Heart of Stone. C.E. Murphy
shared lives.
Ir-ra-shun-al, a corner of her brain chanted. Margrit smacked her head with the spoon. As if doing so turned up the reception, the TV in the other room suddenly got louder, a female reporter’s voice cutting through the quiet apartment: “…park improvements will have to be delayed…” The sound cut out again. Spoon in her mouth, Margrit went back to the living room and dropped into the couch, juggling ice cream and the remote to turn up the volume as she watched the pink-cheeked reporter.
“This area of the park, scheduled for renovation, is tonight the scene of a crime the likes of which has not been witnessed in over a decade,” the woman said earnestly. Locks of hair blew into her eyes and she tucked them behind an ear with a gloved hand. Margrit sat up straighter, clutching the ice-cream carton. “A young woman was brutally murdered here tonight, just beyond where I’m standing now, Jim. I have with me Nereida Holmes, who witnessed the attack.”
The reporter turned, angling her microphone under the mouth of a petite woman with large eyes and carefully arranged, flat shining curls. She wore a chocolate-brown coat, the collar lined with darker fur. In the hard white light of the TV camera, the fur looked stiff and unyielding, as if it would prick the woman’s chin.
“It looked like he hit her, no?” Nereida Holmes’s words were tinged with a faint Spanish accent. “He was crouched over her, like he was some kinda animal. Growling. There was blood on his hands. And then he saw me and ran away.”
The reporter pulled the mike back, demanded, “Can you tell us what he looked like?” and thrust it toward Nereida again.
“Um, yes, he was a white guy, maybe so tall?” She lifted a hand well above her head, some inches beyond the top of the reporter’s head, too. “He had long legs—you could see that even when he was down low. And he had light hair, real light, and good shoulders. I couldn’t see nothing else, ‘cept he was wearing a business suit, but no winter jacket.” She shook her head. “He musta been cold.”
“Anything else you can tell us?”
Nereida blanched even more. “I heard that girl screaming. It was terrible. I hope they catch that bastard.”
“Thank you, Ms. Holmes.” The reporter turned back to the camera. “Anyone wishing to report seeing a man of this description in Central Park between the hours of 10:45 and 11:15 p.m. this evening, please contact the police immediately. This is Holly Perry, reporting for Channel Three. Back to you, Jim.”
Ice cream slid off Margrit’s spoon and plopped onto her running tights, the chill immediate and sharp against her thigh. She startled, stuffing the spoon back into the carton, and reached for the remote. She turned the television off and sat, silent, staring at the blank screen.
TWO
THE BELLS OF the nearby cathedral counted out the small hours of the morning, warning of the need to retreat before sunlight found him. He watched her window from his high perch across the street, safe on an apartment building rooftop. It would be such a little thing to stand on her balcony, such an easy thing to do. To make himself just that much more a part of her life. A glance inside her world, a moment of intimacy beyond anything he’d shared in more years than he cared to recall….
Such a risk.
Logic dictated he wouldn’t be noticed, not at this hour, when so many lights were off, implying slumber behind curtained windows. It was nothing: half a block, a few floors down. He stretched and flexed as if he might make good the thought.
The danger was that, of all the windows in that row of apartments, hers was the only one with the lights still on. He shifted his weight forward, then settled back again, rumbling with indecision. Surely she slept. There’d been no movement since minutes after he’d followed her home. Surely she slept, and the amber light bathing the balcony wouldn’t reveal him to prying eyes.
Centuries of habit left him hanging back, unable to make the leap. He’d chanced it once already that evening, in speaking to her. Getting close enough to see that her curling hair was browner than he’d thought, that her petite form was even smaller than he’d expected. Close enough to see the strength in her legs and the muscle in her stomach as her shirt shifted against her skin. Soft fabric; softer-looking skin, made sallow by park lights until he couldn’t be sure of its color. He’d never seen her in daylight. He never would.
Close enough to see emotion in her dark eyes. Anger at being startled, defensiveness and caution, but not the fear he’d expected from a woman accosted, no matter how politely, in Central Park after dark. It was the lack of fear that had prompted him to follow her home.
He hadn’t done that in a long time, not in three years. He’d wondered and imagined, but never dared. She lived much closer to the park than he’d thought, west of the unfinished cathedral. He knew from signs posted on the streets that students lived there, paying prices for their postage-stamp apartments that would have bought whole townships in his youth.
There was a man in the apartment with her. His tenor voice had been by turns cajoling and concerned, while she—Margrit. Leaning back, he savored the name, baring a slow, toothy smile. “Margrit,” the man in the apartment had called her, while they’d argued over her safety and her job at something called Legal Aid.
So she was a lawyer. He had no personal experience with lawyers; he tended to think of them as white knights in pursuit of justice, though even he knew from television that the idea bordered on absurd. But still, she was a lawyer, and her name was Margrit. The information was a priceless gift, stolen from the air as their voices carried out through the glass balcony doors. It was more detail about a woman he watched than he’d learned in decades.
He curled his fingers, feeling the heavy scrape of nails against his palms, and dropped deeper into a crouch, his shoulders slumped. Consequences could not be damned. There would be no silent leap through the city night to look in Margrit’s window, not tonight and not any night henceforth.
Winter chill had little effect on his kind, but cold seemed to penetrate his bones as he accepted the truth. He drew warmth around him in a winged cloak, and put a hand down on icy cement, bracing himself on three points as he watched Margrit’s window and waited for dawn to come.
She ran across the Rockefeller Center skating rink, skidding on the ice more dramatically than she’d ever done racing the paths of Central Park. Hundreds of people surrounded her, small and dark-haired, black-eyed and smooth-skinned. None of them reached to help as she slid, but stood apart, watching her with calm wide eyes.
Heat followed her, melting the ice and turning it to water. When she lifted her gaze, the watchers wore soft fur cloaks that repelled the rising flood, while she swam against a current that came from nowhere. Nothing seemed to move them, even her stretched-out fingers pleading for help.
Hot fingers wrapped around hers, a slight man’s solid grasp. He pulled her up with surprising ease, then bowed gallantly. A white silk cravat as long as Doctor Who’s fluttered around him, catching in wind created by burgeoning heat. He whispered something indecipherable, then arched his eyebrows and nodded behind her. Margrit whipped around in a hiss of skirts, her practical running clothes replaced by a gown that she knew, instinctively, suggested a height her petite frame had never seen.
Dancers surrounded her in a ballroom filled with golden light, the small dark people at the skating rink now gliding across the floor with such grace she could only gape, admiration mixed with despair. No one could move so beautifully. Surrounded by them, she felt cloddish and slow, like a lump of earth trying to emulate a star.
Something changed. With a rustle of warning, the crowd parted to allow a tall man entrance. He wore silver, more striking than simple white, and it made him a ghost among the small dark people, eminently dangerous. His pale hair was long and loose, no longer tied back as it had been when she’d seen him in the park. A few strands fell in slashes across his cheekbones, emphasizing a brief and deadly smile.
A weapon pressed against the inside of Margrit’s wrist: a pencil. She acted without considering, leaping forward and slamming the wooden