The Beautiful and the Cursed

by Page Morgan

  “I am your gargoyle,” he whispered, his breath sweet and warm against her lips.

  This was what Ingrid had been wanting. This was what she’d been missing. Luc, showing her that he actually cared. Not the cold, aloof, emotionless Luc. This one.

  “Your heart is racing,” he said, taking a long, discouraging step away. He dropped his hands and Ingrid listed to the side, against the belfry wall. She felt cold, her temperature dropping along with her heart and stomach.

  “If I can feel it, so can Dimitrie,” Luc explained. “Go. I’ll watch you from here.”

  She didn’t want to leave, but she knew she couldn’t stay. Luc wouldn’t be able to see her to the rectory, of course. Not in the normal sense. But he could watch her just the same.

  Ingrid took the tower steps down, rotating slowly, her legs suddenly tired and weak. She went easily through the abbey, her vision having adapted, then across the courtyard to the rectory. She felt Luc’s eyes on her the whole time, even after she’d closed the front door and started up to her room. He could watch her whenever he pleased, she supposed. He could stay with her all night, if he wished.

  Perhaps he did.

  Perhaps he kept her scent with him at all times, and that was the reason why he hadn’t wanted her to know about it. It was ridiculous how much the notion stirred her.

  I am your gargoyle.

  Yes, he was. But that wasn’t all he was. By the way Luc had held her, saying those words like a vow, he’d let slip that he still considered himself something much more.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Grayson wasn’t sure where he was, but he knew there was blood nearby. A lot of blood. Freshly spilled.

  He’d crossed the Ile de la Cité to the Right Bank and had started wandering through a few middle-class neighborhoods and squares. He wore his suit and tie from that evening’s dinner, his coat draped over his arm. The heat was unbearable, like blue-hot coals being stoked inside his stomach and chest. He’d cooled down a little since leaving Ingrid on the rectory lawns, but the flecks of ice were still a relief against his sweltering skin.

  Why the devil had he told her?

  He’d only wanted her company while walking a circuit around the churchyard. He hadn’t wanted to talk. Hadn’t planned on confessing the one secret that could destroy the way everyone, including his twin, saw him. He had only wanted her there beside him while he’d cooled down. She had always been able to steady him, and he’d needed that desperately. Father hadn’t said a decent word to him all day, and then that reckless rider after dinner had sent Grayson plunging over the edge.

  The uncontrollable trembling had set in after that. His muscles had coiled painfully and his bones had ached as if some great weight from within them were pushing out, trying to break free. He’d had the sensation of trying to hold himself in. Hold himself together. He’d thought a bit of cold air and his twin’s presence would help.

  But he’d gone and told her the truth. His darkest sin. And then he’d needed to run.

  Now the smell of blood stopped him short.

  He slowly ducked into the opening of a mews. The slim alley stretched behind one side of a residential square. High walls enclosed each home’s backyard, so no one could see Grayson creeping along the bricked road, which was slanted toward the center to allow horse waste to run freely toward the sewers.

  He followed his nose, allowing it to root out the source of the smell. He pushed aside the niggling thought that he was sniffing like a hound when he came to the arched entrance of one family’s stable. The doors stood ajar. The coppery bite of blood landed hard on the back of Grayson’s tongue. The origin of the scent he’d been tracking was inside.

  He listened for a moment before pushing a door open and slipping in. A small carriage was parked inside, the single horse pointed toward the far wall, as if it had been led in. The animal was still hitched, and a pair of beveled-glass lamps sputtered on both sides of the driver’s bench. The horse tossed its head nervously and stomped the cobbled floor. With good reason—two slumped figures sat upon the bench.

  The driver, a man, had fallen against the seat back, his arms limp at his sides. His head lolled toward his spine at an unnatural resting point. The passenger, a woman, had fallen forward against the curved dashboard, her profile craned toward the quivery light of one carriage lamp. Her eyes were wide, her lips parted. And on the ground beside her was yet another figure. A young man, Grayson noted as he edged closer.

  The smell of their blood thickened Grayson’s throat, though thankfully not with thirst. Splattered as it was over the slumped bodies, carriage, and cobbled floors, the blood didn’t affect him the way it did trapped within a person’s veins. He breathed out, relaxing a bit.

  But there was still the matter of the three bodies.

  Something moved in the corner of the stable, near a pile of stacked hay and bags of feed. A quick, darting motion. By the time Grayson focused, it was gone, replaced by a scratching sound, like nails on stone. It came from the driver’s side of the carriage. A dog? Grayson slowly went around the back of the carriage and a foul odor hit on top of all the blood. Sour milk and fetid meat.

  A creature scuttled out from behind a crate and under the chassis. The horse whinnied and stomped, lashing its tail back and forth. Grayson leaped back.

  That was no dog.

  The thing had darted by on three sets of pitchfork-type legs, its nails clicking on the cobbles. A wicked spike tipped its long, curled tail, which resembled a scorpion’s.

  Grayson had seen something like it in the Underneath.

  The demon shot straight toward Grayson’s feet. He staggered backward into a long workbench. Tools rattled on the surface and Grayson swept his hand over them, searching for a heavy, blunt object to swing at the miniature beast. He closed his fingers around something just as the spiked tail whipped forward over the demon’s ratlike skull and snapping teeth. The spike struck the stone an inch from Grayson’s foot. He smashed a long wrench into the demon’s tail, but the demon only recoiled, uninjured, and immediately dove forward again.

  Grayson braced himself against the worktable and tucked up his legs. The stable doors flew open and a gleam of silver spun low through the air, inches above the cobbles. The silver embedded itself in the demon’s ridged back and the creature flashed into a cloud of death sparks.

  Grayson lowered his feet when he saw Chelle and Vander standing in the doorway. The two Alliance members looked at Grayson, then the bodies, and then back at Grayson.

  “What are you doing here?” Grayson, Chelle, and Vander all asked in unison.

  Chelle sighed and closed the doors behind them. “We were out patrolling when Vander caught the scorpling’s dust trail. What were you doing?”

  Grayson set the wrench back on the worktable. He took deep breaths, willing his heart to calm. He didn’t need Luc showing up right now. If Luc could sense that Grayson was no longer in danger, perhaps the gargoyle would turn right back around for the abbey.

  He crouched to pick up Chelle’s silver star. “I, ah … I was taking a walk.”

  Chelle propped a hand on her slim hip. “And this is where you ended up?” She took a suspicious glance at the dead bodies.

  Grayson set his jaw. He didn’t want to admit the truth, but there was no excuse he could give that would make sense.

  “I smelled them,” he said softly, gesturing toward the carriage with the razor-edged star. “I tracked them.”

  Chelle stood still, her frown frozen in place. Vander crossed behind her, heading toward the bodies.

  “Their blood, you mean?” he asked.

  Grayson nodded, his throat cinched tight.

  “Well, there’s a lot of it,” Vander said casually. He crouched by the boy’s body, careful to keep his boot soles out of the surrounding pool of blood.

  Chelle watched Grayson as he left the workbench and extended his hand. He half expected her to take the weapon back and immediately fling it at him. She only tucked it inside her
red sash and appraised him in silence.

  “The slashes at his wrists are deep,” Vander said evenly, as though he worked with dead bodies all day instead of books. “They look self-inflicted.”

  “And these two?” Chelle asked, nodding toward the adults in the bench seat.

  “I doubt either of them would have had the fortitude to cut their own throats,” Vander answered. Chelle made a sickened sound when she saw the gaping dark smiles across their necks.

  “The boy’s parents?” Grayson asked. Vander shrugged.

  “All I know for certain is that he was a Duster.”

  Grayson stood back, staring at the boy’s body with new interest, unable to trace the demon dust that Vander could so plainly see.

  “You’re sure it’s his own dust? What about that thing? The scorpling?” he asked.

  Vander stood and pushed up his spectacles again. “The boy’s dust is a different shade from the scorpling’s.” He circled the boy’s still frame and ran his hand soothingly along the horse’s trembling haunch.

  “What is it?” Chelle asked, apparently seeing some conflict in Vander that Grayson didn’t.

  “Constantine. He has a student who killed his entire family a few nights ago. And now …” Vander crossed his arms, circling back around the pool of blood. “It looks like another Duster might have done the same thing.”

  “But the scorpling,” Grayson said, picturing the spiked tail. Could it have made clean sweeps across two throats and then the boy’s wrists?

  “It’s nothing but a bottom feeder,” Chelle replied. “That thing was here for the dead flesh. It didn’t kill them.”

  Grayson didn’t know this boy at all, but the fact that he was a Duster—or had been one, he supposed—made him a little less of a stranger. It made the boy something much closer to Grayson himself.

  “We can’t stay here,” Chelle announced.

  “What, we’re just leaving them?” Grayson asked.

  Chelle pulled her cap lower. “Before the police are summoned? Yes. Definitely.”

  She was right, of course. None of them had any right to be there, and no clear reason, either. Grayson didn’t need to attract any attention from the police, French or English.

  “Did you drop anything?” Chelle asked.

  Grayson saw his coat lying on the floor near the workbench. He scooped it up and then helped them scatter a few armfuls of hay around the stable floor where their shoes had made slushy footprints.

  “Thanks,” Grayson said as Vander checked up and down the mews to be sure they wouldn’t be seen leaving the stable.

  “For what? Making sure you weren’t implicated in a triple murder?” Chelle asked, eyeing his coat.

  They slipped outside, dragging their feet in a messy line so no specific prints would be left behind.

  “No,” Grayson answered. “For saving my life. Gabby said you were pretty good with those stars.”

  Chelle snorted. And even though it was a snort, she somehow managed to make it lovely. “They’re called hira-shuriken. And I’m better than ‘pretty good.’ ”

  “She also said you were extremely insecure,” he replied.

  Chelle scowled at him from under the short brim of her cap as they turned out of the mews, away from the dead Duster.

  Had he lost control? Had the boy’s anger overrun his senses? Grayson could understand, if so. It made him shiver with nausea. Perhaps this boy just hadn’t been able to get away fast enough to simmer down. As they walked toward the Seine, Grayson wondered how many more Dusters were out there, perched on the edge of a killing spree.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Gabby doubted her plan the moment the demon emerged. It slipped from under the stone bench, looking, at first, like a shorter version of the bench it had been hiding beneath, one of many benches within the closed and gated park along rue de Babylone.

  The demon had four stumpy legs and a long, flat back. It remained in its benchlike form for another moment. Plenty of time for Gabby to consider whether she should have stayed at the rectory instead of sneaking out, fully armed with two blessed daggers and the short sword Nolan had given her. She gripped the handle of the sword, her leather gloves sticking to the cold silver.

  Damn that Carrick Quinn! He’d made her so furious, wounded her so deeply, that all she’d been able to do the last two days was formulate her revenge plan. If the Alliance wasn’t going to take on any regular first-generation members, then she’d be something spectacular. She’d prove that she could fight. She’d hunt demons on her own until Carrick Quinn got wind of it and finally accepted that he’d been wrong.

  The benchlike demon started to change. The flat seat grew longer as new vertebrae appeared like leaves being inserted into a grand dining room table. Two more sets of stumpy legs fell down from where they’d been tucked up beneath the seat, and those, too, began to lengthen.

  Gabby skittered back as one end of the bench curled up, peeling back like a banana skin. One set of stumpy legs, another pair, and then a third, drew off the ground, until only a single pair of legs supported the thin, flat demon. The rest of it stood erect, and to Gabby’s utter horror, it also had a head. Like the two hidden pairs of legs, the demon’s head had been tucked in. It unfolded now, the higher end of the bench becoming a neck.

  It probably had eyes and a nose, but really, all Gabby saw was its mouth: a round hole with two sets of spiked teeth rotating and gnashing together like cogs. Upon seeing its dangly legs—no, arms, she now saw, each tipped by a thick, tusklike horn—Gabby realized what this demon was: an appendius.

  For the first time, she felt her resolve slip. Like before, on the abandoned bridge, she unintentionally gave in to fear. But unlike before, she failed to push it back out. She knew what the appendius could do. Tomas, the traitorous Alliance member, had been attacked by one. The appendius’s horns had left gruesome scars on his face and neck—worse than Gabby’s by far. The appendius would have skinned me alive. It would have devoured me piece by piece, taking time to digest between meals. The memory of what Tomas had told her about the appendius sent her skittering back another few steps. Her pulse hammered in her throat.

  Then the demon took its first swing.

  The horned tip of one arm slashed toward her. Gabby barely leaped out of its reach, ducking behind a tall, deep green cast-iron Wallace fountain. The appendius slammed its horned tip into one of the four sculpted caryatids, their raised arms holding up the fountain’s domed top. Gabby scrambled farther back, behind a box hedge, her fear completely unleashed. Luc would already be in his scales and on his way, she was certain.

  The ground shook beneath her feet as the appendius plodded along, following her as she weaved deeper into the park. Fool! What did she know about fighting demons? A few lessons from Chelle and one from Tomas, and that was it.

  She threw herself behind a massive tree trunk and gasped for air, forcing herself to breathe evenly. Tomas had taught her that the appendius’s weak spots were in the center of each arm, where there was nothing but soft cartilage.

  With both hands gripping her sword’s handle, she jumped out from behind the tree and took an upward swipe at the appendius’s oncoming arm. The blade cut through with barely any resistance. Her victory was short-lived, however—the other arm pierced her shoulder with its tip. She went down on the packed dirt and rolled against the knotty base of the tree. Her ears started to ring with panic.

  But she still heard the wings.

  A shriek rent the air, and clutching at her wounded shoulder, Gabby watched as a pair of sapphire wings unfurled in front of her, shielding the appendius from view. The blue-tinted scales of the strange gargoyle glimmered in the moonlight. What gargoyle was this? She’d chosen this spot purposefully. It wasn’t marked. There couldn’t be a Dispossessed guarding it.

  The gargoyle, though smaller than Luc, brutally sheared off the rest of the demon’s arms with two powerful strokes of its talons. The appendius reeled back, no longer balanced, and fell. Instead of de
stroying it, the gargoyle turned to Gabby, plucked her from the ground, and spiraled into the air.

  The wind rushed up her nostrils and drove down her throat, stealing away her breath. She closed her eyes to shut out both the pain of her throbbing shoulder and the sight of the ground that she knew was far, far below. The flap of wings filled her ears, the gargoyle’s stony arms and legs enclosing her like a cage.

  If this wasn’t Luc, and if the park wasn’t protected, then this had to be the new boy. Dimitrie. His scales are beautiful, Gabby thought as her head grew heavy.

  The rhythm of the gargoyle’s beating wings changed, and Gabby forced one eye open. They were descending toward the top of a building, its flat roof covered with raised garden beds filled with snow-dusted crushed gravel. And there was a man.

  She closed her eyes again as Dimitrie landed.

  “Stop where ye are, gargoyle.” The brusque voice rang familiar to Gabby. She was still cradled in a pair of arms. She startled when she saw that they were no longer covered with shimmering blue scales.

  “Who do ye have?” The voice had grown closer and had softened. Gabby forced open her eyes again. It was the man from Nolan’s apartment. The one who’d opened the door for her and asked her if she’d be all right. The gargoyle had brought her to Hôtel Bastian.

  “Give her to me,” the man said, but Dimitrie, in his human form, clutched Gabby closer.

  “Fine,” the man said with a sigh. “But stay wi’ me. Ye’re not supposed to be inside, gargoyle.”

  Gabby let her eyes rest as she was taken through the roof door and jostled down a stairwell, then down a long corridor. Her shoulder felt worse than before, the pain starting to spread. Her neck and shoulder blades ached, and the throbbing had even extended to her hand.

  Demon poison, she realized as her back hit a cold table. Dimitrie’s arms slid from underneath her.

  “Gabriella, open yer eyes.” The man’s voice was so close that she complied with a start. He was directly above her, palms planted on the table on either side of her head. He smiled down at her, his ice-blue eyes crinkling at the corners.