A Box of Gargoyles (21 page)

But first she did whisper good-bye in the direction of the gargoyles. Maybe they heard it, and maybe they didn't. They were being very still again, in the darkness. They were back to behaving like stone. They made no sound.

Maya was thinking about gargoyles, and thinking about Valko.

Valko didn't understand about the egg, but that wasn't his fault. He wasn't used to things depending so much on him, probably.

But the way he glared at those gargoyles: it was the way other people sometimes glared into the mirror on a bad morning.
Yes
, thought Maya.
Into the mirror!

Because think about it, right? Quarried in one place and hauled off to another! Part this, part that, part something else, always translating, always out of place! Maybe being a Valko—or, for that matter, even being a Maya—was not so entirely different, after all (thought Maya as she followed the flashlight's beam down the embassy stairs), from being a gargoyle.

 
12
 

B
y the time Valko and Maya made their way down the stairs, the generator was rumbling away in the background, and the lights were back on. There were candlesticks set out hastily on all the surfaces, as well, just to be safe. Some of the mirrors above some of the chimneys had been warped by the strangeness into abstract whorls of glass, and at certain places in the paneling, bunches of wires had broken through the surface of the wall as they blossomed into wild designs. But in the grand drawing room of the embassy, the two Dr. Nikolovs—Valko's mother and father—were calmly waiting to greet their earliest guests. Had they even noticed the strangeness rolling through? The Nikolovs were diplomats, and thus by training unflappable, no matter what was going on at the time with the laws of physics.

Maya tightened her grip on her bouquet, which—after the excitement on the roof and a certain amount of molecular rearrangement—was somewhat the worse for wear, and surreptitiously wiped her nervous right hand on her skirt.

The lights were very bright. There were old paintings in frames on the walls, and the furniture was dark and elaborate, and there were flowers everywhere, as well as people standing by with trays in their hands, waiting for the real guests to arrive.

“Here we go, Maya,” said Valko, with an encouraging smile. “Time to meet my absolutely terrifying parents. Mama! This is Maya.”

Maya handed over the bouquet, shook Dr. Nikolova's hand firmly, said, “
Zdravejte
” with conviction, which was the proper Bulgarian way of saying hello, and looked straight into Valko's mother's brilliant dark eyes.

(“Chessboard eyes,” Valko had told her on the roof. “You'll see what I mean when you meet her. She was a chess champion when she was a girl, you know. Milena Todorova, queen of the checkered board. Her eyes are always at least seven moves ahead.”)

“Lovely flowers, thank you,” said Valko's mother. “I'm glad to meet you, at long last. Georgi, this is Valko's young friend from school, Maya Davidson. The scientist's child.”

Valko's father shook her hand, too, and said something kind. His hair was gray at the temples, and he was in a suit that made him look like a movie star. Maya ran through all the polite phrases she could think of and tried very hard to keep smiling, but those sixty seconds before Valko rescued her by dragging her off to the drinks table made for a long, long minute indeed. The other guests had begun to arrive.

“Fine so far,” said Valko. He seemed relieved, Maya thought, just to be off the embassy roof and away from the impossible talking statues. But a glittering dinner party with grown-ups you didn't even know had to be a thousand—a
million
—times worse than gargoyles! No, it wasn't fair: Maya was practically sweating bullets, and here was Valko sailing through the evening as if it were the most fun he'd had in ages. That was what being a diplomat's kid meant, Maya guessed. He hadn't even seemed all that nervous back when he first met Maya's parents, had he? Maya tried to remember. No, it seemed to her that even then, Valko had remained unreasonably cheerful and calm.

“So, this is the Bulgarian Cultural Foundation's annual award dinner,” said Valko. “As you know. If you read the invitation all the way through. That means a lot of artists and doddering profs around the table tonight. Get ready!”

At least they were kind enough to seat her next to Valko at the huge dining table in the next room. She could keep an eye on which fork he was using, and she figured that might just save her etiquette-challenged neck.

On her other side was an older man, older than her father. He introduced himself, very politely, as a historian.

“What kind of history?” asked Maya, equally politely.

“At the moment,
mademoiselle
,” said the old man, “I am completing a very important project on the history of yogurt.”

“Yogurt!” said Maya. That surprised her, all right, but she kept her expression as much under wraps as possible.

“Yogurt, but yes, absolutely!” said the old man. “The crowning glory of Bulgarian, as it were, culture. That's a pun, my dear.”

Maya blinked, not knowing what to say.

“Why, even the vaunted Greeks use
our
cultures! Read the labels on their cartons, if you don't believe me, child. Bulgarian cultures everywhere:
L. bulgaricus
, humble conqueror of the Western world. You,
mademoiselle
, I sense, are neither French nor Bulgarian.”

“American,” said Maya.

“Ah,” said the historian of yogurt, making a very horrified face. “Where, I have heard, they serve yogurt
frozen
! And with—what do you call them?—
toppings
!”

Maya risked a quick glance at Valko on her other side. He was grinning from ear to ear.

“And now you have met our favorite crusty historian. But you are harmless, aren't you, Professor Stoyanov?”

The old man chuckled into his napkin.

“Oh, yes, yes, young Valko. Sad to say. Harmless, harmless. They need not hide me down here at the children's end of the table. I have given up breaking plates.”

And that was when the dining-room doors flew open. All heads at the table looked up and around. A woman had paused with one foot through the doorway—almost, you might say, striking a pose under the elegant arch. She was wearing a tailored black skirt and a rather showy jacket (floral brocade with threads of gold!), but everything was slightly askew. Her blouse was untucked on one side. You could see that her hair had started off combed sleekly back into a ponytail, but had then rebelled. And down one side of that disobedient hair was a streak of surprising, blinding white.

“Madame Blakely!” exclaimed Valko's unflappable mother. “How pleased we all are that you have arrived!”

“I'm afraid I'm late,” said Madame Blakely, in plainly American English, her face twitching into a foolish smile. “I am late, aren't I? I arrived just outside, and then the lights went off, and then . . .”

She moved her hands about hopelessly, describing something she was obviously in no condition to describe.

“The carnival downstairs,” she said. “There's a carnival, yes? And then suddenly, you know, I was singing!”

She laughed.

“Of all people: me, singing!”

Everyone else at the table sat as if stunned.

“Well, the adventure ends happily,
madame
,” said Valko's mother, with professional courtesy. “You have found your way to our table, and before the soup! Please do take a seat. . . .”

Indeed, as the men at the table remembered their advanced manners and rose in greeting, members of the embassy staff were already guiding Madame Blakely to the empty chair across the table from Maya and Valko.

“Pernithia Jane Blakely is this year's winner of the Bulgarian Cultural Foundation's works-in-progress grant,” said Valko's father to the table at large, “for artists whose works engage deeply and profoundly with Bulgarian culture. We are very happy Madame Blakely could attend our dinner this evening. It is an honor for us, I'm sure.”

The soup had the tastiest little meatballs in it. Maya realized by the second spoonful that part of the funny feeling in her stomach had been plain, old-fashioned hunger. She was glad to have something to do with herself, too: she knew how to eat soup.

“Bulgarian culture!” said the historian of yogurt, setting his spoon down in his empty bowl. “So your writing engages with Bulgarian culture, Madame Blakely? May I ask, what aspect of Bulgarian culture has attracted your interest?”

“Oh,
yes
!” said Pernithia Jane Blakely. “Vampires!”

Was it Maya's imagination, or did several people at that table stiffen slightly? Pernithia Jane Blakely, ignoring her soup, had jumped into a description of the book she was planning to write,
Love with Long Teeth
, in which, apparently, a beautiful girl was going to run her European rental car off the road and be rescued by a handsome and mysterious man with mechanical skills and a reluctance to share his name. Then they were going to go to his family mansion, in the hostile, barren Bulgarian hills, and one night the man would bare his sexy chest and reveal a set of surprisingly sharp eyeteeth, and she —

“Excuse me,” said the historian. “But no. No!”

“Professor Stoyanov!” said Valko's mother, her voice chilly. But he waved her reproof away, while a crew of waiters replaced the soup bowls with plates containing little gourmet mounds of chopped salad, garnished with walnuts and—what was that? Maya's heart contracted. For a moment she thought the strangeness had affected the embassy's kitchen. Then she realized that what she was seeing was a radish carved—by hand, not by magic—to look exactly like a rose.

She relaxed again, but only for a second. Professor Stoyanov, historian of yogurt, was in the middle of a long lecture on the figure of the
vampir
in Bulgaria, and whenever he got to a particularly important point, he whacked his fork against his plate for emphasis.

“Not sexy!” (
Whack!
) “Not sexy
at all
! I am sorry, but I am fatigued by this nonsense.” (
Whack!
) “Do you even know what creates them,
vampiri
? A bad death, someone dies and the funeral is not done properly. An evil man who dies badly—that can make the poor, unhappy
vampir
. And then, is it sexy, is it handsome? No!” (
Whack!
) “It is a hungry shadow—some say a bag of blood. The
opposite
of sexy!” (
Whack!
) “For forty days, the shadow wanders. If it can feast enough,
madame
, on the living, it can, on the fortieth day, return to life itself. That's what it hungers to do. Eat someone's heart, and live. That is all. No bare chests and romance.
No!
Not a
Bulgarian
vampire!”

A final couple of whacks for emphasis, and then the servers swooped in and took all their salad plates away. Professor Stoyanov, disarmed, glowered across the table at the American writer, who seemed to be taking the diatribe quite well.

“I am just simply asking you,
madame
,” said the historian of yogurt. “Where you are getting your false information, about Bulgarian vampires?”

“It's not false information,” said the writer in surprise. “It's fiction. I mean, I made it all up, of course. And anyway, vampires have to be sexy. Everyone knows that. Otherwise, what's even the point?”

The historian huffed with impatience, and, in any case, Maya was hardly listening anymore. The salad had been replaced by the gourmet version of stuffed peppers (tiny, beautiful peppers arranged on a plate and drizzled with bright swirls of some kind of sauce). But Maya looked at her plate and saw hungry shadows, wandering the streets for forty days.

“Forty days!”

That was Valko's quiet voice on her left side. So he had heard it, too. Of course he had.