Tara’s tea tasted of bergamot and ash. Ms. Kevarian didn’t need to say any of this. She could have waited and watched to see if her new associate flew or failed. Her admission was a gift—a confession of respect, an invitation into confidence—but also a curse. In addition to gargoyles and assassins, now Tara had to fear her own superiors. From their distant stronghold, the senior partners of Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao settled their fiery gaze upon her, weighing, probing, seeking every flaw and imperfection. She felt like a tightrope walker forced to gaze into the yawning gulf beneath her feet.
The drop made little difference, Tara told herself. She did not intend to fall. Then again, few women fell on purpose. “So, what are we supposed to do?”
“Our jobs,” Ms. Kevarian said, “with care, professionalism, and speed. Time is of the essence.” She turned to the window. The sky, though pale in the morning, had darkened in the intervening hours and drawn closer to earth, as if to crush the city. “I don’t like the look of those clouds.”
“Tea?” Tara offered.
“Later. Work now. For both of us.”
Before she left for her own chambers, Ms. Kevarian grabbed the long red tongue of Tara’s bell-pull and tugged. It produced a hiss of steam.
5
Fifteen minutes, give or take, was all Tara could allow herself before Abelard arrived in answer to the bell. Not much time, but there was no sense wasting this opportunity.
If she failed the Church, her career was over. No one would take a chance on her if Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao fired her once this probation ended. She would eke out some sort of living in obscurity, or else … back to the mob. The thought chilled her.
But there were many ways to fail a client. If Cabot’s murder was related to the case somehow, she would be neglecting her duties not to investigate.
Thus bolstered by flimsy logic, Tara brought her mug of tea to the vanity table. The wig stand stared at her with empty wooden eyes. Rooting in her purse, she produced the black leather book, a black marker, a tiny silver mallet, and a small black velvet bag with a sapphire clasp, the contents of which jangled as she set it down.
Face-stealing had been perfect for her purposes at Cabot’s penthouse, but was far from ideal on this end. The face required a mount. This wig stand was the right shape, at least, but poorly prepared, and she could only do so much with the marker, scribing elaborate designs on the smooth undifferentiated features, to improve upon it. Fortunately, she had brought her own silver nails.
She unfolded the face from the book, removed the first nail from the velvet bag, and drove it through the gargoyle’s forehead into the wig stand with the mallet. She fastened the remaining eight nails at the temples, ears, the base of the jaw, the chin, and the bridge of the nose, whispering as she did so a simple binding formula.
Don’t look at him as you do this, she told herself. Don’t even think of him as a him. That makes it easier.
At least it was easier until she drove in the final nail and the deep green eyes opened. Before she could speak, he bared his teeth and said, in a voice void of all emotion, “Who the hell are you? What did you do to me? I’ll kill you.”
His brow wrinkled in confusion, a strange effect when compounded with the creases and furrows produced by Tara’s hasty nail work. Tara knew what to expect, but watching still churned her stomach.
“I’m going to tear your throat out with my teeth.” This said with all the inflection of a bored lector at Sunday chapel. “I’ll drink your blood and splinter your bones.” Comprehension dawned, slower than the sun. “Why do I sound like this?”
“Disinterested? Surprisingly calm given your situation?”
“I should be furious. You tried to kill me.”
“I didn’t try to kill you. I got you off that roof without hurting anyone. Or,” she amended, “without hurting anyone in the long term. This is hardly a permanent arrangement.”
“Why aren’t I angry?” His nostrils flared. His eyes flicked left, right. “Why can’t I move?”
“Two related questions with a related answer.” She turned the wig stand to face the vanity table’s mirror.
His eyes widened, and his mouth fell open. No sound came out.
“You can’t move because you don’t have a body. You’re not feeling anything because, well, you’d be surprised how much of what we call emotion is really chemistry. A few extra grams of this or that hormone in your blood, and you’re angry, or sad, or in love. You have no blood at present, though, or whatever it is a gargoyle has for blood. Lava, maybe? Your personality exists in a self-sustaining matrix I Crafted for it. Your face is the locus, and your own body’s chemical energy powers the whole thing from a distance. A nice piece of work, if I do say so myself.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“No, no, no!” She shook her head. “That’s not how we get anywhere. You start by telling me your name.”
“I can’t feel pain. You can’t torture me.”
Neither statement was precisely true, but it would not be politic to tell him that. “I’m not trying to hurt you. All I want to know is what happened to Judge Cabot.”
“You want a confession.”
“I don’t!” She raised her right hand to the mirror so he could see it. “Honest. I think you’re innocent.”
“Why stab me in the stomach and steal my face?”
“I said I think you’re innocent. The Blacksuits don’t. You said they were chasing you down, and if you thought a gargoyle could get a fair trial in this city, I doubt you’d have run from them.”
The face said nothing.
“Am I right?”
“Stone Men don’t deserve a fair trial,” he said at last, his tone dry and grating. “We tear the city apart. We thirst for blood—or haven’t you heard? You couldn’t assemble a jury to acquit me, whatever evidence you showed them. Not that Justice would bother with a jury.”
“Look,” she said, “I’m sorry. We’ve started off on the wrong…” She checked herself. He didn’t have feet at the moment, and it would be rude to remind him of that. “I’m Tara. I’m trying to help you.”
His eyes locked with hers in the mirror, and she took an involuntary breath. They were more than green: the color of emeralds, the color of the sea. “Shale,” he said.
“That’s it? Shale?”
“Why do you people always think we need more names than everyone else?”
“I’ve never met a gargoyle personally.…”
“So you assume we go around painting ourselves with pitch and swooping from rooftops to devour innocents, and call ourselves things like Shale Swiftwing, Beloved of the Goddess, Scout-in-Shadows.”
“You were a lot less sarcastic when we first met.”
“When I was hiding from the Blacksuits?”
“And threatening to kill me.”
“Well, I had a body then.”
The tea was well steeped, and Abelard was no doubt ascending the last flight of stairs to the guest level. She might not have enough time alone to try this again for days, and she’d learned nothing useful so far. Expulsion from the firm weighed on her left shoulder, and death by a murderer’s hand on her right. She drummed her fingers on the vanity table and tried to clear her head. “Is that your actual name?”
“What?”
“You know, Swiftwing and all the rest?”
He rolled his eyes.
“If I am to help you, I need to know who you are. Where you come from. What you were doing in Cabot’s penthouse.”