C.E. Murphy - Heart of Stone

Margrit bared her teeth, frustrated at the reminder. “All right. Still, you’ve said you live alone, privately. Maybe you’re hard to find.”

“I have been so deliberately, though if someone…haunts me…then perhaps I haven’t been circumspect enough. Margrit, I saw-”

“You saw her dying. But dawn was close, and you said the stone heals you. Maybe she got away, Alban. Maybe she was too hurt to find you again. Ausra is Hajnal, Alban. I saw it in Biali’s memories. She was small and had black hair and amber skin and-”

“What?” Alban’s voice went hoarse. “You-what? Rode memory with Biali? ”

“I didn’t mean to. He didn’t mean to let me. I was asking him about Ausra and he said he didn’t know her, but this time a memory caught me. She walked right up to him and he said, ‘You’re dead.’ I saw it. They’re the same person. I think Hajnal must’ve gone crazy.” Insistence lost the battle to sympathy as Margrit concluded her argument.

Alban stared down at her, sightless. “We don’t-” he began.

Margrit shook her head. “Somebody who knows about gargoyles is out there killing people, Alban. Somebody who knows about you. Somebody who’s willing to risk exposing you all, just to hurt you. If the Old Races are so circumspect, isn’t what she’s doing insane?”

“It can’t be,” Alban said, but without conviction. “You…saw her?”

Margrit edged another step forward and wrapped her hands around his, around the sapphire in his palm. “I’m sorry. I know it shouldn’t be, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be. All kinds of things that shouldn’t be, are. Like us.”

“Us.” He looked down at her with weary, questioning eyes. Margrit’s heart skipped a beat and she wet her lips, trying for a smile.

“Us,” she said again. “I mean, a gargoyle and a lawyer? That can’t be written in the book of things that should be.”

“Is it wrong?” Alban wondered, without moving. “This thing that shouldn’t be?”

“No,” she whispered. “No, it’s not wrong.”

He straightened away from the table, making it creak again, and brushed a taloned finger against her cheek, pushing an errant curl back from her face. “It has been a very long time since someone said my name with hers, and meant us.”

Margrit gazed up into his eyes, unable to take a deep breath. “Maybe it’s time to start living again, Alban.”

“Perhaps it is.” He cupped her cheek in his palm, his hand dwarfing her skull. Smiling, Margrit turned her face into the touch as Alban lowered his head.

Beads rattled, a soft precursor to Chelsea’s voice. “Forgive me.” She shifted the curtain a few centimeters, enough to look into the back room. “Forgive me, but I thought you needed to know. There are police on the way.”

“POLICE?” SHOCK TIGHTENED Margrit’s stomach even as Alban took a few quick steps toward the stairway leading to the roof. “How did they-”

“Someone must have seen me come in,” he growled. “I should have used the roof.”

“But I told Tony that-” Margrit broke off with a soft curse. “I told him Vanessa’s killer was a copycat. There’d be no reason to retract the APB on you, Alban. You’re still their primary suspect. We’ve got to get out of here.” A sense of the absurd rose in her as she echoed the words of a hundred bad movies. “Who knew people actually said things like that?” she breathed, then followed Alban across the room, stopping at the foot of the stairs, where he blocked the way. “Go,” she said impatiently. “It’s not like I can fly out of here without you. We’ve got to find Hajnal, Alban. We’ve got to stop her. Go! Move!” She pushed him, which was as effective as trying to shift a wall.

Beads rattled as Chelsea disappeared back into her bookstore. Alban glanced at the swinging curtain, then slowly uncurled his palm, where the sapphire rested. “When we were very young, we made a foolish promise to each other.”

“What was it?” Margrit squeezed past the gargoyle, taking the stairs two at a time. Alban followed ponderously, stopping again at the first landing while Margrit searched fruitlessly for something to block the door with.

“That if we were ever endangered and separated, we would find the highest place in the city or countryside where we were, and wait every night for a month for the other to come.”

“Great.” Margrit caught his hand, tugging him up the stairs. Alban followed, as if the only thing keeping him in action was her momentum. “We’ll go to the Empire State Building. It’s tallest now.”

He made a low sound in his throat, loosening his hand and slowing to a stop. Margrit turned back, impatient, to catch a distant look in the blond man’s eyes, as if he no longer saw her or the stairs where they stood. “In Paris, it was Notre-Dame. We loved the cathedral and its gargoyles. Once in a while we’d settle there for a day, to be among our human-made brethren. Every night, Margrit.” He refocused on her, his expression drawn. “I waited every night for a year. She didn’t come. She cannot be alive. Biali’s memories must be wrong.”

Margrit groaned and took Alban’s hand in both of hers, putting her whole weight into pulling him, without effect. “We’ll never know if we don’t try. Come on, Alban.”

“Margrit, it was centuries ago, and she never came.”

Exasperation overtook her. “Do you have a better idea? You could go back downstairs and let the police arrest you, for example. I’m sure they’d be very understanding at seven-thirty when the sun comes up and you turn into a block of rock, which you’ve already got for brains. Come on, Alban!”

Irritation flooded his face, the first real expression since she’d suggested Hajnal was alive. He looked up the circling stairway, then flexed his shoulders. “Do you insist on climbing all of these on foot?”

“I wouldn’t mind a faster route if you’d like to give me a hand. Are you with me now?”

Another grumble sounded low in his throat, but Alban offered a hand, a slow, graceful movement. Margrit plucked the sapphire out of his other hand and put it back in her pocket, shrugging when he looked askance at her. “So it won’t get dropped.”

“I wouldn’t drop it.” He closed his fingers around hers, pulling her into his embrace, and she heard words that went unspoken: no more than I would drop you. “Hold on,” he said above her ear. “There isn’t room here for my wings, and leaping requires both hands.”

“I’m a runner, Alban,” Margrit muttered against his chest. “My strength’s in my thighs, not my arms.”

After a tension-charged moment, he replied with humor, “Remember this was your idea.”

He slid his hands under her bottom and lifted her as if she weighed nothing, wrapping her thighs around his waist. Margrit barely contained a shriek of laughter, ducking her face against his shoulder to smother a shout that would bring the police to the stairwell in seconds. She locked her ankles behind him, then leaned back, grinning as heat colored her face. Her heartbeat scampered faster when she met Alban’s cautious eyes, inches from her own. She ducked her head forward, bumping her nose against his, and Alban responded to the intimate invitation.

Margrit’s breath disappeared; awareness of his strength and closeness superseding all else. Clarity descended, making her hands tingle with knowledge of the thing that lay between them, as yet unbreached. It would remain that way unless Margrit acted, Alban’s nature precluding such a thing.

Should and ought to were washed aside in favor of the hunger she’d been trying to ignore. For an instant they were simply two people sharing desire, Alban’s mouth as soft as any man’s, Margrit’s fingers tight at his nape. They were both wordless, breathless, when they broke apart, Margrit’s eyes wide until a broad grin overtook her.