“It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Huo. I’m Margrit Knight.”
“Chelsea.”
“Chelsea,” Margrit echoed obediently. Chelsea’s eyes crinkled again, her smile making wizened apple wrinkles in her round face. “Nice to meet you,” she repeated. “Insomniacs?”
“Are why the store is open so late. I get all sorts of sleepless customers, looking for the comfort of books, or sometimes for one dull enough to send them into slumber. They’re constants, aren’t they?” Chelsea asked cheerfully. “Books are. That’s why we like them so much. They seem immutable. They’re not, of course, not from the author’s first draft to the tenth printing, but they seem like it.” She leaned in confidentially. “And used bookstores like this one are always crowded because the books breed, you see.”
Margrit laughed, looking up at shelves tilting toward one another with the weight of volumes, and grinned. “I didn’t even know I’d said that out loud. It explains a lot, though.”
“Doesn’t it? Now, what can I do for you, Margrit? What are you looking for tonight?”
“I’m looking for-” Margrit cut the words off with a hard swallow. “I’m supposed to meet someone here. Tomorrow.”
Chelsea’s feather-fine eyebrows rose. “You’re a little early, then, aren’t you? Who are you meeting?”
“His name is Alban.” Margrit folded her arms around herself, glancing down an aisle between shelves. She felt, more than saw, stillness settle over Chelsea, and looked back at her curiously.
“Of course,” the tiny woman murmured. “You’re the runner in the park. The young lawyer. Peculiar that he should contact you, but-mmm. Well. How interesting.”
“You know him?” Margrit’s voice broke as she reached for Chelsea’s arm, at the last instant stopping herself from grabbing the other woman. “You actually know him? I mean, do you really know about him?” She almost laughed with frustration, trying to rein in frantic words. She sounded as if she was bordering on lunacy, even to herself. It took a moment to deliberately flex her fingers and move her hand back from Chelsea’s arm, pulling in a discreet breath as she did so. “Please,” she said in a calmer voice, “if you really know Alban, it’d be nice to have somebody tell me I’m not losing my mind.”
Chelsea Huo reached up and grabbed Margrit’s chin, pulling her down for examination. Margrit bit back a growl of protest at the proprietary action and let the tiny woman study her. Chelsea turned her face this way and that, as if inspecting her for flaws, and Margrit felt a growing sense of indignation rising in her. She wasn’t chattel to be declared worthy or inspected for salability.
On the other hand, the imperious little woman knew Alban. It was the first chance to validate what he’d told her, and putting Chelsea off might close the only avenue of information available to her. Margrit bit her teeth together, feeling her jaw clench under Chelsea’s fingers, and strove for a polite tone. “Please. I really don’t know what I’m up against here.”
The bookstore owner let her go with a critical click of her tongue. “Well, then, I suppose you’d better come in back and have a cup of tea.”
“…I mean, it’s not possible.” Margrit ducked her head over the teacup, hands wrapped around it as if she was cold. “It just isn’t possible. But I saw it. I saw him turn into a gargoyle. So either I’m losing my mind or…what did you put into this tea, anyway?” She squinted at the pale liquid semisuspiciously, then looked up at Chelsea with a crooked smile. “I’ve been not telling people.” She could hear herself imbuing the words with capitals, Not Telling People, as if every waking moment had been focused on not sharing the new facet of the world she’d learned about. “All day. Every time I think about it I want to blurt something out, but who would believe me? So here I am with you.” She lifted her eyes, half apologizing with the glance. “Spilling my guts. So I hope to God you’re one of the good guys, or I’ve totally screwed Alban.”
“I’m not one of the bad guys.” The bookseller’s eyebrows fluttered up again. “Though I suppose one of the bad guys would say that, too. So you explain it-why are you telling me?”
Margrit ducked her head over the tea again, all but putting her nose in it. “Because Alban chose this place to meet, I guess. Because if I don’t talk to someone I’m going to go insane.” She glanced up again. “And because I don’t really think I’m on the good drugs and imagining all this. I really need to understand what’s going on. This is awfully good tea.”
Chelsea’s pure laugh rang up to the ceiling and bounced down again. “So you’ve said three times. Any more and I’ll think you’re full of blarney.”
“But it’s true!” Margrit protested, then bit her tongue.
Chelsea smiled delightedly at her. “Thank you. I grow it myself. All right, Margrit Knight. Much of this is not my story to tell, but I will tell you what I can. I’ll tell you enough.”
“Who gets to decide what enough is?”
“I do,” Chelsea said with a simple shrug. “Because it’s not my story.”
Margrit closed her eyes, then nodded. “All right. I’ll take anything. I’m lost.” She laughed without humor. “What is he?”
“A gargoyle, as he said. But you mean that question in a larger sense, I think. The answer to the question you really mean is, he is one of the Old Races.”
“The old races. And I thought that was like the lost tribes of Israel, or something.” Margrit shook her head. “What the f-” She cleared her throat, censoring herself. “What are the old races?”
“They were the children of a different evolutionary path, from before this world settled on what direction it would take. There are four or five left, now. Five, if the selkies still survive. They were so terribly few, and then…” Her thin eyebrows arched and she shrugged. “There used to be more. Creatures you know the names of. Yeti and siryns.”
“And then?” Margrit put the question off in favor of a second: “Sirens?” She glanced toward the door, half expecting to hear police cars wailing.
Chelsea’s mouth pursed in amusement. “Siryns,” she corrected. “Mermaids, you’d probably call them. Sea- born creatures, whose shape could be changed to let them leave the oceans, only at great cost. Once transformed, they could never return to their home.”
“Isn’t that a fairy tale?” Margrit smiled crookedly, meaning to tease, but Chelsea’s eyebrows flitted up.
“Many of humanity’s oldest legends stem from creatures that were once real. And a few of them still are, but not the siryns. They’re dead now, or so depleted they can no longer breed. The selkies had countable numbers a few generations ago, but the siryn pods disappeared in the seventeenth century. A shame,” she murmured. “Their music was enchanting.”
“Literally?” Margrit asked, humor infusing the word. Then her eyebrows dipped. “How do you know?”
Chelsea’s eyes disappeared into a smile and she gestured with her teacup. “I collect knowledge of the Old Races. My records are desperately incomplete-only the gargoyles truly record their histories-but there is information to be found, if that’s what you desire.” She swirled the tea in her cup thoughtfully. “If you have only the gargoyles to deal with, you’ll be fortunate. They’re the least changeable of the remaining Races, and perhaps the most trustworthy.”
“Chelsea,” Margrit said as steadily as she could, “the only gargoyle I know is suspected of murder. You’re not inspiring a lot of confidence here. What are the others? How can I recognize them?”
The woman looked up, her lips pursed in a wrinkled smile. “Dragons and djinn, selkies and-” She broke off, distracted. “‘Dragons and djinn’ go together so nicely in the mouth. It’s a pity none of the others are so tasty to say.”
“Selkies and…?” Margrit prompted, a little desperately.
“Oh.” Chelsea’s thin eyebrows shot up. “And vampires, of course.”
“Vampires.” Margrit wrenched herself from a blank-eyed stare filled with nothing but Chelsea’s pleasant expression and a phantom thrum in her own ears. She felt nailed to the chair, grounded in a way that mocked the soaring freedom she’d felt in the Blue Room. Instead of being on the verge of breaking free, the earth itself seemed to have set hooks into her muscles and skin, binding her down with malicious intent. “Vampires and dragons and…They don’t exist.”
Neither did gargoyles. She could all but see her own thought reflected in Chelsea’s gaze. A chill made her shiver, and Margrit wrapped her hands around the teacup, lowering her eyes to study it. “I don’t want to believe this.”
“Not believing won’t make it any less real.”
“I know.” Beneath the emptiness in her stomach lay a kernel of acceptance-and an edge of excitement.
