Hands of Flame

“So the sacrifice you chose was your own people.” Chelsea sounded more interested than condemning, as though Margrit had proven thought-provoking.

Margrit dropped her head, weight leaned into the railing. “The needs of the many over the good of the few. In one way, it doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to come in and clean up Janx’s empire. Whether the dji

“If I did, I would have suggested it earlier.” Chelsea let silence hang for a judicious moment, then conceded, “The caveats were well done. I don’t know if the dji

“I think so. I hope so. It depends on if Tony’s willing to believe me.” She motioned at the warehouse, evoking another one with the gesture. “He’s still angry, but he thinks all my weird behavior was trying to help set a trap for Janx. If I told him fire trucks full of salt water were the only way to quell the violence down here, he might listen to me.”

“I was more thinking of the vampire’s blood.”

“Oh.” Margrit straightened away from the railing. “Actually, that part I’m more certain of. Daisani was pretty a

“Slippery ground you stand on there.”

Margrit shot the smaller woman a sharp look. “I think I’m bending over backward here to give the dji

A smile passed over Chelsea’s face. “Good. The fire’s still there. I just wanted to make sure.”

“Oh, now you’re manipulating me, too? Thanks.” Margrit pulled a face at Chelsea’s cheerful nod. “So how did you do it?”

“Mmm?” Chelsea’s eyebrows rose in modest curiosity.

“You gave me legitimacy in there. Why didn’t they fight you? No offense, but you’re just a bookshop owner.”

“Oh, that.” Chelsea shrugged it off. “Even the Old Races can be taught to behave if you’re firm enough with them. I think you may be learning that yourself.”

“That’s your story and you’re sticking to it?”

“I am.” Chelsea gestured. “Shall we?”

“Yeah.” Margrit took the lead, trotting down the stairs.

White-hot noise met her at the bottom.

CHAPTER 9

She could tell she screamed because the tang of copper tainted her throat, and with it came the raw, red feeling of too much force. Her ears, though, rang with a profundity that outweighed any hope of hearing her own voice. She knew her eyes were open because she touched them, felt the lashes parted and the sting of salt and minute dirt from her fingertips against their orbs. Fingertip pressure, as light as it was, sent bloody waves through the snow-blinding whiteness that had become her vision. She closed her eyes, instinct whispering that the comfort of expected darkness was better than the wide-eyed blindness. Red overwhelmed white, but reassuring black lay out of her reach.

Her chest heaved, telling her she still breathed as the brackish black taste of smoke began to overwhelm the flavor of blood at the back of her throat. Margrit coughed, then doubled over with her arms wrapped around her ribs. Didn’t double over: curled on her side fetally, the scrape of concrete against her cheek advising her more about her position than intellect could. That made no sense, but she couldn’t rewind her thoughts far enough to understand what was happening. A wall rose up every time she did, concussive force of light slamming into her and ripping coherency away. She opened her eyes again, as if doing so would force comprehension. Stars spun in her vision, then began to clear away in orange whorls of dust and grit. Daisani’s gift, she thought, rather than human adaptability kicking in.

She pushed to her feet awkwardly, aches fading from her bones, but dizziness still swept her as the song in her ears rang louder. A clear thought cut through the sound: she had been in the city when the towers fell. The noise had been overwhelming, and then entirely gone, eerie silence broken only by crying voices and the wail of emergency vehicles struggling through the broken city. She could not remember head-pounding ti

Attacks.

Only then did the chaos around her resolve into something that made sense, insofar as an all-out fight in a warehouse could make sense. Smoke and dust billowed around her, making ghostly shapes in sunlight that shouldn’t spill through the warehouse the way it did. The better part of a wall was missing, light filtering gold and blue through the grime in the air.

Those welcoming colors fought a losing skirmish against the more dangerous shades of red and yellow as flames began to eat the warehouse’s sides and reach toward its roof. People rushed to escape, bumping past Margrit. She jolted with each contact, stumbling, but never moving far from where she stood.

They were all human, the ones who ran. To see that so clearly tore a sound from her chest, so deep it bordered on a sob. They were human, sharing Margrit’s earthbound, compact grace, and within seconds they were gone, abandoning the warehouse for the safety of the streets.

But i

A man walked through its remains, preacher-collared shirt and Chinese-cut silk pants making the line of him tall and slim. He pulled sunshine with him, its glint playing in auburn hair and its shadow darkening his eyes past jade into blackness. He laced his hands together in front of him, looking about the chaos of Cara’s warehouse with a mild, curious smile.

“Janx.” Margrit whispered his name out of compulsion, as though voicing it was the only way she could keep herself from stepping toward him. He could not possibly hear her, not over the distance, not through the sound she imagined must be roaring through the ruined warehouse. Could not possibly, and yet an eyebrow lifted sharply and he turned his gaze from examining the warehouse to unerringly find Margrit.

For the briefest moment, she thought she saw surprise, and then regret, cross the dragonlord’s face.

Then for the second time in a matter of seconds, an impossible concussive force slammed through the warehouse, taking all the air with it as Janx transformed.

Margrit kept her feet by dint of distance, not willpower, but lost her breath as much through awe as the massive implosion of air as Janx’s mass shifted from a man to a monster, vastly larger than he’d been an instant before. She hadn’t seen him transform before: when he and Alban and Malik had fought, she’d been literally knocked aside by the process, too close to observe. Only close enough to be empirically affected, and terrified witless. Her heart hammered now, and her breath came quick, but the raw mindless fear she’d felt when she’d watched Alban and Janx fight seemed weaker. Watching Janx now was less shocking, though no less impressive.

As a vampire, Daisani moved impossibly quickly. Janx, too, was terribly fast, but his movements had the sense of a vast attention being moved from one place to another, rather than Daisani’s blurring speed. His transformation was like that, too: it seemed to Margrit that she’d simply been unable to see him properly before, and that his shift from man to dragon threw off the illusion that she’d been tricked by. It was as though he always carried his weight with him, and the blast force of transformation was the dropping of a cloak. Alban’s change to and from his gargoyle form was so modest in comparison as to be a different process entirely.