Heart of Stone

CHAPTER 9

AN ACRID SMELL woke her. Margrit gagged and coughed, trying to wave the scent away. Her hand slapped against cool flesh that barely gave with the impact; someone moved as she opened her eyes. Blue neon lights swam in her vision and she shut her eyes again, clenching her teeth against nausea.

“How do you feel?” The male voice, deep and gravelly, was vaguely familiar. Margrit pried her eyes open once more and sat up.

The world did a sharp plunge and twist to the left, taking her stomach with it. She rolled to her side and vomited. A minute later, tears dripping from her eyes, she saw there was a stainless steel bowl settled on the floor, clearly meant for the purpose for which it had just been used.

“Your aim is excellent,” the voice said wryly. “Lie down. I believe you have a concussion.”

“Where am I?” Margrit curled into a ball, unable to do anything but lie down even if she wanted to. The room spun every time she opened her eyes, so she kept them closed, her forehead wrinkled with pain and concentration.

“In a safe place,” he murmured.

“A hospital? Am I in a hospital? There was a…a car.”

“Not in a hospital. The car didn’t hit you.”

Margrit let out a feeble laugh. “Then did you get the number of the Mack truck that did?”

“I’m afraid that was me.” Some of the gravel left his voice, making it more familiar still. Margrit’s eyes popped open and she regretted it when the room lurched precariously.

“Alban?” She pressed her eyes shut again as she asked the question, unwilling to risk another bout of sickness.

“Yes.” His weight squashed the mattress and he put a cold cloth against her forehead. “You have a concussion,” he repeated. “Mild, but you should stay still awhile, and shouldn’t fall asleep.”

Sleep. An overwhelming exhaustion swept over Margrit. “Sleep sounds nice,” she whispered.

“No.” Alban slid fingers beneath her chin, turning her head slowly and gently. Margrit clenched her teeth.

“Don’t do that,” she said hoarsely. “I’ll puke again.”

“Better that than sleeping. I apologize for the concussion.”

“What’d you hit me with? And what’s wrong with the lights?” Margrit kept her eyes closed and tried swallowing to clear the rasp in her voice.

She heard, rather than saw, Alban shift and look upward. “The lights?”

“They’re neon. Or is it just my eyes?” She was afraid to open them again to find out.

“Oh.” Alban was silent a moment or two. “They are neon. We’re in…” Wryness filled his voice again. “Not the best part of town. I apologize.”

“You dress well for somebody who can’t afford a decent place to live.” Margrit lifted a hand to her forehead, still without opening her eyes, and prodded the swollen goose egg there. “You’re also very polite for a murderer.”

Some of the politeness left his voice, surprise replacing it. “You’re personally acquainted with a lot of murderers?”

“You’d be surprised who you meet in my line of work.”

A droll note infused his response. “I suppose I would be. I’m not a murderer, Margrit. If I wanted you dead, the car would have done a fine job of it.”

“Except it wouldn’t be personal. They say serial killers like to make things personal.” Margrit’s eyes opened again against her will. “Wait.” The neon lights lunged toward her and she moaned. “You were driving that car?”

“Of course not. I was trying to save your life.”

She frowned faintly and pressed her fingertips against her eyes. Squealing tires. Blinding lights. An impact of colossal proportions. “Are you sure the car didn’t hit me?”

Alban chuckled and moved from the edge of the bed. “Yes.”

“It felt like a car hit me.”

There was another silence. “That, too, would be easier to explain later. When you’re well.”

Even with her eyes closed, the lights seemed to pulse and wobble, making bright, sickening sparks behind her eyelids. There was something wrong with the way she felt, more than the pain and nausea of the concussion. Margrit swallowed, trying to pinpoint the source of discomfort. “Why am I not in a hospital?”

“I wouldn’t be able to talk to you in a hospital, and I need to talk to you.” He sounded patient but tired.

“Why can’t you talk to me in a hospital?”

“For one,” Alban said, “I seem to be wanted for murder.”

Margrit thought she might blush, if her head didn’t hurt so badly that the idea make her temples throb.

“For another,” Alban said more slowly, “hospital visiting hours tend to be during the day.”

“So, what?” Margrit wished she dared open her eyes, even just to stare at the ceiling. “You’re a vampire?”

He sounded a bit startled as he answered, “No. Not at all.”

“So I don’t see the problem, then.”

Alban went quiet again, except for small clinking sounds, as if coffee was being prepared. Water boiled, a kettle whistling, high-pitched enough to set Margrit’s teeth on edge. The screech cut off after a few seconds and she slumped in the cot, relief as palpable as discomfort. “I’ll help you sit up,” he said, his voice at her side. “I have a tea for you to drink. It’ll help the pain and the swelling.”

“They seem to be doing fine on their own,” Margrit said groggily.

Alban chuckled again and slid an arm behind her shoulders, enveloping one of her hands in his. The touch was gentle, his hands dwarfing hers in strength and size. Her heart hammered harder, making her temples pound, but it cleared her mind a little. She knew the thrill of feeling in danger: that was what was missing. She wasn’t afraid. In pain, yes, but not in distress for her life.

“I must’ve hit my head harder than I thought,” she mumbled.

Worry came into Alban’s voice. “Can you not sit?”

“No, I can sit. I’m just-” She stopped abruptly, unwilling to give up the only advantage she might have. A kidnapper didn’t need to know his victim wasn’t afraid of him. “I can sit,” she repeated instead.

Alban helped her upright. “There’s a wall to your left if you need something to lean on.”

She put her hand out, finding it, and shifted against it before Alban folded her hands around a sturdy mug. Margrit smiled without opening her eyes. “Nice cup.”

“Thank you,” he said with mild surprise. “I made it.”

“Really?” She opened her eyes, looking at neon lights reflected in yellow tea. The mug was stoneware, glazed a pale seaweed-green and had a chip in the handle. Spiderweb cracks lined the glazing at the bottom of the cup. “It looks old.”

“I was young when I made it.”

Margrit looked up cautiously, the room swimming and dipping alarmingly behind Alban. He appeared to be around thirty-five. “Yeah. ’Cause you’re so old now.”

He smiled. “Drink your tea.”

She lifted the cup, inhaling the scents of honey and lemon, then hesitated. “You said you were innocent. At the club you said you were innocent but you couldn’t go to the cops. Why? Are you here illegally? You said you needed to talk to someone who wasn’t easily frightened, and that’s why you wanted to speak to me. How do you know if I’m easily frightened or not? Why do you need someone who’s not?” She threw the questions out as if they were barriers to any harm that might come to her, words being her only weapons. They helped her focus through the throbbing in her skull, though the pain didn’t ease any.

Alban’s smile came again, sorrow touching it. “You could say I was an illegal immigrant, though it’s an oversimplification of gross proportions. The reasons I can’t go to the authorities are very much tied to the reasons I need to talk to someone who isn’t easily frightened, Margrit. I know a little about you. What I know gives me the irrational hope you can help me. Please.” He nodded at the mug she held. “Drink the tea, and we can talk.”

Ir. Rah. Shun. Al.

Margrit met his eyes, then drank the tea.

He hadn’t intended to lie to her.

The tea had been brewed to clear her head, not put her to sleep, though he doubted she would believe him when she awoke a second time. Alban dropped into a crouch, watching her, then lifted his own hand to stare at it dispassionately. She might believe him, he amended silently, if she would listen at all. In retrospect, he’d realized he’d never made the healing tea for a human woman before, and that the potency should probably have been halved for someone her size. He was unaccustomed to thinking in terms of how his people differed from hers, except the most obvious.

The way she slept, for example. Color flushed her cheeks, her breathing deep and even. He breathed imperceptibly when he slept, with no restless flutters of eyelashes or twisting in the covers. Margrit knotted and loosened a hand around the mug she still held, revealing bruises on her knuckles. He reached out to touch the injuries, then stopped, the gesture seeming an intrusion. Even slipping the mug from her fingers seemed rude, so he’d left it in her grasp. He would have to wonder, or ask, how she’d hurt herself.

He gave a snort of disbelief, skeptical that they might ever hold such an ordinary conversation.

But why not? For a woman seized by a stranger-a man wanted for questioning about a murder, no less-Margrit retained her equanimity wonderfully well. The head injury may have helped with that, pain giving her something internal to focus on rather than her situation, but her questions had not been those of a woman befuddled. She wasn’t presenting a bold face; there was no scent of fear about her at all. If she could face so much with such ease, perhaps the rest might be less insurmountable than he’d always imagined.

Margrit stirred and whimpered, lifting her hand toward her head. Alban reached to comfort her, then stopped again. Better to go out and get an ordinary drug like aspirin than to offer her another dosage of the tea that had always helped him. He pushed himself erect, hesitating a moment longer as she fell into a deeper sleep. She would be all right for the brief time he’d be gone.

A flash of humor creased his face. She would have to be. He couldn’t carry her unconscious body to the nearest convenience store. He brushed his fingers over her hair, not quite touching the tangle of curls, then was gone.

A nasal buzz erupted; Margrit flinched awake, hefting the mug she still clutched. The room’s shadows were blue, the only light the garish color from the neon sign outside. It hummed incessantly, making her wonder how she’d slept at all.

The answer came to her easily, and she tightened her fingers around the mug. Alban had drugged her, despite his assurances of wanting to talk. Anger rose, then dissipated as she realized the pain was largely gone, reduced to a dull throb in her forehead. For a moment Margrit counted out the pulses, ir-rah-shun-al. There was still no hollow fear in her belly. There hadn’t been since the flash of headlights and Tony’s panicked shout.

Tony. He would be worried sick. Margrit sat up, holding her head as she groaned. Her cell phone. Her purse. She fumbled on the table by the cot, searching for the purse without looking. Her fingers closed around a strap just as the window slid open, a hush of sound that let in a shaft of cold air. Margrit jerked around.

A monster perched in the window. Winged and clawed, it overflowed the frame. Neon lights backlit it, red and blue that cast demonic shadows across sharp, harsh features. Its eyes were wide and colorless in the gloom.

Margrit screamed, instinct driving her to fling her purse at the thing. The monster batted it away easily, then hopped forward, landing on the cot. The bed sagged and creaked, then collapsed. Margrit snatched Alban’s mug up and swung it as hard as she could into the monster’s temple. Shards exploded everywhere. The creature roared in pain, rolling sideways off the collapsed cot, and disappeared into the jumble of shadows and clutter. Margrit staggered to her feet, panting, and lurched out the window.

Metal bit into her feet as she scrambled onto the fire escape. She stared down, wondering where her shoes had gone, then swayed as the ground, twenty feet below, rippled and spun. She took another step forward, running a hip into the safety railing, and felt her balance give way entirely. Her feet scraped against the metal grating as she fell forward, grabbing feebly at the rail in an attempt to stop her fall. The alley floor below zoomed close, like a movie camera rushing in to examine a detail.

What a stupid way to die, she thought, and closed her eyes.

An arm, solid and muscular, snagged her around the waist and hauled her backward. Margrit spun upright again, her head snapping back and cracking against…something too hard to be Alban’s chest. A hollow sound popped in her ears, and she doubled over, vomiting through the fire escape grate. Bile spattered on the walkway below. The arm around her waist held her steady, then pulled her back in the window she’d made her escape through. Once on the shambles of the cot again, Margrit whimpered and slid out of the embrace, into the blankets.

“Are you all right?” Alban, standing above her, looked down with concern in his eyes and blood trickling from a crescent-shaped cut on his temple. Margrit scrambled into the corner, using the walls for support as she shoved herself to her feet.

Someone from the bar below pounded savagely on the little apartment’s door, cursing them both for the vomit. Neither of them moved, staring at one another. After several minutes, the pounding ceased and the irate bartender stomped away.

Only then did Margrit trust herself to so much as swallow, a hard raw gulp. “What,” she rasped, “the fuck. Are you?”

Alban hesitated. “That would be easier to-”

She shot a hand up, stopping the words with her palm. Her heartbeat pounded in her throat, thickening her voice with anger that overrode fear. “Not later. Now. Tell me now.” Her fingertips tingled as adrenaline rushed through her body, buoying her up despite the redoubled pain in her head.

“Easier to show you than explain,” Alban murmured. Margrit stared at him, her nostrils flared and her jaw thrust out in fury and distrust. She nodded once, shaking with too much flight-or-fight energy to speak.

Alban stepped backward, as if to give her space, and inside that step, transformed.

Margrit saw it, yet couldn’t see it, all at once. Space contracted around him, and he grew to fill it, like a sudden deep breath that strained the lungs. The blue light that had bleached fair skin to a sickly white now corroded pockets of gray with purple shadows. He dropped into a crouch, his weight on three points, right hand resting on his knee.

The harsh neon light made hard planes of his face. He shifted one shoulder, changing his weight, and spread wings with long narrow tarsals at peak and edge, like elongated fingers with paper-thin skin stretched between them. Slender blood vessels made black lines through fragile-looking skin, like etchings in silver. For a few seconds he held the pose, breathlessly larger than life, so very still it seemed there could be no life in him. Impossibility blurred into aching beauty, a sculptor’s Pygmalion dream made real by the gods as he settled into place, wings folding down so smoothly Margrit had to look twice to see them, even knowing they were there.

His shoulders were massive, his skin almost white. Not human white, but pure and rich, like carved alabaster. Literally, Margrit thought with a twinge of hysteria. This wasn’t the mock thrill of a late-night run through Central Park. Alien fear clenched her heart, making her feel every beat slamming through her lungs and chasing air away. She laughed, the sound high-pitched and frightened. Alban’s head came up, his lips pressed together. The wide mouth was beautifully shaped, even in the incredible new form he wore.

He looked like himself and he didn’t. The narrow line of his nose had broadened, as had his cheekbones and the set of his eyes. Pale hair fell loose and long over his shoulders, color bleached from it until it was unmistakably white, even in the garish neon lights. When he shook his hair back, his ears swept into distinct points, so fine and delicate Margrit thought a good thump with a fingertip might shatter them. His eyes were colorless, pupils large and swallowing all the available light. It was unquestionably the man Margrit had seen in the park.

It was incontestably not.

She backed up a step. “What the hell are you?”

Alban didn’t move, though light played on muscle as if he had, breaking shadow into points and curves. The width of his shoulders clearly tapered to a slender waist. The hand that rested on one thigh was overlarge and the nails taloned; the thigh beneath it was muscle so solid it could have been carved of-

“What the fuck are you?” Margrit’s voice shot up, almost a shriek.

“My family name is Korund,” Alban rumbled. It was the granite-on-granite voice she’d heard before, the one that seemed familiar and strange all at once. Margrit put her palm against her concussed forehead and closed her eyes for a moment. “It means stone,” he added. The sound lifted goose bumps on her arms, and she shivered as she looked down at him again. Even crouched, he was easily four feet tall. “I am-your people would call me-a gargoyle.”

Margrit stared at him in silence, then shook her head violently. “That’s impossible.”

Alban’s mouth curved in a smile. “Merely improbable.”

“No!” The word came out too sharply, and Margrit found herself backing up. “No, it’s just impossible. I don’t know what the hell kind of hallucinogenic was in that tea, but you’re going to regret it, I swear to God you’re going to regret it-”

Alban stood up. Margrit’s throat went dry as she raked in seven feet of gargoyle with one look.

Seven feet of naked gargoyle.

“Jesus Christ.” Color scalded her cheeks, banishing terror in one embarrassed swoop.

Alban’s wings stretched again, tips bumping against the ceiling only half unfurled, his bulk added to immeasurably. “I’m out of the habit of clothes in this form,” he said dryly, stepping past her to pull open a drawer and drag a pair of jeans out, and on. “My apologies.”

Margrit swallowed and averted her eyes. “What happened to them? Your clothes.”

“A gargoyle transforms in front of you, and you wonder about his clothes?” Alban turned back to her, safely clad in jeans that were no less distracting than the nakedness of a moment before. Margrit stared at his hips, where ivory skin slid into dark denim, and swallowed again. There were no telltale curls, no chest hair of any color running in a V down his abdomen to be hidden by the jeans. Her fingers curled as she fought the urge to step forward and touch his stomach and see if it was as absurdly smooth to touch as it was to look at. She wondered if stony skin would be cool under her hand, or warm as human flesh.

“Margrit?”

She yanked her gaze back up to his face. Her head ached, bright pulses of pain behind her eyes. “What the hell was in that tea?” she asked again, voice hoarse.

“Willow bark,” Alban said, puzzled. “A little…oh. No drugs, no hallucinogens. I’m afraid I’m real. And the clothes stay with the form.”

“So you, what, don’t need them in this one?” Margrit asked faintly. His feet were enormously wide, as if his weight was meant to stand forward on them, though he didn’t. The nails there were taloned, too, just like his hands. Margrit’s gaze drifted to the jeans again, this time at the hems. They were undamaged, belying the breadth of his feet. “That must get chilly. Shrinkage and everything. Embarrassing.” Her voice was shrill and thin, a barrier against accepting the impossible as it stood before her.

A whisper of humor entered Alban’s tone. “Stone doesn’t react like flesh. I don’t suffer-” more amusement flooded the word “-shrinkage. In this form I don’t usually need clothes. Having them change with me would be inconvenient, don’t you think? I would destroy my outfit at dawn each day.”

“Dawn?” Margrit looked back up at him. Her mind was addled, she thought distantly. It was the only possible explanation for standing there holding a near normal conversation with a gargoyle. She shivered hard and wrapped her arms around herself, still staring at him. Fear, no longer distracted by the extraordinarily pragmatic question of his clothing, swept back over her, taking the strength from her muscles and leaving her shaking.

“The sunlight holds power over my kind.” Alban dropped into a crouch again, both hands folded over his knees now. He looked comfortable, as if it was his natural stance. “Rather like your people’s tales of vampires, although we’re not destroyed. Only transformed.”

“Into…stone?” Margrit put her fingertips against her forehead again, testing the injury there. It throbbed badly enough to make her dizzy once more. She was hallucinating. The thought gave her comfort even as she swayed and shivered.

“Or very nearly,” Alban agreed, and offered her a hand, his palm up. Margrit stared at it as if it might bite her. Alban closed his fingers against his palm, loosely, then let his hand fall. “I’m not your enemy, Margrit. I won’t hurt you.”

“You can’t possibly exist.” She closed her eyes. “I want to go home.”

“Will you hear me out?”

“No!” Her eyes flew open. “No, I just want to go home. My friends will be worried sick about me.”

“Call them,” Alban urged. Margrit snorted, then whimpered as the inhalation seemed to drive spikes through her nose and into her brain.

“Call them and say what?” she demanded, cradling her head in both hands. “‘Don’t worry, I’m fine, a lunatic with a special effects machine has got me’?” She turned and dropped to her hands and knees, looking for her purse in the tawdry neon light. The impact with the floor sent a jolt of agony through her head, but she scrounged around until she found the bag.

“I’m leaving now.” She climbed to her feet. “I’m leaving now, and you’re not going to stop me.” Weaving her way to the door took fierce concentration, one careful step after another.

Alban dropped his head. “Margrit. Please.”

“No.” She hesitated with her hand on the knob, expecting a word from him, a movement to stop her. It didn’t come.

She yanked the door open and stumbled out.