Hands of Flame. C.E. Murphy

      The manager’s eyebrows unbeetled a little. “She didn’t mention a guest. ‘Course, she usually doesn’t. How were you planning on getting back downstairs?” He jangled his keys, still looking sour, but no longer as if he suspected Margrit was to blame for the gargoyles.

      She clapped her hands over her mouth, eyes wide with dismay. “Oh, God, I didn’t even think of that. Wow, I’m such an idiot. Thank goodness you came up here or I’d be stuck all day. Thank you! You totally saved my life!” She felt her IQ dropping with the breathless exclamations, but the manager looked increasingly less dour.

      “You should think things through more carefully.” Chiding done, he looked beyond her at the gargoyles and sighed explosively. “Well, shit. I’m going to have to get demolition guys in here to get rid of those things.”

      Horror clenched a fist around Margrit’s heart. “But they’re so cool. I bet you could make a buck or two letting people up here to see them for a while before you got rid of them. Besides, somebody in the building must’ve done them, right? I mean, unless helicopters swept through in the middle of the night and dropped them off.”

      The manager twisted his mouth. “Or they flew here.”

      Margrit laughed, high thin sound of nerves. “Yeah, which would be totally freaky.” A law-school education, she thought with despair, and she was relegated to totally freaky. “So if somebody got them up here, he must have a way to get them back out, right?”

      “Do you know how many tenants I’ve got? I don’t want to knock on every door asking who the damned fool who put a couple monsters on the roof is.”

      Margrit bounced on her toes, putting on her best helpful smile. “Look, I could do it for you. I’ll wait a little while to be sure people are getting up so I don’t disturb them, and you’ve got to have a million things to do in a building this size, and I don’t mind lending a hand. Makes me feel useful as a visitor, you know? I’m Maggie, by the way.” She stepped forward to offer a hand, wincing at the nickname she never used. Margrit had a plethora of short names, and she used one no one else did: Grit. But Maggie was close enough to her name that she’d remember to respond to it, and since she was on the roof under false pretenses, it seemed wiser not to offer her real name.

      The building manager shook her hand automatically. “Hank. You’re not Rosita’s usual type, Maggie.”

      Margrit knotted her fingers in front of her stomach, hoping she looked winsome instead of nervous. She hadn’t known she was potentially Rosita’s type when she’d pinned her presence on a “friend,” but she was unexpectedly interested in the answer to, “Better or worse?”

      “Better. She’s usually into—Well, look, it doesn’t matter. You seem like a nice girl, and I could use the help. Jesus, what kind of idiots …”

      “I’ll totally take care of it,” Margrit promised. “Just don’t call any demolition guys until I’ve talked to everybody, okay? They’re too cool to smash up. Somebody’ll want them.”

      “Yeah, all right. Come on.” Hank turned away, opening the door. Margrit’s shoulders slumped with relief before she put Maggie’s perky smile back on and followed him into the building.

      The other time—the only other time—she had visited Eliseo Daisani’s penthouse home had been an impetuous 4:00 a.m. arrival on the rooftop a few weeks earlier. Now, arms hugged around herself, Margrit stared hundreds of feet into the air at Daisani’s mirror-glassed apex apartment, wishing she could enter the way she had then.

      Wished it for a host of reasons, not the least of which was that Alban had carried her in his arms then, ignoring human convention and soaring across the sky in his haste to make certain of Margrit’s safety. Malik had teased Alban with the threat to move against her during the day, when Alban was helpless to protect her.

      Alban had turned to Daisani for help. That in itself might be reason enough for Margrit to do the same now, but standing outside his building in the small hours of the morning, she doubted herself.

      Not so small anymore. Margrit shook herself. It was nearly seven, and Daisani would be on his way to work. Alban and Biali had to be rescued before she went to work; before Hank decided to take a sledgehammer to the statues on his rooftop. Daisani might not be a good choice, but he was the only one she had. Janx, even if she could get to him, no longer had the resources necessary to rescue a pair of wayward gargoyles.

      She remembered too clearly that the first time she’d met Eliseo Daisani, he’d had two sealskins pinned to his office wall. One had been adult-sized, the other pup-sized. She’d thought then that he was a ruthless hunter, willing to take mother and child. It had proven that the furs were selkie skins, their presence in his office trapping a young woman and her daughter in their human forms. That he’d given them to Margrit as part of a bargain did nothing to reassure her: the fact that he’d had them at all said he was more than happy to take advantage of any powerful hand he might have over another. Turning Alban—and to a lesser degree, Biali—over to him while they were vulnerable was a last resort, something to be avoided if at all possible.

      Margrit frowned toward the rooftop, knowing she was stalling, but not quite able to push herself forward yet. She wanted another answer to the problem at hand, but her heartbeats counted out passing moments in which Alban’s danger grew.

      She wasn’t certain which held her back: a reluctance to owe one of the Old Races yet another favor, or Eliseo Daisani’s endless distressing failure to fit into any of the legends she knew. The other races were easier to deal with: lesser known, they also fell into old mythologies more readily, with the djinn ability to dissipate or the thin blue smoke that always followed Janx fitting what they really were.

      But it was the gargoyles who were bound to night, not vampires. Daisani had been standing in an office full of sunlight the first time she met him, all swarthy smiles and a charisma that made his middling looks handsome. His teeth were unnervingly flat, no hint of too-long canines or a mouthful of razor-sharp ivory weapons. The dragon had pointy teeth, but the vampire, no. Neither garlic nor silver crosses held him off, nor did he require an invitation to pass a threshold. Alban had pointed out, prosaically, that Daisani would certainly die if someone thrust a wooden stake into his heart, but then again, so would anything else.

      If she’d not seen the impossible speed Daisani could move with, if she’d not been given a gift of his blood to help her heal, she would never have believed he was anything other than what he appeared: a slight man with a great deal of personal wealth and business acumen. That, more than anything, made her not want to bargain with him.

      Margrit tightened her hug, then let herself go forcefully, driving herself forward with the motion. As if she’d summoned him with the action, a security guard approached her. “Sorry, miss, but there’s no loitering here. You’ll have to move along.”

      Genuine astonishment rose up as laughter. “Are you serious? This is a sightseeing stop. ‘Oh, yeah, that’s where Eliseo Daisani lives. He’s supposed to be worth forty billion now, you know?’ How do you get tourists to stop loitering?”

      The guard gave her a tight smile and gestured her away. “Like this.”

      Margrit held her ground as the guard stepped into her personal space. “Eliseo’s my boss. I need to see him.” She tried sidestepping the guard and found herself caught in a dance with him.

      Visibly exasperated, he stepped back, language turning formal, as though he repeated a well-rehearsed line. “I’m sure if Mr. Daisani is your employer, you’ll find a more appropriate opportunity to speak with him.”

      It struck Margrit that using Daisani’s first name—though she’d been invited to—probably put her in league with starstruck stalkers, not a properly subordinate employee. She grimaced, then stepped back with her hands lifted in acquiescence. The guard stood his ground until she’d headed well down the block, only returning to his rounds after Margrit disappeared around a corner and peeked back. She counted to thirty, then, grateful he