their skins. They get sick.”
“I will do everything I can,” Margrit promised in a harsh whisper. “I’ll go beard the lion in his den, if I have to. Cara, are there other selkies here? Is that what Daisani wants with this place? Does he know about the Old Races? About selkies? I thought-I’d been told there weren’t many of you left. Maybe even none at all.”
Cara jerked her eyes up to Margrit’s, surprise swallowing brown irises to black. “There are. Please, Miss Knight, you can’t tell-”
Margrit chuckled and dropped her head. “I know. I know. Even if you weren’t protected by the lawyer-client confidentiality-I know. God, what a mess. All right.” She lifted her head, lips pursed. “Does Daisani know about the Old Races? Has he got some kind of grudge against your people? Something that would prompt him to do this?”
Cara laughed, a quiet bitter sound that seemed at odds with the dark innocence in her eyes. “They all think we’re mongrels, Miss Knight. They don’t need any other reason to hate us.”
“They? Mongrels?”
“The others. The gargoyles, the djinn.” Cara made a short hard gesture, as if cutting herself away from them. “The other Old Races. We bred with humans,” she said flatly. “To survive. There was no other way.”
“You can do that?” Margrit’s voice soared with surprise, and she cleared her throat. Cara sent her a look as flat as her words.
“It’s the third exiling offense. We’re careful about the bloodlines, to keep as true as we can so we don’t lose ourselves to humanity, but they wouldn’t care. As far as they’re concerned, if any of us are left we’re contaminated.” The girl sounded older than her years, as if an ugly memory learned by rote had come alive to haunt her. Then vulnerability washed back in, her gaze going dark as she dropped her eyes. “It’s just how it is.”
Sympathy surged up in Margrit, and she offered her hand. “So we’re cousins.”
Cara hesitated, then put her pale fingers in Margrit’s café latte ones, eyebrows drawn down with uncertainty. “Cousins?”
Margrit smiled. “Sure. If your people bred with humans to stay alive, then we’re cousins, right? Not close, maybe, but cousins.” The smile turned into something near a laugh. “There are six billion of us, right? Strength in numbers, Cara. Who cares what the other Old Races think.” Margrit squeezed her hand, nodding. “It’ll be okay. I’ll figure out a way to make it all work.”
She burst out of the apartment building at a run, despite her jeans and heavy boots. She couldn’t think, being too excited and full of revelation to put coherent thoughts together. She needed the clarity of motion, the purity of thought that developed as her strides lengthened. It was miles to the nearest park she knew, miles to get home or to the office, and she wasn’t sure where she needed to go, anyway.
Run. That was what she needed most. To run. Lose herself in physical action and let it work its magic, clearing her mind and tiring her body until she could make sense of the unexpected, chaotic layer of the world she’d been introduced to.
The rational mind wanted to discard the proof she’d been handed: Alban’s impossible transformations; the manifest panic in Cara’s eyes as she’d realized Margrit knew her secret. The thinness of the air around Janx, as if she stood in the presence of something that took up all the oxygen in the room, rather than the cheerful redheaded devil she’d met. An entire world under her nose her whole life, and Margrit had never suspected.
Unmitigated disbelief seemed in order. Margrit huffed a smile. Unmitigated disbelief in the sky or gravity made about as much sense. The only thing to do now was run with it.
Run, and ignore the blisters from the boots, she thought ruefully, collapsing onto a park bench half an island later. “Ow.” She bent forward, pulling a boot off to examine her foot as it steamed in the cold air. Red spots graced her heel and instep, and a blister had already burst on the side of her big toe. “That was dumb.” She pulled her sock and boot back on and flung herself against the back of the bench, arms spread wide as she stared at the sky. A mounted policeman clopped by and she nodded without seeing him, gaze fixed on the darkening dome high above. It was too early for stars, too much blue left above the city, but Margrit searched for one anyway, trying to settle on a wish.
The fruitless one that came to mind was wishing she understood the world she’d found herself involved in, but even without wishes, she knew she was beginning to. The pieces didn’t fit yet, but they would, and when they did a murderer would be caught and Alban’s name would be cleared. And Margrit would have some bad enemies. Eliseo Daisani already wanted her incapacitated or working for him. Either would make certain she was under control.
A grin slid across her face. Daisani would have to learn to live with disappointment. Margrit laughed. In five days she’d gone from knowing nothing of the Old Races to spitting in the face of a powerful man who wanted to harm a selkie girl. The world had changed, and she was ready to take it on in all its new glory. An impulse rose up in her, delight over telling-Tony. Only there’d be no sharing this with him, and the realization filled her with regret. Margrit shifted restlessly. Out of everyone she might tell, he was the first and last who should be told. Catching killers was his job, and Margrit wasn’t equipped to do it, but there was no way to explain the situation to him without betraying confidences. Not just Alban’s, but those of whole races who relied on discretion for survival. As much as she’d promised Tony they’d talk, that they’d try to make it work, there were larger factors in place. She couldn’t share with him what she’d learned any more than he could talk to her about the intimate details of his investigations. The inevitable wall was one they’d have to learn to scale together.
Or not at all. The thought whispered through Margrit’s mind and she pushed it away with a shake of her head. There would be a way to make it work, as long as they were willing to try. As long as they could find enough common ground to keep them together through the rough patches. She scanned the streets and pathways near where she sat, suddenly have the sensation of being watched.
But no one was skulking nearby, there was no sign of her sometimes lover, and who else would be watching? Sunset was still more than an hour off, Alban imprisoned in stone until then. A bus lumbered up, belching and groaning, and Margrit limped up its steps, watching shadows gather in the park as it pulled away from the stop.
“Ow ow ow ow ow.” Margrit slid down the inside of the apartment’s front door, untying her boots and peeling her socks off carefully. She crawled into the bathroom to find astringent and bandages, while Cole came to frown at her.
“Cops rough you up?” He was only half kidding; Margrit looked up at his tone and cracked a smile.
“Yeah. Friction burns to the feet. It’s a new torture-eeeyow, that stings!-device.” She wrinkled her face and waved her feet in the air, hissing as hydrogen peroxide worked into blisters and raw spots, clearing potential infections away.
“That why you decided to take a nap at the dining room table this morning?” Cole’s voice was brusque to hide worry, and Margrit gave him another fond smile.
“No, not really. They let me go around 1:00 a.m., I guess. I had some stuff to do after that. Thanks for picking me up this morning, Cole. I thought I could just tough it out, but the last thing I remember was putting the yogurt down. My stupid feet are from going running in dumb shoes.”
“Something happened with the case.” Cole walked back down the hallway to the kitchen, making his words a statement instead of a question.
“Yeah. I think I found out why Daisani wants that building knocked down. It looks like it might be some kind of long-term personal thing for him.” Cara, she realized, had never verified that Daisani was a member of the Old Races. Margrit muttered under her breath, wondering if the girl had avoided answering because it wasn’t true, because she didn’t know or out of misplaced loyalty to discretion in the face of discovery. Bandages in place, Margrit abandoned her socks on the bathroom floor and hobbled down the hall after Cole, still mumbling.
“Is there any point at all in suggesting you should think about dropping this case, Grit?” Cole stood over the stove, intently watching a pan of oil heat. Margrit peered around his shoulder hopefully.
“Is that going to be fried chicken?”
“I don’t know how you can tell it’s fried chicken from a sauté pan full of oil. Don’t avoid the question.”
“Possibly the chicken in the fridge this morning tipped her off,” Cam said from her perch on the dining room table. She’d cleared several inches of space, piling Margrit’s paperwork even more precariously than it had been. Every time her weight shifted, so did the stacks of files. Margrit came over to extract a portable file box holding
