Heart of Stone

“That was impossible,” Tony snapped. “I don’t know what the hell happened there, but the video musta gotten screwed up. That just wasn’t possible. He couldn’t have jumped out of the viewing area, and where the hell’d he leap to? None of the other cameras show him landing anywhere. He’s gotta still be in the building. Gotta be.” His words fell over themselves even faster than usual, rising and falling nasal tones. Margrit found herself smiling at him. “What?” he demanded. “What’re you grinning at?”

“You’re cute when you’re upset,” she said. His jaw clamped shut and color scalded his cheekbones. The door opened with a bang and a sullen-looking Ira came in, dragging another chair.

“You’ve got lousy timing, Grit,” Tony muttered, before rounding on the security technician. “Where were you? Never mind. I need to look at every video in that room at—” He broke off to glower at the time stamp on the frozen video frame. “At 10:19 p.m. I gotta be able to see everything. Margrit.” Spoken with Brooklyn intensity, it came out Mah-grit. “I was gonna ask if I could give you a ride home, but there’s somethin’ weird goin’ on here. I donno how long this’s gonna take, and, well—” he forced a smile and slowed down his speech, accent thinning “—I don’t think there’s much you can do here.”

“Does that mean I’m dismissed, Detective?” Margrit ducked her head, feeling a faint smile of frustration pull at her mouth. The demarcation between her job and his had never seemed more vivid. Rationally, she understood, but emotion was more slippery. “Just when things are getting interesting.”

“Don’t be a pain in the ass, Grit. Not right now, okay?”

“Yeah. Whatever.” She heard the snappishness in her words and laughed, a sound of irritation rather than humor. She knotted her hand, trying to release ire before speaking again. “Look, I’m going to find Cole and Cam, and maybe we’ll keep hanging out. You’ll be able to find me if you need me to ID somebody, or something, all right?”

“Yeah.” Tony was already turning back to the video screens, forgetting Margrit was there. “Go have a good evening. I’ve got work to do.”

Rhythm pushed Margrit around the dance floor, until she was drifting like a leaf on a river’s surface. Strobe lights flashed and she lifted her hands into the air, weaving her arms together as sinuously as she could. The strobe chopped the motions into gorgeously inhuman pulses of motion, impossible to achieve in reality. Fog swirled above her, lit brilliant blue-white by the bursts of light. Steel girders threw soft-edged shadows against the dark paint of the ceiling high above. Stars, Margrit thought. The club needed to put tiny Christmas lights up there, to make stars against the ceiling. Buoyed by the music, she thought she might be able to break away and fly, if there were stars up above.

Dancers jostled around her. Margrit let herself be moved by them, feeling only distantly attached to her own body. Cole and Cameron had gone to the swingdance room. Margrit, content to stay with the ever-changing music in the Blue Room, had waved them off with a smile, knowing they’d find her when they were ready to leave. To her surprise, the dark-eyed man located her and claimed a dance or two. He vanished when she forgot she was dancing with him, and turned away.

An arm encircled her waist, sliding possessively across the silk of her camisole. Margrit returned to her body with a jolt that shot electricity through her fingers and toes. It made a cold knot in her belly that melted to warmth, spilling down to pulse between her thighs, making her laugh with desire. She closed her eyes and wound a hand up and backward, to wrap her fingers around the nape of her partner’s neck. His hands slid to her hips, rucking up the hem of her top, to settle against her suede skirt. He could be anyone. He could be the killer; he could be the dark-eyed man who’d asked her to dance earlier. Not knowing was half the fun.

Irrational, she whispered to the beat of the music, and let herself go again.

He was a strong dancer, very sure of himself, his hands intimate without being obtrusive. The two of them fit together well, despite his height, and Margrit tucked her hips back with a purring smile. She felt the curve of his body as he lowered his head, felt the warmth of his breath against her shoulder, making her shiver. He moved a palm to her waist, then pulled her closer, protectively, as if he could warm her with his own body heat.

Margrit relaxed back into him, grinning lazily, eyes still closed. His breath spilled over her shoulder again, against her neck, and she tilted her chin up, exposing more throat. He hesitated, close enough that she could feel the heat of his mouth against her skin before he murmured, “I didn’t kill that girl.”

Adrenaline crashed through Margrit, leaving her fingertips cold and a twist of sickness under her sternum. She straightened abruptly, the sensation of flight and freedom lost. As if in response, the strobe lighting cut out. Spotlights swept the crowd instead, dancers standing out in brilliant purples and oranges. Sweat and alcohol and perfumes mingled in the air, giving it a too-sweet scent, like oversugared candy. Margrit could hear individual voices, as if the cacophony of music had suddenly died, leaving everyone shouting into silence. She clenched down on the panic in her belly, feeling heavy when an instant ago she’d been soaring weightless among the stars.

“I didn’t kill her.” Beyond the urgency in his voice, Margrit detected a hint of an Eastern European accent that hadn’t been noticeable the night before. She latched on to the detail; it would be something to report to Tony.

A deep breath calmed the fear boiling in her stomach and left behind nervous excitement. If Tony was watching the screens, she might be able to delay the blond man until he arrived. It was a risk worth taking.

She turned in the man’s arms.

Every ounce of intimacy between them was lost. The man stood rigidly, his head shoved forward as he hunched over her. Margrit leaned back from his arms, the muscles of her legs bunched, ready to run. If she were an outside observer, she would judge their relationship a dangerous one, she decided—built on passion and anger rather than romance. Her heart knocked against her ribs even as she studied his face, trying to memorize his features so she could offer a better description to the police.

A spotlight washed over them, turning his eyes vivid violet, then moved away, leaving them green in the predominantly blue lighting of the club. “I didn’t,” he said for the third time, “kill her. Please believe me.”

“Then talk to the cops. You’ll be fine if you’re innocent.” Margrit felt her biceps contracting, tension bleeding out of her body any way it could.

“I can’t. I truly can’t. But I haven’t hurt anyone.”

“I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me who did,” Margrit snapped.

“I would like that very much, but I don’t know.”

“Yeah.” She stepped back. “Right.” The man touched his fingers to her lips, so quickly and gently her exhalation turned into a bewildered laugh instead of the scream she intended.

“Please,” he said. “Don’t scream. My name is Alban Korund.”

“Maagh.” Margrit swallowed the sound, surprised at how automatic the impulse to respond in kind with her name was. Alban smiled, a flicker of understanding and dismay.

“Please. You have no reason to trust me, I know, but I need your help.”

“My help.” She stared up at him. They stood only a few inches apart, unmoving among the sea of bodies, like a couple so lost in one another they’d forgotten to keep dancing. Only the tension between them gave lie to that illusion. “Why would I help you?” she asked. “And why me?”

“Because I’m innocent,” Alban whispered, “and because you’re not easily frightened.”

Margrit’s heart skipped a beat, hanging painfully in her chest a moment too long. A jolt of stress angled through the empty place where the heartbeat should have been, and she gasped, stumbling a step. Alban caught her, a hand around her elbow to steady her, then let go again almost before she knew he’d touched her. “Please,” he repeated. “I don’t have much time. Will you help me?”

“I—”

The attitude of the dancers changed, a sudden switch from casual to disturbed. Heads turned, bodies straightening, as if in response to a silent warning that not all was right with the world. Margrit and Alban looked toward the DJ’s table, the direction the alteration had come from.

Tony pushed his way through the crowd. His clothes didn’t set him apart from a dancer who wanted onto the floor, but the brusque way he moved, full of purpose, did. There was no acknowledgment of the music in his movements.

“Dammit!” Alban cast one desperate look down at Margrit, then disappeared from her side. In almost the same moment Tony grabbed her shoulders, examining her with a critical glare, then released her to continue after his prey. A cobalt spotlight lit Alban’s hair to a fiery blue. Then the strobes popped back on, and Margrit lost them both in the crowd.

He hadn’t kissed anyone in nearly two hundred years.

She was almost as surprised as he was, looking him up and down. “Goin’ slumming or something, buddy?” She was tall and plump, with kohl-rimmed eyes, her hair dyed an unnatural black. In his slacks and button-down shirt, hair pulled back in a long ponytail, he no more fit into the Anne Rice Victoriana Room than anywhere else in the club.

Still, there’d been no choice. Margrit had swept the street with her gaze that evening, watching for someone who wasn’t there. Searching in shadows between alleys and cracks in buildings, not looking up, where he hid among rooftops. He’d followed her from her building after night had fallen, boldness driving him to linger across the street, high in the sky, to wait for her evening run. Instead, she’d left with friends, dressed as he’d never seen her: in a short trench coat thrown on over a skirt no longer than a promise, showing off slender strong legs. Tall heels shaped her calves, her stride as certain in them as it was in running shoes. He’d caught only a glimpse of the camisole she wore, clinging to her ribs and hugging her waist, when she’d slipped her coat off just inside a restaurant door.

He’d quashed the desire to follow her in, an impulse stronger than anything he could remember in decades. He’d protected her in the beginning because her daring nighttime runs woke fondness in him. But a few moments’ stolen conversation had lit embers so long banked he’d never have imagined they might still bear heat. Even that he might have ignored, had the news not borne whispers of impossible things to his ears. Need had arisen in him: a need to prove himself innocent to Margrit; a need to avoid becoming even more of a fugitive from the human world than his people were by their very nature.

With that need came awareness of his own limitations. Margrit’s indignation at being accosted had reflected back the shallowness of his own existence. In all his centuries, he had never found himself or his enduring path to be wanting, but now he was reminded of a vitality so long forgotten he almost wondered if it had ever been. He had not—not!—let himself brush his hands over her arms to feel the softness of her skin, or his mouth over her shoulder before he’d spoken, for all that she’d seemed to invite it. The closeness they’d shared had been heady enough, so extraordinary as to make him risk uncharacteristic things.

Such as kissing this woman now standing before him. “Flirting with a beautiful woman is never slumming.”

A sly smile of disbelief stained her mouth as surely as her lipstick stained his own. A pang of guilt laced through him, already too late. Authorities knew he was in the building, and he could not afford to be caught in their presence come sunrise. The chance to get Margrit away and speak with her had come and gone. The only thing left was his own survival. Nothing else would have driven him to the measure he’d already taken, much less the one he was about to.

He lifted his gaze, examining the room briefly. It was littered with carved vampires and gargoyles, their stone forms making drink holders and seats for the dancers. The walls held mock gaslights and candles, giving off flickering yellow light usually overwhelmed by the dance floor light show. The bar was dark polished wood, the seats covered in red velvet with worn spots, and the dancers were pale and beautiful in their dramatic dark clothing. “I have an idea,” he murmured to the girl. “There are three security cameras…”

“An’ she comes over an’ he goes over an’—” “We can see it, Ira.” Tony waved his hand, silencing him.

On the security screens, the kohl-eyed girl grinned at the camera in the corner and reached up. The picture cut out. In the opposite corner, Alban was recorded doing the same thing, except he kept his eyes and head lowered so the camera recorded only the top of his blond head.

The detective swore and hit the security-room desk with the heel of his hand. The Goth girl had been detained in the hall; Margrit could hear her talking to another cop.

“Man, I thought he wanted to, y’know, like, make out. Get a little down and dirty in the club, y’know? I thought it was cool.” She was pale-faced and sullen, her lipstick so dark red it bordered on black. “That’s all. I’ll pay for the wire, Jesus. But then he was fuckin’ gone, man. Bailed and left me to take the blame. Bastard.”

An air vent at the top of the wall opposite the camera was found with its grate dangling from just one screw. The third camera in the Goth Room had caught Alban frantically untwisting screws after the other two cameras had been disabled.

Tony pounded the desk again. “A full-grown man couldn’t have fit into that vent, goddammit. Especially not in forty-five seconds. He didn’t have time. And nobody saw it happen!” The third camera—hidden behind a bubble in the Goth Room ceiling—hadn’t filmed Alban’s scramble into the vent, but had focused instead on its sweep around the room. “Goddammit. Westing! Anybody find anything in the furnace room yet?”

“No, sir. They’re searching the perimeter of the building, too.” The cop talking to the Goth girl leaned into the security-room door, frowning at Margrit. She lifted an eyebrow brazenly, challenging him to question her presence there. He spread the fingers of one hand in appeasement and focused on Tony instead.

“Keep looking,” Detective Pulcella muttered.