by Page Morgan
“Vincent!” Luc strained to be heard above the pandemonium.
The Chimera had to be here. This was his army, his orders. Vincent would want to see his bidding done.
Something thudded against Luc’s back and knocked him off balance. He swung out of his fall and hurdled into the air, barely evading the swipe of the hellhound Duster’s fangs. He resisted the urge to sink his talons into the greasy ginger fur. The Duster was just a spellbound girl, the stretched and ripped amethyst silk gown speckled by dried blood.
A silver gleam parted the air and the hellhound girl went down, howling, a dagger embedded in her flank. A throng of well-armed and red-capped Roman Alliance wearing crisp black suits had entered the orangery. Interspersed among them were nonuniformed and more familiar Alliance members, including Vander Burke.
The Seer saw the injured Duster and jammed his hand crossbow into the chest of one red-capped soldier. “Only the Chimeras, you idiot!”
“We came here for the Dusters!” the red-capped fighter bellowed, and then with a flash of silver, raked a dagger along Vander’s shirtfront. The blade flayed the fabric and sprang blood.
Luc flew over the mewling hellhound Duster with every intention of bowling into the Roman fighter, talons out. Constantine’s short gray form sidled up next to the fighter first, however, and Luc threw out his wings to avoid colliding with the old man. Constantine twisted the round knob of his cane and pulled a thin rapier from within. He raised it to the fighter’s throat and said something lost to Luc’s ears. With a quick nod to Constantine, Vander set his spectacled eyes on Luc and started toward him.
“Where is Ingrid?” Vander shouted, his hand testing the shallow wounds on his chest. What did the fool think? That Luc was going to change back into human form so he could hold a conversation?
Gaston flew between Vander and Luc, his black pennant wings completely blocking the Seer from view.
“Yann isn’t here,” Gaston announced, his vocal cords grinding through three shrill keys.
“I haven’t seen Vincent, either, but he’ll be close,” Luc replied. “I’m leaving to find him.”
Luc surged into the air, his wings brushing against the heavy limbs of a lemon tree and rustling up a bright citrus scent. He’d thought to use one of the gargoyle-sized holes in the glass and iron roof as an exit but met with an impenetrable barrier of gargoyles above the bower of Constantine’s jungle. Neither side seemed to be dealing deadly blows, and Luc felt a twinge of relief. They needed to end Vincent, not his followers.
The orangery’s ground-level door would have to serve. Luc dove back through the maze of shrubbery and trees, which was thinning out now as wings bent and snapped limbs and stalks and as swords hacked into the greenery. The sweet odor of crushed berries, citrus, and tropical blooms being mashed under boots and shredded by talons hit him as he dipped under the dome of a pink flowering tree and then plowed through to the other side. Luc reeled to a stop. The Seer had made his way deeper into the orangery, and now, less than ten yards from Luc, he staggered away from a Chimera—part pelican, part panther. Vincent.
Luc’s mind went blank. His body seized with indecision. He knew what he had to do. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t killed another gargoyle before. But this gargoyle wouldn’t stand still and allow death to come, as Dimitrie had.
Vander clutched his stomach with one hand while holding a short silver sword in the other. The blade dripped with an oily black substance—gargoyle blood—and Vincent’s pickax of a beak wore a thin wash of crimson. It took another vicious stroke toward Vander’s body. The Seer deflected the strike with his sword, but the beak’s rugged cartilage barely received a nick. Vincent’s long, fleshy orange bill came back and slammed into Vander’s sword hand. The blade disappeared into a white-berried shrub. The Seer grappled with his hand crossbow, attempting to load a bolt, while Vincent’s front paw drew back, his black claws extended and hooked for the kill.
Luc moved without thought. Without plan. He hurtled into the slim gap between the Seer and Vincent and planted his foot on Vander’s chest. He shoved him away, perhaps with more force than necessary, and turned to face Vincent head-on—a move he should have made first.
Fire tore down Luc’s left wing, rending through leathery membrane and thin cartilage. Vincent’s claws sheared into Luc’s wing, wrenching him down onto the terra-cotta tiles. The agony was worse than the white-hot scorch of an angel’s burn, but what turned Luc’s stomach and brought on a pulse of panic was the sudden featherlight weight of his left wing. Luc rolled to his right and stole a glance, but he looked away and faced Vincent before he could fully understand what he’d seen: his wing, still attached to the thick bone base in his back, but except for the first peaked gable, it had been almost completely sheared off. The wing drooped, lifeless, on the floor, hanging by only a finger’s length of scaled membrane.
“This is an unexpected windfall,” Vincent snarled. He shook his claws and spattered Luc’s obsidian blood onto the fronds of a palm tree. “Destroying you should be much easier now.”
He used his beak to slash at Luc—a predictable advance Luc easily avoided, even while in agony. He caught the ungainly beak around its wider center, hooking it tight between his forearm and bicep while swinging himself onto Vincent’s white-feathered head. The Chimera bucked and squawked, but Luc held on, giving up a fraction of his hold in order to rake his talons across Vincent’s down-covered neck.
Vincent’s paws crashed onto Luc’s hanging wing. He felt it catch and twist, and with another crack of pain, the final few inches of scales and membrane severed. Vincent threw Luc off, pinwheeling him through the air, into the stand of palms.
“Luc!”
The Seer. Coming back. The idiot. A grating shriek followed the Seer’s shout. Vincent loped to the side, a gleaming silver crossbow bolt lodged in the muscle of his front left leg. Vincent roared at the Seer but, instead of resuming his earlier attack, shot upward, through the combatants above, and out through one of the shattered roof panes.
Luc clambered from the destroyed palms, slick with his own blood, and attempted to lift off after the Chimera. His remaining wing propelled him into a drastic slant, and unable to sustain flight, he thudded back down into the palms.
“Luc—” Vander approached the palms, his eyes riveted to the mangled remains of his wing.
“No pity,” Luc growled. Vander didn’t need to understand the words. He nodded and backed away.
Luc plunged through the broken palms on foot toward the orangery door. Once outside, he’d try to fly again. By fleeing, Vincent had showed the true coward he was. Hopefully his followers had been witnesses to his retreat.
A brassy ridge of light pushed up over the bare trees beyond Constantine’s vineyards, the lawns and trellised rows of pruned vines deserted. Luc fluttered his one wing and the bony base of the one he’d lost. The motion jolted pain through his back. It reached into his arms and legs, and he stumbled, his heart pumping out a panicked rhythm. He’d had scratches along his wings before, and a mercurite-dipped rod jammed through both, but never anything this grave. Wings could heal and regenerate, but Luc didn’t know how long it would take.
Movement to the right of the orangery walls attracted his attention. Vincent was there, on the frosted brown grass, the Seer’s dagger gone from his leg. Luc fought the urge to close his eyes, to sink to his knees and breathe through the agony. He had to pay attention. Had to fight. Giving in now would mean losing everything, including his life.
It’s only pain, he told himself. Luc blinked away the fogged corners of his vision and focused on Vincent with new determination. The sleek curves of his panther’s body began just below the bloody gouges Luc had made in his lithe pelican neck. Luc had seen some horrid Chimera blends, and Vincent’s was one of them.
“Do you actually believe you can have her?” Vincent said, his meaty black paws gliding over the grass toward Luc. The tip of his tail rolled with the suppressed excitement a real panther would show wh
ile stalking its prey.
“When you are dead and I am elder,” Vincent began as he herded Luc backward, “I will enjoy making an example of your beloved abomination. However … I may stop to investigate what the bother is all about first.”
Luc’s snout crinkled back, but he kept his teeth ground together. He wasn’t game for the distraction of a verbal fracas, which seemed to be exactly what Vincent was attempting to incite. He believed he had a leg up on Luc. Luc, with one wing and one bloody stump. Wings were as important to gargoyles as air and blood. Wings were strength and majesty. They were feared. What use was a gargoyle without them?
The ground beneath his feet dropped into a stepped slope, and Luc stumbled into the sunken garden sited beside the orangery. Vincent laughed, and with the sound, an icy spike hammered through Luc’s stomach. Was he too wounded to fight?
Vincent bounded into the garden. The winter had claimed whatever flowers the garden usually had, but there were still carefully pruned boxwoods, and stone and marble statuary was scattered along the crosshatched brick walkways. Constantine had a penchant for armless Italian women, or so it appeared. Luc stopped beside one statue, raised upon a stone pillar.
“Ingrid is more powerful than both of us. Touch her and she’ll bake your insides.”
Vincent sprang forward and spread his wings, his speed lifting him into the air. Luc wrapped his arm around the stone pillar and heaved it down into Vincent’s path. The Chimera reared back to avoid the falling statue while Luc planted his foot on the overturned pillar and launched himself into the air. He didn’t need to fly. He just needed to level the playing field.
Luc caught Vincent’s wing as he fell back to the earth and with a swipe of his talons carved through tough skin and flexible cartilage. White feathers speckled with black blood clouded the air as Vincent and Luc thudded onto the upended Italian statue, cracking it into several pieces. Vincent’s bottom bill ballooned as he screamed, his black paws pummeling Luc in the chest. Luc’s steely plates protected him, but he still sailed backward, his talons ripping free of Vincent’s wing. It hung, useless and bloodied, but Vincent came at Luc again, swinging his beak side to side like a scythe. Luc dodged it once, twice, but on the third swing, the pointed tip raked into his abdomen, tearing a long gash through his scales.
His heel slammed into something and he lost his balance. He fell backward into a fountain, the stump of his wing grinding into the stone of the dry basin. Vincent placed his paws on the rim of the fountain, and his garish pelican’s head, his small black eyes ringed by yellow feathers, loomed over Luc.
He screeched as he drew back, preparing, Luc knew, to impale him with his beak. When he lunged, Luc rolled to the side and Vincent’s bill hammered into the stone basin instead. The Chimera’s paws slid out from underneath him, as if he were a cat on ice. He slipped forward, momentarily stunned.
Luc knew he wouldn’t get another chance like this.
He hooked the talons on one hand and drove them through Vincent’s chest. He clasped the Chimera around the neck and gritted his teeth as he punctured skin, tendon, muscle, and finally, bone. Vincent went rigid. With a twist of his wrist, Luc’s talons sheared through a defiant swath of gristly sinew and ligaments, enlarging the wound. Grunting with resolve, his throat tight with disgust, Luc plunged the rest of his hand into the cavity of Vincent’s rib cage. The Chimera’s black eyes went wide as Luc’s palm filled with what he’d gone in for. He didn’t know if it was pity for Vincent or for himself that made his own chest feel as if it were being torn apart.
“We were human once,” Luc whispered, his hand hot and wet and throbbing with every thrash of Vincent’s heart. “You forgot that. I didn’t.”
He pulled his hand free. Vincent’s body drooped and Luc shoved him to the side with an easy thrust. His Chimera form flopped over the rim of the fountain, his pelican half draped inside the basin. Luc heaved himself to his feet and climbed out of the fountain, his muscles strung tight and bile rising high into his throat. Vincent’s true form deteriorated rapidly; ivory down and black fur pulled back into his skin, leaving him pale and naked; his vicious beak shrank into his face, reshaping into a mouth, chin, and nose; his eyes were still black, but they were human once again. They stared blankly into the basin.
The heart had gone still in Luc’s hand. He backed away, toward the slope of the sunken garden. Inside the orangery he could hear chaos, and when he walked in, Luc found he didn’t have the slightest urge to do more than stand and watch. Alliance fighters were quarreling among themselves on the floor of the orangery, while the gargoyles were still brawling in the air, though no longer physically. They screeched back and forth, arguing about Dusters and Axia and the fate of the city. They all just wanted answers, Luc knew, and no one had them, human or Dispossessed.
Vander saw Luc first. He held his hand up to a Roman, red-faced and shouting, and stepped away from him. That Roman fighter followed Vander’s attention, and then another one beside him did, and so on and so on. Within a minute, the rest of the Alliance had gone quiet. All of them stared at what Luc held in his hand. Gaston dropped from the bowers of the orangery jungle and landed on the tiles in front of Luc.
Constantine’s gargoyle pinned his eyes on Luc’s dripping hand, his expression as inscrutable as ever. Luc stayed where he was as one by one, every last gargoyle dropped to the floor and stared. The silence stretched on, but it wasn’t an expectant kind of quiet. No one waited for Luc to speak or explain.
Luc opened his talons, and the oil-black heart made a wet slap on the tiles.
Gaston lowered himself to one knee and bowed, his clipped ears pointed toward Luc’s feet. The rustle of wings and the scratch of talons echoed off the glass walls as the rest of the Dogs followed their leader’s show of fealty; then the Snakes did the same. Luc searched for Marco as the Wolves dropped to their knees next. Their leader was still gone. How long had it been? Luc wondered, his mind racing toward Ingrid even as the first Chimera got down onto one knee as well. Two more Chimeras knelt, then three more, then five, and then every last one of the Dispossessed had bent in bows of recognition. It was a significant moment, one that would change Luc’s existence forever, but it was weighted by a creeping unease.
The Seer came through the rows of kneeling gargoyles, taking deft steps to avoid brushing against any of them. As he passed, however, the gargoyles straightened. Luc sighed and began to shift back into his human form. The broken ridge of his injured wing sank into his back with such pain it made his vision swim.
“I’m glad it’s you,” Vander said a moment later, his eyes flickering away from Luc. He nodded toward Vincent’s heart. “I’m sure that was necessary in some ancient and ritualistic way.”
Luc shook his head. “Not really.”
Vander huffed a laugh and adjusted his spectacles. “You saved my life,” he mumbled, unable to meet Luc’s eyes. “Thank you.”
Luc looked over Vander’s shoulder. “I hope you savored the experience. It won’t happen again.”
Vander shook his head and started to speak. Luc cut him off.
“I can’t fly and I need to find Marco.”
Constantine’s cane preceded him through the lines of gargoyles. He cleared a space to step out between two Dogs, then coughed and straightened his hat.
“You may have one of my horses,” he said to Luc, and with another small cough, added, “as well as some clothing.”
“Is it Ingrid?” Vander kept his voice low so the Roman troops wouldn’t hear.
Luc followed Constantine, who had started to thread his way back through the Dispossessed.
“That’s what I’m going to find out,” he answered.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Ingrid had not believed anything could be more frightening than coming face to face with Axia in the Underneath. That was before. As the fallen angel, covered as usual in an all-encompassing dark blue robe, glided across the stone square toward Ingrid, she knew she had been wrong. Coming face to face
with Axia here, on earth, was absolutely terrifying.
“You were with me the day before last.” Axia’s voice tolled through the square. The vibrations tickled up through Ingrid’s feet. “However, now, you are absent.”
Ingrid gripped the handle of the dagger hidden within her skirt pocket so hard her knuckles ached. “How do you mean?”
“I can feel all of my seedlings,” Axia replied, her figure now gliding to the left.
The arms of her robes were crossed over her abdomen, the panels tied tightly with golden brocade. She had no notable shape underneath all those folds, and Ingrid worried that Grayson’s theory about Axia’s having taken on a corporeal form was wrong.
“You should not be able to ignore the call of the one who has created you,” Axia said. The writhing shudder of her robe ceased. “I do not understand. How do you defy me? Do traces of my blood linger within you, Ingrid Waverly? Have they magnified just enough to obstruct my will?”
Her deep voice turned shrill, and Ingrid winced. Axia’s robes began to ripple with blustery rolls. Her robes reflected her emotions, and right then they seemed to thrash with unharnessed anger.
“I thought I had reclaimed every drop, leaving none to mature within you,” Axia continued.
Ingrid parted her lips, uncertain what to say. She stammered through the beginnings of an appeal before feeling a rush of air whisper against her shoulder. She turned instinctively and startled backward. Axia stood beside her, her cavernous black hood an arm’s length away. Ingrid looked back to where Axia had just been standing and saw nothing but an evaporating blue mist, a few shades darker than the coming dawn.
“How did you—” she started.
“I will have all of my blood, Ingrid Waverly.”
The robed arm struck out and a pale hand emerged from within the sleeve. It grasped Ingrid’s arm with strength of a machine. Ingrid fumbled the dagger out of her pocket with her free hand and, what felt like a decade later, sliced the blade across Axia’s forearm. The blade never slowed, never met resistance, and then Axia’s robed sleeve was evaporating into another cloud of mist.
