C.E. Murphy - Heart of Stone

The idea brought a grin to her face and she left the garage cheerfully, stretching her legs into a jog. Huo’s on First was close, and if anyone had a sense of where Alban might have hidden in the moments before sunrise, Chelsea seemed a likely candidate. Margrit came up the steps to the bookstore two at a time, cheeks pink from exertion. Chelsea appeared from the stacks with a look of amusement. “There you are. Who’s after you?”

“Nobody, I hope.” Margrit folded her arms over her chest. “I can’t find Alban. He suggested meeting here before, so I hoped…have you seen him?”

Chelsea tilted her head toward the beaded curtain at the back of her store, smile warming. “He’s waiting for you.”

Margrit jolted, a few quick steps sending her through the rattling curtain. Alban stood in time to catch her as she flung her arms around his neck. Even in human form, his scent was cold stone, the clean smell of earth after rain. Margrit inhaled deeply, tightening her arms around him and trying not to let herself think beyond the warmth and safety she found in his embrace. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to find you all night. I thought maybe something’d gone wrong this morning, at sunrise.”

He closed his arms around her carefully, as if she might be fragile. “I landed a few blocks from your building just before dawn. Perhaps I should have just gone to the top of yours, but I thought if anyone knew where you lived…I was careless,” he admitted. “I haven’t been that incautious in centuries. I won’t do it again.” He shifted his weight back so he could look down at her. “After I checked your home and saw you weren’t there, I came here. I hoped you’d think to. I’d have called your cell phone if I’d known the number.”

“It doesn’t work anymore. Malik phased it into oblivion.”

“Malik?” Alban’s voice rose with alarm. “You’ve seen Janx?”

“I’ve been busy since I saw you.” The words seemed so inadequate she laughed and cast a helpless glance upward. “I haven’t done my laundry, though. It’s Sunday, right?”

“It is,” Alban said, bemused. “Laundry?”

“That was my big plan for Sunday. Laundry and cleaning the bathroom. Maybe watch the Superbowl. I wonder who won.” She breathed a laugh and ducked her head. “How did I end up chasing down murderers and gargoyles instead?” She held up a hand to stop his reply, wincing at her purpling fingers. “Rhetorical question. Lawyers like those. Janx set us up, Alban. He sent us after Grace O’Malley so he’d have time to hire a copycat killer. Vanessa Gray was murdered last night.”

Alban’s eyes widened, palpable shock rolling off him. “Daisani’s assistant? That Vanessa Gray?”

“That one.”

Alban whistled, a long high sound of wind howling through stone, and Margrit looked at him in surprise. “You can whistle?”

His eyebrows wrinkled. “Can’t you?”

“Of course, but it’s so frivolous. You’re sort of stolid. I wouldn’t have thought whistling was in a gargoyle’s nature.”

Alban chuckled. “I don’t do it often.” Laughter faded into concern. “Do you understand what Gray’s death means, Margrit?”

“That Daisani’s schedule will be messed up for a week?” Margrit lifted her hand again, dismissing her own flippancy. “I know that Daisani hauled me in this afternoon to tell me I was personally responsible for apprehending the killer. He knows Janx is behind it, but he won’t go after him.”

“Personally responsible.” Alban’s voice became quiet. “Had he said that to me, Margrit, my inclination would be to run.”

“I did,” Margrit admitted in a mumble. “After I threw up.” She stepped out of the gargoyle’s embrace, shrugging. “But not far, because can you imagine any place on earth that he couldn’t find me, if I ran? I can’t, and I’m pretty damn sure if there was somewhere, it wouldn’t be an island paradise in the Bahamas.”

“Mmm. It may be worth considering, regardless.”

“I’m not going to run, Alban. Besides, I might’ve gotten a lead. I had to borrow Janx’s cell phone after Malik zotted mine, and I found an overseas number. Maybe it’s a place to start. I called Tony with it.”

“Tony. Your detective.” The words were half a question, and Margrit felt her shoulders go stiff and uncomfortable.

“Not exactly mine. It’s complicated.” She lifted both hands, index fingers pointed upward, and ducked her head toward them, bringing her thoughts under control. “Not the point. Gray’s death was the point. I thought I knew what it meant. Is it more than a thorn in Daisani’s side?”

“Far more.” Alban’s voice dropped and he turned to lean on the table. It creaked beneath his weight, and Margrit winced, taking an inadvertent step backward. “Gray had been with Daisani since the eighteen eighties.”

Margrit tilted her head, scrubbing a finger against her ear. “I’m sorry, what did you say? The early eighties? She must’ve started working for him when she was about fourteen, then.”

Alban looked down at her. “The eighteen eighties.”

Incredulous laughter broke from Margrit’s throat. “The woman was only forty years old.”

“Vanessa Gray has been Eliseo Daisani’s assistant-among other things-since eighteen eighty-three. Some of the stories about vampires are true.”

A cold wave ran through Margrit, numbing her fingers. “What, he made her a vampire?”

Alban shook his head. “No more than I could be made human. But a taste of a vampire’s blood can bring long life, Margrit. Very long life. I’m sure the records claim a line of descent, family working for family for generations, but it’s the same woman. She was well over a hundred years old.”

“People don’t live that long,” Margrit whispered. The memory of a photograph, an austere bob-haired Vanessa Gray standing beside Dominic Daisani, flashed through her mind. “Jesus. That picture at Daisani’s office. It’s them, isn’t it? Not their grandparents.”

Alban inclined his head marginally. “Eliseo Daisani’s blood could turn New York into the City of Youth for three generations. Vanessa Gray might have been expected to live centuries, if she’d been allowed to-age naturally, for lack of a better phrase. The blood of vampires is potent stuff.”

“So Janx really won this round,” Margrit whispered. “Does this kind of thing happen a lot?”

“No. It precipitates a kind of war, Margrit. Brief and violent and destructive. Perhaps a battle more than a war,” he said with a quick wave of his hand. “We can’t afford wars.”

“There aren’t enough of you,” Margrit murmured.

“And wars tend to be noticed. Especially when fought in the streets of human urban centers.”

Margrit nodded, only half listening. “Who’s Janx’s second? Malik? Does that mean his life is on the line now?”

“That…is a difficult question. Yes,” Alban said abruptly. “Very probably. The difficulty is in how. We do not kill our own.”

“Malik’s not one of Daisani’s own.”

“We all are, in a way. We Old Races.”

“You have to hang together, or you’ll most surely hang separately?”

“As your founding fathers aptly said, yes.”

“Is that why Janx and Daisani haven’t killed each other?”

“I’m not certain they would anyway. They’re in the habit of one another, as well. They’ve been playing this game for a long time.” Alban lifted broad shoulders and let them fall again. “But Eliseo may make an example of Malik, despite convention.”

“Good,” Margrit said viciously, and lifted her chin in defiance as Alban’s eyebrows rose. “I don’t like him. He scares me.”

“Malik scares you.”