Heart of Stone

CHAPTER 29

IT WAS NOT as he remembered it.

He recalled a peak thrusting toward the stars in a clear, midnight blue sky. Now that peak was hidden by dark clouds that roiled with the movement of his wings. Fog stirred around him, a fine mist against his skin, almost rain. There was no easy passage, no welcoming sense of being a small part of a greater whole. He’d given that up centuries earlier, yet still found the lack unexpected.

No matter. Memory could be clouded, but never forgotten. He knew his own path there, and for over a century, Hajnal’s had run beside it. They were intertwined, and no mere fog could keep him away from her.

He banked and rolled in the air, closing his eyes against wind and spitting water, letting old familiarity guide him where vision could not. Shadows closed around him, mountains of memory belonging to those whom he had grown up among. Those peaks were to be trusted, no more changeable than the sun’s path in the sky.

But there was a bleakness to them that he didn’t remember. A sense, unfamiliar to him, of being worn down by time. Too many of those mountains no longer grew, he realized, their reaching peaks stunted by their creators’ deaths.

How many? The question lanced through him, a pang of regret. Deliberately avoiding his own people for so long had left him less knowledgeable about their numbers. Aside from the recent meeting with Biali, Alban could not clearly remember the last time he’d spoken with one of his own.

Which had been the point of exile. “The Breach,” Grace had said accusingly. Alban drifted in memory, tasting the wound of that word. It, too, was something he couldn’t clearly remember last hearing, though that may have been due more to a deliberate reluctance on his part. Biali was not above throwing cutting words, working to provoke a fight wherever he could.

Blackness boiled up in the clouds, a wall forming out of the fog. Nearby memory-mountains darkened, seeming to move closer, until the space in which he unfurled his wings felt tight and constricting. Alban inhaled, filling his lungs and broadening his chest, an act of defiance against claustrophobia.

“You don’t belong here, Korund.” The voice should not have surprised him, though it did: Biali’s gravely tones. The one gargoyle with whom he’d had contact was now the one to stand in his way. For the first time Alban wondered if the scarred gargoyle had been asked to stay near him, in order to provide just this kind of barrier from the memories. Certainly no one else of their people would be as enthusiastic about the prospect of thwarting him. It was not the nature of gargoyles to hold grudges, but then, neither did stone forget easily.

Clouds whirled in circles, black and gray streaming together with the beat of wings, and Biali’s thick form came out of the mist, his scarred face curled in a sneer. Weight came behind him, the ponderous weight of time and memory; of disapproval, as heavy as mountains. As the closest to him physically, Biali stood guardian against Alban’s intrusion into the memory of their people, but he carried the support of others with him. All around him, mist dripped and formed into solid streaks, building a granite wall between Alban and his destination.

“She was my mate, Biali. Don’t I have the right to visit her memories?”

“No.” The gargoyle gave no quarter, the sound of rock slides thundering in his voice. “No longer.”

Alban flexed his wings, feeling dampness catch and trickle down the membranes. “I defeated you once before.”

“Centuries ago. You were young. You had passion. You have nothing now, Korund. Turn back. You’re not welcome among us any longer.” Biali’s wings flickered, keeping him aloft in the memory of mind as the wall grew higher behind him.

“I would walk the path my mate knew,” Alban whispered. “I would see her last moments.”

“You could’ve done that two hundred years ago. Instead you made yourself something we had no word for. Your chance is lost. Leave this place.” Biali’s massive chest flexed, his hands curving into dangerous talons, every action a prelude to battle. “Leave, or make me force you out.” Dark hope infused the last words, so raw Alban backwinged, moving a short distance away.

The scarred gargoyle was right. Three hundred years ago he’d had passion and youth on his side. Two centuries of exile now made him a poor match against a gargoyle whose employ for the past fifty years had been thuggery. For a few seconds Alban hesitated, caught in the swirling mists and watching the wall betwixt himself and his goal grow taller. Easier, surely, to let it go.

And let Margrit die.

There was no surety in the thought; Margrit had not been threatened. Other women, yes, but not even women Alban had watched, making the connection tenuous at best. Tenuous, and yet they’d had a look about them…Dark hair, often marked with curls; flawless skin, pale to olive in tone. Vanessa Gray, with her straight brown hair, had been the least like the others, and she’d died for the game between Janx and Daisani. But more, she’d died because the killer who haunted Alban’s steps had created a circumstance in which Vanessa might be removed. For the one, Alban could have let it slip by. But for the other, and for the determination in Margrit’s gaze, he raised his eyes to look across heavy fog at his rival.

“I will pass.” Simply spoken, the phrase had the weight of ritual to it. Pleasure glittered in Biali’s gaze, the only acknowledgment that battle had been agreed upon.

He exploded forward, leaving behind the protective wall. Alban folded his wings and dropped, not a dive, simply a plummet that took him out of Biali’s space inside an instant. Wind and the weight of his falling body made his wings scream in protest when he snapped them open again, climbing below Biali, his goal the foreboding wall.

Biali slammed into him from behind, driving them both into the black barrier. It gave with the impact, shuddering around them. Memory, the stuff of its being, fragmented, shards flying loose to embed themselves in Alban’s being.

A woman’s presence shattered through his mind. Worn with travel, but proud, she had translucent skin, tinted gold and delicate features half-hidden by hair blackened and heavy with rain. Beautiful, delicate, she was a creature of obsidian and amber, carved by a master.

“Hajnal.” Alban’s voice broke even in the depths of memory. The woman lifted her eyes, meeting his with a dark gaze cold and empty as a winter night. There was no recognizable music to her memory, no hint that her path had lain with his for over a century. Only rage and betrayal shimmered in her eyes. She lifted a hand to strike, and Alban waited for the blow, too astounded at the bleakness within her to resist.

Memory shredded and tore away with Biali’s howl of anger. Wakefulness came back to Alban, rain lashing his skin as the fog seemed to respond to Biali’s cry, intensifying into a storm. Alban reached for the wall, clawing at it as if doing so would grant him access to the recollections that had been torn away. Biali’s weight hit him in the back and he roared, snapping into a ball-a vulnerable, dangerous position. He dropped again, skidding and bouncing against the wall of memory. On the third bounce he acted, straightening his legs as he hit. Momentum shoved him upward, hands clawed to sink into Biali’s shoulders as the other gargoyle dived toward him. Flesh gave more easily than he expected, Biali bellowing with pain as Alban tore skin and sinew, releasing not blood, but a flood of memory.

Amber skin and pale, locked together in the sky.

Rage and betrayal exploded in Alban’s breast, fury at the inconceivable. The laughter of pleasure rode on the wind, and for an instant Alban saw through memory to recognize a vivid sneer of triumph smeared across Biali’s scarred face. Then remembrance swept over him again, a barrage of impossible truths.

They stood on a precipice, circling one another warily, no longer the men they could pretend to be, but primal creatures of earth and stone. The sky above was the same slate-gray, nighttime clouds lit from behind by a determined moon. The embattled gargoyles stood out, slashes of blinding white against duller tones. Others gathered to watch; foremost among them stood Hajnal, her delicate features creased with concern and anger. Her skin beneath the diffuse moonlight was milkier than in Biali’s more recent memories, both creatures now coloring history with their own perspectives.

Three centuries on from that fight, Alban still felt the talon-ripping horror of stone shattering beneath his blow, Biali’s face half torn away. Alban shuddered, old pain remembered anew, and Biali leaped forward again, landing a blow as crippling as that one had been, hundreds of years earlier.

It was difficult to remember that the battle was not in truth physical, but fought in the corridors of memory, with strength of the mind instead of strength of the body. Alban shouted in pain, feeling moments of his own, hoarded close, torn loose from him. There was no telling, from his side, what slipped free; no way to know what exploded from his close-kept secrets into Biali’s consciousness, and from there, when the sharing came, to the greater memory banks.

So many things. Regret lanced through him, a pain as real as bodily harm. So many secrets kept, to risk being lost here and now. Alban pulled his lips back from his teeth, snarling as he bent to the attack again. They’d lost flight somehow, rolling and sliding across the surface of the memory wall, as if it had come to encompass the two of them in a sphere safely away from the stony mountains that made up the greater gargoyle memory.

He did not remember landing the blow that opened a new wave of memories for him to sift through. His own hands-Biali’s hands-covering smaller ones, the golden tint to her skin played up brightly against the near white of his own. Carving soft stone together, making tiny figures that settled into a peg-holed board. His hands guided hers, a sense of proprietary pride in each small cut of the knife. First gargoyles, carved to perch on the high places of a city built onto the board, then human figures. Women, all of them, as frail in reality as the figures seemed in massive gargoyle hands. Then wings through the air, the creak of scaffolding, and the carvings left behind to brave cold New York nights.

He felt his head crack to the side, his cheek split open to release another smattering of recollections. Even in the midst of battle he curled his fingers, as if doing so would call memory back to him, keep it safe and protected within him. It couldn’t, didn’t, happen that way, and a howl of protest broke free from his throat. Biali’s laugh, rough and sour, cut through it, as if the other gargoyle considered Alban’s cry a weakness.

Outside of memory, outside, it seemed, of time, Alban saw Biali lift his hands, doubled together to make a stony hammer, and swing them toward his skull.

Silent as stone, still as stone. Margrit watched the gargoyle and the stairs, one more than the other; footsteps would echo if anyone used the stairwell, and Alban’s immobility was fascinating. He breathed, if only just. Margrit held her own breath in order to be still enough to see the incremental lift and fall of his chest.

Mist floated around her and swirled away again, the experience clearly not her own. There were glimpses, nothing more, of what Alban saw: a mountain range wreathed in fog, each peak carved into a rugged, stony gargoyle form. She struggled among the frozen statues, trying to find her way. A surge of determination rose up through the struggle, pushing her back: Alban, rejecting her from the gargoyle gestalt as surely as he thought he himself might be rejected. There would be no shared memory between them if he had his way, and as the gray walls of the stairwell reasserted themselves, it seemed he would.

A vivid pulse of color broke through fog and gray walls alike: a slender redheaded man with laughing jade eyes, his gaudy crimson cloak thrown back to show a high-collared shirt with a ruff at the throat. A second man, smaller and swarthy, with his black hair tied back in a ponytail, made a dour counterpoint to the redhead, his own clothes dark and well-fitted, a long black coat worn over them. Both were dwarfed by the size and power of Alban’s human form, almost as pale as his gargoyle shape. He, too, wore fashionable clothing from another era, his own long hair held by a sapphire ribbon matching a cloak that only emphasized the breadth of his shoulders. The three stood facing one another, an agreeable standoff that ended with a sweep of crimson cloak as the redhead bowed sardonically to the other two.

A woman stalked through the gathering, turning the figures to wisps of fog. Her skin was copper, her black hair fell in lush waves around her shoulders, and her gaze, dark and forthright, looked through memory directly at Margrit. She slid a hand over her belly, a gesture old as man itself that told Margrit the woman carried a child, for all that there was no hint of it yet in her form.

Then, with a savage wrench, that image was ripped apart, exposing a gargoyle woman bent in the rain. She appeared sallow in the dull light, her hair tangled and dripping in midnight curls. Her wings flared and she cried out, a sound Margrit echoed aloud, clapping her hands over her mouth.

Bullet holes riddled the gargoyle’s wings, blackened her skin in places; pain and rage were made manifest in the play of powerful muscles beneath torn skin. She shoved herself upward, kneeling in the rain, and threw her head back to howl defiance to the rising sun.

Stone swept over her, catching her in all her tattered agony. Margrit flinched, biting the ball of her palm to keep from crying out again as the memory fled.

Alban caught his breath, sharp and unexpected after so many minutes of stillness. As if the sound released her, Margrit’s knees buckled and she knelt beside him, dizzy. Alban put a hand out, steadying her, then met her gaze with his own.

“She lives.” His voice, always gravelly, was even rougher than usual. Once certain Margrit was steady, he released her, bringing a hand to his head and grimacing. “Biali defeated me in the memories. I…could not follow them into the heart of it, to see how she survived, but I saw her. Through his eyes. They have…” a note of bewildered hurt came into his voice “mated. She seemed so cold. As if I didn’t know her at all, Margrit. As if she’d become someone else.”

“Ausra,” Margrit whispered. “She did become somebody else. People, humans, do it all the time, Alban. They do whatever they have to, to survive. If that means finding a new persona and wearing it until you can’t remember who you used to be, then that’s what we’ll do. Maybe even gargoyles will, if they’re pushed far enough.”

“Perhaps.” Alban’s hand fell away from his forehead, heavy and graceless. “She’s left a carving for us-for me-at the cathedral. That much I saw, in Biali’s memories. I should go alone, Margrit.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “You and what army are keeping me from going?”

“If she’s trying to draw me there to wreak some sort of vengeance-”

“Then you’re sure as hell not going alone,” Margrit finished.

“It could be-is likely to be-dangerous. You humans are so fragile.” Alban brushed her cheek. “I don’t want to see you hurt, trying to help me.”

Margrit released a humorless breath. “You should’ve thought of that before you got me mixed up with Daisani and Janx. It’s too late to keep me safe, and I’m not letting you go alone.”

Alban’s mouth curved as he glanced toward the top of the stairs. “I could just leave you.”

“The cathedral’s a block away. Leave me behind and I’ll just run over there and kick your ass up and down the sidewalk when I catch you.” She stepped closer, putting herself firmly in Alban’s space. “I’m going where you’re going, buddy.”

“Buddy.” Alban tilted his head, the graceful action of a winged creature. “Does the use of nicknames suggest a new level in our relationship, Margrit?”

“Yeah. It suggests the level where I feel free to kick your butt if you leave me behind.” Margrit turned a suddenly cheerful smile on the gargoyle. “So which will it be?”

Alban tipped his head again, bringing it closer to Margrit’s. Her smile grew, her heartbeat thundering at the intimacy of his approach. With his mouth very nearly against hers, he murmured, “Forgive me.”

In the same breath he gathered himself and leaped, clearing Margrit and the steps above her easily. She shrieked and ducked out of instinct, realizing his intent too late. She whipped around and scrambled up the stairs, tripping over her own feet in her haste. Fumbling with fallible, human grace.

Alban shot her one apologetic look over his shoulder before shoving open the rooftop door and disappearing into the night.