walk away. You don’t keep this kind of secret by letting people who blow your cover live.”
“No.” Janx turned his attention to Grace thoughtfully, air heating with the weight of his regard. “We don’t.”
The faintest smile quirked one corner of Grace’s mouth and she sauntered to Janx, stopping bare centimeters from him. She stood on her toes, tipping her face up as though she’d steal a kiss, and instead whispered, “Be my guest, dragonlord. Try it.”
Interest glittered deep in Janx’s eyes, but he only inclined his head in acknowledgment of the challenge before lifting his gaze beyond Grace to look at Tony again. Smiling, the vigilante stepped back, taking up a place at Tony’s side as Janx asked, “Is this your final wish, detective? That you should see us in all our glory before you die?”
“My final wish would be to die of old age in my bed, if you’re granting them.”
“Sadly,” Janx said, “the djinn have fled, and they’re not of a bent to grant wishes even on their best days. I’m afraid it is this or nothing.”
Like Alban, he transformed as he spoke, the last words deep and distorted as they were spoken by a throat not intended to form human words. Only the gargoyles remained rooted through the enormous force of his transformation, air banging out as mass forced it away. Tony fell back; even Margrit’s body was knocked askew, flung over to face the rear wall. Selkies scattered, while Kate and Ursula knotted arms around each other to retain their feet. Contortions ran over Kate’s body, as though she struggled to hold back her own transformation, and Janx whipped his head around to hiss at her.
More than hiss: he spoke in a language of whispers and sibilance and song, rising and falling hypnotically. Kate stared at him, increasingly nonplussed, until Ursula finally said, “She doesn’t speak dragon,” and Janx broke off with a splutter of offended surprise. He lifted one gold-taloned foot, new threat whose translation couldn’t go unmistaken.
Kate, far from afraid, exploded into her dragon shape and hunched her long, slim back like a cat preparing for a fight. Clearly disgusted, Janx swatted her and she bounced, wings over tail, out the door.
Tony’s harsh laughter cracked across the loading dock. “Kids, huh? Can’t live with ’em, can’t kill ’em.”
Anything further he might have said was lost beneath a rush of movement, Janx’s wings whistling through the air as the dragon pounced on him. One clawed foot pinned the detective to the ground easily, talons making a cage around him, and Janx’s tail lashed, sweeping the room dangerously. “For Margrit Knight’s sake, I spare your life for the crime of having learned the truth of our people.” His words rode on smoke and heat, reddening Tony’s face as Janx brought his muzzle close to the detective. “Be grateful.”
Alban closed his eyes briefly, discovering that he, at least, was grateful. Condemning Margrit’s onetime lover in the face of her death seemed an unusual cruelty, one he had no stomach for.
He opened his eyes again as Ursula and Kate crept back into the loading dock, coming to stand on either side of him and slip their hands into his. They felt fragile and small: very human, though he had seen clearly where the boundaries of their humanity lay, and how far apart from the strictures of the Old Races those boundaries put them. They knew the laws of their fathers’ peoples, and yet devastated bodies lay around the concrete room as evidence of how little regard these two half-human children had for the edicts which ruled the Old Races. And perhaps they should have no more care than they’d shown: after all, they had lived human lives for a dozen generations, condemned by the immortal halves of their heritage. In their place, Alban thought he might well have fought for humanity, which had at least embraced them, rather than the Old Races, who had forbidden them.
In his own place, he had.
Tony, through gritted teeth, acknowledged hard-pressed gratitude, though under the crush of Janx’s claw it could hardly be anything else. Alban squeezed the girls’ hands and released them to approach the dragon, suddenly tired of posturing.
Janx’s tail snapped into him, a lash with so much power it could only have been deliberate. Alban, taken off guard, flew through the air to smash into a wall. Other gargoyles flinched forward as he recovered, but Janx slid a golden talon to rest against Tony’s throat. “Unfortunately for you, detective, I bear another grudge. You led the human raid against the House of Cards, and I have been denied my vengeance on that matter on all fronts. No longer.” A dragonly smile split his face as he arched up, ribs expanding to prepare a blast of fire and wrath.
And then came a low, distorted voice, too quiet to be heard, and yet somehow Alban heard it. They all heard it, Janx arrested in midaction by Margrit’s cold command: “Dragonlord, you will not.”
CHAPTER 28
Margrit awakened with a pounding head and the befuddling idea that she’d heard a gun.
Instinct drove her to sit up, but her muscles were rubbery and she faltered, barely able to lift her head.
Crimson spread out in front of her, the only clear thing in her foggy vision. It was warm, though cooling rapidly, and sticky, and she thought it should mean something to her, all that red liquid so close to her. It smelled of copper, only discernible because she lay so close to it. Other smells were far more overpowering: fire, smoke, barbecue. Her stomach rumbled and she tried to clap a hand against it, but her movements were too clumsy, and all she did was smear a hand in the blood.
Hunger twisted into nausea as she realized her unthinking recognition was right and that she lay in a pool of blood.
Recollection slammed into her, a shock of adrenaline giving her the energy necessary to jerk upright. Her vision cleared as she twisted to face the room, the world sharpening into hyperdefined focus.
The first sound she made after coming back from the dead was a laugh.
No one else heard it: it was too low and raw a sound, as she took in the impossible things spread out before her. Her blood in the foreground, yes, and the air thick with smoke and flame. Bodies, some charcoaled, some flayed, some gnawed upon as though an animal had gotten to them, lay scattered around the floor, and amongst them stood gargoyles and a dragon in their elemental forms, and selkies and a vampire who looked human to an untrained eye.
And under the dragon’s claw lay Anthony Pulcella, who didn’t belong there at all and who was about to pay for his audacity with his life. Beyond him was Grace O’Malley, only slightly less out of place, her peaches-and- cream complexion paled to ghostly white. Janx was speaking, something Margrit hadn’t known he could do in his dragon form, and then he coiled upward, clearly preparing for a final strike.
“Dragonlord,” Margrit said, and her voice was a disaster, “you will not.”
Not if she lived a hundred years would she become accustomed to the lack of movement that came over the Old Races when something surprised them. Every being in the room save Tony went deadly still, bewilderment spasming over the detective’s face. Margrit thought he hadn’t heard her: the ruin of her voice was so quiet she’d barely heard herself, but the Old Races had better senses than humans did.
Janx, with terrible precision, turned his long face toward her, complex double eyelids shuttering over eyes that burned emerald with challenge. His gaze was weighted, heated; all the things she had come to be accustomed to from the dragon. For the first time she felt no fear at all; could, indeed, barely remember why it was he’d frightened her. “You will not,” she said again, and air imploded as Janx returned to his human form.
“An unexpected surprise, Margrit Knight.” The dragonlord looked furious, hands repeatedly clenching into fists.
Relief swept Margrit as his change agreed to her demand, or at least gave her further time to negotiate. She sagged toward the floor, then ground her teeth and forced herself upward. Not just to sitting, but to her feet, a distance she wasn’t at all sure she could travel. But then there was a hand at her elbow, supporting her, and Alban was at her side, his eyes round with hope and astonishment.
Margrit laughed, so breathless it would have been fragile had her throat not been ruined. As it was it scraped, a gurgle as dreadful as her last breaths had been, and she whispered, “Hi.”
“I thought you were dead.” Alban’s hand on her arm was delicate, as though he doubted what he saw and touched. As though she might shatter under his grip, a possibility that felt alarmingly real. The nausea she’d felt before remained in place, symptomatic of light-headedness and blood loss, but she managed another broken
