Fire Song (City of Dragons) (5 page)

“Listen,” said Flint, who was surrounded by a gaggle of female gargoyles. “This would really be easier if we could talk to Mr. Ross alone?”

Brody Ross was behind all of his female relatives, hidden completely from sight.

We hadn’t gotten one look at him since arriving at Brody’s home. He was a suspect, according to Flint, and we were there to interview him. But thus far, we weren’t getting anywhere near him.

“I don’t think so,” said Brody’s mother. “We know his rights, and we are not going to let anyone near him without a warrant.”

“Actually, that would only be if I’d uncovered enough evidence for an arrest,” said Flint. “If I could talk to him now, I might be able to cross him off my list entirely.”

“No,” said Brody’s mother.

Brody’s sisters all stood in a row, gray arms crossed over their chests.

“Hiding behind the women?” said Flint. “Is that really what you want to do, Ross?”

I shook my head at Flint. That was a very bad idea. I pushed in front of him. “Don’t listen to the detective,” I said. “He’s human, and he doesn’t understand.”

“We would not let Brody out to talk to you,” said his mother. “What he wants to do makes no difference. We are his family. We know best.”

“Of course you do,” I said. “Listen, we wouldn’t dream of asking you to leave him alone. Of course, you must be here to protect him. That’s only proper.”

Flint raised his eyebrows.

“But if we could ask him just a few questions?” I said.

“You ask the questions,” said the mother. “We will decide if he can answer them.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s fair.”

“It is?” said Flint. But he shrugged. “All right.”

“We are waiting,” said his mother.

“Can we at least see him?” said Flint.

“It’s best not to push,” I told him.

He shrugged again. He seemed to do that a lot. “All right, then. Mr. Ross, I understand that you were fairly angry about the new development that went up in the north side of the city. You spearheaded several protests to stop the dragons from building their summer homes on that land. Said it was the site of your ancestral home.”

“Oh, that can’t be true,” said Brody’s mother. “That’s far too dangerous. Of course, it is terrible that those dragons built their houses there. Our family used to care for a lighthouse there for the mage family we served.”

Gargoyles had been created by mages, using dragon sacrifice, the most powerful of magics, to be as strong as dragons and protect them from retaliation. It was only sixty years ago that gargoyles had been emancipated from mages and given status as citizens. Since they were tied by magic to the houses they inhabited, they had been a largely ignored magical race for centuries.

“Tell them you wouldn’t do such a thing, Brody,” said one of his sisters.

“Um…” came a voice. “I did start the protests. Fat lot of good it did, though.”

“So, you were angry at the dragons,” said Flint. “Weren’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Brody.

“Did I say you could answer that question?” said Brody’s mother sharply.

“Sorry, Mom.”

“Angry enough to kill?” said Flint.

“What?” said Brody’s mother, horrified.

“What?” said Brody. He pushed between two of his sisters. “I never hurt anyone.”

“Dragon girls keep washing up on the beach,” said Flint. “Dragon girls who live in that housing development.”

“Hey, I have no idea who lives in the housing development,” said Brody.

“Brody!” admonished his mother. “You keep your mouth shut. You know how these police will twist your words.”

“Do you happen to know where you were on February twelfth?” said Flint. “Might not be significant, but it’s the last day that anyone saw Sophia Ward alive.”

“I have no idea,” said Brody. “What day of the week was that?”

“A Friday.”

“He was probably with Gina,” said one of Brody’s sisters. “They’re together a lot these days.”

“Oh, if he is not with us, and not at work, he is with Gina,” said Brody’s mother.

“Gina who?” said Flint.

“You’re not going to talk to her, are you?” said Brody. “Leave Gina out of this.”

We were on our way to talk to Gina, who was another gargoyle who lived across town.

As we drove, I explained gargoyle culture to Flint. “They have a matriarchal society,” I said. “The family group is organized around the mother, the grandmother. It’s not until the oldest female’s death that the family begins to branch off into smaller units.”

“Okay, I get that,” he said, gripping the steering wheel as we sped down Atlantic Avenue, the main strip of highway that went up and down the coast. On one side of us, twenty-story hotels blocked out the ocean. On the other side, restaurants and strip malls lit the night. “What I don’t get is why they wouldn’t let him talk.”

“They think men live in a state of perpetual childhood,” I said. “They don’t trust men to own property or to have any say over major decisions. Those are all taken care of by the matriarch.”

“So, men are just second-class citizens?”

“Well…” I shrugged. “I’m sure there are human men who wouldn’t complain about living a gargoyle lifestyle. The men basically have no responsibilities besides impregnating females. They can have sex with whoever they want with no expectations of commitment, because they don’t ever leave their mother’s houses. Gargoyles don’t pair bond like us. Women raise their babies in the matriarch’s home, along with their brothers. All the children stay with their mothers until she dies.”

“Like orca whales,” said Flint in a thoughtful voice.

“Is it?” I said.

He nodded. “And I don’t think it would work for human men.”

“Why do you say that?” I said.

“Because that isn’t how men are wired,” he said. “Men do everything that they do in order to provide for these so-called responsibilities you think we want to flee from. Life isn’t worth living to a man if he doesn’t have a family.”

“Do you have a family?”

His jaw twitched. “It’s just basic psychology.”

“Maybe gargoyles are different.”

“The gargoyle who works for you? He’s gay, right? How’s that work?”

“It doesn’t. If he’s not mating with women, he’s basically useless to the society. A burden. His grandmother kicked him out. He lives with me now.”

“You took him in?”

“I couldn’t let him live on the street.”

He didn’t say anything for several minutes. When he did, he’d changed the subject. “You could have told me this gargoyle stuff before we went in to interrogate that guy.”

“You didn’t ask.”

“Didn’t know I should,” he said. “There anything I should know before we talk to the girlfriend?”

“She’s not his girlfriend,” I said. “There’s no expectation of monogamy in gargoyle culture.”

“Right,” he said. “No one cares who the baby’s father is, so there’s no reason for it.”

“That’s not the only reason for monogamy,” I said.

“No, I realize that. Pairing off is good for very helpless offspring. That’s the reason men are wired to want to take care of their responsibilities. Better for the species survival.”

“I never thought about that,” I said.

There was a red light. He pulled the car to a stop and turned to me. “You’re not going to argue with me about that, tell me I’m being unromantic, I don’t suppose. After your history, you no longer believe in romance.”

I looked out the window. There was a sliver of sea and sky visible between two hulking, shadowy hotels. “It’s not like that for dragons. It’s not romance.”

“So, what is it?” he said.

“Biology,” I said. “It’s very difficult for dragons to conceive and carry full term, so in order to ensure that, we evolved to be very, very attached to our mates.”

“But does that make sense?” he said. “Wouldn’t having multiple partners like the gargoyles make the chances of conception better?”

“Evolution doesn’t always make sense. It keeps on because it works, not because it’s the best way to do things. It just has to be serviceable until a better mutation happens along.”

The light turned green. The car started to move again.

I sighed. “I guess you’re right. I used to believe in destiny, that there was something magic and pure about finding one’s mate. But now I think…” I turned back to look at him, abruptly shifting topics. “I don’t understand how the police department in this city could be so clueless about magical creatures. Sea City is like the magic capital of the east coast.”

“Magic scares humans,” he said. “They don’t understand it. It frightens them. They’d rather not waste a lot of time thinking about what frightens them, so they try to sweep it under the rug and ignore it.”

“It doesn’t scare you?”

“Sure it does. But I’ve got murders to solve, and I feel blind half the time trying to navigate here. The creatures here, I don’t understand them. You know, we could pay you as a consultant. Not a lot of money, but something.”

“I don’t need money.”

“Right. You bought a hotel with cash.” He pulled the car into a turning lane and put the blinker on.

We had arrived at where Gina worked.

*

Gina the gargoyle was in a maid’s uniform, which figured. She wouldn’t be doing a service job that put her out and about in front of paying customers. She might scare them off.

Gargoyles weren’t in as bad a position as drakes that way. They were much nicer to look at, for one thing. Most of them were beautiful, like stone angels with chiseled features and figures. But they were still… odd. That meant that they were still shunted out of sight for the most part.

She told us that she only had a few minutes or she’d get behind. She had a lot of cleaning to do that night.

“This shouldn’t take too long,” said Flint. “We’re here about Brody Ross.”

“Brody?” she said. “Did he do something wrong? Because I was always telling him that those protests of his were a bad idea. Just so dangerous, you know? Everyone hates dragons and all, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Would you say he hates dragons?” said Flint.

“
Everyone
hates dragons,” she repeated.

I shifted on my feet. Everyone?

“Anyway, I haven’t seen him in months,” she continued. “We hooked up a few times, but then he stopped coming around.”

“Months?” said Flint. “How many months?”

She shrugged. “Uh… I don’t know. Maybe since November?”

“So, you weren’t with him on February twelfth?” said Flint.

“No, no way,” she said. Inside her apron, her phone vibrated. Without thinking about it, she fished it out and checked the screen.

“Could you wait a minute before you do that?” said Flint.

Her eyes had gotten wide, the size of saucers. “Um, what day did you say again? Because the thing is, I
did
see Brody recently.”

Flint made a sour face. “He just texted you and asked you to lie for him, didn’t he?”

“No,” she said too quickly. “That’s… that’s ridiculous.”

Flint held out his hand. “Let me see your phone.”

She stuffed it back in her apron. “I don’t have to give you my phone. I’m fairly sure you can’t just take things from me.”

Flint folded his arms over his chest.

She chewed on her lip. “Are you going to arrest him now? What did he do?”

“We don’t know if he did anything,” said Flint. “But since he’s obviously trying to hide something, I have to ask. Have you ever seen him be violent? Do you think he would be capable of killing someone?”

“What?” said Gina. “No, that’s not Brody at all. He’s a nice guy. You can’t seriously think that he’s a murderer.”

“Well, he’s not doing himself any favors by not cooperating,” said Flint, sighing.

After Flint dropped me off, I went for a walk on the beach, just trying to gather my thoughts. I wondered if an angry gargoyle really could have killed those two girls. Brody hadn’t seemed guilty, but what did I know about that kind of thing?

I thought about what Gina had said, that everyone hated dragons, and I wondered if it were true. To everyone else, dragons probably did seem scary, I guessed. We had strong magic, and it was innate. We made the magic just by existing. We could shift into strong creatures who could fly, who could breathe fire.

But it wasn’t as awful as the stories made it out. We weren’t nearly as huge as some of the legends, for instance. When we shifted into dragon form, we tended to be about as tall as we were as humans. Of course, we also had tails and big wingspans, so we were formidable in size. But we weren’t the size of whales or something.

And we had limitations. We could only use our magic if we’d shifted into dragon form within the past two weeks or so. We could also drain our magic if we used it too fast, meaning that we’d have to shift again to get more. And we could only shift in water.