Heart of Stone

“Hajnal? Oh, that’s even better than I hoped. No, I’m Ausra.” She turned her head in a snaky motion, to smile at Alban. “Don’t tell me you don’t recognize your own little girl, Papa.”

Adrenaline ricocheted through Margrit’s body, a vicious swell of energy numbing her hands and deepening the nausea in her belly. But it gave her the strength to stagger clumsily to her feet, clutching her left arm.

Alban stared at Ausra, his expression too blank to register shock or disbelief. Then he closed his eyes, in one brief moment of defeat. “You look very like her,” he said. “Even Biali thought you were she, in that first instant he saw you.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “And I couldn’t go far enough into the memories to find the truth. He taught you to carve. The memories are clearer now.” Alban opened his eyes again, barely seeming to see Ausra. “I knew she couldn’t be alive. Not after so long, not without me knowing.”

“Alive?” Ausra gave him a hard-edged smile of anger. “Not for two centuries, Father. Not since you abandoned her.”

“I didn’t,” he whispered. Ausra hissed, flashing a hand out. Long fingernails caught Margrit’s cheek, laying it open. She cried out, clapping her palm to her face and leaving her broken arm to dangle.

“Every time you lie,” Ausra purred, “she hurts.”

“I’m not-!”

Ausra’s arm flashed up again, warningly. Margrit made a little sound of fear, stumbling back a step. “No,” Alban blurted. “No. Don’t hurt her.”

“How precious,” Ausra murmured. “Concerned for the mortal girl. Did you care about all the other pretty toys, Father? The ones I left broken in the park for you? That was the best part,” she said with wide-eyed glee. “Destroying them in daylight, so all you knew was that they died, never how. And the guilt kept you hidden for so long, Father. I’ve been waiting to play again. They break easily, but they can last a surprisingly long time if you’re careful.”

“Father…” Alban shook his head. “How can I be your father?”

“Oh, the traditional way.” Ausra walked around Margrit with lanky strides. “Mommy and daddy gargoyle loved each other very much, you see, and one day they had a little gargoyle.” Her voice slid to ice. “Only Daddy had abandoned Mommy and baby by then.”

“No!”

Ausra’s hand flashed again. This time Margrit brought her forearm up, blocking Ausra’s next attack. The impact made her stumble to one side, Ausra’s size belying tremendous strength. Margrit’s whole body ached from stopping the blow.

Her assailant tilted her head slightly, acknowledging Margrit’s attempt to save herself. “It won’t help,” she assured her, “but it’s more fun if you fight back. Too bad about your arm. Not that the odds were even to begin with, but now you don’t even stand a sporting chance.”

“Ausra.” Alban’s voice was strangled. “This can’t be true. I would never have left Hajnal if she were pregnant.”

“No, of course not,” Ausra cooed. “Not even to save your own stony skin, Papa. Of course not.” The mocking gentleness left her voice, turning it back to ice. “She died because of you, and it’s long past time you paid for it.”

“How?” Margrit wrapped her hand around her left arm again, holding it against her body. “How can you be his daughter?”

Ausra clicked her tongue. “Didn’t we just go through this? Mommy and Da-”

“You’re the first witness.” Shocked recognition flooded Margrit, washing pain away for a moment. “You’re the one who reported Alban at the scene of the crime.”

Ausra smiled. “And you jumped right on my bandwagon, didn’t you? Faster than I’d even hoped. I thought I’d have to go round and round, waiting for you to join the game. I didn’t count on the Gray woman dying, though. I was afraid you’d lose the scent. I had to go to certain extremes. You do have my mother’s stone, don’t you?” she inquired politely. “I’ll want that back before you die.”

“Janx has it.” Margrit’s lie sounded thick to her own ears. “Why don’t you go get it from him?”

Acidic laughter cut the cold air. “Janx? The dragonlord? How would he get it? Your detective should have brought it to you.”

Margrit managed a laugh of her own, edging back half a step. She hardly imagined she’d escape, but the longer a guilty client talked, the more likely she was to say something damning, or for the circumstances to change. “Tony wouldn’t have shown it to me, Ausra. You think I’m important to this case. He didn’t. He’d have had no reason to. Anyway, somebody working for Janx took it from the scene before Tony ever saw it. Janx showed it to me last night. That’s why I thought you were Hajnal. I thought she’d lost her mind and was killing people. I didn’t count on a crazy daughter.” Flippancy helped keep Margrit’s mind off the white-hot pain in her arm, and she’d pulled back a few steps without Ausra stopping her. Maybe she could run.

Outrun a gargoyle. The thought was ludicrous enough to make her smile.

“She wasn’t pregnant,” Alban whispered. “She never told me.”

“Do you want to know?” Ausra demanded. “Do you really want to know? Shall I share the memory, Father?”

“No…” Margrit lifted her good hand, as if she could hold off the wall of memory that rose up and threatened to drown her.

Bleeding from a dozen gunshot wounds, her wings in tatters, she crawled toward the east, leaving blood and water smeared together on the cobblestones. She shoved herself upward as rain-heavy clouds lightened in color, and howled out her life to the rising sun. Dawn, when it came, brought a blissful recession of agony, healing stone offering a last chance at life.

She woke weak, her breathing difficult. A man sat beside her, a human, his eyes dark and thoughtful. She snarled, lunging for him, but chains brought her up short, manacles bound into her very flesh at wrist and ankle, around her throat. He didn’t move, only sat there, utterly without fear.

Memory blurred. She grew stronger, testing her chains the same way at each sunset. He left her food, starting with raw meat, then finer items, experimental. She slept, even during the nights, during the hours that were normally hers to live. She broke a chain, if not the iron bound to her skin, and he began drugging her food. She could smell it, but had no choice: it was eat what he gave her or starve, and her body was too weak to go for days and weeks without meals.

Her wings didn’t heal. He stitched them together, and the skin slowly grew back, but they were thick and heavy, and when she moved them, they barely responded.

Worse than the thickness of her wings was the growing thickness of her belly. A burning anger coiled above the child growing inside her, waiting for the chance to break free and destroy the man who had captured her.

Waiting, with desperate hope, for Alban to find her.

Outside of the memory, Alban cried out, agonizing shout that brought Margrit to her knees, sobbing.

She knew it wouldn’t happen. She had told him to run, had been glad when he did. She knew he would wait, too, longer than they’d agreed. She would have. If she could only escape, even into the memories, she could find him; find help.

But iron bound her, and nothing in the gestalt had warned her that in binding, it cut away her natural ability to reach the shared history that was her people’s greatest legacy. In six hundred years of living, she had never felt so alone. Waking every night to the bone-throbbing cold of the iron chains was bad; waking unable to find her way into the comfort of mental touch drove her slowly mad. At first she knew it, and fought it, but as weeks turned to months exhaustion defeated her strength, burned away her anger, and left her raw-voiced with shrieking out her solitude. Reason failed; worse still, the reason to retain sanity failed. Once, she’d known that a gargoyle’s death passed memories to the next nearest of her kind, making certain that no history was lost forever. A baby’s mind wasn’t meant to take that kind of influx of experience, even from a composed elder who could control the sharing. A child burdened with the chaos that had become Hajnal’s mind could be scarred beyond repair.