to look up at the dragonlord.
Daisani accompanied him, expression bleak with anger so old it looked as though it had been banked for centuries and only now brought to the fore. “You let us believe she had died, Alban.” The vampire’s voice was impossibly soft, barely disturbing the static in Margrit’s mind, and then rose to a sound so sharp she thought she couldn’t hear it with her ears: “You let us believe she had died!”
CHAPTER 19
“It was what she wished.” Alban’s sorrow was heavy enough that Margrit felt it as her own. She sagged against the gargoyle’s broad chest, relieved to tears that the two immortals’ anger wasn’t directed at her. Through a headache renewed with every heartbeat, she listened to Alban’s soft words, heard reassurance in his voice and felt exhaustedly, inexplicably safe. “After you fought, after the fire began…” The gargoyle shrugged, large motion that shifted Margrit against him and made her feel tiny and fragile in his arms. “She could not live with what we were.”
Margrit could almost hear the words Alban didn’t say, the choices he made to spare Daisani and Janx what Sarah Hopkins had said centuries earlier. Not what we were, because Alban had been fond of the woman, but had never loved her as his friends had. What they were; what they are: those were the words Sarah had spoken all those years ago. She could not live with what Janx and Daisani were, for all that she had loved them, too. Alban’s memories flowed unchecked now, a quiet river of regret. Despite her pounding head, Margrit gathered them up and held them close, seeing deep parallels between a woman born almost forty decades earlier and Margrit’s own family. Rebecca Knight had turned away from learning Daisani’s true nature, a cut that wounded the vampire more deeply than reason explained. Perhaps it stemmed from a love lost in a far-gone era.
“What of the child?” Janx’s voice scraped low, each word so precise it stood on its own, a threat instead of a question. “Did the child live, Stoneheart?”
Alban sighed and folded his head over Margrit’s, new and ancient grief welling inside him. She closed her eyes, feeling the answer within him, and the weight of the promise he’d made to Sarah Hopkins: a promise of silence, no matter what the cost and no matter what truths might be revealed or hidden. And yet, after nearly four hundred years of keeping that silence, he drew breath to answer.
Tariq, hissing fury, burst in to steal Alban’s chance. “Forget your ancient grievances. Is what was seen in the human’s memory truth?”
Margrit, numb with foolishness, opened her eyes and said, “Yeah,” even as Alban tightened his arms in warning.
As one, the djinn exploded in a whirlwind of outrage, their combined strength enough to knock the strong- bodied selkies and slender vampire from their stances. The gargoyles remained unmoved, and Margrit, safe in Alban’s arms, did, too. Janx, even weightier than the gargoyles, looked unimpressed and insulted. Margrit shot a worried glance toward Chelsea and Grace.
Both returned her gaze with unruffled calm. Chelsea still sat in her council chair, looking tidy and patient and sad, and Grace stood with her legs wide and arms folded over her breasts, a platinum superhero in black leather. Static rushed up to fill Margrit’s head again and she turned her face against Alban’s chest in confusion, certain that if she wasn’t safely ensconced in his arms, she’d have been whipped around the room. The djinn were settling now, their display having earned too little awe, or maybe they simply couldn’t talk in their air forms, and, like angry children, wanted to be heard more than they wanted to indulge in excess.
“Then we know who Malik’s killer is.” Tariq spoke almost before he’d finished forming, making his words airy but full of spite. “No wonder you offered us so much, mortal. You bargained for your own life.”
Margrit lifted her eyes, oddly relaxed in the face of his challenge. It was partly Alban’s presence that gave her confidence. His gentle strength was a well to draw from when her own ran dry, and his compassion ran ever deeper than she’d known. She could feel his breath, her own so slow as to match it, making the two of them one.
More prosaically, her head also hurt too badly to allow for fear or anger or any high-pressure emotion, and so she felt only detached reserve as she met Tariq’s eyes. “I offered you as much as I did because I believed it was right. I still do, and the offer still stands. You have another day to consider, and then if you insist, my lord djinn, we’ll take it to the mat.” The last words rather lacked the dignity she’d hoped for, but they were at least spoken with the same tranquillity as the rest of her statement.
“Margrit?” Daisani’s voice scraped as badly as Janx’s had a moment earlier, his astonishment even deeper than Tariq’s. “You took Malik’s life?”
“I did.” Alban interrupted as Margrit drew breath to explain. Daisani’s expression went ever more incredulous, and Margrit said, “He had help. They can’t change if they get soaked with salt water. I had a watergun.” She lifted one hand to mock squirting, then realized what she’d done with dismay. Not the confession, but the playful pull of an invisible trigger. It lacked all the formality that her exhausted headache was trying to settle on her.
“In their defense,” Janx said unexpectedly, “the thing was done in my defense. Malik was trying very hard to kill me, and very nearly succeeding.” He spun the corundum cane in a theatrical circle, apparently having forgotten the anger that had held him in its grip only moments earlier. “I know, my old friend, that you swore an oath to keep the djinn safe, and to make restitution against anyone who might breach your word. Perhaps this once we might…forgive old vows, and leave the game to continue.”
Daisani shot the briefest of glances at Tariq, who curled his lip as he looked at Janx. “Do as you will. Your vengeance is not ours.” With a twist as dramatic as the dragon’s, he whipped himself into a dervish, the other djinn following suit. In a moment they were gone, leaving nothing but a rattle of dust in the air, and then even that faded. The youthful selkie who had spoken to Margrit at the meeting that morning gave her a look of angry scorn, and with no more commentary, led his people from Grace’s audience chamber.
Margrit mumbled, “I’m going to have to talk to Tony,” and turned her attention back to Janx and Daisani.
They stood as though locked in ancient combat, both so still they seemed all but lifeless. Neither looked happy, though Janx’s face was so accustomed to wearing merriment that a hint of it lingered and marked him with a profound sorrow, as if the exaggerated lines of a comedy mask had been peeled away to show its tragic partner underneath. “Very well,” the dragon finally whispered. “If it is not so easy as that, we will make do as we must, my friend. As we always have and as we always shall.” He swept a less insolent bow than any Margrit had ever seen him perform, though it wasn’t precisely respect that marked the gesture, either. Acceptance, maybe, or resignation.
Then, as one, the two men turned to Margrit and Alban, and this time it was Daisani who murmured, “The child, Alban. Tell us of the child.”
“He can’t.” Margrit’s voice sounded light and distant to her own ears. The headache made her feel as though her skull had been stuffed with cotton. “He promised her. You must know that. He promised her that whatever happened, he would never tell either of you. If I didn’t have such a messy mind, you wouldn’t know now.”
Daisani, startlingly, bared his teeth at her. For all that they were flat and ordinary, Margrit flinched back, heart rate spiking at the show of aggression. Her headache flooded back and Daisani’s voice grated across it: “The child would be one of ours, Margrit Knight. After all you’ve done to change our people, you dare make mockery of something this important?”
“I’m not mocking.” Margrit’s pulse fluttered in her throat, bird-quick, distressing her with its vulnerable show. “I’m just saying he can’t tell you. You know how gargoyles are.”
“Margrit,” Alban murmured. She smiled, trying not to wince as moving her face redoubled the pain in her head.
“Am I wrong?”
He huffed, answer enough, and Margrit’s wince-inducing smile repeated itself as she looked back at the ancient rivals standing above her. “She lived. They lived. There were two of them, both girls. Sarah named them Kate and Ursula. They lived,” she said again, and this time her smile didn’t hurt. “Congratulations. One of you has
