Alban flexed his shoulders, feeling wings stretch and fold, reminding him of who he was. Helping him to break out of the phenomenal static rush that Margrit’s life, pictured in moments, made up. Only just then aware his eyes were closed, he forced them open, and let go a rough, low sound of astonishment.
The gargoyle tribunal had joined with Eldred before he’d completed the ritual to enter Margrit’s thoughts. That they should be enthralled was to be expected.
That Janx and Daisani, that the gathered selkies and djinn, that even Grace O’Malley, should all stand slack-jawed and silent, was not expected. Mutable expression slid over vacant faces: fear and anger, dismay, outrage, hope, delight, all tangled with the endless rush of memory pouring from the dark beauty at the room’s center. A shard of panic sparked powerfully, not from Margrit at all, but, if Alban read its flavor correctly, from Janx or Daisani. Of the two Janx was the more likely to revel in such raw emotion, strong enough to alter the path of recollection Margrit followed.
Keeping his own thoughts unclouded was difficult. Margrit’s memories were as forceful and brisk as her personality, and the new thoughts she lingered on were deliciously seductive.
And hardly to be shared with others. Concentrate, Margrit. Focus your thoughts. Think of Ausra. He formed the thoughts with caution, uncertain if she would hear him in the chaos. Her mind was alight with fire, leaping easily from one scene to another, as quick and light as flame jumping a river. There was too much to take in, too much to hold on to in the quicksilver way her human mind processed images and discarded them.
Flame went still for a few long seconds, as if caught in ice. Caught in glass, he realized, seeing Margrit’s metaphor more clearly for an instant. The brief moments he and Ausra had encountered one another encompassed him, entangling Alban’s own memory with Margrit’s so thoroughly he staggered, uncertain whose life he was experiencing. Margrit poured detail into the gestalt, moments seen from two places at once and none the easier to bear for having been shared. They ended with the hideous firecracker noise of Ausra’s neck breaking, a sound that sickened Alban even in memory, and one which would never let him go.
But Margrit’s thoughts whirled again, dragging down through time and promises to unearth other moments of shared truth. Noise rushed up around him again, though whether it was his own attempt at protecting old secrets or simply the chaos of human memory trying to pull him down with everything else, he could no longer tell. He gave up trying to process her thoughts or guide her memories and instead worked his way forward step by slow step, reminding himself with each movement that he was a gargoyle, a creature of stone. Gargoyles did not lose themselves to mercurial passions so easily.
At last, at long, long last, he reached her and dropped to his knees beside the table. Cupped her face and turned it toward him, whispered her name to eyes gone white with the weight of memory, and then offered a kiss, soft and simple and sweet, to break the spell.
Margrit came awake with an indrawn breath bordering on a shriek and yanked her hands from Eldred’s before she even knew Alban was at her side, holding her, protecting her. Her skull raged with pain, as if someone’d poured glass shards into her brain and stirred vigorously. She stared at Alban, wide-eyed, then heard a high-pitched giggle that went with wondering whether Daisani’s gift of healing blood could cope with a brain razored to bits. Only when the sound repeated, piercing her headache and sending it to a new height, did she realize it was herself making it. With a cry half of embarrassment and half of pain, she tumbled out of her chair and collapsed against Alban, fingers curled in his shirt as she struggled not to whimper.
Even the beating Ausra had given her hadn’t hurt as badly as her head did. Needles of ice slid in her ears and under her nape, stabbing inward and creating more too-loud static that lifted hairs all over her body and made them feel pain, too. Margrit folded her arms over her head, trying to protect herself from herself. “What happened?”
The silence that followed was filled with shrieking static. “It seems human memory is not meant to be read by gargoyles,” Eldred finally said, so dryly Margrit let another too-high giggle of pain escape. If she could only hold her head hard enough, she thought she might squeeze the ache away.
“Tell me you got what you needed.”
“We did,” Eldred began, but Janx, sibilant and angry, breathed, “Oh, yes, Margrit Knight. We did.” He glided up behind her, great weight and heat making the air so heavy she couldn’t breathe. Her head throbbed harder and she stuffed a fist in her mouth, trying to hold back a cry as she bit down, then gasped raggedly for air and twisted to look up at the dragonlord.
Daisani accompanied him, expression bleak with anger so old it looked as though it had been banked for centuries and only now brought to the fore. “You let us believe she had died, Alban.” The vampire’s voice was impossibly soft, barely disturbing the static in Margrit’s mind, and then rose to a sound so sharp she thought she couldn’t hear it with her ears: “You let us believe she had died!”
CHAPTER 19
“It was what she wished.” Alban’s sorrow was heavy enough that Margrit felt it as her own. She sagged against the gargoyle’s broad chest, relieved to tears that the two immortals’ anger wasn’t directed at her. Through a headache renewed with every heartbeat, she listened to Alban’s soft words, heard reassurance in his voice and felt exhaustedly, inexplicably safe. “After you fought, after the fire began…” The gargoyle shrugged, large motion that shifted Margrit against him and made her feel tiny and fragile in his arms. “She could not live with what we were.”
Margrit could almost hear the words Alban didn’t say, the choices he made to spare Daisani and Janx what Sarah Hopkins had said centuries earlier. Not what we were, because Alban had been fond of the woman, but had never loved her as his friends had. What they were; what they are: those were the words Sarah had spoken all those years ago. She could not live with what Janx and Daisani were, for all that she had loved them, too. Alban’s memories flowed unchecked now, a quiet river of regret. Despite her pounding head, Margrit gathered them up and held them close, seeing deep parallels between a woman born almost forty decades earlier and Margrit’s own family. Rebecca Knight had turned away from learning Daisani’s true nature, a cut that wounded the vampire more deeply than reason explained. Perhaps it stemmed from a love lost in a far-gone era.
“What of the child?” Janx’s voice scraped low, each word so precise it stood on its own, a threat instead of a question. “Did the child live, Stoneheart?”
Alban sighed and folded his head over Margrit’s, new and ancient grief welling inside him. She closed her eyes, feeling the answer within him, and the weight of the promise he’d made to Sarah Hopkins: a promise of silence, no matter what the cost and no matter what truths might be revealed or hidden. And yet, after nearly four hundred years of keeping that silence, he drew breath to answer.
Tariq, hissing fury, burst in to steal Alban’s chance. “Forget your ancient grievances. Is what was seen in the human’s memory truth?”
Margrit, numb with foolishness, opened her eyes and said, “Yeah,” even as Alban tightened his arms in warning.
As one, the djinn exploded in a whirlwind of outrage, their combined strength enough to knock the strong-bodied selkies and slender vampire from their stances. The gargoyles remained unmoved, and Margrit, safe in Alban’s arms, did, too. Janx, even weightier than the gargoyles, looked unimpressed and insulted. Margrit shot a worried glance toward Chelsea and Grace.