no easy turning back once they’re part of our world.' Janx flicked a careless hand. 'Oh, perhaps if she gathered her wits about her and ran far and long, but I don’t think Margrit’s the sort. Be done with her, Alban, and tell me what I want to know. We have,' he added pointedly, 'a bargain.'
'I’m not your creature, Janx. Don’t test me.' Despite that warning, Alban drew a deep breath, then inclined his head. Janx had satisfied the rituals of asking that the memories be searched, and to do so and refuse an answer was outside of Alban’s scope, outside his comprehension. 'The selkies are gone. I have no other answer for you.'
A shadow contorted Janx’s features. 'That’s not possible.'
'The last memory we gargoyles have of the selkies is their retreat into the sea, centuries ago. If you don’t believe me, ask Biali.'
'I have.' Janx spat the admission, his face twisting when he saw Alban’s surprise. 'I know what I said. I didn’t want to taint your answers. You’re the less likely to amend your responses to thwart a rival, but I had to be sure. It’s possible memories have been kept apart. Kept private.'
Alban’s broad shoulders moved in a dismissive shrug. 'It is our custom to preserve specific personal memories from the whole, when asked. You know that better than most. But this last memory is one the selkies clearly intended to share. What’s driving this, Janx? Not Margrit’s selkie girl.'
'She’s only a harbinger.' Janx stalked to his table and flung a folder across it. Alban stopped it with a fingertip and regarded the dragonlord for a long steady moment. Janx glanced away, as much apology for or admission of rudeness as he was likely to offer, and Alban opened the file.
Photo after photo showed human bodies lying in graphic displays of gruesome death, shredded and torn as though they’d been flailed. He turned the photographs over one at a time, studying each briefly before going on to the next. Four men, none of them familiar to him, but linked together by the manner of their deaths, if nothing else. Memory rose unbidden, whispering to him that one people among the Old Races used this method of killing. And yet it wasn’t that race Alban put a name to, asking instead, 'Eliseo?'
'You have grown suspicious, Stoneheart. How admirable. And yes, obviously, using the selkie girl’s appearance as a cover.' Janx leaned over the table and planted a finger on the pile of photos. 'But why then would he agree to Margrit’s terms?'
'Margrit’s terms,' Alban repeated heavily, certain he didn’t want to hear what they were, yet just as sure he should.
Janx looked up from the photographs of his men. 'Oh, of course. Sleeping Beauty knows nothing of what passes while she slumbers. Margrit’s gone to work for Daisani, Alban. How nicely your court is divided-thee for me, and she for he.'
Stone’s unyielding aspect rolled the words over his skin, refusing to absorb them. Alban had warned her more than once against accepting gifts from Daisani, against making bargains with Janx. It struck him that Margrit, too, could harden like stone, and let all the wisdom in the world slough off her. His eventual answer was half a question, and all weary regret: 'For Malik’s safety.'
Janx flashed a smile. 'As you say. It was clever on her part, annoyingly clever. And Daisani’s agreed to her little plot, so I put it to you again. Why would he, if he were doing this?' He gestured at the photos.
Alban didn’t spare them another glance, still working to comprehend the magnitude of Margrit’s choice. He couldn’t: what it meant for her to work with Daisani was beyond his ability to fathom, except that no matter what he did, she would never be free of the Old Races.
Complex emotion rose in him, cracking stone and leaving the flavor of rock dust in his mind. Relief. Dismay. Chagrin and admiration. He might have called her an enigma, but for the fact she wore her heart on her sleeve and revealed her intentions so clearly.
It occurred to Alban with slow clarity that he was, perhaps, a fool. A fool for pushing her away, and all the more of one for succumbing so swiftly to the most profound of those emotions climbing in him: hope. He shouldn’t allow himself hope when it was he who’d broken off with her so deliberately, and yet. And yet.
He barely knew his own voice as he made an answer to Janx’s question. 'Revenge is said to be a dish best served cold. Perhaps having Margrit in his court-out of yours-is worth more to him than Malik’s timely demise.'
Janx darted a lizard-quick look at him. 'Not a statement I would expect from you, Korund. Has she changed your worldview so dramatically, so quickly? I thought stone did not alter when it alteration found.'
'‘Nor bend with the remover to remove,’' Alban murmured. There was too much appropriate to the sonnet just then, and he closed his throat on more, saying instead, 'You remember. Somehow that surprises me.'
'We all remember,' Janx said sharply, before his voice returned to its usual teasing lilt. 'You fail to finish the stanza, my friend. Why is that?'
'My worth is not unknown, Janx, nor has it been for three and a half centuries.' Interaction with humans changed everything. That was the reason for staying apart; it was how and why those Old Races who survived kept their identities, both individually and racially. Alban had clung to that belief for two hundred years, holding himself apart, uncorrupted, untouched by the human world.
And all around him, the Old Races had adapted, leaving him behind as a relic of a long-gone way of survival. A life outside the shadows had seemed an impossibility for someone such as himself, and he had been content to live in the darkness. This wanting, this desiring something more-gargoyles did not find themselves in such a position. Alban sighed, turning his attention back to Janx. 'She said she met a selkie a few nights ago.'
'Kaimana Kaaiai. A philanthropist,' Janx said distastefully. 'He’s helping the city turn our speakeasy into a tourist showcase. Too rich to be tempted by much Eliseo could offer, and presumably not stupid enough to start hunting my men in traditional selkie fashion. It’s not impossible, but I’d consider it improbable. And his visit’s been planned for weeks. Daisani’s had time to set it up.'
'You’ve proven it only takes a few hours to set a trap, if the stakes are high enough.' Alban moved to the windows, watching the casino below.
Janx’s chuckle followed him. 'When opportunity knocks it shouldn’t go unanswered. If it’s Daisani, why wouldn’t Kaaiai put a stop to it? Is he willing to risk making an enemy of me?'
'Maybe you’re less alarming than Eliseo.' Alban heard Janx’s huff of indignation and smiled. 'Maybe he doesn’t know. Do the news stories say, ‘The victim was employed by the notorious House of Cards, an illegal gambling establishment run by a man known only as Janx?’ Is the method of murder being reported in the papers?'
'Stoneheart.' Janx’s tone turned sour. 'Of course not. I wouldn’t allow the one, and the police wouldn’t allow the other. They don’t want copycats.'
'So it’s sheer arrogance on your part to assume that Kaaiai has even the slightest idea your men are dying.' Alban put a hand against the glass, idly testing its strength. It flexed slightly, enough to tell him how little effort it would take for him to shatter it. 'You forget, Janx, that not all of us are caught up in the game you and Eliseo play.'
'You say that as though you aren’t.'
'No.' Alban curved his fingers against the glass, nails slicking over it where talons would scrape, then turned back to Janx. 'No, I think that’s a mistake I’ll never make again. Where is Malik, dragonlord? I have a duty to render.'
'You don’t trust Eliseo’s word?'
'I won’t risk Margrit’s life on it. Solve this riddle, Janx. Loosen us all from these ties that bind us.'
'It’s a Gordian knot, old friend. One loop loosened draws another one in.' Janx fell silent, leaving his last thoughts unvoiced and still ringing too clearly in Alban’s ears: that Margrit Knight was the thing drawn inexorably closer, no matter how he might try to free her.
Malik curled a lip and dissipated when Alban approached, highlighting the difficulty of both protecting and damaging a djinn. Setting watch over any of the Old Races seemed an exercise in futility; part of the reason they’d survived despite small populations was they were simply not easy to kill.
Still, the djinn hadn’t gone far, the white corundum he carried a flare in Alban’s mind if he chose to follow it. Only one other stone within the city was as easy to locate, but the egg-shaped star sapphire he’d once gifted Hajnal with lay belowground, safe with his own belongings in Grace’s hideaway. Other pieces of corundum, less significant, itched at him when he put effort into sensing Malik’s stone, but none of them had the same pull. Alban crouched on the warehouse roof, waiting patiently for Malik to move far enough away from the casino to be
