The Wondrous and the Wicked

by Page Morgan

  Instead of joining forces, though, the two underground societies held such contempt for one another that the only communication and partnerships seemed to happen behind closed doors.

  Hugh continued around the sofa, toward the fireless hearth. “My father’s madness tainted the Daicrypta as a whole, and unfortunately, his power extended all over Europe. Except here,” he said, reaching for a small iron knob set into the wood paneling beside the hearth. She hadn’t noticed it before he’d brought her attention to it.

  “Why?” she asked.

  Hugh puckered his brow as he opened the door. “The dynamics of our father-son relationship were, suffice it to say, strained. In short—pardon the pun—I was not his ideal heir.”

  “Because of your height?” She only felt bold enough to mention it because he had done so first with that pun.

  “No,” Hugh said, stepping through the door and into another room. “Because we could not see eye to eye—whoops, I’ve done it again—on what it meant to be Daicrypta.”

  Gabby thought carefully about Hugh’s revelations as she followed him into the connected room, this one windowless, lit by electric wall sconces and glass-domed ceiling fixtures.

  “And what does it mean to you?” she asked.

  Hugh approached a long worktable in the center of the room, outfitted with a series of wide drawers underneath the zinc top.

  “That is something I can only demonstrate over time. Now tell me: what about the diffuser nets are you interested in knowing more about?”

  He rolled one drawer open and removed from it the familiar crossbow and the tucked-up net dart. He set them on the long table.

  “I want to know how they work,” Gabby answered, no longer nervous. “I know they are meant to capture demons, and I’ve seen them hold gargoyles as well. But can these nets also detain other creatures?”

  Hugh processed her request with another stretch of silence. He reminded her of Ingrid in that way. Thinking before reacting. Weighing words as carefully as a jeweler might weigh the value of a mound of gold dust.

  He left the long table and turned to a tall metal filing cabinet against the wall behind him. The six-drawer cabinet was covered in scraps of sketches and newspaper clippings, all fastened with thick, round magnets. Hugh pulled two magnets, currently out of use, free.

  “Here, I want you to hold this,” he instructed, quickly walking back to the table and extending his hand over the zinc top. Gabby frowned at the circular magnet but did as he asked. The magnet was smooth and flat as a river stone.

  He kept the second magnet and held it out in front of him. “Now hold yours out to mine.”

  She kept her lips sealed and did as asked. Her magnet was less than an inch from his when she felt her magnet rear back and waver off to the side.

  “Do you feel the magnetic field?” Hugh asked, their arms hovering over the table. “The way it balloons between your magnet and mine, rejecting their union even though they are made of the same material?”

  Gabby felt her patience beginning to slip. “Yes, I know how magnets work. What does it have to do with the nets?”

  Hugh gave his magnet a small push, forcing his way through the magnetic field and snapping the two black circles together.

  “It’s lodestone,” he said. “A natural-forming magnet.”

  He took the joined magnets and rolled them around in his palm. “When I was a boy, my science tutor brought me a nugget of lodestone one day. After he left, I was in my father’s laboratory, tossing the nugget from one hand to the next.” He did so now, tossing the joined magnets to his other palm and closing them in his fingers, which were also slightly stunted, she noted. “I neared one of the tables to peer at a beaker of demon blood—a substance that was not as easy to come by twenty years ago as it is today.

  “I took a step closer to the table and the beaker flew toward me, smashing against the same hand I had fisted around the lodestone nugget. The shattered beaker glass fell to my feet, but the demon blood”—Hugh held up a finger, as if this would be quite important—“the demon blood had congealed around my closed fist, sealing itself to my skin. The blood continued to move, pushing to slip through the gaps of my fingers and reach the lodestone. Frightened, of course, I opened my hand and dropped the stone. The blood followed, every last drop, and a moment later it had formed as a tumorlike mass around the lodestone on the floor.”

  He told the story so well, Gabby could almost feel the same shock he must have experienced as a boy.

  “Demon blood will seal itself to lodestone,” she said, and with a nod from Hugh, continued. “And the nets are made of lodestone? So the nets will … will seal to the demons they capture?”

  She recalled how the net had closed around the mollug demon and the creature had not been able to move.

  Hugh placed the magnets on the zinc tabletop. He lifted the net bolt by the longest of the four rods running through it, then pushed the steel-cap button on the tip of the bolt. The three other rods immediately lifted and spun, unraveling the tightly tucked net.

  “The netting is crafted of hollow, transparent Parkesine,” Hugh explained, touching the tubular crosshatched net. “It’s flexible, easy to bend and twist. We inject a liquefied compound of lodestone into the Parkesine tubes. The same bond that happens between two magnets forced together also happens to the demon and the net. And on top of that, my father soon discovered that the lodestone also diffused whatever powers or energy the demon possessed. Their blood is simply no match for the magnetic force of the lodestone.”

  The smaller slugs skittering away from the trapped mollug demon made sense now, as did the hellhound in the Daicrypta courtyard in Paris that had avoided the net tented around Ingrid. They would have felt the pull of the lodestone and known to avoid it.

  “The nets don’t seal to Dusters,” Gabby said. Ingrid had been able to move beneath her netted prison, and Vander as well.

  Hugh nodded while admiring the silvery net. “Not enough demon blood in their bloodstream, perhaps?”

  And then Luc, Gabby remembered. He had screeched in pain as he’d pried the net’s stakes out of the ground to free Ingrid. “But what about gargoyles? It seems to hurt them.”

  “That I can explain. The nets are dipped in a thin wash of mercurite.” He then whispered conspiratorially, “While I trust Carver, not all gargoyles are our friends.”

  Gabby reached across the worktable and fingered the netting. This net … it held such promise. She licked her lips before glancing back up at Hugh, who still stood on the opposite side of the table.

  “You know of Axia?”

  Hugh lifted his chin and nodded. “I have my connections.”

  “These nets,” she said, holding the handful of netting in her palm. “Could the lodestone seal itself to an angel?”

  “I would have to have some angel blood to test that theory on. Unfortunately, from what I hear, Axia has recently depleted the only known source of angel blood on the planet.”

  Gabby let her breath go and dropped the netting. Why couldn’t she have discovered these diffuser nets before? Frustrated, she backed away from the table, hopes dashed. Her time here had been wasted.

  “Thank you for answering my questions, Mr. Dupuis,” she said, and began toward the door to his study.

  “Miss Waverly—”

  He was interrupted by a clamor outside the laboratory. Two raised voices, sharp and harsh. Hugh rushed past Gabby and out into the study, where the voices became clearer. They were right outside the study, in the hallway. Gabby groaned as she realized what was happening.

  The door to the study crashed open and Rory and Carver spilled into the room, each one shouting over the other. The corvite, still perched upon its stand, fluttered its wings and growled at the intrusion. Rory saw the bird and puzzled at it a moment before turning his attention to Gabby. He went quiet. Darkly and frighteningly quiet.

  She knew excuses and apologies would only make things worse. Her tongue was sticking to the r
oof of her mouth anyhow.

  Rory crossed the study with measured steps, his eyes briefly catching on Hugh Dupuis as he passed him. The look he sent the Daicrypta doyen was as cold and sharp as one of his blessed daggers.

  “Miss Waverly has done nothing wrong,” Hugh said, surprising Gabby with his show of support.

  Rory ignored him and stopped within inches of Gabby. He pulsed with so much barely contained fury that the space between them felt like the force field between the two magnets she and Hugh had held up against one another.

  “Ye shouldna be here alone wi’ him,” Rory said softly, though not so softly that Hugh and Carver could not hear.

  “I pose no threat to her—romantically or otherwise,” Hugh said, and Gabby knew what he said was true. He wouldn’t harm her, and he had not shown a glimmer of interest in her the way other men might have. Well, before her accident, at least.

  Rory took a tentative glance over his broad shoulder, toward Hugh. The two locked stares, neither of them speaking. They seemed to be reaching some sort of silent understanding, Gabby observed, though she wasn’t sure what it was. She just knew it was time to leave. Before Rory or Carver, who remained in the doorway, his face pinched in disgust at the demon hunter, lost his temper.

  “Good day, Mr. Dupuis,” Gabby said, her breath rushed. She hadn’t removed her cloak or gloves to begin with, so all she had to do was head for the door.

  She heard Rory fall into step behind her, and with a brief look up at Carver, she darted into the hallway, toward the foyer, and outside into the brisk Belgravia air.

  “That was foolish, laoch,” Rory said as soon as the front door had shut behind them. “Ye should ha’ told me where ye were goin’.”

  “You would have never allowed me to go,” she replied.

  He stopped her from taking another step down the sidewalk with a hand on her elbow. Then he tugged her to face him.

  “I ain’t yer keeper, Gabby. If ye wanted to go, all ye had to do was tell me.”

  She didn’t quite know what to say. All of a sudden she felt incurably childish and embarrassed.

  “Oh.”

  He crinkled his forehead and grinned. “No more sneakin’ about, then?”

  She shook her head. “No more sneaking about.” They walked side by side for another few moments before Gabby asked, “How did you know where to find me?”

  Rory ducked under the overreaching branches of a holly hedge. “Nolan told me that if ye went off and did somethin’ reckless, to think of the one place I knew ye shouldna be.”

  Imagining Nolan advising Rory like this made her slightly giddy. However, the feeling crashed before it could buoy her up. She didn’t want to talk of Nolan, or even think of him. She didn’t want to think of the nets, either, and how her one hope for them had, after just a quarter hour, been snuffed out.

  Perhaps she truly was too far away to be of any use after all.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The abbey vaults were the only part of the church that had not yet undergone drastic changes. As Grayson led Chelle into one of the larger spaces in the underground level, he smelled the cold stone of the walls and columns, which split the vaults into domed rooms, much like a piece of honeycomb. He scented the musty air, long trapped beneath the abbey, and the faint tang of rotting wood. But that was it. For the first time, he couldn’t scent Chelle’s blood.

  The mersian blood injection had worked. Vander’s blood had somehow rubbed out everything: the ability to smell blood, the disgusting thirst for it. The aching, itching urge to shift into hellhound form. It was better even than dust reduction. He felt like himself again. He felt happy. So happy, in fact, that he was actually looking forward to Chelle’s teaching him how to wield a blessed silver sword.

  Grayson stopped within a large domed space. There was a solid wall of stone behind him, and three arches in front and on either side, leading out into the maze of vaults. He set the glass lantern in a beehive-shaped niche in the wall and then turned to Chelle. He spread out his arms.

  “I am yours to command,” he quipped, earning from her a suspicious—yet good-humored—glare.

  “You sound strange,” she said, setting the lantern she had been carrying in another one of the alcoves.

  “I feel strange. Strangely wonderful,” he replied.

  This time, Chelle actually smiled wide enough that he saw the slim gap between her two front teeth.

  “Should I ask why?” She shook her head. “Never mind. We have work to do.”

  She had arrived with a long, hard-sided case. She placed it carefully on the floor now and undid the latch.

  Meeting at Hôtel Bastian would not have been too risky—the idea of Chelle’s teaching Grayson how to protect himself with a sword wouldn’t have been far-fetched, especially with the sense of subdued panic and focused preparation among the Alliance fighters now that the Roman troops and Directorate representatives were en route to Paris. However, Grayson had thought it wiser to avoid Alliance headquarters altogether. He imagined that if Chelle’s plan to attack and destroy offending Chimeras was discovered, the consequences would be severe.

  Grayson had suggested the vaults, which were quiet, private, and safe. And he didn’t mind having Chelle all to himself for a little while, either.

  From the case she removed two rapiers of equal length and size and handed one to him. His palm grasped the handle inside the intricate silver hand guard, a feature meant to protect his hand from an opponent’s blade.

  “I’m suddenly wishing I’d taken up fencing back in England,” he said, the leather-wrapped handle slipping around inside his sweaty palm.

  “These are dull, and only for practice. You will require a sharpened sword to pierce a gargoyle’s scales,” Chelle said.

  Grayson tried to catch her eye to see if the words she’d just uttered had bothered her at all. They had bothered him. He couldn’t imagine using any weapon to pierce a gargoyle’s scales.

  For he and Chelle to go out on their own and kill gargoyles bordered on insane. It wasn’t that Grayson didn’t want revenge for what those Chimeras had done—they’d taken Léon’s life and the lives of other Dusters. But Chelle’s passion for this plan, her insistence that it happen, still felt unsubstantiated. It seemed to Grayson that she must have had more than just one reason to put it into action.

  Chelle stepped away and rolled her wrist, cutting her rapier through the air at angles. Grayson removed his jacket, shifting his rapier from one hand to the other before tossing the jacket to the dusty floor.

  “Are you truly ready to kill a gargoyle in cold blood?” he asked.

  She used his distraction to cut her blade up through the air and lunge toward him. He swung his rapier like a cricket bat and knocked the oncoming blade aside.

  “Yes,” she answered. The lack of hesitation or doubt unsettled him.

  “If you really think killing them is the way to solve the problem, what makes us any better than the Chimeras?” he asked.

  Chelle hardened her gaze at being likened to the Dispossessed.

  “The gargoyles don’t care about stopping Axia. They are doing this to prove their power and strength.” She swung her blade again, this time in a downward, diagonal slice.

  Grayson clashed his blade into hers and held it level.

  “They are doing it because they will take any opportunity of unrest to lash out at humans,” Chelle continued, her teeth gritted with the effort of throwing off the pressure of Grayson’s rapier.

  He loosened the tension in his arm and their blades swung toward the floor. Chelle breathed heavily, her nostrils flaring, and not just from physical exertion. His accusing the Alliance of being no better than the ruthless Chimeras had upset her more than he’d intended.

  “What is it?” he asked, surprising her with a lunge and thrust of his own. Chelle intercepted the point of his blade, but not before it came dangerously close to her throat. “Why do you despise the Dispossessed the way you do?”

  She’d n
ever tried to hide how she felt about the gargoyles. She didn’t trust them, and was definitely in favor of the proposed regulations to put the Dispossessed on shorter leashes.

  The fire in Chelle’s expression sputtered, and though it was only for a moment, Grayson thought he saw a touch of sad vulnerability. She glazed it back over with indignation before knocking Grayson’s blade aside. She moved swiftly, the point of her rapier now nudging his pectorals.

  “Something happened,” he wagered, knowing full well Chelle might nick him for it.

  She didn’t. Instead, she let the tip glide down the front of his waistcoat. The distant sadness came back.

  “My father was a hunter. One of the best,” she said, her voice no longer gruff or defensive. The changing light of the two lanterns cast fingers of shadows across her face. “He was on patrol in the Marais one night when a gargoyle … it just attacked. No warning. No reason. The gargoyle’s talons ripped through his arms, shearing muscle and breaking bone.”

  Chelle squeezed her eyes shut against the unbearable drain of memories. Grayson knew what it felt like to remember awful things and experience them again and again.

  “There was too much damage. Even after he’d healed he wasn’t able to hold a sword without it trembling and then clattering to the ground. His hands just couldn’t stay closed around the handle. After that, they stuck him in the weapons room. His new duty was to polish and sharpen the blades he’d once wielded with such grace and skill.”

  Grayson watched as Chelle’s face, screwed up like a prune, began to soften.

  “What happened to him?” he asked.

  Eyes still closed, Chelle swiped at a tear before Grayson could see it fall past her lashes.

  “What do you think happened to him?” she bit off, the return of her defensive style oddly comforting.

  Chelle’s father was dead. If he had been alive, he would have still been in the weapons room at Hôtel Bastian polishing silver. How he’d died wasn’t much of a mystery, either.