knowing what I know, I can’t see throwing them in one of our prisons and tossing out the key. It’d be like slapping handcuffs on a shark for eating a surfer.'
'Sharks aren’t rational, thinking creatures capable of making moral decisions.'
Margrit gave another sharp laugh. 'Haven’t you been trying to impress on me that your people have different sets of morals from humans? That you don’t actually think like we do?'
'And haven’t you been trying to convince me that the only way for us to survive is to become more like you?'
Margrit dropped her head forward, thumping it against his chest. 'I think if you want to survive as a people you’re going to have to do something as drastic as the selkies have done. I don’t know if that means becoming us. It shouldn’t. They seem to have kept their sense of selves and their way of thinking. There’s got to be a point in between. A place where…' Her shoulders dropped with defeat. 'A place where it’s not impossible for you and I to try being together.'
'It’s not impossible.' Alban lowered his voice further and touched Margrit’s chin, lifting her gaze to his. 'If you can forgive my foolishness, Margrit…'
'Alban.' Janx’s voice cut across the distance. 'I do hate to disturb your little lovers’ chat, but my liegeman has disappeared again, and I’d like you to find him.'
CHAPTER 19
An unaccustomed pulse of tension throbbed through Alban’s temple. It took a moment before he trusted himself to move; a moment of examining unfamiliar irritation welling within himself. Two centuries of solitude had not prepared him to rejoin the world. Memory seemed briefly faulty, unable to tell him whether small daily annoyances had once pricked his temper as easily as they did now. He thought not; it went against everything he imagined himself to be.
Biali’s shattered visage shot through his mind’s eye, a painful reminder that at least once, he’d been moved to violence. More than once, he recalled, as Ausra’s delicate amber features replaced Biali’s rougher face in Alban’s memory. What he was, and what he thought he was, lay further apart than he could have once imagined.
When he did move, it was to step back from Margrit, letting his hands fall from her shoulders. Denied hope slid across her face and she glanced away, making frustration leap anew in Alban’s chest. The space between them was hardly an insurmountable obstacle for a creature born to flight, and yet he’d insisted on furthering it. He was abruptly uncertain whether it was Margrit he’d tried to protect by doing so, or himself. His hand made a fist of its own accord and he turned toward Janx with a scowl.
'Temper, temper, Stoneheart.' Janx clucked his tongue, eyes merry with scolding. Beneath the veneer of good humor, though, lay a note of strain that almost no one would recognize. Daisani would see it, and Alban, and perhaps a handful of others not in this city. A surprising flash of sympathy scored Alban’s heart. He, too, was learning what it was to lose control, and liked it no better than Janx did.
The dragonlord shook his head, mocking solemnity in the motion. 'You were always so steady, old friend. Time’s left a deeper mark than you’d like to think.'
'On all of us,' he growled. Janx would be no more pleased with a show of compassion than Alban would be offering it. He had always thought of Janx and Daisani as alike, and himself the outside third to their complicated friendship. In many ways it was true-the dragon and vampire’s relationship stretched back centuries before Alban’s birth. But for the first time in decades he recalled-let himself recall-that they had once, the three of them, shared a friendship that had set him on a path none of his brethren had ever taken. He most often let himself remember that with a kind of blame assigned to the others, but in truth, no one forced a gargoyle to a road he didn’t want to walk. Time had left its marks, indeed.
Alban wrenched his thoughts away from the past, bringing his attention back to the too-tense dragonlord. 'Would you have me chasing Malik across half the city like a frantic parent watching a fledgling spread its wings?'
Janx pursed his lips, eyes wide as he considered the question, then spread his hands and smiled beatifically. 'Yes.'
Another growl erupted deep in Alban’s throat, precursor to argument. Janx’s smile grew broader and more pointed, his love of bartering washing away some of his stress. 'I can set Margrit to it, if you like.'
'Go ahead.' Margrit’s voice broke into the conversation with cool strength. 'You’re wasting everybody’s time keeping Alban on him anyway. Anyone who goes after Malik is going to have you and Eliseo to deal with. Somebody that dumb deserves what he gets.' Sotto voce but clearly aware she’d be overheard, she added, 'I should know.'
'Out of the wide variety of adjectives I’d use to describe you, my dear, ‘dumb’ is not one of them. Rash. Impetuous. Bold. Foolish. Dauntless. Audaci -'
'You can stop now.' Margrit’s glare earned a full laugh from Janx that sent a sizzle of envy through Alban. It was worsened as she struggled to maintain her glower, then lost the battle, her own mouth twitching with humor. They made each other laugh easily, and while nothing logical suggested Margrit-a lawyer and a principled woman-would find romancing a crimelord appealing, logic failed in the face of her amusement.
And if that unlikely love affair should come to pass, Alban would have no one to blame but himself. He gathered himself, searching for shadows where he could transform and leave behind the complications of the world for the silence of the sky. Margrit stalked past him as if he wasn’t there and folded her arms as she drew breath to argue with Janx.
'He gave his word.' Janx dismissed her argument before she spoke. Frustration rumbled in Alban’s chest, but the dragonlord had the right of it. 'Even if Eliseo’s been so good as to offer his protection, our dear Stoneheart’s word is-well.' He widened his eyes, as though surprised at his own turn of phrase: 'Solid as rock. Once given, there’s no going back.'
'Well, release him,' Margrit said. 'You can’t expect his word to bind him indefinitely, especially when the source of danger as you defined it has been removed.'
Janx smiled over her head at Alban. 'Don’t you love it when she talks that way?' He transferred his attention back to the petite mortal woman, who rolled her head in exasperation. 'I can,' he said more softly. 'I’ve made bargains with gargoyles before, Margrit Knight. They are binding.'
'They can’t be that binding. He walked away from keeping an eye on me.'
'Did he ever promise you in so many words that he would watch over you?'
Alban heard only the catch of Margrit’s breath in reply, as long strides took him to the shadows. Janx’s voice, cheerful and pitched to carry, followed him into the sky: 'Do you think it was something we said?'
He never had promised her he would watch over her. The promise had been to himself, and that was hard enough to break, even with more than one warning that he would leave her to run alone at night. Then again, in accepting Malik as his responsibility, Alban protected Margrit in a different way.
Perhaps if he told himself that often enough, he would begin to believe it. Stone didn’t take to deception easily. It had to be worn down through long exposure, the way he’d come to let himself lay blame for his own choices as Janx’s and Daisani’s feet. There was no such time to be had with Margrit; her brief span of years would end before Alban could teach himself to believe he guarded her life by watching over Malik’s.
A familiar flash of brightness soared beneath him: Biali on the wing. Alban could feel Malik’s presence-or that of the stone he carried-ahead of him, moving the same direction Biali did. There was time enough to pursue curiosity, and Alban tucked his wings to fall into a slow dive, watching Biali cut through the city canyons.
They rarely saw one another in the skies, but with such a grouping of Old Races as there’d been tonight, it wasn’t a surprise to find Biali in the air. The other gargoyle, though, had clearly not known of the hastily met quorum. As both the elder and the one who was in good graces with their people, he would have rightfully demanded to take Alban’s place. That Janx hadn’t insisted on calling him was a gift of sorts to Alban, though it would no doubt carry a price.
So long as that price wasn’t Margrit. Alban’s wings flared, catching a draft as he followed Biali across Madison Square Park. Ahead of them both, color twisted in the air, a cyclone of light that had nothing to do with
