"You say that as though you aren’t."

"No." Alban curved his fingers against the glass, nails slicking over it where talons would scrape, then turned back to Janx. "No, I think that’s a mistake I’ll never make again. Where is Malik, dragonlord? I have a duty to render."

"You don’t trust Eliseo’s word?"

"I won’t risk Margrit’s life on it. Solve this riddle, Janx. Loosen us all from these ties that bind us."

"It’s a Gordian knot, old friend. One loop loosened draws another one in." Janx fell silent, leaving his last thoughts unvoiced and still ringing too clearly in Alban’s ears: that Margrit Knight was the thing drawn inexorably closer, no matter how he might try to free her.

Malik curled a lip and dissipated when Alban approached, highlighting the difficulty of both protecting and damaging a djinn. Setting watch over any of the Old Races seemed an exercise in futility; part of the reason they’d survived despite small populations was they were simply not easy to kill.

Still, the djinn hadn’t gone far, the white corundum he carried a flare in Alban’s mind if he chose to follow it. Only one other stone within the city was as easy to locate, but the egg-shaped star sapphire he’d once gifted Hajnal with lay belowground, safe with his own belongings in Grace’s hideaway. Other pieces of corundum, less significant, itched at him when he put effort into sensing Malik’s stone, but none of them had the same pull. Alban crouched on the warehouse roof, waiting patiently for Malik to move far enough away from the casino to be worthy of concern. It was a far cry from the vigilance Alban showed in watching over Margrit, but her speed, strength and size were only human.

Her wit, however, was beyond him. Alban made a fist and pressed his knuckles against the rooftop, balancing himself on three points. Had he imagined she might turn to Eliseo Daisani when he refused to involve himself more deeply in her life, he might have chosen differently. Bad enough for her to have bargained with Janx. Adding a debt of any sort to Eliseo on top of that made her safe exit from his world virtually impossible.

Which had been her point all along. Alban sighed, half tempted to shift into his gargoyle form so he could wrap his wings about himself, a proper shroud of frustrated dismay. All his centuries of standing apart had taught him how difficult it was to remain uninvolved. Margrit could never leave the Old Races behind without leaving the city. Even then, word would spread through the network that kept them all connected. In time, no matter where she went, if any of the Old Races lived there and needed human help, they would come to her.

And he’d known that when he’d approached her two months earlier. Known it and let himself break habit and caution and speak to her anyway, with far more appalling consequences than he could have dreamed. As a youth he’d fought one of his own kind, and stayed his hand less from mercy or fear of exile-he’d been too young then to appreciate what that meant-than from an unalterable belief that no crime was as great as taking the life of one of his own people.

Biali had thought little of his choice, for all that it was his life Alban had spared. Hajnal had thought better of it, though she’d held the opinion that fighting over women was for humans, and she’d scolded Alban with a disgusted silence for a full six months before relenting. Neither of them would have thought that Alban could rise up in a protective rage and save the life of a human woman by taking a gargoyle’s.

He flinched, the memory still raw and unacceptable. Ausra had been insane, driven mad at birth when her dying mother’s memories had cascaded into an unformed mind, but reason had had very little to do with Alban’s choice that night. He had moved instinctively and placed Margrit’s life above Ausra’s, even knowing there was a slim chance the latter was his own daughter. Time and examination of her memories had told him she was not; she had been a daywalker, Hajnal’s near-impossible child by a human captor. Hajnal’s daughter, Alban’s last link to his one-time life mate, and he had taken her life.

His fist tightened against the concrete, knuckles bearing down as though to leave an impression there. Not quite his last link; memories passed from one gargoyle to another upon a death, so nothing was ever completely lost to them. The mental link they all shared made intimacy easy and deception difficult; it was why he’d stood apart as thoroughly as he could. Hajnal’s memories had passed through Ausra, shattering her infant mind and leaving her with a bewildering, meaningless array of information that she had never found a way to cope with. Alban had received them on Ausra’s death, and through painstaking meditation had sorted madness from truth, trying to fully understand the sequence of events that had led Ausra to her demise at his hands.

He blanched again, a tiny physical reaction that struck him each time he faced that truth. Emotion ran deeper than guilt, ringing closer to bafflement. Ausra’s death was a memory he kept in a box, barely able to look at, much less comprehend how it had come to be. Intellectually, he could follow the steps, but it became a disaster of rage and fear and protective impulses when he struggled to sort out his feelings. For one moment in the conflict the question had been Ausra’s life or his own, and he’d been willing to choose her over himself. It was only when Margrit’s life was endangered that he’d acted against what he believed to be his every impulse. Even that he thought he might in time come to terms with.

What made the memory unbearable was the fear that he would make the same choice again.

"You think too loud, Korund."

Alban opened his eyes, not allowing himself the luxury of another flinch. Biali stood a few feet away in his blunt human form, taking no notice of the rooftop wind that cut through his T-shirt. Never handsome, his scarred features were contorted with anger so deep it seemed to come from the bone. He held himself so still Alban could see muscle trembling with the effort, and that was unnatural for a gargoyle. "How long have you been there, Biali?"

"Long enough."

Dread and relief released themselves as a wave of exhaustion. Bad enough to be caught with a criminal’s secret, but for a gargoyle-for him-it might be worse still to go undiscovered. "Where’s Margrit?"

A smirk came into Biali’s whole being, changing his stance and the cant of his head. "Thought she’d be a screamer, but no, silent as sunrise."

Fury flashed through Alban, searing weariness away. He didn’t realize he’d moved until he was already stretched through the air in a lion’s leap better suited to his natural form. Biali laughed and stepped aside, letting Alban hit the rooftop in a roll that made his pale suit filthy and brought him to his feet yards away from the stumpy gargoyle. "There’s the man I used to know. Willing to fight when something mattered. Pity you didn’t fight for her, Korund. She might not have flown in my arms tonight." His smirk contorted into a sneer and he jerked his chin toward the perch Alban had abandoned. "Go back to playing watchdog, ‘Stoneheart.’ It suits you better than meddling with the world."