The Wondrous and the Wicked

by Page Morgan

  “You should have told me where you were,” she whispered.

  Luc abruptly moved back, toward the open ballroom doors. “And now you know why I tried to keep you away.”

  Ingrid followed, her body shivering uncontrollably. “I’m not afraid of Vincent.”

  She knew Luc wouldn’t believe the lie, but it felt good to say it anyway. Of course she was afraid of him. He was an angry, powerful gargoyle, and he’d just made a public vow to kill her.

  Luc stopped in the center of the ballroom, underneath the giant chandelier hanging crookedly from the ceiling. He stood motionless on the dance floor, the cracked and stained tiles covered in filth, debris, and mouse droppings. The rotted piano had lost one of its legs and crashed into a tilt; yellowed sheet music lay scattered around it like leaves.

  “He wants you dead,” Luc said, his back to her. He wore the same clothes he always had, the loose alabaster linen shirt and tan canvas trousers. He looked the same and sounded the same, and yet there was something different about him. Ingrid didn’t know what it was.

  He turned to face her, the fading sun gilding the ballroom in a hazy golden light.

  “And he wants me out of the way so he can be elder, unchallenged. What better way to do that than to prove to all of the Dispossessed that I’ve taken a human?”

  Ingrid’s stomach bottomed out as she realized what she’d done.

  “Oh,” she whispered, pulling back a step. “Oh, no. Luc—”

  She’d entered gargoyle common grounds and defended Luc, attacking his opposition with her demon gift. And just moments after Vincent had accused Luc of falling in love with a human. With her.

  “I gave him what he wanted.” She buried her face into her palms. “I’m so sorry, Luc. I wasn’t thinking. I heard him firing up the other gargoyles, and I knew they’d try to attack you and rip you apart like what happened to René, and I—”

  Tears stung her eyes, and she was glad she’d covered her face. She hated when her lips and chin quivered in the effort to fight off a sob.

  “Ingrid.” Luc had come to stand directly in front of her. He pulled her hands from her face, but she turned her head, not wanting to see how disappointed he was.

  He brought their entwined hands down between them, level with his hips, and tugged her forward. With his lips at her ear, Luc whispered, “It’s not that I wasn’t impressed.”

  She felt the brush of his lips against her earlobe and forgot her embarrassment. She forgot the run-down ballroom and her dwindling time before Marco came to fetch her.

  “But don’t risk yourself for me again,” Luc said, his breath hot against her ear. She angled her head toward him, wanting nothing more than his warmth.

  “You risked yourself for me,” she said. “By finding me in the park. Coming for me when Vincent could have been watching your every move.”

  He sighed, nuzzling her temple before letting one of her hands go. He stepped back.

  “Have you healed?” he asked, rubbing his thumb along the center of her palm. “I wish I could know without asking.”

  That was what was different about him. He couldn’t sense her. She felt the loss of that connection, too.

  “I’m fine now,” she assured him.

  He kept hold of her hand as he started walking, avoiding a pile of old sheets in the middle of the dance floor. He kept on toward the grand, Rococo-style double doors that led to the building’s main corridor. She didn’t know where he thought they could go with the few minutes they had left together. Ingrid wanted to follow Luc through the house anyway, perhaps up the stairs to Lennier’s rooms. She wanted to stay with Luc in this decrepit, timeless place while the rest of Paris dealt with Axia’s imminent return.

  “What if Vincent is right?” she asked. Luc stopped on the threshold and she continued. “What if Dusters are dangerous? What if we end up belonging to Axia in the end, doing her bidding, the same way Grayson did after she released him from the Underneath?”

  Her brother had had moments of clarity when he’d been under Axia’s control. He hadn’t wanted to harm her or Gabby, but he also hadn’t been able to stop himself. What if the same thing happened to her? To all the Dusters?

  “You don’t belong to anyone,” Luc said. He seemed to abandon his plan to take her somewhere within the town home and instead stood with her between the open ballroom doors, one of which hung perilously loose on a single hinge.

  “Ingrid, you have more power than you give yourself credit for. I saw it just now; we all did. Axia is evil. You … you’re good. She will not win. She will not take you away. You won’t let her, and neither will I.”

  Ingrid felt the muscles in his hand and arm go rigid when she tried to get closer to him. He held her back, even though the low burn in his eyes said he wanted something different.

  “Marco is coming,” he whispered.

  It couldn’t have been five minutes already.

  “I need to know something,” Ingrid said, hating that she felt rushed now.

  Luc furrowed his dark brow and waited for her to ask her question.

  “Vincent accused you of taking a human.” She forced her gaze on Luc to stay steady and not drift away with nerves. “Have you?”

  Luc held still. He didn’t smile; he didn’t tilt his head in consideration. He didn’t do anything but hold her gaze and her hand with absolute security. She felt the heat of a blush staining her cheeks, and she didn’t know if it was from the intensity of his emerald stare, the humiliation of having been so forward, or the sudden fear that he was going to break her heart once and for all.

  Luc lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed his lips gently against the back of it, as a gentleman might.

  “I have,” he answered softly.

  She could only part her lips and whisper his name before Marco’s heavy steps echoed through the ballroom. Luc released her hand and drew away, sending one thoroughly annoyed glance in Marco’s direction. See her home safely, Luc’s silent bidding seemed to say, and then he was gone, retreating through the ballroom doors and into the dim corridor.

  Ingrid remained where she was until Marco cleared his throat. He said something sarcastic, she was sure, but the effect was lost on her. She could think of nothing, hear nothing, other than Luc’s voice: I have. He’d taken a human. He’d chosen her. Luc loved her still, even without the gargoyle-human bond.

  As Ingrid followed Marco from the courtyard and through the arcades, into the quickly purpling twilight, she could not smile, not even with her heart so gloriously full. Because what Luc had just said—what she had just asked of him—could very well get them both killed.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  London Daicrypta headquarters was nowhere near as impressive as the Parisian Daicrypta seat, a Montmartre mansion that must have once been home to royalty. The simple whitewashed Georgian home rested snugly in the heart of Belgravia, between Turk’s Row and Sloan Square. The place looked like every other building along the street: a clean stone façade and four stories of tall, polished windows. There was no indication at all, from where Gabby stood on the well-swept front steps, that the people inside were demonologists with a penchant for controversial experiments involving both humans and creatures from the Underneath.

  As she reached for the bronzed pineapple knocker, her gaze lifted and stuck on the triangular frieze above the door. A man’s face had been carved into the stone, his mouth wide with horror. A small, clownish-looking gargoyle protruding from the stone frieze was nibbling on the man’s ear with razor teeth. Gabby sighed and brought the knocker down hard, twice.

  The other night, on their way back to Waverly House, Rory had been muttering a slew of crude epithets for Hugh Dupuis and the Daicrypta, while Gabby had been considering how to get her hands on some information. Namely, Hugh Dupuis’s home address.

  The following morning she’d quietly asked the butler, Reeves, and with a stiff bow, he’d set off to fulfill her request. He’d returned with an address in less than an hour. Mean
while, Rory had received a second coded telegram from Nolan, this one saying that Ingrid had been taken into the Underworld and drained of her angel blood. Gabby had immediately known two things: Axia would now be able to come here, into their realm, and so far, the Alliance had no weapon with which to fight her. Gabby’s mind had gone directly to the diffuser net. The Alliance had nothing like it in their weapons cache, but it could bond to a demon and seal it into place. What if the nets could work on other creatures that weren’t of this world? What if they could capture an angel?

  The door to the London Daicrypta swung open on soundless hinges and Gabby’s eyes went wide.

  “You!” She was looking up into the face of the gargoyle that had interrupted her and Rory’s sparring at the dry docks and delivered a message from Marco.

  The man smirked down at her, his ginger beard and mustache appearing redder than they had in the sheltered light of the dry docks.

  “Me,” he replied, a thumb pointing up over their heads, toward the frieze.

  Gabby didn’t need to see it again. “You’re a clown gargoyle?”

  His goading smirk fell off quickly.

  “There ain’t no clown gargoyles,” he said with an irritated sniff. “I’m of the Primate caste.”

  She raised her chin, suddenly amused. “You mean monkey.”

  The gargoyle squared his shoulders. “I mean Primate. Now what’s your business here?”

  Gabby bit her lip to stop herself from laughing. The poor man. She could only imagine what he looked like in true form.

  “I am here to call on Hugh Dupuis,” she managed to say without cracking a smile.

  The monkey man—oh, good heavens, it was too ridiculous, she thought—stood aside and allowed Gabby to step into the foyer. Though small, the interior was stylish, with mint-green walls and creamy trim, potted palms at the base of the curved stairwell, and a mahogany porter’s chair, where the gargoyle likely sat waiting for the door knocker to sound.

  The increasingly put-out gargoyle led her from the foyer and down the hallway directly ahead. Underneath a section of ceiling that had been outfitted with a skylight—for there was an odd shaft that cut through the center of the home—he stopped and rapped on a door. A muffled reply came from within, and the gargoyle, with one last glower, opened the door and stood aside.

  Gabby, having been distracted by seeing this gargoyle again, had temporarily forgotten her nerves. She knew what the Daicrypta was and remembered all too well fighting off the disciples who had been studying under Robert Dupuis. Paying Dupuis’s son a call without more than her short sword in her cape for protection was a risk. Rory would be furious. After the second telegram’s arrival, she had told him she wasn’t feeling well and wanted to take a long bath and rest for the day. He likely still thought her sleeping in her darkened room at Waverly House.

  She stepped inside what appeared to be Hugh Dupuis’s study. Through the slanted crimson veil of her hat she saw bookshelves lining the walls, all of them stuffed with texts. Brown leather sofas and club chairs sat before a hearth, and there was a large desk in front of a bay window that jutted out over the slim lane between this home and the neighboring house. Hugh Dupuis was lounging in a chair behind the desk, his raised brows revealing his surprise at seeing her. Her brow lifted as well, for on his right arm was a leather falconry gauntlet, and perched upon it was a massive, oily black corvite demon.

  “Thank you, Carver. That will be all,” Hugh said. The gargoyle grunted before slipping back into the hall and shutting the door loudly.

  Gabby kept her eyes fastened on the Daicrypta doyen, who was dangling something that looked like an earthworm in front of the corvite’s sharp beak. She watched in horror, prepared to see the demon bird snip off Hugh’s fingers as it snatched the bait. Instead, it gently nibbled the squirming end of the worm before taking it from Hugh’s hand. He stroked the bird’s breast while it finished its snack.

  “It’s your pet,” Gabby said, incredulous.

  “I have many of them here. Practically a rookery,” he replied, standing up. He appeared even shorter than he had at the docks, especially with the giant bird perched on his arm for comparison. “Although, at my last count, the number had dropped by one.” He shot her an accusatory glare.

  Gabby remembered Rory hurling his dagger at the corvite on her windowsill.

  “You sent them?” she asked. “You’ve been spying on me?”

  Hugh touched the side of his nose and then pointed his index finger at her. “Ah, Miss Waverly, that is my limitation with these birds. They can’t exactly spy for me. They can, however, answer simple yes-or-no questions.”

  He came out from behind his desk, which was much lower than most. Should Gabby have stood beside it, the tabletop would have been level with her thighs instead of her hips or waist.

  “So you had them answering questions about me,” she said. “And your gargoyle. You had him follow me to the Battersea docks.”

  The gargoyle, Carver, had not accompanied Hugh to the London docks the night before. Not in plain sight, anyway.

  Hugh approached an iron perching stand and, with a soft nudge and whispered instruction, transferred the corvite from his leather gauntlet to the long arm of the stand.

  “You cannot blame me for wanting to keep an eye on you, Miss Waverly. Things got rather messy in Paris, did they not?” He gave the bird another loving rub on its domed skull and then turned to Gabby fully. “However, Carver must have come to you of his own accord. He has free rein, of course.”

  Hugh busied himself with the laces on the leather gauntlet. The crown of his head reached Gabby’s well-corseted chest and no farther. His torso appeared to be the longest part of him, his legs and arms curiously stunted. His appearance, other than his height, held no other malformations.

  “You may ask,” he murmured, finally removing the gauntlet and hanging it on another arm of the perching stand.

  “Ask?” she repeated.

  “Whether I am a dwarf.”

  She felt her cheeks go warm. “It isn’t polite to ask such things.”

  He peered up at her, his sandy-blond hair falling rakishly over his forehead. “It’s also not polite to kill other people’s pets.”

  Gabby turned away from him and moved toward the hearth. “I am afraid that general rule cannot apply to demon pets, Mr. Dupuis. And I didn’t kill it. Rory did—the man who was with me on the docks.”

  Though there was no fire in the hearth, it was warm in the study. She felt a few beads of sweat gathering under her veil and wished to push back the tulle, but she didn’t want to expose her scars just yet.

  “Your Alliance muscle is not with you this morning.”

  Hugh leaned against his low desk and crossed his arms, appraising her silently. He wasn’t overtly handsome, but he had distinctive features that might have been considered charming. Like full lips and wide, dark brown eyes. The most intriguing thing about him wasn’t any physical feature, however. It was the keen intelligence that glowed behind those wide eyes of his.

  “You are Daicrypta.” Her statement required no further explanation.

  Hugh didn’t appear offended. “Most Alliance would not knock upon my door.”

  “I am not Alliance,” Gabby retorted, but then added, “Not yet, at least.”

  He remained quiet, his inspection of her seeming to probe even deeper.

  “I would like to know more about the diffuser nets,” she said, uncomfortable with the stretch of silence. “You said your father invented them?”

  He clenched his jaw with what looked like displeasure. “He did.”

  The thought of Robert Dupuis soured her expression as well. “Your father was a madman. If he hadn’t been stopped, he would have bled my sister dry for her angel blood.”

  Gabby had plenty more to say on the subject of Hugh’s father, but she forced her mouth shut. She wanted information on the diffuser nets too badly to risk being tossed out.

  To her surprise, after a moment, Hugh
laughed. “I see we aren’t very different in our esteem of him, then. He was a madman, Miss Waverly. I left the Paris seat many years ago to put distance between us.”

  He walked away from the perch, toward where Gabby stood in front of the sofa.

  “You see, my father was a genius, but his moral compass was no more evolved than those of the demons he studied. What he wanted rose above all else, and what he wanted was power.”

  “And you wouldn’t have done the same as your father? You wouldn’t have tried to drain my sister’s blood so you could sell it to the Alliance?”

  He huffed, as if offended. “It is not power and influence I seek, Miss Waverly. What I want is to understand the demons that come from that other realm. What do they want here? What are their patterns and desires? What are their limitations, their powers, and even their bodily compositions? The more we know, the better able we are to protect humankind.”

  He sounded as passionate about his research as Nolan and other Alliance fighters did about the skill of demon hunting. Gabby was wary, though. He could have just been saying these things to appeal to her.

  “You don’t perform experiments, as your father did?” she asked, stressing the word so that he knew exactly what sort of experiments she referred to.

  “None that harm human beings,” he answered evenly. “I don’t believe Carver would take very kindly to such goings-on under his roof here, do you?”

  The gargoyle protector at the Paris Daicrypta mansion, Dimitrie, had suffered endlessly for the things done to human test subjects under his roof. Both the victim and the villain were his human charges, putting Dimitrie between a rock and a hard place. He’d failed to protect his human charges—Robert Dupuis’s test subjects—so many times that the angel’s burns he’d received as punishment had scarred his back.

  “If you’re so humane, why don’t the Alliance and Daicrypta work together in a much more visible fashion? It seems you both want the same things,” she said.