“That looks like a dragon.” Cam pointed to the dominant crimson, coiling around the combined frames into a sinuous whiskered creature of power and grace.
“Gargoyles,” Margrit whispered, touching the grays on the screen. The gargoyle pictured seemed more delicate than Alban, as if it was perhaps female, but the breadth of wing and the comfortable crouch were unmistakable. She traced blues in the picture, picking out the graceful outlines of a half human, half seal creature.
“Mermaids,” Cam offered. Margrit nodded, not wanting to admit how she knew otherwise.
“Like the chess set. There was a set with mermaids and desert creatures in the club.”
Cam traced another shape with her fingernail. “Like this? It’s the right color, all sandy, for the desert. It looks wispy, though. Like a genie. Want to make a wish?”
“I wish I could figure out what the hell was going on,” Margrit said. “And then there’s this.” She touched the one human-looking figure among the others, picked out in blacks, a cloak flaring behind it like the gargoyle’s wings. “I wonder what it is.”
Cam grinned. “Man conquering the monsters, obviously.”
“Obviously.” Margrit slid down in her seat, staring at her screen. Not man, she thought. The fifth figure’s cloak was subtly segmented, more insectoid than Alban’s wings, or the representational gargoyle in the picture.
Five. The Old Races.
Her wish had come true. Staring at the consolidated photographs, Margrit understood at least another part of what was going on. The selkie living in Eliseo Daisani’s building was happenstance, a bonus to gild his real goal with. He didn’t care about destroying a rival member of the Old Races. It was pettiness that drove him, sheer childish pettiness. He was taking the building down in revenge.
Because Grace O’Malley had discovered and exposed his hidden speakeasy.
Margrit stood on the spot Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II had stood upon the occasion of her visit in 1976. Tourists and congregation members came and went, never leaving the Trinity courtyard quiet. The noon service had become a two o’clock tour, and there hadn’t been a long enough break in activity for Margrit to make a dash to Alban’s hidden chamber. Not so hidden anymore; the door was closed, but yellow police tape cordoned off that corner of the church, warning Do Not Cross.
Frustration had driven her to come lurk around his daytime refuge. Even if he wouldn’t be awake-or there, for that matter; he was unlikely to have snuck across police lines just before sunrise-it was possible she might find a hint somewhere in his room as to where he might be when his first home was compromised. Maybe nowhere, maybe hidden on a rooftop somewhere. The memory of his headlong flight into sunrise sent a wave of worry sweeping through her. He’d risked too much by being with her. Risked exposure.
Risked more than that. Risked exile, for telling her the Old Races existed. Though he was outcast already, according to Cara. Not, Margrit thought, the most reliable source of information, if her own people were considered anathema among the Old Races. But the selkie girl had been as casually dismissive of Alban’s status as she’d implied others might be of hers.
It was a topic that could wait. Would have to wait. Margrit bounced on her toes again, impatient with the need to deduce where Alban might have hidden. The room he’d brought her to when the car had nearly hit her, maybe; even now she couldn’t clearly remember where it had been. That she’d been almost too dizzy to walk when she’d left seemed irrelevant.
It was also unavoidable. She rocked back on her heels, glaring futilely around at the congregation. If she could get into Alban’s chamber, it’d be the work of a few minutes to look, and then she could use up some of the energy building in her by running to the new location. Alban still wouldn’t be awake, but at least it would be action. Forward motion. Margrit felt as if she hadn’t moved forward in days. She knew intellectually that she was wrong. New information kept coming to light, but for a woman whose greatest joy was plunging headlong through park pathways at an all-out run, inching toward resolution felt irritatingly slow.
A smile flashed over her mouth as she recalled Luka Johnson’s disbelieving joy at clemency being granted. There was something to be said for the snail’s pace, even if Margrit preferred the hundred yard dash. She just had to keep that in mind.
“May I help you?” someone asked at her elbow. Margrit jumped off the plaque guiltily and shook her head.
“No, I’m just-” She broke off to gape at her questioner, whose beard was as erratic in daylight as it had been the night before.
“Just waiting for an opportunity to slip into the bowels of our church?” he asked with the slightest of smiles.
Caught, Margrit gaped another moment, then ducked her head. “Something like that.”
He nodded, then tilted his head in an invitation to walk, waiting until they were away from the church to say, “I had an active imagination as a child. I loved the idea of good conquering evil, of God conquering the devil. I thought churches were more than just houses of worship. I imagined them as so strong in faith that they might pin down dragons and demons, evil captured and imprisoned by goodness. I grew up in this parish. Trinity was my church. It was stained black, you know. From the pollution. I thought it was from the evil it kept from the world, that it had become tarnished in order to protect its people. I heard my calling and spent years abroad, all around the country and the world, until I finally came home to New York and to Trinity.” He paused, turning back to look up at the graying sandstone. “They cleaned it while I was gone. My black, Gothic church proved to be pink.”
“It’s still beautiful,” Margrit said.
“Oh, yes,” he agreed. “But different. A great evil might be kept below a black church, but beneath a pink one?” He chuckled. “So the first time I saw Alban, I understood what I wouldn’t have understood as a child.”
Margrit swallowed on a dry throat. “What’s that?”
“That God and his creations are more wonderful and mysterious than I could hope to comprehend. That for a creature such as he, the safest home possible would be in a church. Did you know, Ms. Knight, that once upon a time, men could claim sanctuary against the world inside a church? A sort of religious non-extradition treaty.”
Margrit gave a start, then grinned with embarrassment at her shoes. “I kind of knew,” she admitted, “but only because I saw Disney’s
The priest laughed. “Knowledge is where we find it. Even in Disney.” Laughter tempered to a smile and he shrugged one shoulder, a somehow cheery gesture. “You made a splash on the news the other night. I like to think I pay enough attention that a pretty young woman’s name wouldn’t fall out of my head in a matter of days.”
Margrit’s forehead wrinkled with amusement. “Are you flirting with me, Father?”
The priest waggled his eyebrows, good humor in his eyes, then shot a glance at the cordoned-off corner of the church. “I’ve never spoken to him, Ms. Knight, but I believe he is our protector. Church sanctuaries are no longer recognized as such, so I helped the police as best I could. But tell me.” He turned to face her, blue eyes bright in the afternoon light. “Am I right?”
Tears stung the backs of Margrit’s eyes, prickling her nose and making her sniffle. She smiled around them and nodded, clearing her throat. “You are. I think he’s been kind of a quiet guardian, but…” She paused, turning to look at the empty space in the sky where the towers had once stood. “But he’s one of the good guys, Father. Sorry if that’s not the right word to call you. I’m Catholic.”
The priest grinned through his beard. “Everyone has their flaws.” He glanced at the church, then nodded toward it. “Good luck in finding the truth, Ms. Knight.” He walked away, his purposeful strides calling attention to himself. Margrit slipped through the hidden door under cover of his dramatic departure, and let it close behind her.
The chamber below still glowed with torchlight, dim but steady. Margrit jogged down the steps, afraid to see a disaster left by the police force. A dull thud echoed as she came down the stairs, and she startled. “Alban?”
“Not exactly.”
Margrit rounded the corner at the base of the stairs. Detective Anthony Pulcella sat in the chamber’s single chair, elbows on his knees, a leather-bound book open in his hands. Beyond him, the books stood in tidier rows than they’d been left, straight in the shelves and piled neatly on top of each other. The cot was back in its corner,
