Heart of Stone

Margrit stared up at her, muscles locked with pain and disbelief. She tried to close her eyes, filled with the irrational conviction that it would somehow hurt less if she didn’t see it coming. Her eyelids wouldn’t respond, any more than she could convince her legs to get up and carry her away as fast as she could run. An inhuman roar tore against her eardrums, and she thought, so that’s what dying sounds like.

Alban appeared above Ausra, behind her, jaw dropped to let his roars escape, and his massive hands closed on Ausra’s head. He twisted, one violent motion that turned her head around the wrong way, the sound of fireworks popping off accompanying the action. Ausra’s body turned to jelly, her own weight pulling her head from Alban’s hands.

Police sirens wailed in the distance.

CHAPTER 31

MARGRIT STARED UP at Alban, her chest heaving. He stood above her, hands cupped loosely, as if he still held Ausra’s head. The sirens grew louder, and Margrit shook herself, swallowing against bile. “You’ve got to go,” she whispered hoarsely. He blinked at her without expression.

“Alban!” she said again. “You’ve got to get out of here. You’ll still be at the station at dawn if you don’t. Go. Go! I’ll be…” She laughed, a fu

Memory, exhausting, washed over her: Hajnal’s voice, saying the same words that she herself spoke now. Margrit laughed again, thinly. “I’m not Hajnal. Go, or it’s all for nothing. Go!”

Alban nodded once, jerkily, wheeled and ran. Margrit’s eyes finally closed, and she didn’t see him disappear into the sky. Lights flashed, blue and white, through her eyelids, and someone shouted, “Put your hands up!”

Margrit put her right hand up, a slow painful motion.

“Both hands!” the cop barked.

Margrit shook her head. “I can’t,” she whispered, and lay still.

Tony was beside her bed when Margrit opened her eyes again. Tony, and more vases of flowers than she could count in a glance. She blinked slowly, then sneezed. Every muscle clenched and she flinched, expecting agony.

There was none. She opened her eyes again, cautiously, and looked around until she found an IV drip feeding into her right arm. “Ooh. They gave me the good stuff. That’s good.” Her eyes drifted shut again, then she frowned. “…Tony?”

The policeman gave a quiet, nervous laugh. “Yeah. Hi, Grit. Glad to see you back among the world of the living.”

Margrit absorbed that. “How long’s it been?”

“About eighteen hours. They weren’t real worried, said you were just sleeping. I didn’t believe ’em.”

She pried her eyes open. Tony had days’ worth of stubble, and circles under his eyes, though the bruise she’d given him had faded to faint yellow. “So I’ve been sleeping and you’ve been watching me?”

He pursed his lips, looked around, found no escape, and nodded. “Pretty much.”

Margrit nodded slowly. “You look like hell.”

He spilled worried laughter. “Thanks. You should see the other guy.”

“Would that be me?”

Tony nodded again. “Pretty much, yeah.”

Margrit absorbed that. “Is there a mirror?”

“You think that’s a good idea, Grit?”

“Do you?”

He studied her, then let out a noisy breath. “Yeah, I guess. You’re tough. You’re not pretty right now, though.”

Margrit chortled, pleased with how it didn’t hurt. “I’m insulted. What’s the damage list?”

“Broken arm, broken cheekbone, hairline fractures in your right index and middle fingers, stitches across the cheekbone and, how the hell did you do that with a broken arm?”

She wet her lips. The echo of Ausra’s neck breaking sounded loud in her ears, sending goose bumps over her arms, even the one bound in a cast. “I had to,” she whispered. “She was going to kill me.” The lie came more easily than she’d expected.

Tony’s gaze weighed her. “Her head was twisted around the wrong way.”

Margrit stared at him without comprehension. “Isn’t that what happens when necks get broken?” Her own head seemed to be floating several inches above her body, balloonlike. Uncertainty made a bubble of illness in her stomach, compounded by the painkiller. She shuddered as Tony exhaled wearily.

“Like you were standing behind her.”

Margrit’s tongue thickened, filling her mouth and throat. “I don’t know.” The words sounded as clumsy to her ears as her tongue felt. “I don’t really remember…doing it, Tony.”

It was a half-truth, at best. The memory of Alban standing above her, the powerful jerk of his arms taking Ausra’s life, was all too clear. Too clear, the shocking pop of bone. Even if it hadn’t been her hands making the twist, she could never forget the sound or the way Ausra’s body had turned boneless, slithering heavily from Alban’s grip. Margrit shuddered again and swallowed against sickness.

Tony’s hands came into her line of vision, palms out. “Sorry. I’m not trying to put you on the spot. You okay?”

She swallowed down bile a second time and nodded. “Under the circumstances, I’m great.”

“You’ve got that right. You’ve got more structural damage than the other women, but I figure you had a chance to fight back and they didn’t. I’ll need to get a statement when you’re feeling better.”

“Sure.” Margrit let her eyes close again.

“Damnedest thing,” Tony added. “They packed up her body and brought it to the morgue. The boys went to work on it the next morning and it’d calcified.”

Margrit’s eyes popped open despite the apparent weight of her lids. “It’d what?”

“They never saw anything like it. They called it sudden something or other calcification, I forget, but I think what that means is they don’t know, and they’re going to try hard to forget about it. I saw it. Looked like a marble statue that’d been pounded half to dust.”

Your people are good at ignoring things they don’t want to see. Margrit remembered Alban saying that. She shivered again. “Remind me not to use the drugs she was on.”

Tony gri

“It’s good to be awake. I wasn’t sure I was going to be.”

Tony nodded somberly. “You got lucky. Real lucky.”

“How’d you boys in blue manage to show up in the nick of time?” Margrit frowned, then shrugged. “Almost in the nick of time, anyway.”

“Half the department was in the park, Grit, with the fourth murder down on the southern end. Even city cops come ru

Margrit huffed a laugh. “Thank God.”

Tony reached out to touch her shoulder carefully. “I’m glad you’re okay, Grit. I’ll-call you?”

Margrit met his gaze a moment, then dropped her eyes. “Yeah. Give me some time to get back on my feet, Tony. I don’t know what’s going on in my head yet.”

“Sure,” he said quietly. “You take care, Grit.”

“You, too.” Margrit closed her eyes and listened for the door closing before she let herself slump back into the pillows.

Daisani sat by her bed the next time she opened her eyes. He looked older than he had in his offices, with lines around his mouth that she hadn’t noticed before, a few silver hairs threaded through the black at his temples. He rolled up his right sleeve with tidy, small movements, entirely focused on the task at hand. Margrit watched him through a distant haze of morphine for a few seconds before rasping, “Hello.”

He looked up with a faint smile, then completed the last fold of his sleeve, his arm exposed to the elbow. “Good evening, Miss Knight. I’m very pleased with you.”

“Oh good. What for?” Sudden panic cramped Margrit’s stomach with sickness as she remembered the copycat killer. “Oh God. Please tell me they caught him.”

“In fact, they did. Getting off the plane at Heathrow. I admire your resourcefulness. I could use a woman like you.”