The Wondrous and the Wicked

by Page Morgan

  The bay mare in the warm stables snuffled and stomped one of its hind legs. Gabby nearly laughed. She felt like making the same complaint.

  “It’s not fun being left behind, is it?” she asked, rubbing the mare’s snout once more before leaving her be.

  Gabby had worn her cloak but had removed it, her Prussian blue day dress warm enough for the gathered heat in the stables. Her cloak hung on a peg driven into a beam near the doors, and as she ambled along the weathered floorboards, hands clasped behind her back, she saw a glint of silver from within the folds of the cloak. She always kept the pommel of the sword Nolan had given her at a high polish, though it had been some time since she and Rory had last sparred.

  Gabby crossed to the cloak, withdrew the sword, and as usual, admired the craftsmanship. Nolan would not have given it to her had he not believed that she would one day wield it well. Perhaps he was too protective, too coddling, but she also knew he was right. When she and Rory had come across the mollug demon on the London docks and Rory had simply handed her the diffuser net, expecting her to figure it out on her own, she’d been furious. And scared. She wasn’t ready yet. But she would be someday.

  Gabby cut the sword through the air and sank into a defensive crouch. Rotating on one heel, she spun and slashed the blade in a clean stroke, then, taking hold of the handle with both hands, practiced one of the offensive moves Rory had shown her. The sword was the perfect size and weight for her, showing yet again just how well Nolan knew her. Gabby imagined him with her, circling her as she thrust and cut, calling out instructions or correcting a blunder, his eyes sharp and his lips turned up in a mischievous smirk. He would be thinking about kissing her, no doubt. And she would chastise him for distracting her.

  Gabby heard a soft thump as she punctured the air in front of her with the tip of the sword. She held still, her heart beating fast and making her breathing loud. The noise had sounded as if it came from overhead. She stood tall, her sword falling until the tip brushed along the hay-strewn floor.

  Another thump came, this one louder than before. Something had landed on the roof. Gabby’s eyes drifted up. She stared at the beamed ceiling and the curved rafters and for a fleeting moment convinced herself it had only been a pair of birds.

  Her throat felt unnaturally dry as she regripped the handle of her sword and eyed the doors. She’d shut them behind her to keep out the cold, but she hadn’t thrown the heavy wooden bolt into place. Instinct, base and immediate, urged her to hide. To duck into one of the empty stalls or climb into the hayloft. She imagined Nolan issuing another piece of advice: Trust your instinct, lass.

  Gabby swung herself into the nearest stall just seconds before the stable doors crashed inward. They sounded as if they’d been blown open by a black-powder explosion. The stall belonged to the chestnut she’d been petting. Gabby retreated to a rear corner of the stall, the mare whinnying and stomping.

  “I know you’re in here.”

  Gabby’s stomach bottomed out at the sound of the canyon-deep voice that filled the stables.

  “Did you believe I would forget?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut and exhaled a tremulous breath. The total silence allowed her to hear the soft rush of a gargoyle coalescing.

  Yann had come for her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Champs de Mars had been totally surrounded by armed citizens and the French Imperial Guard by the time Ingrid, Hugh, Nolan, and Rory had approached the exterior of the exhibition buildings. They’d come on foot, Luc having stopped the landau two blocks distant in an attempt to go unnoticed by Axia and her demons. He had argued, once again, against Ingrid’s leaving his side. And Ingrid had been reluctant to, as well. She couldn’t show her unease, however, considering the whole plan had been her idea.

  Eventually, Luc and Marco had assented that they could not be part of Ingrid’s small party when she entered the Champs de Mars. The demons there would only trigger their impulse to coalesce and to shield Ingrid from danger, when danger was exactly what Ingrid needed to find. She needed to get close to Axia and distract her long enough for Vander to sight a clear shot from where he would be hiding with an unenthusiastic Hans.

  A trio of uniformed military policemen stepped into their path, just in front of an arched entrance to the Champs de Mars.

  “Vous n’avez pas permission d’entrer,” one of the policemen said, his eyes alighting on the vest of blades worn by Rory, who had left his coat purposely unbuttoned.

  “Listen to me carefully,” Nolan said, his attention fixed on the flat roofline of the exhibition halls. “Bullets are useless against these creatures. You need silver blades, and you need to have them blessed.”

  The trio of policemen glanced skeptically at one another, then back at Nolan and the broadsword he’d just drawn from his hip scabbard.

  “Steel or iron won’t work. It has to be silver.”

  The policeman switched to English. “And who are you?”

  Nolan finished inspecting the roofline and met the man’s eyes. “Someone who has fought these things before and won. Let us through. We’re here to help.”

  The absence of his ever-present sarcasm made Ingrid feel the sheer magnitude of what was to come. She wished for more confidence. She wished for the sputter of electricity beneath her skin. Instead, all she had was the erratic thumping of her pulse, a knot in the pit of her stomach, and a curious light-headedness as the policemen parted to allow them to pass. As she followed Nolan closely, Rory and Hugh behind her, she heard a man giving orders to search for silver weapons. Another was muttering a prayer for the souls walking toward their own deaths. Ingrid wished she hadn’t heard that part but praised herself for at least knowing more French than she used to.

  The long, tunnel-like entrance took them past entrances to the exhibition halls and out into the esplanade, a rectangle closed in on three sides, the fourth capped by the Eiffel Tower. A fiery sunset glow, hazed by smoke and clouds of ash, pinked the white plaster façade of the opulent Château d’Eau. The smokestack on the far right end of the Palace of Electricity, directly behind the chateau’s scalloped roofline, caught her attention. A gargoyle perched atop the stack. It was Marco, she realized, with a slight dip in her spirits. Luc would not have been able to fly up there without help. He couldn’t fly at all, and not for the first time, she wondered how he would get to her if she needed him.

  “Eyes down,” Hugh whispered as he came up beside her.

  Ingrid dragged her gaze back toward the ground and immediately took an unintentional step in reverse. Demons occupied nearly every patch of grass, every melting mound of snow. Hellhounds circled humans, who huddled together for what she assumed was both warmth and comfort. Corvites perched upon the crocodile- and goddess-shaped fountainheads of the Château d’Eau, and tiny, monkey-shaped creatures with curling horns swung from the swaths of red-and-white striped fabric shading each arcade directly across the esplanade.

  A lectrux demon scuttled down the gravel walk toward them, its antennae sizzling with electric light. A wolf-shaped demon, half the size of a hellhound but with equally vicious fangs, slammed into the lectrux, knocking it off course. The lectrux spit more electricity and shocked the wolf but hung back. Nothing else approached, though Ingrid was certain every demon and Duster within the Champs de Mars was watching them stand underneath the domed colonnade entrance.

  “Hugh,” Rory said, his hands already holding the double swords he’d freed from his back sheath. “Ye canna stay.”

  Despite Rory’s discontent, the London Daicrypta doyen had insisted upon entering the Champs de Mars with them. He was neither tall nor brawny, but he had training, he’d assured them, and he knew more about demons and their weaknesses than the Alliance did.

  “It appears I cannot leave, either,” Hugh replied.

  Ingrid turned around and saw a giant black spider crawling along the ceiling of the entrance arcade. Its legs were easily the length of Ingrid’s entire body, its hairy belly and head
the size of a hansom cab. The arachnae demon ceased moving and clung, upside down, to the ceiling, blocking their escape.

  “Do you see him?” Ingrid whispered, trying to keep her eyes lowered instead of up, searching along the roofline for Vander’s creeping form.

  “We won’t see him,” Nolan answered just as softly. She supposed that meant the demons and Axia wouldn’t, either. If they did, all would be lost.

  “I suppose we should wander out like the sacrificial lambs we are,” Nolan said next, attempting nonchalance. Ingrid could still hear his underlying uncertainty.

  Ingrid let her gaze bounce up toward the smokestack again. Marco was gone, but a half-dozen or more shadowy figures hunched on the cars of the giant Ferris wheel. Anyone seated within one of those passenger cars would have just as good a view of Paris as someone standing on the Eiffel Tower, though she was certain the winged creatures now atop them, with their night vision, had a far superior view than even that.

  Ingrid stepped from the domed colonnade and matched Nolan’s cautious pace. There were no lights along the esplanade, electric or gas, but within minutes they would be required. Ingrid and Nolan marched along the gravel walk toward the looming Iron Lady. The path cleared for them as they went, hellhounds slinking to the periphery, a bench-shaped appendius loping out of the way, though it kept its spiked teeth on menacing display.

  Axia was the only being capable of ordering these beasts to refrain from attacking. She was here. And Ingrid had reached the point in her rather hastily thought-out plan where she officially became bait.

  “Axia!” Ingrid’s voice reverberated off the surrounding buildings. The utter stillness of the esplanade, and of Paris beyond the square of halls, made her voice sound as though it belonged to a giant. She cringed but called the angel’s name again anyway.

  “Axia, come out!” Nerves squeezed her vocal cords and made her words tremble. “You were right! I still have your blood in my veins, and you can have it back—on one condition!”

  She took the clear glass vial from her skirt pocket and held it above her head.

  “This is my blood! Take it and see for yourself!”

  The esplanade remained dark and quiet. A chill worked its way up Ingrid’s spine as the sun sank quickly behind the fire-kissed brume.

  “She isn’t coming,” she murmured, lips barely moving, her arm still high in the air.

  “Give her a moment,” Hugh replied.

  For the first time, Ingrid allowed herself to imagine what might happen should Axia call her bluff. Two demon hunters, one Daicrypta, and one human girl against an arena filled with demons and spellbound Dusters did not an even fight make. And Ingrid would be useless. At least Hugh had a sword and some training. If only she still had a fraction of her lectrux power. It had been two full days since her first mersian blood injection.… Shouldn’t it have been wearing off by now? Shouldn’t she have been feeling something?

  This was more frustrating than before, when she’d had no control over the electric impulses. It wasn’t until her nightmarish imprisonment in the Daicrypta draining room with Hugh’s father that she had realized she could draw electricity from other sources around her—lightbulbs, rushing water, stormy skies … anything that generated electricity.

  The incessant shivers skittering along Ingrid’s back suddenly turned to steel. She stood taller, shoulders squared, afraid even to breathe for fear of losing hold of the realization that had just struck her. She spun around and looked toward the opposite end of the Champs de Mars, past the magnificent façade and fountains of the Château d’Eau, to the sloped glass ceilings of the building behind it. The Palace of Electricity.

  The Exposition Universelle wasn’t set to open for another week, but Ingrid knew the Palace of Electricity was in working order—she and Vander had heard the low hum of the machines inside less than a week before. Ingrid had felt the current of tremors rolling through the air. The air was still now, though, the building likely abandoned. But underneath that darkened glass roof were the generators that would power the entire fair. The Eiffel Tower would no longer be lit from the top with gaslights but with thousands of bulbs strung along its sides. She knew what it felt like to draw energy from a single powered bulb. But thousands of them? A whole building of generated power?

  Her distraction had not gone unnoticed.

  Hugh touched her arm lightly. “Lady Ingrid?”

  “That building,” she said, still dazed by her realization. “The Palace of Electricity.”

  Nolan stood close enough for Ingrid to feel his side knocking gently against hers. “What about it?”

  She felt a cramp of desire, of pure need, close around her stomach. She’d never thought she’d long for her ability like this.

  “I need it turned on.”

  Hugh cleared his throat and started to speak, when a high, keening wail spiraled up from somewhere within the Champs de Mars. Other sounds joined the single moan—grunting and hissing, rasps of pain. The huddled Dusters, penned in by demons, sank to the ground, clutching their heads, fists pounding against their ears.

  “This is not a promising sign,” Nolan said, his broadsword sweeping up into a defensive position.

  The moans of the Dusters stopped in unison and the esplanade was silent once again. Only now, the hellhounds that had been slowly circling the Dusters stepped out of their rotations, allowing the humans freedom. They weren’t free, though. Ingrid knew better. Axia had reached into their minds and taken up the puppet master’s strings.

  What she hadn’t taken was the bait.

  A rattilus came at them, whipping its serrated scorpion tail, the hooked quills looking as though they could saw through flesh and bone. The tail scythed once past Nolan’s kneecaps, and on the second attempt, Nolan’s sword connected. The blade sheared through, and before the lopped-off tail could even hit the ground, his sword speared the thick, crusty exoskeleton of the creature. The explosion of green death sparks hung in the air a pregnant moment. As the last one disappeared and no other demon or enthralled Duster attacked, Ingrid began to wonder if Axia had changed her mind.

  She hadn’t.

  Ingrid screamed as Rory pitched a dagger in her direction. The blade whistled past her shoulder and thudded into one of the wolf demons midleap, its paws less than a foot away from Ingrid’s head.

  “We could use our wings now!” Nolan screamed, though he hadn’t needed to. The sky above the Champs de Mars darkened as scores of gargoyles swooped, dropping into the esplanade.

  Their contingency plan wouldn’t last, however; not if Axia forced the Dispossessed into submission the way she’d done with Marco that morning. It would only give them enough time to backtrack out of the esplanade.

  And then they’d be at the beginning all over again. No ground gained. All hope dashed.

  Rory and Nolan had widened their circle, their swords flashing in every direction as they attempted to beat back the demons coming for them. Hugh had his sword in hand, and though it was only the size of Gabby’s short sword, it looked enormous and unwieldy in his grasp.

  “Lady Ingrid, you should at least have a dagger,” Hugh said, his eyes on the ever-shifting battle around them.

  “I wouldn’t know how to use it,” she replied, searching the esplanade for the one-winged gargoyle she wanted to see more than anything else. It was too chaotic, though. and the fading light was tingeing every thrashing body—human, demon, and gargoyle—the color of mud. Any moment now she expected to see Marco’s wings slicing toward her. He would seal her to his chest and twirl her up to safety, pulling her from her one plan to destroy Axia.

  “Ingrid!”

  The shout had come from a distance, but it had still hammered into her, clear and strong. Breath lodged in her chest, Ingrid searched the esplanade, where the path widened out to bracket the base of the Eiffel Tower.

  She spotted him, his arm waving manically over his head to capture her attention. And this time, it wasn’t a delusion demon.

  “
Grayson.” She stood tall again and waved madly in return. “Grayson!”

  He stood alone, just out from underneath the belly of the tower. He hadn’t shifted into hellhound form, so she knew his mersian blood, like hers, was still holding strong.

  “Mr. Dupuis!” Ingrid turned to the Daicrypta doyen and grasped his arm. “The Palace of Electricity—can you get inside? Can you work the machines?”

  Hugh had yet to swing his sword, Rory and Nolan doing a fine job of caging the both of them off from approaching threats.

  “Breaking in and working the machinery should be simple,” he answered, the first hint of panic lacing his tone. “If I don’t become a tasty hors d’oeuvre first.”

  “See that you don’t,” Ingrid said.

  “Yes, well, I hope—Wait! Miss Waverly!” But Ingrid had already lifted the hem of her skirts and started dashing along the gravel esplanade to meet Grayson.

  Her brother rushed forward, his arm outstretched and ready to hook hers as soon as he was close enough. She heard a sharp shriek behind her, near the Château d’Eau. It reached into her stomach and gave a ferocious tug. Somehow she knew it had been Luc, that he’d been calling to her, and yet she couldn’t stop and turn back, not with her twin so close.

  Grayson took her arm and immediately started hauling her toward the tower pillars. The Champs de Mars ended on the other side of the tower, and unlike at the other end of the esplanade, there was no building to block their exit. They could keep running to the Seine if they liked.

  “We can’t leave!” Ingrid heard herself shouting, breathless. She could do nothing to help, either, but ducking out for safety would have been cowardly. And if Hugh got the generators going in the Palace of Electricity, she might actually have a weapon more powerful than any blessed silver blade out there.