“I believe you.” Margrit met her defensive gaze with a calm, steady one of her own, and squeezed the young woman’s hands. “I believe you. But…” She shook her head. “I don’t understand why that might have something to do with the building being knocked down.”
Cara’s shoulders slumped. “Maybe it doesn’t.” Her tone belied her words, however, although Margrit didn’t understand why. Cara looked up again, misery darkening her eyes to black. “But we’ve got to have them back, Miss Knight. We can’t live without them.” The despair in her voice bordered on strange, but a penny dropped at the back of Margrit’s mind, providing her with a visual so intense she actually focused beyond Cara, on the image. Daisani’s private office, by the bookcases. Two furs, pinned to the wall next to the window, where sunlight wouldn’t damage them. One large and one small, both unexpectedly soft and lush to look at.
“The Secret of Roan Inish,” she blurted. “Oh, my God. I saw that movie. I remember now. That’s what a selkie is, I knew that. Seal people. Oh, my God. You’re a selkie.” She sat back on her heels, gaping at the girl, whose face lit with panic and confusion. “No! No, it’s okay, it’s-oh, my God. He’s got your sealskins. You’re a selkie. ”
Margrit jumped to her feet, pacing the little apartment in a few long strides, then swung back to face the stricken mother. The air seemed sharper, clearer suddenly, and it sang in her lungs like the promise of a hunt. This was the high of running, the excitement of never knowing what danger lay ahead. Lifeblood. Margrit’s words spilled out, tumbling together in her haste. “It’s all right. I know about you, about the Old Races. I’ve even met Janx-”
Cara blanched and scrambled backward in her chair.
“No! No, I’m not friends with him, I’m not-but God, no wonder, are there other selkies here? Is that what Daisani wants with this place? Does he know about you? Oh, my God.” The need to run throbbed through Margrit’s body, impatience driving her to pace the room again. “Jesus, God, this makes more sense now, I mean, it would if he knows, if…” She shoved both hands back through her hair, raking her ponytail out and tying it up again in swift movements. “Okay, Margrit. Think, Grit! No, screw thinking, just tell me what’s going on. Cara. Cara, it’s all right.” She strode back to the girl, kneeling again in a deliberate effort to make herself smaller and less threatening.
“I’m sorry,” Margrit said. She modulated her voice until it was calmer and more reassuring. “That was like being outed by a complete stranger, wasn’t it. I’m sorry,” she repeated. “But am I right, Cara? Are you one of the selkies?”
The disbelief and fear written across her face answered the question without words. “How-?”
Margrit crooked a little smile. “I made friends with a gargoyle a few days ago. Alban Korund.”
Cara’s eyes darkened again. “The outcast.” She looked down at her lap, lips pressed together. “I didn’t know you knew about us.”
Margrit’s eyebrows shot up. “Outcast? Alban’s an outcast? Why? What’d he do?” White horror coursed over her vision, making everything too bright and dreadful to contemplate. “Did he kill someone? Isn’t that the exiling offense?” Had she been wrong after all? If Alban possessed the ability to kill, the doubt she’d begun with on his behalf became far harder to hold on to. A seemingly gentle manner could hide danger. Margrit had to remember that.
Cara stared at her, wide-eyed with surprise. “There are other offenses,” she whispered. “Telling humans we exist is one.” It was nearly a question, but Cara shook her head, dismissing any need for answering. “Please, Miss Knight. I’m an adult and can go for a long time without wearing my other skin, but Deirdre-”
Cold worry filled Margrit’s core, replacing the excitement of discovery. “How long?”
“A week,” Cara whispered. “Maybe two. I don’t know, Miss Knight. We don’t keep our children apart from their skins. They get sick.”
“I will do everything I can,” Margrit promised in a harsh whisper. “I’ll go beard the lion in his den, if I have to. Cara, are there other selkies here? Is that what Daisani wants with this place? Does he know about the Old Races? About selkies? I thought-I’d been told there weren’t many of you left. Maybe even none at all.”
Cara jerked her eyes up to Margrit’s, surprise swallowing brown irises to black. “There are. Please, Miss Knight, you can’t tell-”
Margrit chuckled and dropped her head. “I know. I know. Even if you weren’t protected by the lawyer-client confidentiality-I know. God, what a mess. All right.” She lifted her head, lips pursed. “Does Daisani know about the Old Races? Has he got some kind of grudge against your people? Something that would prompt him to do this?”
Cara laughed, a quiet bitter sound that seemed at odds with the dark innocence in her eyes. “They all think we’re mongrels, Miss Knight. They don’t need any other reason to hate us.”
“They? Mongrels?”
“The others. The gargoyles, the djinn.” Cara made a short hard gesture, as if cutting herself away from them. “The other Old Races. We bred with humans,” she said flatly. “To survive. There was no other way.”
“You can do that?” Margrit’s voice soared with surprise, and she cleared her throat. Cara sent her a look as flat as her words.
“It’s the third exiling offense. We’re careful about the bloodlines, to keep as true as we can so we don’t lose ourselves to humanity, but they wouldn’t care. As far as they’re concerned, if any of us are left we’re contaminated.” The girl sounded older than her years, as if an ugly memory learned by rote had come alive to haunt her. Then vulnerability washed back in, her gaze going dark as she dropped her eyes. “It’s just how it is.”
Sympathy surged up in Margrit, and she offered her hand. “So we’re cousins.”
Cara hesitated, then put her pale fingers in Margrit’s café latte ones, eyebrows drawn down with uncertainty. “Cousins?”
Margrit smiled. “Sure. If your people bred with humans to stay alive, then we’re cousins, right? Not close, maybe, but cousins.” The smile turned into something near a laugh. “There are six billion of us, right? Strength in numbers, Cara. Who cares what the other Old Races think.” Margrit squeezed her hand, nodding. “It’ll be okay. I’ll figure out a way to make it all work.”
She burst out of the apartment building at a run, despite her jeans and heavy boots. She couldn’t think, being too excited and full of revelation to put coherent thoughts together. She needed the clarity of motion, the purity of thought that developed as her strides lengthened. It was miles to the nearest park she knew, miles to get home or to the office, and she wasn’t sure where she needed to go, anyway.
Run. That was what she needed most. To run. Lose herself in physical action and let it work its magic, clearing her mind and tiring her body until she could make sense of the unexpected, chaotic layer of the world she’d been introduced to.
The rational mind wanted to discard the proof she’d been handed: Alban’s impossible transformations; the manifest panic in Cara’s eyes as she’d realized Margrit knew her secret. The thinness of the air around Janx, as if she stood in the presence of something that took up all the oxygen in the room, rather than the cheerful redheaded devil she’d met. An entire world under her nose her whole life, and Margrit had never suspected.
Unmitigated disbelief seemed in order. Margrit huffed a smile. Unmitigated disbelief in the sky or gravity made about as much sense. The only thing to do now was run with it.
Run, and ignore the blisters from the boots, she thought ruefully, collapsing onto a park bench half an island later. “Ow.” She bent forward, pulling a boot off to examine her foot as it steamed in the cold air. Red spots graced her heel and instep, and a blister had already burst on the side of her big toe. “That was dumb.” She pulled her sock and boot back on and flung herself against the back of the bench, arms spread wide as she stared at the sky. A mounted policeman clopped by and she nodded without seeing him, gaze fixed on the darkening dome high above. It was too early for stars, too much blue left above the city, but Margrit searched for one anyway, trying to settle on a wish.