deliberate breath, working to slow her heartbeat. Amusement curved Janx’s mouth again and he nodded very slightly, confirming her suspicion: he could hear her heart. It jumped in her throat, making her next swallow thick.
“And if I say I know nothing?”
“Then find out.”
Janx’s eyebrows rose, comically surprised. “Are you delivering me an ultimatum, my dear?”
“You promised me three things, Janx. You have a network I don’t have access to.” Margrit lifted her own eyebrows innocently. “Of course, if you’re telling me you’re incapable of finding anything…”
His eyes narrowed, darkening to jade. “You tread on dangerous ground.”
“I’ve been on dangerous ground since I walked in here. I need answers. People are dying.”
“That,” Janx said icily, “is not my concern.”
“It is if you want to be able to hold the second and third prices over my head.”
Janx bared his teeth. They were pointed, slightly curved in. Margrit swallowed the impulse to ask how he kept from biting his own tongue. “And your third request?”
“I never said I was going to ask for all three tonight.”
Anger lit Janx’s eyes, green paling to the color of new leaves. “That wasn’t established at the beginning of the game.”
Margrit made a moue, shaking her head. “Not my fault.”
“The third price will be high,” he warned her. Margrit felt the pulse thud in her throat, a sick and slow beat, but she inclined her head in a nod.
“I’ll pay it. You have my word.”
“Remarkable,” Janx murmured, then flattened his hands on the table again. “Very well. I can give you three names right now. Perhaps more later, but for now, these three. Grace O’Malley. Biali.” A youthful, impish grin brightened his face. “And the one you have in common-Eliseo Daisani.”
“I haven’t even served the injunction yet.” The words came out numb and foolish, but Margrit couldn’t stop them.
Janx laughed and leaned in confidentially. “My dear girl, I don’t believe he intends for you to do so at all. I believe his words were, ‘incapacitate her.’” Janx smiled beatifically at her.
“What?”
“The problem with handing things off to underlings,” Janx said, full of mocking sympathy, “a little term like ‘incapacitate’ turns into a hit-and-run. Such a pity.”
Margrit’s gaze snapped to Malik. The word irrational whispered through her mind, but she seized on the hunch anyway, her voice sharpening with accusation. “ You were driving that car!”
Malik smiled and spread his hands.
“You sent him after me.” Margrit turned back to Janx, her voice low and shaking with anger and fear. Janx chuckled and leaned forward, taking one of her curls in his fingers again. The gesture was possessive, even more so than earlier, as if her coolness had no effect at all. Icy rage splashed through her, the angry need to make an impression of autonomy on Janx and all his ilk.
“I’m not your enemy, Margrit. Don’t damn the messenger.”
She wrapped her hand around Janx’s wrist. His skin was cool, his pulse fluttering fast as a bird’s beneath her fingers, and his eyes widened fractionally. Not many women-not many people, she thought-would have touched him.
“Don’t push it, Janx.” The accusation bled from her voice, leaving cold dislike in its place. She moved Janx’s hand away from her hair, slowly and deliberately, then released him. His eyebrows lifted as she stood, putting her fingertips against the table. “I’ll be back tomorrow night to see if you have any more information for me.” Cold with fury, she turned her back on him and stalked from the room, feeling his gaze follow her out.
CHAPTER 15
HE’D LOST HER, afraid-wisely afraid-to stay near her building, with the police investigating her so closely. And the cryptic message may have been too cryptic, but Alban hadn’t wanted to risk the others understanding and warning the police where he or Margrit might be in another twenty-four hours.
Surely a day would be enough time for Margrit to extract herself from police proceedings. Especially when she shared a connection with the officer who had called her. Alban had seen it in the way her body language shifted, in the change of her scent, guilt mixing with surprise. Guilt was an emotion that belonged to humans, not the Old Races, but its toll was easy to recognize. Anyone seen with a suspected murderer might feel it, but it had run deeper in Margrit while she’d spoken to the detective below.
And yet she hadn’t betrayed Alban’s own secret. Partly out of self-preservation, almost certainly. No one would believe the truth. But she’d told him to go, more than once. Had warned him away, and created chaos with her arguments and her friends, to give him the time necessary to escape.
Was that trust? Alban made a fist and knocked it against a roofing tile, snarling without sound. He hadn’t been able to read the answer to his question in her dark eyes, in the frantic moments before he took off. She’d drawn breath to speak, and for an instant he’d considered throwing caution to the wind. Snatching her up and taking to the rooftops without hearing her answer.
He breathed a laugh that wasn’t, closing his eyes against the cityscape. For a fraction of a second he’d debated doing that. But it was no more in his nature than…Alban lifted his gaze again to the eastern horizon, graying with the coming sun. No more in his nature than facing the dawn.
A day. He could remain hidden for another day. After two centuries, another few hours could hardly matter. Just so long as Margrit trusted him, so long as she came to Chelsea’s after sunset. She would, Alban promised himself. There’d been trust in her eyes. He was almost sure of it. She would come.
She would come, so long as no one else died.
Alban curled his hand into a fist again, then launched himself into the air, racing the sunrise home.
Irrational fought with don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic, not just back to the street, with Malik’s malicious escort, but back to the West Side and her apartment building. Margrit made it up two flights of stairs before her knees gave out and she sat heavily, fingers pushed into her hair. Tiredness made her hands shaky, and the muscles of her legs feel weak. “Get up, Grit.” She spoke the words wearily, wrapping her hand around the banister and pulling herself to her feet. “You’re in it now, sister.” It took a long time to climb the final three flights of stairs, and she had to concentrate to slide the key into the apartment’s lock.
Dim morning light spilled down the apartment hallway, shadows picking out more shadows. Margrit leaned back against the door, staring blankly through the darkness toward the balcony. She could hear Cole or Cam rolling over in bed, disturbed but not alarmed by her arrival. That was the only movement in the apartment; there were no shifting shadows on the balcony to say that Alban had returned. Or if he had, the rising sun had driven him away again, unable to withstand its light. She shuffled into the kitchen, hesitating at the balcony door, searching the coloring skyline without success. Regret lanced through her, and she watched a few minutes longer, until the sunrise became bright enough that she couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there. Alban was gone, wisely. It would be night before she saw him again.
There were things to do. The case to study, an injunction to prepare for Monday morning. Margrit pulled a cup of yogurt from the fridge, squinting against the brightness of the refrigerator light, and sat down at the dining room table with a yawn.
The clatter of her yogurt cup against the floor woke her up hours later, nestled against Cole’s chest. “She’s fine,” he murmured over her head. “Fell asleep working. She must’ve come in late.” Margrit heard Cam’s near- soundless laughter as Cole bumped a door open with his hip. A moment later he put her onto her bed between piles of laundry, and drew a blanket up over her, murmuring, “Go back to sleep, Grit.” He kissed her forehead as if she were a child, making her smile drowsily before sleep claimed her again.
Headlights haunted her dreams, round white flashes of brilliance that cast impossible shadows on the street in the seconds before impact. Shadows of monsters: winged and enormous, with snarling teeth and curved claws, and Chinese dragons with whiskers like pale smoke streaming past their heads. Rasping sands whisked around
