C.E. Mutphy - Hands of Flame

The selkies gathered together again, picking their way around torn-up flooring and overturned heavy equipment. The youth who’d spoken upstairs stood at their head, watching without expression as the wind tore and ripped at Janx. He staggered under its onslaught, breathlessness beginning to take its toll. Margrit ran forward, putting herself amidst the selkies, and caught the youth’s shoulder. “You have to do something!”

He looked disdainful. “Janx attacked us. This is the cost.”

“You condone murder to protect your work?” Margrit flung the accusation, but turned away before it hit home, recognizing implacability in his eyes. She couldn’t disrupt the whirlwind on her own, even with Daisani’s gift of healing in her blood. She was too small, too delicate, but there had to be something that wasn’t, something she could move.

Her shrill laugh sounded as though it belonged to someone else as she found what she sought, intellect finally catching up to her panicked thoughts.

A handful of seconds later she rode a forklift across the devastated warehouse floor, waving frantically at Janx and bellowing, “Down! Down! Get down!” at the backed-up dragon. Whether he heard her or whether the wind stealing his air had done its job well enough, he slithered down the wall as Margrit crashed the machine into the wall, literally around him. She had enough time to be startled that his sinuous form was slim enough to fit between the lift’s teeth. Then the screaming vortex lost its strength, disrupted by the forklift in its midst and unable to lift its weight.

Like rain pattering around her, bruised and angry djinn fell from their howling whirlwind, and gathered around Margrit in a cloud of fury.

There were more than had been gathered upstairs, all men. Most of them wore human clothing, but two were dressed as Malik had been at Daisani’s ball: flowing robes in the colors of sky and desert and blood, Middle Eastern in flavor but somehow distinctly not human in style. A touch more wing to the shoulders or a flow to the line of sleeve; it drew the eye and made it slide away again, as if the edges of cloth were woven with wind, not silk or linen.

Tariq wasn’t among them. Margrit couldn’t lift her gaze to search the warehouse for him, fear holding her in place. Her hands were knotted around the forklift’s controls so tightly her fingers cramped. She hadn’t thought through what to do next: keeping Janx alive had been an endgame, not just one more move on the board.

The need to act further disappeared beneath a peculiarly familiar rasp, and for a distant, bewildered moment it occurred to Margrit that a woman of the twenty-first century shouldn’t so clearly recognize the sound of a sword clearing its scabbard. Maybe enough movies had ground the soft scrape of metal against leather into her mind; whatever it was, she had no doubt of it, and jerked her eyes to find a scimitar drawn and held by a pinch-faced man who looked as though he not only knew how to use the blade, but was eager to do so. She hadn’t even seen that any of them were carrying weapons, and now stared down a curved length of metal with the vivid awareness that it was probably the last thing she’d ever do.

“I would not, if I were you.” Janx’s voice cut through the sound of air imploding around him as he shifted back into his human form. The djinn nearest him turned away from Margrit, baring teeth. Janx ignored him with aplomb, addressing the group at large. “Enough of you may defeat me,” he went on blithely. “But Margrit Knight belongs to Eliseo Daisani, and a vampire has no natural enemies among the living Old Races. I would not, if I were you.”

The irrational, absurd urge to protest at the phrase belongs to Daisani bubbled up in Margrit. She did not belong to Daisani. She’d thrown Janx’s possessive touch off and challenged him on that very front more than once, unexpectedly earning his respect by doing so. The idea was offensive on a fundamental level.

Being dead would be much worse. Margrit bit her tongue and fought off hysterical laughter. She still couldn’t uncramp her fingers from the forklift’s controls.

“You took Daisani’s woman from him only a few months ago, yet you live.” The sword-bearing djinn threw the words in Janx’s face. Janx smiled, genuine merriment in his jade eyes.

“Yes, but Eliseo likes me.” Margrit couldn’t tell which of the last two words he put more emphasis on: they were both spoken with precise, delightful clarity that rolled over into unmistakable warning. The sword carrier’s jaw tightened, but his sword wavered, and Margrit found herself suddenly able to open her fingers again.

“I hear sirens.” Her tongue loosened with her hands and Janx turned a cat-eyed look of slow amusement on her.

“Implying that we all must run and hide all evidence connecting us to the scene of the crime. My dear Margrit Knight, how the mighty have fallen.” He offered his hand. “Will you join me? I think we have things to discuss.”

Margrit turned her neck stiffly, looking at the ring of angry djinn and the selkies standing beyond them. Tariq was a shadow at the head of the staircase on the other end of the building, watching with an expression unreadable from that distance.

“Yeah.” Margrit shivered and put her hand in Janx’s, relieved to have an escape from the warehouse’s tense, smoky atmosphere. “Yeah, I will. What about Chelsea?”

Surprise filtered through Janx’s gaze for a second time. “If Chelsea Huo was here, rest assured she has the resources to care for herself and stay out of trouble. We, however, are growing short on time. If you will come?” Pressure on her fingers increased slightly, as if the dragonlord would lift her. Margrit came to her feet clumsily, stepping out of the forklift with Janx’s hand to support her. She still felt thick with fear and the aftermath of disaster, but Janx’s strength was steady and calm.

He led her through flame and smoke, and she couldn’t tell if the flame bent away from him or if heat made it appear to do so. Illusion or not, gratitude rose in her. She wasn’t sure she could have made herself walk through the fire without it. “This way, my dear.” Janx gestured at the ruined, burnt-out wall through which he’d made his entrance. Margrit stumbled once, looking back as she made her way over rubble.

The desert-costumed djinn were gone, leaving only ordinarily dressed men in their place, all of them Old Races, smeared and marked with soot. Police burst into the warehouse, their voices adding to the general clamor of destruction. Even through smoke and fire, one of the cops had a familiar shape. Margrit let go a soft-voice curse and scrambled over debris.

But not before Tony Pulcella saw her go.

Janx’s new quarters were posher by far than the ones destroyed when the House of Cards had fallen. Margrit stopped in the doorway of his chambers, fingers resting on a stack of aged stone that had gone unused in the tunnels’ construction.

Soft carpets, thick and rich red with gold trim, sprawled over the stonework floors. A chaise lounge covered in leather and velvet languished empty beside a teak-and-redwood table; oversized chairs of the same make were drawn up opposite the table. The table itself sported a chess set, pieces carved of obsidian and ivory. Margrit walked forward to pick up the white knight, fingers curling around it as she examined the room.

Warm air blew in from somewhere, stirring tapestries that had been hung over the walls. There were three of them, one dominating the back curve of the room and the others to either side. Abstract patterns of jewel-toned reds and greens seemed to leap from them, muted by unexpectedly subtle dune colors and grays. Electric lights covered with gold glass gave the room a comforting air, utterly at odds with the modern steel and hard edges of Janx’s former lair. There was no hint of attendants, no suggestion that anyone other than himself used the room. Margrit ignored prickles rising on her skin and worked to keep her tone conversational. “Did you go steal all this furniture from the speakeasy? This room looks—”