She bound her feet to the rooftop with Craft to prevent them from sliding, and in that moment of diverted attention he began to pull away.
Someone called her name, but she could not answer. Dark shapes moved around her and she paid them no mind because she had no mind anymore. Raz was four feet from the edge of the roof, three. If he fell with Tara’s power hooked through him, so would she.
He would have pulled her off the roof already had she not bound herself to the ground. At that thought, an idea came to her. She knelt, and as he surged against her bonds, fangs bared, she connected the cords of Craft that held him with those that anchored her to the rooftop. One line knit Raz, body and soul, to the solid stone of the Xiltanda. His tether went taut and he bounced back, crumpling on the building’s edge like a netted animal.
Tara stumbled forward and fell a few feet from the vampire. The Craft hooked through his soul blazed, and he spasmed in pain as it burned his memories.
“Tara!”
“No,” she shouted, not in answer. “No, dammit!”
“There’s something you should see.”
“They’re taking his mind!”
The hook would burn him clean if she let it, without leaving a scar. The mind was good at healing. Breaches in memory it wallpapered with ignorance or echoes of routine. She had to stop the process, but she was weak without starlight. She reached for her purse and the implements within. Silver forceps for drawing the Craft from Raz’s mind, and black wax for warding him against its return. There, and there. Rosemary, for remembrance, and fennel, for … for something.…
Abelard had stopped talking. She glanced back to call for his help. Another pair of hands could make a difference.
Then she saw the gargoyles, in the dark.
There were six of them, and they were large, spread out in a loose semicircle on the roof to cordon Tara, Abelard, and Cat off from the stairwell and escape. Shale had been small and sleek by comparison. Each of these creatures was at least eight feet tall, wings flaring higher behind them. Deep scars crisscrossed their bodies. Six pairs of emerald eyes gleamed in six broad, contorted faces, some beaked, some fanged, some tusked like elephants. Light from the street below illuminated the hungry interior of six large stone mouths.
Tara had only defeated Shale with surprise on her side, when he was in human form. His brethren were ready for battle. There would be no reasoning with them, or, no tricking them through reason. They understood force, and Tara didn’t have force on her side.
Cat’s eyes were fixed on the tallest gargoyle—immense, female, and blunt-faced like a lion, with long, wicked talons and muscles tight as steel cords. Cat barely breathed. Abelard looked from Tara to the gargoyles and back. An inch of ash shivered at the end of his cigarette. “Tara?” he said, tentatively.
“Abelard, I can’t.” Raz’s brain was being fried from the inside out, and she was almost spent. She could save whatever this unknown Craftsman wished to wipe from the captain’s mind, or else try to protect Abelard and his junkie friend and maybe herself.
If Raz knew something about the case, Ms. Kevarian needed to know it, too.
Tara’s grip shook on the silver forceps.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Cat said to the gargoyle.
Stupid addict, Tara thought. Hopped up and ready to fight the world. They’d chew through her first, and save Tara to clean their teeth.
But the gargoyle answered. Her voice rumbled like an avalanche.
“We come to reclaim our brother.”
Cat was not fazed. “You violate the law by setting foot within the city.”
“This was our city once.”
Cat turned to Tara, unperturbed by the several tons of killing machine arrayed before her, and said, “Take care of the vampire.” There was authority in her tone and bearing. Tara did not quarrel. Returning her attention to Raz, she gripped the end of that red-hot hook of Craft with her forceps and pulled, evenly and with every fiber of her being. Raz twitched. A soft whine escaped his lips.
Pull harder. If you die here, leave Ms. Kevarian with everything she needs. Otherwise you’ve failed her, which means you left your home and your family to die on a rooftop in a city your kinfolk abandoned generations ago, all for nothing.
The world turned black and white around her as she pulled. Starfire caught and burned in her eyes. The blacks and whites faded to gray and the gray itself began to blur. Breath came heavy in her ears.
She heard a scream.
*
Abelard saw the Guardians, their presence staining the air, and he saw Cat rebuke them like an empress, head back, chin up, the scars at her throat wild and red and raw. Tara collapsed over Raz Pelham’s body, unconscious. His cigarette smoke tasted of sour, copper panic.
Cat glanced from Tara back to the Guardians and said, “It was your city. Now it’s mine.”
She raised a hand to her chest, grasped a small statue that hung from a steel chain around her neck, and began to change.
*
Black ice flowed through Cat’s mind as her hand closed around the badge. It chilled and crushed her fear of these six heretic killing machines, and her fury at their presence. The burning tower of her need stood alone against the rushing cold: the need for a fix, the need for a high, the need to be something better than she was.
Catherine Elle was fallible. Afraid. Angry. Desperate. What remained after the black ice washed over her was strong, clear, hard, slick, patient, hungry. Her mind froze as a shallow, clear pond freezes, trapping fish in midflow. The jumping chaos of her thoughts resolved into stillness, and the stillness came alive with whispers.
These Stone Men were members of a Flight that infiltrated the city days before and had thus far eluded capture. Judge Cabot’s killer was not among this group, but he had been seen in their company.
Idolaters, Cat would have called them. Wild creatures, barely human.
Cat wasn’t here anymore, though. Justice was.
She examined the large Stone Woman with eyes of liquid black. This was the leader of the group, old but still strong. They had not attacked—a good sign.
Your presence is in violation of City law, Justice said through Cat.
“We want our brother,” the leader snarled. “Stand aside.” The Stone Woman darted left faster than a normal human could have seen. Cat moved faster, and blocked her path.
Justice does not stand aside. But if you leave, I promise to let you go.
“Even if you defeat me, my children will eat your heathen heart. There’s one of you, and six of us.”
Not one, she said, but thousands. Fifteen can reach this rooftop before you chew through me.
“You’ll still be dead.”
Doesn’t matter.
The Stone Woman drew herself to her full height, and her wings unfurled. “You’re bluffing.”
Try me.
Wind whispered between them. Cat’s muscles tensed, ready to spring—but the Stone Men were gone. All six, scattered like dry leaves before an autumn breeze. One landed on the roof of a dance hall to the north, wings flared to catch the night wind; three others glided to the peaked gables of a neighboring bordello. Cat couldn’t see the remaining two.
The Suit released her, the oil-slick coating receding reluctantly from her skin. To Cat, it felt like peeling off a scab that was her whole mind. Power left her body, swiftness her thoughts, clarity her soul, and the many voices of Justice died in her ear. Nothing took their place. No, not nothing. The void, an absence strong as any truth.
She sagged to her knees, shaking and cold and in desperate need of a fix. Slender arms encircled her. Abelard. She saw his face as if from the bottom of a pool of water, hazy, naïve, concerned. Her friend.