of-
“What the fuck are you?” Margrit’s voice shot up, almost a shriek.
“My family name is Korund,” Alban rumbled. It was the granite-on-granite voice she’d heard before, the one that seemed familiar and strange all at once. Margrit put her palm against her concussed forehead and closed her eyes for a moment. “It means stone,” he added. The sound lifted goose bumps on her arms, and she shivered as she looked down at him again. Even crouched, he was easily four feet tall. “I am-your people would call me-a gargoyle.”
Margrit stared at him in silence, then shook her head violently. “That’s impossible.”
Alban’s mouth curved in a smile. “Merely improbable.”
“No!” The word came out too sharply, and Margrit found herself backing up. “No, it’s just impossible. I don’t know what the hell kind of hallucinogenic was in that tea, but you’re going to regret it, I swear to God you’re going to regret it-”
Alban stood up. Margrit’s throat went dry as she raked in seven feet of gargoyle with one look.
Seven feet of naked gargoyle.
“Jesus Christ.” Color scalded her cheeks, banishing terror in one embarrassed swoop.
Alban’s wings stretched again, tips bumping against the ceiling only half unfurled, his bulk added to immeasurably. “I’m out of the habit of clothes in this form,” he said dryly, stepping past her to pull open a drawer and drag a pair of jeans out, and on. “My apologies.”
Margrit swallowed and averted her eyes. “What happened to them? Your clothes.”
“A gargoyle transforms in front of you, and you wonder about his clothes?” Alban turned back to her, safely clad in jeans that were no less distracting than the nakedness of a moment before. Margrit stared at his hips, where ivory skin slid into dark denim, and swallowed again. There were no telltale curls, no chest hair of any color running in a V down his abdomen to be hidden by the jeans. Her fingers curled as she fought the urge to step forward and touch his stomach and see if it was as absurdly smooth to touch as it was to look at. She wondered if stony skin would be cool under her hand, or warm as human flesh.
“Margrit?”
She yanked her gaze back up to his face. Her head ached, bright pulses of pain behind her eyes. “What the hell was in that tea?” she asked again, voice hoarse.
“Willow bark,” Alban said, puzzled. “A little…oh. No drugs, no hallucinogens. I’m afraid I’m real. And the clothes stay with the form.”
“So you, what, don’t need them in this one?” Margrit asked faintly. His feet were enormously wide, as if his weight was meant to stand forward on them, though he didn’t. The nails there were taloned, too, just like his hands. Margrit’s gaze drifted to the jeans again, this time at the hems. They were undamaged, belying the breadth of his feet. “That must get chilly. Shrinkage and everything. Embarrassing.” Her voice was shrill and thin, a barrier against accepting the impossible as it stood before her.
A whisper of humor entered Alban’s tone. “Stone doesn’t react like flesh. I don’t suffer-” more amusement flooded the word “-shrinkage. In this form I don’t usually need clothes. Having them change with me would be inconvenient, don’t you think? I would destroy my outfit at dawn each day.”
“Dawn?” Margrit looked back up at him. Her mind was addled, she thought distantly. It was the only possible explanation for standing there holding a near normal conversation with a gargoyle. She shivered hard and wrapped her arms around herself, still staring at him. Fear, no longer distracted by the extraordinarily pragmatic question of his clothing, swept back over her, taking the strength from her muscles and leaving her shaking.
“The sunlight holds power over my kind.” Alban dropped into a crouch again, both hands folded over his knees now. He looked comfortable, as if it was his natural stance. “Rather like your people’s tales of vampires, although we’re not destroyed. Only transformed.”
“Into…stone?” Margrit put her fingertips against her forehead again, testing the injury there. It throbbed badly enough to make her dizzy once more. She was hallucinating. The thought gave her comfort even as she swayed and shivered.
“Or very nearly,” Alban agreed, and offered her a hand, his palm up. Margrit stared at it as if it might bite her. Alban closed his fingers against his palm, loosely, then let his hand fall. “I’m not your enemy, Margrit. I won’t hurt you.”
“You can’t possibly exist.” She closed her eyes. “I want to go home.”
“Will you hear me out?”
“No!” Her eyes flew open. “No, I just want to go home. My friends will be worried sick about me.”
“Call them,” Alban urged. Margrit snorted, then whimpered as the inhalation seemed to drive spikes through
