been master and slave. Or I might’ve been lucky. Two hundred years ago I might’ve been a free black, a placée. Know what that is? It’s a rich white man’s dark-skinned mistress. Somebody my color would’ve been a quadroon, very exotic. Light enough to be almost acceptable.” Her heart hammered in her throat, thick and choking. “So forgive me if I’m having a hard time with what makes someone human or not.”
“Margrit, we’re different races. Different-”
“They call it racism, Alban.” Her voice rose, growing sharp. “All the shades humans come in are defined as races, like we’re alien from one another. It doesn’t matter that we can all interbreed and make pretty brown babies.” She clenched her hands, emphasizing their color, then turned away, shoving them into her pockets. “I don’t like the word race, ” she added to the street. “If we have to be defined in smaller groups than just the human race, it should be by ethnicity.”
“What are you, ethnically?”
She swung around on her heel, snapping, “American. On both sides, my people have been in the United States since the seventeen hundreds. I don’t know what else it takes to be just an American. What do you see when you look at me?”
“A human woman.” Alban sounded surprised.
Margrit grunted, surprised herself. “Not a black woman? Not just a woman? A human woman? I couldn’t pass for one of your people?”
Amusement flickered over Alban’s face. “You lack the grace. Forgive me. I don’t mean it as an insult. But humans are more solid, more grounded in their movements, than the Old Races usually are. Even your greatest athletes are so very-” He broke off, struggling for a word, and opened his hands helplessly. “Human. In their grace. So connected to one form, to one way of being. There’s breathtaking magic in it, but it is not the magic of the Old Races. It’s wholly your own. What do you see when you look at me?”
“A white man,” Margrit said, but even as she spoke Alban changed form, trusting the alley shadows to hide him from passersby. Margrit stared up at his heavy-shouldered figure, the wings folded against his back to make him smaller than he actually was, and hesitated. Alban smiled again, barely creasing the stony crags of his face.
“Am I a person?” At Margrit’s nod, he added, “Are the gorillas your people have taught to communicate also people?” She nodded a second time and he shimmered back into his human form, looking down at her. “And are they human?”
Margrit looked away. “No.”
“Neither is Janx, Margrit. Tread lightly.”
“It shouldn’t matter.” She spoke quietly, recognizing too clearly echoes of the conversation with her mother.
“It should.” The disagreement was startling enough to jog Margrit out of her thoughts, making her glance up at the gargoyle again. His expression was unreadable, cast-Margrit flashed a brief, frustrated smile at her choice of phrase-cast in stone.
She lifted her hands, pulling her hair free and remaking her ponytail before sighing. “This isn’t the time to argue about it, one way or another.” The statement had a familiar ring, familiar enough to make her cringe internally when she recognized it. It was the same kind of phrase she and Tony often used before taking a break from one another. For an instant Margrit wanted to take back the words and pursue the conversation, argue the semantics of humanity and racism. Instead she dropped her shoulders and stared at the ground a few seconds before choosing her course. “It’s getting late. Janx said something yesterday about it being dangerous for you to be out near sunrise.”
Alban’s nostrils flared with dislike. “Dawn is a long way off at this time of year.”
Margrit huffed a humorless laugh. “Which doesn’t answer the implied question, Alban. What was he talking about?”
Alban bared his teeth, then shook his head and stepped back into the alley. “Physically, my people are not easily damaged. But we have times of vulnerability. Dawn, most particularly.” He was silent, his jaw thrust out as he stared across the alley. “If we are chained at dawn, in the moments of transformation…iron binds us.”
Margrit stared up at him. “Seriously? How?”
He dropped a hand, opening his fingers. “It becomes part of the stone when we transform. Once it’s been absorbed, we can’t rid ourselves of it. The chains can be unlocked, but not broken.” He glanced down at her. “I believe gargoyles are the only of the Old Races to have ever been enslaved.”
“But-”
Alban shifted his shoulders. “Margrit, it can wait.”
“But what about the other Races? Don’t they have-”
“Margrit.” He shook his head once more. “Dawn comes late this time of year, but it still comes. If you want to talk to Biali before tomorrow night we need to do it now.”
Margrit closed her eyes. “All right. And what about the other one? Ausra. Who is she?”
“I don’t know her. The name-” Alban broke off, silent for a moment or two. “It means dawn. Just as Hajnal does.” He sighed. “She’s probably another gargoyle. We tend to have a rather limited number of names we choose. We’re fond of words that mean dawn and sunset. Our hours of transformation.”
“What does Alban mean?”
Sheepishness crept over Alban’s face. “Dawn.”
Margrit laughed. “I see.” Her good humor faded and she gnawed the inside of her cheek. “So she’s another gargoyle.”
“Probably. Although if Janx is giving out her name, she may work with Daisani, which means she could be a vampire, as he is.”
“A vampire?” Margrit’s voice rose and broke.
“Yes.” Alban arched an eyebrow, looking down at her.
“Eliseo Daisani is a vampire? ”
“Yes.” Open amusement creased the gargoyle’s face.
“Vampires don’t come out during the day, Alban!”
“Oh,” he asked mockingly, “they don’t?”
“No, they don’t! Everybody knows that! Vamp-” Margrit bit the word off, staring up at him.
Alban spread his hands, smiling. “I don’t know how the legends got mixed up, but vampires have never been night-bound, Margrit. Only my people. You are not so safe from the monsters as you think you are. You’re pale,” he added in surprise. “A few days ago you didn’t believe in vampires at all. Is it so bad to hear your myths are wrong?”
“Apparently,” Margrit said in a thin voice, “there was some part of me that believed. Yes. It’s that bad. A vampire? I went and talked to a vampire? In an office building?”
Alban tilted his head, eyebrows wrinkled in curiosity. “You just faced down a dragon. Why would a vampire worry you?”
“Dragon.” Margrit closed her eyes, remembering the way blue smoke had clung around Janx long after the cigarette was out. “Of course he was a dragon. What else could he be. Fine.”
Alban, very mildly, asked, “You made a plea on his status as a man without even knowing what race he came from?”
Margrit thrust her jaw out. “Does it really matter?”
“Yes,” Alban said again, more sharply. “It does.”
She ground her teeth, then relaxed her jaw deliberately, though she couldn’t keep rancor from her words. “All right. Fine. Biali, then. Where do we find him?”
Alban shimmered into gargoyle form, again trusting the darkness of the alley to hide him from any watching eyes, and nodded toward the sky. “Up there.” He offered her an arm in an oddly submissive gesture.
Margrit stepped into the embrace with an anticipatory grin, curling her arms around his neck. “What’s wrong? You’re kowtowing.”
He laughed, the sound low and rumbly by her ear. “You would kowtow, too, to a woman who looked like she’d bite a dragon’s hand off at the wrist when he touched her without permission.” Alban crouched, power surging through his muscular legs to send them into the sky, his wings snapping open without the slightest jarring.
