A sharp combination of relief and annoyance danced through her. "Fine way you have of showing it." She knotted her arms around herself more thoroughly, staring up at the gargoyle as guilt and apology appeared on his features. Her acid faded and she stepped forward to put her arms around him instead of herself.

The cool scent of stone enveloped her as he closed his arms around her shoulders, carefully. His heartbeat, slow and steady, sounded like the pulse of the world, never-ending and reassuring. The tightness of tears congregated in Margrit’s chest, making it hard to breathe. It was easy to remember sensuality when she thought of Alban’s touch, but his solid presence brought safety, as well. For a few moments she felt as though she was shut away from the world, left in a warm dark cocoon where exhausted emotion could rest a while. Alban, it seemed, could stand there forever, holding her safe against all comers, and she had never been so glad for refuge.

"Tell me." His low voice tickled her ear where it was pressed against his chest. "Tell me what’s happened that I’ve missed, Margrit. Tell me why…" He hesitated, then murmured, "Tell me why your detective has left you."

Margrit muffled a rough sound against Alban’s suit jacket. "My boss is dead. Russell Lomax. He was murdered yesterday morning, and Janx probably had it done, because Russell used to put Janx’s men away on Daisani’s say-so." The words, once started, flowed freely, her speech almost too quick with misery for even Margrit to follow. "And there’s no obvious connection between Janx and Daisani except the tiny, tiny detail that they’re Old Races and ancient rivals, which I can’t exactly tell Tony. So he’s furious with me, and I can’t blame him. Even if I could, how the hell do you put people like them in jail? Not only is it probably physically impossible, they’re not human. Applying our justice system to them is facetious."

Alban set her back a few inches, his hands on her shoulders as he studied her. "Even when they commit crimes in the human world?"

"I don’t have a good answer for that. There ought to be some kind of balance, some kind of price, but knowing what I know, I can’t see throwing them in one of our prisons and tossing out the key. It’d be like slapping handcuffs on a shark for eating a surfer."

"Sharks aren’t rational, thinking creatures capable of making moral decisions."

Margrit gave another sharp laugh. "Haven’t you been trying to impress on me that your people have different sets of morals from humans? That you don’t actually think like we do?"

"And haven’t you been trying to convince me that the only way for us to survive is to become more like you?"

Margrit dropped her head forward, thumping it against his chest. "I think if you want to survive as a people you’re going to have to do something as drastic as the selkies have done. I don’t know if that means becoming us. It shouldn’t. They seem to have kept their sense of selves and their way of thinking. There’s got to be a point in between. A place where…" Her shoulders dropped with defeat. "A place where it’s not impossible for you and I to try being together."

"It’s not impossible." Alban lowered his voice further and touched Margrit’s chin, lifting her gaze to his. "If you can forgive my foolishness, Margrit…"

"Alban." Janx’s voice cut across the distance. "I do hate to disturb your little lovers’ chat, but my liegeman has disappeared again, and I’d like you to find him."

An unaccustomed pulse of tension throbbed through Alban’s temple. It took a moment before he trusted himself to move; a moment of examining unfamiliar irritation welling within himself. Two centuries of solitude had not prepared him to rejoin the world. Memory seemed briefly faulty, unable to tell him whether small daily annoyances had once pricked his temper as easily as they did now. He thought not; it went against everything he imagined himself to be.

Biali’s shattered visage shot through his mind’s eye, a painful reminder that at least once, he’d been moved to violence. More than once, he recalled, as Ausra’s delicate amber features replaced Biali’s rougher face in Alban’s memory. What he was, and what he thought he was, lay further apart than he could have once imagined.

When he did move, it was to step back from Margrit, letting his hands fall from her shoulders. Denied hope slid across her face and she glanced away, making frustration leap anew in Alban’s chest. The space between them was hardly an insurmountable obstacle for a creature born to flight, and yet he’d insisted on furthering it. He was abruptly uncertain whether it was Margrit he’d tried to protect by doing so, or himself. His hand made a fist of its own accord and he turned toward Janx with a scowl.

"Temper, temper, Stoneheart." Janx clucked his tongue, eyes merry with scolding. Beneath the veneer of good humor, though, lay a note of strain that almost no one would recognize. Daisani would see it, and Alban, and perhaps a handful of others not in this city. A surprising flash of sympathy scored Alban’s heart. He, too, was learning what it was to lose control, and liked it no better than Janx did.

The dragonlord shook his head, mocking solemnity in the motion. "You were always so steady, old friend. Time’s left a deeper mark than you’d like to think."

"On all of us," he growled. Janx would be no more pleased with a show of compassion than Alban would be offering it. He had always thought of Janx and Daisani as alike, and himself the outside third to their complicated friendship. In many ways it was true-the dragon and vampire’s relationship stretched back centuries before Alban’s birth. But for the first time in decades he recalled-let himself recall-that they had once, the three of them, shared a friendship that had set him on a path none of his brethren had ever taken. He most often let himself remember that with a kind of blame assigned to the others, but in truth, no one forced a gargoyle to a road he didn’t want to walk. Time had left its marks, indeed.

Alban wrenched his thoughts away from the past, bringing his attention back to the too-tense dragonlord. "Would you have me chasing Malik across half the city like a frantic parent watching a fledgling spread its wings?"

Janx pursed his lips, eyes wide as he considered the question, then spread his hands and smiled beatifically. "Yes."

Another growl erupted deep in Alban’s throat, precursor to argument. Janx’s smile grew broader and more pointed, his love of bartering washing away some of his stress. "I can set Margrit to it, if you like."

"Go ahead." Margrit’s voice broke into the conversation with cool strength. "You’re wasting everybody’s time keeping Alban on him anyway. Anyone who goes after Malik is going to have you and Eliseo to deal with. Somebody that dumb deserves what he gets." Sotto voce but clearly aware she’d be overheard, she added, "I should know."

"Out of the wide variety of adjectives I’d use to describe you, my dear, ‘dumb’ is not one of them. Rash. Impetuous. Bold. Foolish. Dauntless. Audaci -"

"You can stop now." Margrit’s glare earned a full laugh from Janx that sent a sizzle of envy through Alban. It was worsened as she struggled to maintain her glower, then lost the battle, her own mouth twitching with humor. They made each other laugh easily, and while nothing logical suggested Margrit-a lawyer and a principled woman-would find romancing a crimelord appealing, logic failed in the face of her amusement.

And if that unlikely love affair should come to pass, Alban would have no one to blame but himself. He gathered himself, searching for shadows where he could transform and leave behind the complications of the world for the silence of the sky. Margrit stalked past him as if he wasn’t there and folded her arms as she drew breath to argue with Janx.