Another impact shuddered Janx’s long body, a sudden flash of white stone shoving and slamming with the same vigor Alban put into the effort. Flame sprayed everywhere in a hiss of outrage, and Biali came through it unscathed, a broad smile splitting his scarred face. Alban understood in an instant: it wasn’t for Margrit’s sake Biali fought, or for Alban’s, but simply for the joy of pitting himself against the one breed in the world who could fight a gargoyle to the ground. Without him, Alban wouldn’t have stopped the tumble before Margrit’s fragile body was crushed.
For all that his own purpose was to die in battle, Alban acknowledged the other gargoyle with a nod of thanks in the eternal moment before Janx slithered around and roared fury as he pounced again.
Alban went down under the dragon’s crush, knocked breathless as Janx scrambled over him. Insulted, he grabbed the dragonlord’s hind leg and hauled.
Janx dug his nails into the floor as he was yanked backward, the shriek of torn concrete echoed by his full-voiced rage. He strained with the effort of moving forward, utterly ignoring Alban and Biali, all his attention focused elsewhere. His enormous wings buffeted the air, sending cyclones of heat burning through it, and djinn, sent panicking from their native element, began to flee the garage. Alban had never seen them endangered by anything other than salt water and, more recently, vampire blood: the idea that they could be burned out, guttered by flame, was in equal parts fascinating and horrifying. But a handful of them lay broken beneath Janx’s talons, spattered with blood and crackling with flame.
Profound wrongness twinged under Alban’s skin, as bone deep and discomfiting as iron bound to flesh had been. Janx was a thousand things, a killer among them, but to so ruthlessly end the lives of his fellow Old Races was unlike him. Faint humor twisted the sense of transgression: only a handful of seconds ago that was exactly what Alban had sought from the dragonlord.
Another serpentine form slithered in front of Janx and he redoubled his efforts, flame gouting as he surged forward. Alban didn’t know when all the gargoyles came to his side, but now half a dozen of them held the infuriated dragon back as he lashed at his smaller counterpart. It danced out of his way, taunting his captivity.
A black cloak settled around its shoulders, then became a woman, black-haired, dark-eyed, blood drooling down her jaw and coating the insides of her arms, as though she’d slashed her wrists. She dangled a bundle from one hand, and it took long dreadful moments for Alban to recognize it as a head, as smeared with blood as the woman was.
Much too late, much too late, understanding came.
Janx drew himself in, dragging gargoyles to his center, then burst upward in an explosion of power, wings flung out to clap the air. He dislodged Alban and the lanky gargoyle youth, the latter from surprise and Alban through inattention; his gaze was on the murderous twins before him.
If murderers they were. Janx launched himself forward again, this time smashing into the pair with the same strength he’d tackled Alban with. They rolled roughshod through the melted door, landing in the parking lot with an eruption of flame and fury that lit furious panic in Alban’s breast. He charged after them, voice lost beneath the sounds of battle even as he screamed warnings. Nothing stopped them, not even flinging himself into their midst, grabbing desperately for muzzles and claws, anything to pull one off the other and alert them to their danger. To all their danger, for at the most they had a handful of seconds before humans discovered their battle, and should that happen, it was a blow from which they would never recover.
A gunshot ripped the air, a desperately human sound, and their time was up.
CHAPTER 27
Air imploded with the rattle of grenades going off. Janx collapsed under the weight of half a dozen gargoyles, his muffled cursing accompanying useless heaves as he tried to push them away. Alban climbed to his feet, offering his nearest compatriot a hand without seeing him, then said, “Keep Janx down,” in a low voice.
Tony Pulcella stood at the parking lot’s head, his duty weapon clasped in both hands and held steady on the mass of Old Races a few dozen yards from him. Grace O’Malley was at his side, leather-clad and clinging, one hand on the detective’s biceps as if to stay him from further shooting. Alban wondered where the bullet had gone, though it could easily have struck Janx without the dragonlord so much as noticing.
Torn between choices, he finally said, “Grace,” in the same low voice he’d employed with the gargoyles. Behind him, Janx was still struggling and swearing, a fact that might have made Alban smile in any other circumstances. “Grace, what are you doing here? Why is he here?”
Tony barked a laugh that had more to do with covering fear than humor. “I might ask you the same question, Korund, except then I got a whole lot of others I wanna ask first.” His voice was rock steady, and he couldn’t know his heartbeat betrayed him. Still, Alban admired his facade of calm.
“Sure and it didn’t take a lot of cleverness to realize you were all spoiling for a fight,” Grace said. Unlike Tony, she was calm, even derisive. “Something had to be done to stop you, and you wouldn’t be listening to Grace alone, now, would you?”
Janx’s voice shot out of the background, a garbled threat that ended with the sound of flesh hitting flesh: a hand being slapped over the dragonlord’s mouth. Alban wanted to admonish his people not to be careless: six of them could easily hold Janx in his mortal form, but he would eventually be let free, and a grudge-holding dragon was a bad enemy.
“She told me Margrit would be here.” Tony met Alban’s gaze. Then he whitened, and Alban knew that his own expression had given away Tony’s worst fear.
“I’m sorry, detective. Margrit Knight is dead.”
“What?”
To Alban’s surprise, it was neither Tony nor Grace whose voice came out gray with disbelief and horror. It was Janx, and as though his tone told his captors the fight was gone from him, he came forward unfettered by gargoyles, shock wiping away his inhuman grace. “What did you say, Alban?”
“The djinn,” Kate Hopkins said with no care for the human standing in their midst. Ursula joined her, winding an arm around her sister’s waist, as Kate continued, coldly, “In retaliation for Malik’s death. We came to protect her, but we were too late.”
“You.” Janx’s lip curled. “And who are you, daring to transform in my demesne? Challenging me in such a cowardly way, without even declaring yourself first? That will be met, little girl. That will be answered.”
Kate gave him a look burdened in equal parts with pity and exasperation, then turned back to Alban and Tony. “Forgive us. Ursula’s been following her all day, but Tariq snatched her and even my sister takes time to track a djinn.”
“I want to see her.” Tony finally spoke again, strain now sounding in his voice. A wave of sympathy caught Alban, nearly shattering the calm that had settled, unnoticed, over him. He reached for it again, afraid to feel Margrit’s loss, then released whatever hold he’d had on it and shuddered to find blank horror in its place. Lifting a hand to gesture back toward the loading dock hurt; breathing hurt. His insides had been drilled away and filled with regret and sorrow, but beyond a senseless hope of denial, all he could think was how much more bewildered and lost the human detective must be.
Tony holstered his gun and stalked forward, his entire body radiating tension and fear and bewilderment. He had no frame to put around Margrit’s death, no explanations for the things he had seen in the last minutes, and in a very human way, seemed to be thrusting the alien out of his thoughts to focus on what was comprehensible: love, life, loss. Alban had little doubt there would be time for the rest later: Tony Pulcella did not strike him as a man willing to let the inexplicable fade to the back of his mind and be dismissed under the best of circumstances, and now, with Margrit’s death, he imagined very little would stop the detective from fully exploring what he had seen.