“An abrogation of responsibility?” Chelsea asked quietly.
“Think of it more as me taking it on.” Tension lanced through Margrit’s shoulders. Whether or not Kaimana had intended the selkies to help keep the djinn in check, she fully planned to do that herself.
Somehow.
Chelsea pursed her lips, but nodded, and despite looking far from convinced, the young selkie who’d spoken subsided. Margrit wondered briefly if their society was heavily matriarchal, though Kaimana’s position as a powerful leader amongst them suggested otherwise. Regardless, she was relieved at the lack of argument.
“We will have to discuss this,” Tariq said. “Malik al-Massrī’s death is not something we take lightly.”
Margrit inclined her head, the motion coming close to a bow. She hoped it hid the shiver of nerves that ran under her skin, lifting goose bumps. She could—and would—make good on her threat if the djinn didn’t comply with her terms, but any investigation of Malik’s death would end badly for her. If the Old Races accepted accident as a forgivable circumstance surrounding a death, she would confess to the part she’d played, but they weren’t inclined to show clemency to their own kind, much less a human. Voice steady, she replied, “Nor should it be. Is a day long enough for deliberations?”
“We’ll send a messenger when we’ve decided.”
“Fine. Not more than forty-eight hours, though. This needs to be settled.” Margrit nodded again, and trusting there was no ceremony for departures, took the opportunity to escape.
Chelsea exited a step ahead of her, blocking her on the grate landing as the door banged shut behind them. Accompanied by the rattle of windows, Chelsea asked, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Of course not, but never let them see you sweat, right?” Margrit wrapped a hand around the stairway’s cold, metal railing. “I couldn’t think of another way out of it. They can’t go to war amongst themselves. If they’re lucky, they’ll just half wipe each other out. If they’re not lucky, we’ll learn about them.”
“So the sacrifice you chose was your own people.” Chelsea sounded more interested than condemning, as though Margrit had proven thought-provoking.
Margrit dropped her head, weight leaned into the railing. “The needs of the many over the good of the few. In one way, it doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to come in and clean up Janx’s empire. Whether the djinn run it or a human does…” She shrugged. “Either way, it’s still going to be criminal. People are going to die in the long term. Maybe this will keep some of them alive in the short term. Do you have a better answer?”
“If I did, I would have suggested it earlier.” Chelsea let silence hang for a judicious moment, then conceded, “The caveats were well done. I don’t know if the djinn will agree, but your threat was a good one. Can you back it up?”
“I think so. I hope so. It depends on if Tony’s willing to believe me.” She motioned at the warehouse, evoking another one with the gesture. “He’s still angry, but he thinks all my weird behavior was trying to help set a trap for Janx. If I told him fire trucks full of salt water were the only way to quell the violence down here, he might listen to me.”
“I was more thinking of the vampire’s blood.”
“Oh.” Margrit straightened away from the railing. “Actually, that part I’m more certain of. Daisani was pretty annoyed with me for making him let Tariq go. I think he’d like a chance to snag another djinn. Or thirty.”
“Slippery ground you stand on there.”
Margrit shot the smaller woman a sharp look. “I think I’m bending over backward here to give the djinn a fair chance. Especially since Tariq was the one who nearly pulled my mother’s heart out. So if they don’t hold up their end of what I’ve set out, I don’t have many qualms about knocking this game board over. I’d like to have the moral high ground, but it’s hard to find, much less stay on. I’m doing my best, Chelsea. It might not be good enough, but I’m doing my best.”
A smile passed over Chelsea’s face. “Good. The fire’s still there. I just wanted to make sure.”
“Oh, now you’re manipulating me, too? Thanks.” Margrit pulled a face at Chelsea’s cheerful nod. “So how did you do it?”
“Mmm?” Chelsea’s eyebrows rose in modest curiosity.
“You gave me legitimacy in there. Why didn’t they fight you? No offense, but you’re just a bookshop owner.”
“Oh, that.” Chelsea shrugged it off. “Even the Old Races can be taught to behave if you’re firm enough with them. I think you may be learning that yourself.”
“That’s your story and you’re sticking to it?”
“I am.” Chelsea gestured. “Shall we?”
“Yeah.” Margrit took the lead, trotting down the stairs.
White-hot noise met her at the bottom.
CHAPTER 9
She could tell she screamed because the tang of copper tainted her throat, and with it came the raw, red feeling of too much force. Her ears, though, rang with a profundity that outweighed any hope of hearing her own voice. She knew her eyes were open because she touched them, felt the lashes parted and the sting of salt and minute dirt from her fingertips against their orbs. Fingertip pressure, as light as it was, sent bloody waves through the snow-blinding whiteness that had become her vision. She closed her eyes, instinct whispering that the comfort of expected darkness was better than the wide-eyed blindness. Red overwhelmed white, but reassuring black lay out of her reach.
Her chest heaved, telling her she still breathed as the brackish black taste of smoke began to overwhelm the flavor of blood at the back of her throat. Margrit coughed, then doubled over with her arms wrapped around her ribs. Didn’t double over: curled on her side fetally, the scrape of concrete against her cheek advising her more about her position than intellect could. That made no sense, but she couldn’t rewind her thoughts far enough to understand what was happening. A wall rose up every time she did, concussive force of light slamming into her and ripping coherency away. She opened her eyes again, as if doing so would force comprehension. Stars spun in her vision, then began to clear away in orange whorls of dust and grit. Daisani’s gift, she thought, rather than human adaptability kicking in.
She pushed to her feet awkwardly, aches fading from her bones, but dizziness still swept her as the song in her ears rang louder. A clear thought cut through the sound: she had been in the city when the towers fell. The noise had been overwhelming, and then entirely gone, eerie silence broken only by crying voices and the wail of emergency vehicles struggling through the broken city. She could not remember head-pounding tinnitus accompanying, or following, the attacks.
Attacks.
Only then did the chaos around her resolve into something that made sense, insofar as an all-out fight in a warehouse could make sense. Smoke and dust billowed around her, making ghostly shapes in sunlight that shouldn’t spill through the warehouse the way it did. The better part of a wall was missing, light filtering gold and blue through the grime in the air.
Those welcoming colors fought a losing skirmish against the more dangerous shades of red and yellow as flames began to eat the warehouse’s sides and reach toward its roof. People rushed to escape, bumping past Margrit. She jolted with each contact, stumbling, but never moving far from where she stood.
They were all human, the ones who ran. To see that so clearly tore a sound from her chest, so deep it bordered on a sob. They were human, sharing Margrit’s earthbound, compact grace, and within seconds they were gone, abandoning the warehouse for the safety of the streets.
But innumerable people remained, a whole line of men and women, a line of selkies, advancing on the smoking, swirling chaos. Margrit lifted her eyes, looking past the line of warriors to the blown-out wall.
A man walked through its remains, preacher-collared shirt and Chinese-cut silk pants making the line of him tall and slim. He pulled sunshine with him, its glint playing in auburn hair and its shadow darkening his eyes past jade into blackness. He laced his hands together in front of him, looking about the chaos of Cara’s warehouse with a mild, curious smile.
