The Wondrous and the Wicked

by Page Morgan

“No … no, he hasn’t,” Ingrid said, though Grayson detected her uncertainty as he bowed his head before Axia. A show of devotion. Of fealty.

  His stomach in knots, Grayson waited. And then Axia gave him exactly what he needed. She extended her hand and touched him on the shoulder. He moved slowly, clasping his free hand over hers. Her hand was hidden, once again, within her robe, but the fabric was thin. It would be easy to pierce.

  “Grayson, stop!” Ingrid shouted.

  Axia began to laugh. She would be distracted, at least for a second. Grayson started to pull the syringe from his pocket. Marco, his talons scraping the high metal railing of the promenade as he grew restless, screeched. Damn it.

  Grayson felt Axia’s hand tense; start to pull away. The edges of her robe began to glow, golden light seeping out from the hem, from the two panels crossed and bound by a rope belt. The iron floor quaked as Marco slammed onto it, felled, Grayson knew, by Axia’s power. He had to do it now.

  Grayson moved fast. He clenched his fingers around Axia’s hand, drew out the needle, and, holding her firm, stabbed at her arm. He felt resistance as the needle sank into her flesh. Grayson pressed the plunger hard, emptying as much of the mersian blood as he could before she, or her hounds, could stop him. But in the next second, Grayson toppled forward. Axia had vanished, the needle ripped out of his hand.

  Marco roared as he surged up, freed by Axia’s momentary loss of control. Grayson flattened himself to the grime-covered floor as the gargoyle skimmed overhead, his target now standing deeper within the tower. Grayson watched as a second Axia appeared to the left of Marco, then a third to his right; the one Marco had been going for was quickly fading. Ingrid had tried to warn him that Axia was fast, but not that she could make copies of herself.

  “Grayson!” Ingrid shouted. He pushed himself to his feet and saw that a hellhound had backed Ingrid up against a support beam.

  “Get away from her!” Grayson shouted as Axia’s copies appeared in a dizzying circle around him.

  Marco chased the fallen angel, his talons slicing through mist instead of flesh. The gargoyle roared his frustration, his wings cutting dangerously close to Grayson as he swerved after Axia.

  The hellhound cornering Ingrid turned its head toward Grayson, its red lantern eyes narrowing. The beast turned its body and came at him. But then a black-scaled gargoyle with only one wing appeared out of nowhere, colliding with the hound and sending the beast off course. The hound recovered and pushed back at the one-winged gargoyle, blocking Grayson from reaching Ingrid’s side once again. Behind him, Marco shrieked. As Grayson turned, he saw that one of the other hellhounds had raked its claws through his wing, snagging on one of the bony ridges.

  Grayson was noticing that every last Axia had faded when the third hellhound rammed into him—and a shock of brutal pain tore through his stomach. He heard Ingrid’s scream at the same second he saw the hellhound’s fang protruding from his abdomen.

  Grayson knew he was going to die before his feet left the floor. Before the hellhound, its hot breath gusting against his back, bounded toward the railing. And then they were over it, out into the air, falling, Grayson slipping off of the beast’s long fang. Ingrid screamed his name as the wind took him, the ground rushing up at a mesmerizing speed. He had seconds, he knew. Seconds to say a final prayer that he’d made a difference tonight.

  Grayson closed his eyes, ready.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Luc caught Ingrid around the waist as her frenzied screams for Grayson grated through his skull. He shrieked for Marco to follow, and with one last lash of his tail toward the hellhound he’d been battling, launched himself over the railing. His single wing hadn’t been strong enough to beat his way up to the second level—he’d had to climb the stairwell set alongside the tracks for the lift—and it wasn’t able to glide them safely to the ground now, either.

  Marco’s talons clamped around the bony wing stump and leveled out Luc’s twirling fall. The Wolf guided them to the ground, Ingrid still screaming her brother’s name.

  Grayson had hit a few yards from where Luc and Marco touched down. Luc spun around and unfurled his wing, wanting to shield Ingrid from the sight that had just cleaved through Luc like a dull axe.

  “Don’t look,” he said, though his vocal cords mangled the words. Had Ingrid understood them, she wouldn’t have obeyed. She writhed in Luc’s grasp and he let her go, not wanting his talons to accidentally slide along her arms in his attempt to hold her still.

  She jerked out to the side, beyond his wing—and saw.

  Ingrid fell forward, one arm braced across her stomach as her face crumpled, her mouth opening to a silent scream. Luc couldn’t protect her, not from this. He could do nothing more than stand beside her as she stumbled to her brother’s broken body, his arms and legs splayed at odd angles, his head turned toward Ingrid’s approach. His eyes were open and empty, and Ingrid crashed onto her knees at his side. She dug the heels of her palms into her temples, drew in a breath of air, and screamed.

  Marco doubled over as her wail echoed across the Champs de Mars, her anguish cutting through the Wolf.

  Luc knew this pain. He’d experienced it the wintry day Suzette’s body had been delivered home, her soaked dress frozen stiff, her skin the color of ash. He’d clung to her rigid body as his parents had dissolved into shouts and sobs, the men who’d dragged her out of the Seine muttering useless apologies. Luc had rocked her, shook her, railed at her to wake up just as Ingrid was now screaming at Grayson to not be dead.

  Her high, keening wail had paralyzed those in battle nearby on the esplanade, though only for a moment. The Dusters, having been released from Axia’s spell, had merged back into their huddles. A new influx of Alliance fighters and Dispossessed continued to clash with the demons—gaining ground in their direction, Luc noted. They had to move, and he knew he’d have to drag Ingrid away from Grayson’s side.

  “Such a pity.”

  Axia’s bellowing voice split through the battle, as clear and powerful as a bell. Luc couldn’t see her, but in the next second, he felt her. The familiar weight of an angel’s presence drove Luc and Marco and all gargoyles on the ground to their knees. The Dispossessed churning in the sky over the Champs de Mars plunged toward the earth.

  Though the all-out battle slowed, the Alliance and demons continued to clash in intermittent bursts. A light started to brighten near the fountains of the Château d’Eau, and Luc heard a strange humming sound. The growls of hellhounds and the clicking of Drainer wings were closer, though. Stuck like this, Luc and the other gargoyles would be at the mercy of whatever demon wished to tear into them.

  “I grow weary of this resistance,” Axia said, and straining to crane his neck, Luc saw her gliding down the center of the esplanade. She had pushed back her hood, and though he couldn’t look directly at her, he saw that she had changed from what she’d been in the Underneath. Her body had become more human. “You have all been so accommodating,” she went on, “to come here and allow me to extinguish it.”

  She glowed, though not like Irindi, whose figure was always completely hidden within her shuddering ball of white light. Axia merely shimmered, as if she had conjured stage lights to hover over her. Her hellhound guards, still at her sides, enclosed her like two granite walls. Vander needed a better shot than that.

  The strange humming sound had grown steadily louder, and Luc realized Ingrid had ceased screaming. She’d ceased sobbing. He curled around to see her. Ingrid no longer knelt beside Grayson’s body. She stood beside it, facing up the esplanade. Her arms hung limply at her side, her chin tucked into her neck, her wrathful eyes locked on Axia.

  Ingrid wasn’t breathing. She didn’t need air. She didn’t need anything but vengeance, hot, ruthless, and swift. When she had seen her twin lying still on the cold ground, something deep inside her had splintered off. A part of her that she would never get back. It had belonged to Grayson, and he had taken it with him.

  He was dead. He was
gone. The pain was too much, too uncontrollable, to be real.

  Ingrid glared up the esplanade, her gaze unwavering as Axia drew to a halt. Grayson had stuck Axia with one of Vander’s needles, injected her with mersian blood. It had been his plan, the one he’d asked her to trust blindly. He’d meant to cancel out the angel’s severix powers and failed. Ingrid felt the last echoes of his sorrow, his disappointment. One final shared emotion.

  And then Ingrid started to shake. Her body trembled. Not with cold or fury or shock, but with something else. Something much more useful. Behind the fallen angel, the lights inside the Palace of Electricity had brightened. Hugh Dupuis had done it. The generators inside had hummed to life, and inside Ingrid, her lectrux blood flared.

  “Your brother could have been magnificent,” Axia said, her voice ringing out crisp and clear even as Alliance fighters and Underneath creatures continued to clash and the gargoyles, pinned to the ground, shrieked in frustration.

  Ingrid moved forward, burning beneath her skin. The current rolled and twisted, licking down her arms and up again, curling past her shoulders. Whether because of natural depletion, grief, or the newly churning power underneath the Palace of Electricity’s glass ceiling, Vander’s mersian blood no longer held sway. The electricity fanned out into her chest, coursing down her spine into her legs. This was her fury, raw and untamed.

  As Ingrid continued up the esplanade, lights began popping on inside the exhibition buildings. The electrical charge in the air notched, and Ingrid reached for it. She breathed it in. Gathered it close.

  One of Axia’s hounds grew restless and lunged. Ingrid didn’t flinch. She simply held out her hand. Vines of electricity intercepted the beast and sent it sprawling backward. It had been so easy, so effortless, and Ingrid glided on toward Axia, her steps deliberate and controlled.

  “You attempt to challenge me, Ingrid Waverly?” Axia threw her voice along the esplanade, where the subdued gargoyles all suddenly shot to their feet. No sooner had they lifted their wings for flight than they came crashing down again.

  A weakness in Axia’s control. A ripple in her concentration.

  The electric current had dammed up in Ingrid’s throat, and she couldn’t speak. She knew that at any moment Axia could reinstate her control over the Dusters—and that she herself was no longer safe from it.

  “You believe your demon blood can best my own?” The fallen angel threw her arms up, her palms facing out—a signal for the rest of her demons to hold off. “I accept the challenge. My blood against yours. When I am finished, I will weed you out.”

  Ingrid kept her concentration on the lights brightening the exhibition halls and on the fountainheads, now turned on and jetting water. Behind her, Ingrid felt the charge of thousands of lightbulbs as they winked on along the tower.

  She held her arms out at her sides—pulled—and threw her arms forward. Lightning cracked from her fingertips with a blinding flash. But Axia had cast herself aside, leaving behind a fade, unscathed. The gargoyles rose and fell as the fallen angel’s attention slipped, then strengthened. Her wild laughter came from a few yards to the left.

  “I am faster than lightning,” Axia trilled before severing herself yet again. She reappeared directly beside Ingrid, who unleashed another coil of lightning.

  The Dispossessed surged up and crashed down yet again as the lightning burned through Axia’s fade.

  “Faster than your brother’s fall,” Axia whispered in Ingrid’s ear.

  Ingrid whipped around. The mention of her brother eviscerated her frustration and replenished her fury. Briars of electricity sizzled from her fingers, toward Axia, who predictably, cast a fade and vanished.

  Ingrid was about to turn and search for her yet again when the fade did something different. It didn’t evaporate like mist. It became solid again. It wasn’t a fade. It was still Axia. Her smile wilted. Axia tried to sever herself once more, started to disappear—Ingrid saw the blurred lines of her form stretching out into another direction. But her body snapped right back, slamming into her fade, like an elastic band snapping back to its starting point.

  Ingrid held Axia’s confounded stare. Her demon power wouldn’t work. The mersian blood. Grayson hadn’t failed. He’d done it!

  “Vander—now!”

  She heard Nolan’s shout and saw Luc and Marco pitch forward, released from Axia’s hold, just as a howling wind whipped through the esplanade. It thrashed the branches of the trees and sprayed the fountain water in angled sheets, the icy mist flecking Ingrid’s face.

  No longer laughing, Axia threw down the full force of her angelic power, buckling Luc and Marco at the knees. Ingrid expected to feel the ground quaking, to see blackness seeping into the corners of her eyes as Axia dragged her under the Dusters’ spell. But Ingrid could still see, still stand. And then she remembered what Axia had said: I will weed you out.

  A hellhound, a Drainer, and a rattilus bore down on Ingrid, their orders to hold back terminated. She could attempt to stun them all, the way she’d done to that first hellhound. But they would just keep coming, one demon after another, while Axia held the gargoyles in submission. Ingrid knew she could not electrocute every last demon here.

  They had come here for Axia. Grayson had come here for Axia.

  Time in the Champs de Mars slowed, and though the demons were nearing, Ingrid didn’t see them. She saw Grayson, the two of them as children. They were sitting in the grass, comparing their birthmarks; together in Hyde Park, Grayson playfully nudging her closer to the Serpentine River; in their father’s library, building a domino line out of books; at Victoria Station before he left for Paris last fall, twirling her in a circle, trying to make her dizzy so she wouldn’t see his anxiety; Grayson, in the Underneath, bite marks riddling his skin.

  Grayson. Dead.

  And there it was again. The sob that poured through her chest and into her throat, eddied through her head, going everywhere but out of her mouth. She dragged in air, gulping it, trying to release the scream. To release the pain.

  The demons bearing down on her were obliterated by blessed silver before they could touch her, but there were more on their way. Ingrid paid them no attention. What she saw were the bulbs along the Eiffel Tower, brightening, straining, and then bursting. The lights within the exhibition halls flickered and went out. Behind her, the screeching wheels of the generators revved to a deafening whine before clanking and crashing to a halt.

  Ingrid raised her arms and finally, finally screamed as fire raced over her palms. An orb of lightning slammed into Axia, throwing her back. Her body seized in the air, the ropes of electricity wrapping her, holding her in place while Ingrid continued to scream, continued to drain the current from every last corner of her body.

  Released from the fallen angel’s hold, Luc and Marco rose and collided with the hellhound and appendius that were seconds away from tearing into Ingrid. She watched everything unfolding as if she were merely an observer, untouchable. Lightning shivered from Axia to the iron tower and then back to the angel, who hurtled toward the ground as a net twined around her convulsing body. The spikes along the rim of the angelic diffuser net shot into the grass. The mesh netting sealed to Axia, who was still shivering in blue and white spits of electricity. Vander had hit his target. They’d captured her.

  Ingrid’s arms went limp, her ears rang, and a dark tunnel closed around her vision. She didn’t feel anything as she hit the ground. The last thing she saw was the top of the tower, a gargoyle perched on its spire.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Paris was supposed to be beautiful in April. The city’s greening had started to paint over the destruction left behind by Axia’s Harvest. It had been one week. One week since the world had exploded with news of the madness in Paris, a near-apocalyptic event. The citizens who had fled had since returned, and tourists for the exposition had come early and in droves. Surviving an invasion of bloodthirsty demons had seemed to inspire a need to celebrate, and everyone wanted to join in, he
ar stories, relive the horror.

  Some enterprising artist had started hawking papier-mâché hellhounds and gargoyles near the Champs de Mars, churches hadn’t seen higher attendances in years, and there were even guided tours cropping up, highlighting the places where the most savage deaths had taken place. People weren’t repulsed by the demon invasion at all. They were absolutely giddy.

  It made Gabby ill. She’d purchased a hellhound from one such street vendor, dropped it on the pavement, and crushed it under her boot heel. She’d gotten stares and a cry of disappointment from the vendor, but she had kicked the paper hellhound into the gutter and stormed off.

  The Harvest was over, but it had taken everything.

  And no, as it turned out, Paris wasn’t beautiful in April. The ground was just thawed enough for them to bury Grayson, however, and that was what they were doing that morning.

  Clouds, platinum-lined with the hint of another spring rain, hung low above the rectory cemetery. Gabby stood on the soft grass, still damp from the rains that were melting the snow and exposing new, pale green grasses underneath. She and Ingrid had wound their arms together and laced their fingers tightly. A bracing wind buffeted their black silk mourning dresses and black velvet capes. Before coming out to the graveside burial, Gabby had put on one of her hats with a slanted veil. She’d tugged out the pins and chucked the thing across her bedroom before breaking down into gasping sobs.

  Her brother wasn’t supposed to be dead. He wasn’t supposed to have left them, not now, not yet. Not like this.

  Mama stood to Gabby’s right, with Papa there to shore up Mama’s other side. He’d arrived two nights after the Harvest ended, and though his eyes had been red-rimmed, Gabby hadn’t yet seen him cry. She’d only heard him. That first night, and every night since, whenever Gabby passed the study door, she heard soft, muffled sobs. She pictured her stoic father, the man who had disowned Grayson, slouching in his chair, bawling into his monogrammed handkerchief. That was all any of them had been doing.