by Page Morgan
“Grayson!” she shouted again, but he wasn’t slowing. He also wasn’t cutting straight underneath the tower. He’d veered toward one of the thick pillars.
His hand tightened around her upper arm. “Ingrid, I need you to trust me.”
“Where are we going?” He didn’t answer, but directed her onto the first step of the stairwell leading into the center of the pillar.
Their feet scuffed up a dozen or so iron steps before reaching a platform where the stairwell turned on itself. Ingrid tried to drag her feet, but Grayson tugged her along, up the next section of steps.
“Grayson, tell me what’s happening.” Ingrid was short of breath at the next twist in the stairwell, and by then, she’d had enough. “Grayson!”
He paused on the iron step above her, his chest heaving.
“I’m sorry, Ingrid. I promise you, this is the only way.”
She gripped the cold metal handrail and took a wary glance down. They were already a good distance up.
“Where are we going?” she asked, wishing she’d heeded Luc’s shriek and turned back.
“I’m sorry,” her brother repeated, his grip on her arm unrelenting. “I’m taking you to Axia.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Gabby’s wrists quivered like aspic as she braced her sword with both hands. The laces on her corset seemed to tighten with every shallow breath. She listened as Yann moved through the stables; his lion’s paws scraped along the floorboards about two stalls to the left. The boards groaned under his immense weight.
He wasn’t alone. There had been two thumps on the roof earlier. There were more gargoyles outside. Perhaps dozens. Gabby closed her eyes and tried to curb her fear. This was Gaston’s territory. She was a guest on it, and Gaston would feel Yann’s presence. He’d be here any moment.
As the drag of Yann’s claws drew closer, the horse sharing Gabby’s hiding place lashed its tail and bucked its powerful hind legs. They were intuitive creatures, and this one clearly knew something wicked was near. The animal was as large as Yann’s true form, she wagered. It didn’t have talons, but its wide body was pure muscle. A perfect shield.
Gabby slipped to the other side of the mare and crouched. The stall door was still rolled open—she hadn’t had time to close it.
Screwing up her courage, Gabby slapped the flat side of her sword against the mare’s rear end. The horse bleated, but it didn’t bolt forward as she’d hoped. She gave the animal another tap, but it still played coy with the open stall door. Gabby ground her teeth. If the horse wouldn’t be her shield, then it would be her ride.
She climbed onto a half-tumbled stack of hay and threw herself, belly first, onto the mare’s back. She kept low, swinging her left leg forward to straddle the mare, despite the scandalous rise of her watered silk dress. Who the devil cared if her knickers showed? Gripping the horse round its thick neck, she dug her heels in and the chestnut took off, skittering out of the stall and into the open stables.
The hopes that perhaps Yann had left or that the horse would provide adequate protection proved false. Gabby had nearly made it to the stable doors when a long, whiplike tail pounded into her right side, lifting her clean off the horse’s back. The bay mare was gone before Gabby hit the floor. She lunged to her feet, weaving slightly, her sword out before her. Yann’s lion-and-eagle amalgamation appeared in front of her. The long silver hair covering the lower, lion half of his Chimera form glistened like stardust. His black eagle eyes were cold and alert, his yellow beak hooked into a sharp tip.
His tail lashed out at Gabby and bit into her sword arm. She screamed and the sword clattered to her feet. She reached for a dagger sheathed inside her cape, but her hand only combed the air. Blast! Her cape still hung on a peg behind Yann. She had only one dagger left—the blade at her heel. Yann’s wings snapped open, his starry-night feathers singing a metallic song as they bristled. Gabby had seen his feathers shear through a crypsis demon, the edge of each one as keen as any blessed silver blade.
The Chimera’s tail lashed out at her again, aiming for her shins. Gabby jumped as it cut underneath her heavy skirts. She landed, bent into a crouch, and extracted the blade at her heel. It left her palm, her aim hasty but precise. The dagger drove into the lion’s meaty breast, though nowhere near its heart. Yann shrieked and lurched as his wings collapsed.
Gabby scooped up her dropped sword and bolted through the open stable doors, into the dusky blue sunset light. Her knees nearly gave out when she saw Gaston, still in human form, rushing across the gravel drive, toward the stables.
But then he stopped, his eyes on the space above her head, and in the next second, Gaston shattered out of his clothes and skin. His black leather wings, stretched tight over slender bones, unfolded and he launched himself into the air. Gabby swiveled around to follow his course, losing her balance as she did. She stumbled, her feet and ankles crossing over one another as if she were a baby giraffe taking its first steps.
Gabby’s hip slammed into the gravel drive, but she was still looking up, so she could see a half-feline, half-stag Chimera with feathered wings swooping toward her. Gaston had already collided with a second Chimera, so this one was all hers. Gabby rolled to the left in the last second before the Chimera’s calico legs, tipped with bulbous paws and wicked nails, could land and crush her skull. Still holding her sword, Gabby sliced the blade a few inches above the gravel and hacked into its front legs. Her blade stuck there; the blessed silver was crafted to melt through the flesh of a demon, not a gargoyle. She needed a mercurite-dipped weapon.
The Chimera thrashed and recoiled, and the handle of Gabby’s light sword was ripped from her palm. The silver blade was still embedded in the creature’s legs, but she wasn’t about to try to get it back.
Gabby dug her hands into the cold gravel, heaved herself up, and stumbled toward the chateau. The doors to the library were open, and Constantine filled the entrance.
“Go! Inside!” she screamed, though she knew a gargoyle could easily crash through the glass door or windows of the library.
Constantine, however, didn’t retreat into the relative safety of his library. He twisted the globe topper of his walking stick and withdrew a long, thin rapier. Gabby’s pace faltered a moment as the older gentleman rushed from the doorway, looking for all the world like a soldier entering the fray of battle.
The telltale shriek of a Chimera closing in from behind made Gabby’s legs pump harder.
“Inside! On the table!” Constantine shouted as their shoulders brushed past one another. Before Gabby could ask what on earth he’d meant, his coarse battle cry rent the air. Gabby kept running, her ears filled with the deafening crash of her own pulse and ragged gasping. She didn’t stop as she came to the doors, or even when Constantine’s war cry abruptly cut off.
She plowed into the library, the soles of her boots slipping along the polished parquet floors as she threw out her arms to slow her momentum. A pair of hands clamped around her arms and Gabby screamed before seeing the red-caped Directorate representative, Hathaway, at her side.
“What in Hades is happening?” he bellowed as Gabby tried to wrench her arm from his grip. The table. Constantine had said something about it being on a table.
And then she saw it. The low table in front of the sofa, where Constantine and Hugh had been seated earlier drinking tea. Resting forgotten, atop the lacquered mahogany wood, was the diffuser net. Vander had taken the one designed for Axia, but not this one, designed for demons—and mercurite-dipped for protection against gargoyles.
The tall, mullioned window behind them exploded. Hathaway dropped Gabby’s arm to shield his body from the rain of glass. Jagged shards rained down on Gabby’s neck and scalp as Yann’s shaggy coat shook off the bits, like a dog casting off water. Hathaway came up out of his hunched stance with both swords drawn, and Gabby, ignoring the raw sting of her sliced skin, bounded across the room for the low table.
Yann’s screeches and Hathaway’s grunts of exertion were
a tidal wave, pushing her forward. Gabby dove for the crossbow. Her heart sank. The bloody thing hadn’t been loaded! In her haste, Gabby knocked the bolt, the net tightly wound and ready for loading, onto the floor. She lunged for it as Yann’s next grating shriek thundered directly behind her. The Chimera had beaten his way past Hathaway and now stood at the arm of the sofa, the corvite’s vacant birdcage directly underneath him, the dagger still embedded in his chest.
With unreasonable calm and unnatural strength, Gabby yanked the crossbow string into locking position. Yann’s beak darted forward in a pecking jab, and Gabby braced herself, ready to smash the empty crossbow into his beak.
But another object smashed into Yann first. And then another. Books, Gabby realized as a third volume, this one thick as a dictionary, rammed into his neck.
“Stay away from her, you big ugly bird!”
Gabby gasped as Mama chucked another book at Yann, distracting the Chimera long enough for her to slam the wound-up net into place. She heard the satisfying click, raised the crossbow, and pulled the trigger. The kick of the release knocked Gabby off her feet, and as the net went sprawling through the air, she crashed backward onto the floor. The net spun open as Mama hurled one last book at Yann, striking him in the eye. The silvery mesh slapped down over Yann’s head and back. Though the net didn’t drape entirely over his outstretched wings, it didn’t matter. He shrieked as the mercurite-dipped mesh flattened him, the rim of the net springing spikes that drove into Constantine’s parquet floor. The tips of Yann’s wings, left outside the perimeter, were pinned into place as well.
Gabby heard the bend and twist of metal as the birdcage disappeared under Yann’s thrashing body, and then another, sharper snap and the distinctive peal of shattering glass.
“Gabriella!” Mama dropped her next heavy text and rushed toward her.
“Mama,” she breathed. “That was … that was brilliant!”
Mama reached for her arm and helped her to her feet.
“Well done, Lady Brickton,” Hathaway groaned as he stumbled against the back of the sofa, clutching his bloodied arm to his stomach. The sleeve of his shirt had been flayed open, his skin underneath as well.
Gabby felt Mama stiffen. “I desire no compliments from you, sir.”
Hathaway glowered before turning to see the Chimera, sealed beneath the net, a puddle of blood seeping out beneath the spiked rim. For the briefest moment, Gabby puzzled over the blood—she hadn’t mortally injured him with the dagger, and the net wouldn’t kill, only immobilize. And then the color of the blood registered. Cherry-red. Not black, as a gargoyle’s blood would have been.
Hathaway’s strangled outburst put everything into place. He started toward the captured Chimera with a look of pure shock but drew up short of actually reaching for the net. The blood streaming out from under Yann was neither gargoyle nor human. It was angel blood. The jars had been inside the portmanteau Hugh had perched his birdcage upon earlier.
“Oh dear,” Gabby said, unable to hold back a smile. “That is quite unfortunate for you.”
The Directorate representative made a low growl in his throat. He turned his back on her and stormed out of the library.
Grayson bypassed the exit to the tower’s first level and continued up the stairwell, toward the second. It had been less than a five-minute climb to this point, but that was plenty of time for Marco to home in on Ingrid’s peril.
The gargoyle was frantically flapping his wings as he circled the pillar, searching for a break in the iron that caged the stairwell. Grayson ignored him and took a glance back at his sister instead. His hand still shackled her elbow in an effort to keep her from running away and to help pull her up the steps.
Ingrid’s deep blue eyes met his. She’d said nothing since he’d told her he was taking her to Axia. Rather than ask a slew of questions, his sister was apparently trying to determine his course of action on her own. He doubted she would ever succeed, and they only had another few minutes before reaching the second level, where Axia waited.
“I’m supposed to be convincing you to give up your angel blood willingly,” Grayson said, more winded than he’d have liked.
Ingrid lifted her chin. Grayson saw a spark of understanding.
“Axia bought it?” she asked, taking the next few steps in a short burst of energy.
He slowed. “Bought what?”
Ingrid peered out at Marco, who continued his dizzying circuit around the pillar.
“That I still have some of her blood inside of me, and that there is more elsewhere,” she said. “We just needed to get close to her, and then Vander was going to capture her with Gabby’s net.”
He narrowed his eyes. Gabby’s net? What on earth was that?
Ingrid shook her head. “Never mind! It’s not going to work up here. Vander can’t get a clear shot, not with all this ironwork.” She struggled against his grasp. “We can’t go up, Grayson. We have to get Axia down onto the ground.”
Grayson put more pressure in his fingers and Ingrid yelped. “She won’t come down. She isn’t a fool.”
Ingrid huffed as they spun onto yet another section of steps. “Then what do we do? Why are you even here?”
Grayson loosened his grip. “I have a plan. And like I said, I need you to trust me.”
Ingrid made a little annoyed growl while gasping for air. “You don’t need to ask. Of course I trust you. I just want to know what you plan to do.”
They had nearly made it to the thin waist of the Iron Lady. They’d be at the second level within moments.
“I can’t tell you everything, there isn’t time. And there are too many ears,” he said. As if on cue, a corvite wheeled through the gaps in the iron pillar, most likely to tease Marco. “It’s going to seem bad, Ingrid. But you know me.” He wished he could stop and look her in the eye. There wasn’t time. “You know that I’d do anything to make things right. To fix this.”
He knew he wasn’t making sense, but being vague was both deliberate and necessary. If this was going to work, Ingrid needed to react convincingly in front of Axia. She needed to appear horrified. And truth be told, she was an awful actress.
“Grayson, I’m afraid.” Their feet slammed onto the metal steps, drumming up an echo that nearly drowned out her voice. “I don’t know what you’re planning, but you should know that Axia is faster than before. She has the blood of a severix demon—”
He hushed her when he saw the turnoff for the second level up the next flight of steps.
“Trust your big brother,” he said.
“By a whole six minutes,” she muttered as they turned onto the second level. He tugged gently on her hair, which was loose around her shoulders.
Their footsteps clanged against the iron platform. Grayson suppressed the amusement the old argument usually brought him—Ingrid had been griping about her status as the younger twin for ages. Had the situation been different, Grayson would have kept at it, asking her if it was six minutes to the hour, or if she thought that climb up the stairs had lasted less than six minutes.
But his wistful grin couldn’t withstand the stench of Axia’s hellhounds. They greeted Grayson and Ingrid in front of the stairwell.
Wind from the elevation whipped at Grayson’s coat and trousers, batting his hair back and forth into his eyes. With one hand still clutching Ingrid’s arm, he reached into his trouser pocket and closed his fingers around the needle and syringe. The glass barrel had gone cold.
Ingrid tensed under his hand. He felt her nerves and his as a bubbly sensation in his chest, heard the change in her breathing. When this was all over, Grayson intended to make up for lost time with his sister. Walking so close beside her as the hellhounds led them to the outer rim of the platform, along the promenade, felt natural. For the first time in a long time, he didn’t feel so alone.
Marco appeared on the promenade railing, but the gargoyle made no attempt to rip into the hellhounds. Not yet, at least. That would change within a minute or two, Grayson f
igured.
“You have come to me to strike an accord, Ingrid Waverly?” Axia’s silky voice preceded her hooded figure, which emerged from the curve along the gallery walkway ahead. The sun had slipped beneath the horizon, and the smoke from the fires raging unchecked around the city consumed whatever light dusk usually granted. Below, the spectacle continued, the esplanade having filled with more Alliance and gargoyles.
“I’ll give you back your angel blood.” Ingrid’s hand opened to present a glass vial she must have been clutching the entire climb. Her arm trembled and her voice lacked confidence. Good. Axia would prefer it that way.
“Take it. There is more. If you cease these attacks, it’s yours. If you do not, it will be used against you,” Ingrid said.
Axia had not pushed back her hood, but if the lazy sway of her robes was any indication of her expression, she was not intimidated.
“I believe you do have my blood, though not within your veins,” the fallen angel said. Ingrid shifted uneasily under Grayson’s hand.
“Of course it is in my veins.”
Like Grayson had already considered: an awful actress.
“It is not. And since it is not and that small chalice you present to me now is but a token of your false greeting, I have but one last offer to make you,” Axia said, finished playing the game Ingrid was so clearly losing.
He felt his sister shudder. “I want nothing from you.”
“The world is going to burn, Ingrid Waverly. However, pledge your fealty to me here, now, and you will know only safety.”
It was time.
Grayson released Ingrid’s arm and stepped toward Axia. It was a carefully measured step, one that would not alarm the two hellhounds at the fallen angel’s side. His twin, however, lurched forward, attempting to hold him back. He jerked his arm out of her feeble grasp and dropped to one knee before Axia’s rippling blue robe.
“Your brother has already made his accord with me.”
