“I do want to know,” Alban said mildly. “But I said I wouldn’t ask, and I’m not as bedeviled by curiosity as you are. I don’t want you to walk away from us, Margrit,” he added more softly. “I don’t want you to walk away from me.”
Margrit sighed and put her forehead against his broad chest. “I’m not planning on it. But don’t think I haven’t noticed you didn’t answer any of my questions just now, either.”
Alban chuckled. “You notice everything. Most of your questions aren’t mine to answer, or I have no answers. Even the gargoyle memories tell us nothing more about the vampires than that they claim to be not of this world. It’s an affectation, but…” He trailed off, and then a smile came into his voice. “You may have noticed that we Old Races, as a rule, tend a little toward affectation.”
“No, really?” Margrit tipped her head up, mouth twisted into a smile that faded away. “Will I ever get answers? Am I always going to be the human stuck in the middle of a fairy tale?”
“You can route any comer, defend any stand, argue any case. The Old Races fall before you, and no,” Alban said with a lift of his brows, “I am not teasing you. I think you’ll get your answers in time, Margrit. You may have to earn them from each of us as you go along, because we aren’t prone to sharing secrets, but give us time. Give yourself time.”
“Easy for a four-hundred-year-old gargoyle to say.”
“Almost five hundred,” Alban said lightly. “Your haste has already shaped our world. You can afford a little patience. It’s been barely three months since you discovered us at all.”
Margrit opened her mouth and closed it again, surprise washing out the ache in her head for a moment. “Okay. All right, you’re right. I can probably stand to wait another three or four before I know everything about all of you. But I will want to know, Alban. I have to know everything I can. I’m never going to be one of you. Understanding who I’m dealing with is the only compensation I’ve got.”
“I rather think you might understand us better than even I do, who have stood apart for so long.”
Margrit shook her head. “You’re not alone anymore. You’re with me. You’re part of your community again. Just—don’t pick any fights with Biali.”
Alban brushed his knuckles against her cheek and a thrill of warmth suffused Margrit. Still damp, exhausted and hoarse from arguments, she was more fully at home within the circle of the gargoyle’s arms than she could ever remember being elsewhere. It went beyond sensuality, beyond happiness, into something so complex and profound it seemed absurd that a single word could encompass it, yet one did. Content. She was content, and had never known that emotion could fill her so completely.
Seeing her smile, Alban dipped his head to touch his lips against hers, then his forehead to hers. They stood that way, both smiling, as he spoke. “As you so assiduously tried to tell me, and I so fervently refused to hear, I have not been alone since you came into my life, Margrit. I believe I will stop trying to convince myself I am, for fear you’ll move whole mountain ranges to block my way when I try to leave.”
“That’s more like it.” Margrit wound her arms around Alban’s waist. “We should be together, and on the same side. The djinn aren’t going to let Malik’s death go. I’m sorry.” She set her front teeth together delicately, lips peeled back in a show of frustration. “I’ve been playing both sides against the middle for two days, not letting anybody know how he died, and now—”
“You could hardly have anticipated what would happen when you offered memories to the collective.”
“A feedback loop would’ve been bad enough. I turned into a broadcast tower!” Margrit wrinkled her face as her own pitch made her head ring. “I blew the top off every secret I knew.”
“No,” Alban said with sudden clarity. “Not every secret. You buried one with an avalanche of others.” He glanced toward the door, and Margrit followed his gaze, knowing which two of the many who’d passed through it he was thinking of.
“Yeah. I told them everything, but I didn’t tell them you’d found her again.”
Even with static rushing in her head, it was easier to ride memory now, as though new channels had been opened up in her mind. She knew that it was Alban’s memory she recalled, but she felt very little dichotomy, no confusion of one body or another. Wings spread beneath the moonlight felt natural and strong, and wearing his broad body, meant for flying, felt natural, with no confusion as to what had happened to her own smaller form.
Forty miles outside of London, in the midseventeenth century, might have been four thousand in the modern world. It was an easy night’s flight, even there and back again, as long as the winds were with him. Janx and Daisani had taken the broken pieces of their hearts and left the city that had disappointed them years since, and Alban had waited until he thought even Sarah’s memory had faded before he winged north to the farmstead she’d owned.
He knew it had been abandoned before he landed. The land was unfurrowed and weeds choked those vegetables left to grow on their own. No smoke rose from the chimney, and no scent of it lingered on the air to say a fire would be banked high in the morning. There was a stillness to the house that said it was unlived in, and when he first opened the door, it was to a room stagnant with disuse.
A cradle, long since too small for the girls’ use, was tucked against the wall beside the fireplace; opposite lay a straw bed molding with age. The twins would have altered their hours in the cradle and bed, one suckling while the other slept, but neither had done so for a long time.
Everything else was gone from the cottage: no pot hung over the fire, no blankets lay to rot with the bed. Even the kindling was gone, perhaps to be made use of on the road. Alban crossed to the cradle and set it to rocking, a little surprised it hadn’t been broken apart to be burned, as well.
A patterned piece of fabric lay at its bottom, little more than an off-colored shadow in the moonlight from the open door. Alban lifted it, finding the pattern to be stitches, and, frowning with curiosity, he brought it into the light.
A crude shape was picked out on the fabric, a rough oval with a handful of divots breaking into its form. Near the bottom was a tiny stitched house; at the top, another. The piece’s edges were ragged and frayed, as though it had once been a child’s chew-thing. Bemused, Alban tucked it into his fist and carried it back to London.
Hajnal gave the scrap a bare glance and, with a look of fond exasperation at him, said, “It’s the island, Alban. England and Scotland and Wales. She’s gone to live in the north.” Then amusement had sparked in her eyes and she’d added, “It’s very like our way of making sure we won’t lose each other, isn’t it. Our promise to meet each other at the highest point we can find. Did you tell her about that?”
Alban, flummoxed, admitted he had, and Hajnal looked knowing. “The top of Scotland is as high as you can go without leaving this island. It’s a clever bit of work.”
Nearly four hundred years later, Margrit felt Alban’s rise again in both memory and the present, pure bewilderment as he said, “But how do you know?” And in memory, she thrilled at the warmth of Hajnal’s responding laugh.
“I know because Sarah would leave a message only one man could read, and you’re him. You’d have come to it in time.”
“Your faith is ill placed.” Alban pulled his lifemate into his arms, and memory faded into another time.
Not so very much later, but long enough. Winter, for ease of traveling through the long nights. Two gargoyles winged through cold starry skies, full of joy at living and exploring and togetherness. The northern coast of Scotland was an expansive area to search, but there was little hurry. Children grew up quickly, but not that quickly, and a woman alone with two young girls would eventually be found.