by Page Morgan
“Nolan’s coming, lass,” he whispered. His Scottish burr nudged some awareness deep inside her. The eyes. Not Nolan’s, but somehow the same.
“Who are you?” she asked. Her body shook with fatigue and what felt like a creeping fever.
“Rory, laoch,” he answered, again with that familiar grin.
Rory what?
The door sailed open and plowed into a wall. “What happened?”
Where Rory’s voice had nudged, Nolan’s kicked. He thundered into the room, a wrathful storm darkening his eyes as they inspected her shoulder.
“You.” Nolan thrust a finger toward Dimitrie, who stood at the foot of the table without a stitch of clothing on. Thankfully, everything from the waist down was hidden from Gabby’s view.
“What was it?” Nolan demanded.
“An appendius.” Dimitrie’s voice cracked on the last syllable.
“Well, what have you been waiting for? You’re the new Dispossessed at the abbey, aren’t you? Get on with it. Slice open your hand or your arm—your jugular, for all I care. Just give your blood!”
“I wouldn’t have brought her to you if I could heal her myself,” Dimitrie said through clenched teeth. He turned, showing his pale back. Gabby tried to sit up when she saw the paper-thin horizontal lines, but she couldn’t do more than lift her head.
Angel’s burns. Ingrid had told her about them. Dimitrie’s burns started at the nape of his neck and descended to the small of his back. Most were white and healed, but some at his lower back were pink and new. He’d failed his human charges so many times Gabby couldn’t begin to count the scars before she fell back against the table.
He would be punished for her injury tonight, too. So would Luc. Gabby felt sick with guilt, on top of everything else.
“You know what these do to a gargoyle’s blood,” Dimitrie said, his head drooping low in shame.
Nolan raked his hand through his hair. “Your blood’s useless. Why didn’t you take her back to Luc at the abbey?”
Gabby didn’t understand what was happening, but she did know that she’d never heard Nolan so furious.
“She was in a park one street away from here,” Dimitrie answered. “And if Luc wasn’t at the abbey when I arrived with her …”
Dimitrie had only been thinking about healing her, and fast. Even Gabby could see that.
“For Christ’s sake! Where is Luc?” Nolan hissed. He unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. “Rory, guard the door. My da can’t know she’s here. Or him,” he said with a nod toward the naked boy.
Rory nodded and slipped out of the crisp, sterile room. It was a medical room, she noticed with detached wonder. Hôtel Bastian had a medical wing? There were two walls of glassed-in cabinets holding bottles and linens and strange-looking contraptions. Gabby lay on one of many metal tables—gurneys, she realized. A moment later, after Nolan rummaged around in one of those glass cabinets, he came back to her side.
“Gabby,” Nolan whispered. He brushed her hair from her sweaty forehead. “Lass, you’ve demon poison in you. I can’t wait any longer for Luc to find you. It’s got to be mercurite, or the poison will spread too far and deep.”
And that would be that, Gabby concluded.
She nodded, and without further ado, Nolan ripped the bloody and battered sleeve of her dress, tearing it straight off at the shoulder seam. Gabby remembered applying mercurite to one of Nolan’s wounds, and the way the viscous silvery liquid had beaded up and seeped down through the curving line of stitches. The liquid silver and mercury worked together to surround the poison and then destroy it. She also remembered the grimace on Nolan’s face.
The first splash touched her shoulder and shocked the breath out of her.
“It won’t last long,” Nolan said, as soothingly as a mother tending her sick child.
The bone-crunching cold gave way to an itch, then heat. And with every passing breath the heat intensified, until it clawed deep into tissue and then bone. Gabby’s whole arm, and a path across her back, felt as if it had been consumed by flames. She whimpered but swallowed a scream. Nolan was trying to hide her presence.
He pressed his mouth against her forehead and mumbled words she couldn’t comprehend. Gabby heard only the rush of blood through her ears, the pealing scream she held blocked in her throat.
And then it was over. The burn collapsed inside her and she dragged in a gulp of air. Every tensed muscle sagged toward the table.
“It’s over,” Nolan confirmed. “God, Gabby, I’m sorry. I know what it’s like, especially the first time. But—” He paused, and even though her eyes were closed, she could see him screwing up his face in frustration. “How the hell did this happen?”
She rolled her head away from him. Lying wounded before Nolan hadn’t been part of her plan tonight. She’d failed. And now he knew.
“You picked a fight with it,” he guessed, and when Gabby didn’t deny it, he slammed a fist onto the metal table. “What were you thinking? You could have been killed!”
“I can fight,” she said, testing her shoulder. She wanted to get up and away as fast as she could.
Nolan brought his palm to her opposite shoulder and held her down. “How the devil can you fight, Gabby?”
She couldn’t tell him about Chelle’s lessons. She couldn’t send Chelle to the guillotine like that.
“I can prove to your father that I belong here,” Gabby said instead.
“If he found out about this it would only prove how much of a liability you are,” he growled, but then reached his fingers into her hair, combing the tangled strands. “I don’t agree with my da. He’s wrong about you, Gabby, but there’s no telling him. He won’t be swayed. You don’t know him.”
He stopped, dipped his chin, and picked up the bottle of mercurite he’d set beside Gabby’s hip. The black glass had no label. “Hell, I don’t even know him anymore.”
He corked the bottle roughly as Rory returned to the room.
“We’re clear. Uncle is still out on patrol,” Rory relayed.
Nolan thanked him, then turned back to her. “Gabby, this is my cousin.”
Cousin. Those eyes made sense now. Gabby met them again and Rory nodded a hello.
“We’ve met,” he said.
Nolan’s cousin was a half head taller than him, and at least twenty pounds heavier, though Gabby was sure it was all muscle. Again she noticed his brown leather vest, strapped with a half-dozen gleaming silver daggers. Clearly his weapon of choice.
“She needs a second dose of mercurite,” Rory said, his eyes on her bared shoulder.
“I’ll wait for gargoyle blood,” Nolan replied. He seemed to just then remember the gargoyle standing at the foot of the table. “Luc’s, by the look of it.”
Dimitrie lifted his head. “He’s here.”
Rory calmly strode back out into the hall, and Gabby knew it was to meet Luc on the roof.
“I don’t need Luc’s blood,” Gabby said, feeling more embarrassed and angry by the moment. And guilty, too. She’d screwed up, and Luc and Dimitrie would suffer for it. It wasn’t fair. Her actions were her own. She should suffer the consequences for them, no one else.
Nolan came to her side and cupped her cheek. In all the madness, she hadn’t once thought about the scars along her face. He tenderly swept his thumb over them. “I won’t use any more mercurite than I need to, lass. After a while …” He sighed and pulled his hand back. “After a while, it changes you.”
It had changed his father. Gabby pieced together a few of the comments he and the others had made about Carrick Quinn. The mercurite had changed him, and not for the better.
She couldn’t help but wonder: how long until it changed Nolan?
Luc’s talons had barely touched down on Hôtel Bastian’s flat roof when a flood of hot white light split the night sky. It poured over him, searing his scales, but it was a warm caress compared to what Luc knew was coming. An angel’s burn.
Gabby had gotten herself hurt, a
nd Luc hadn’t been there to protect her. He hadn’t even known she had sneaked out of the rectory. He’d been so focused on Ingrid, on getting her up to that tower, and on hiding from Dimitrie. Which infuriated him. He shouldn’t have to hide from anyone while on his own territory.
“You have erred,” Irindi said.
The gravel beneath Luc’s talons shook when she spoke. He couldn’t look at her, not directly. Her presence forced him into a neat bow, his forehead a spare inch from the crushed gravel and snow, his wings spread out behind him. From the corner of his eye he could see the pearly contours of her lithe shape, though she had no solid features. She was nothing but a quivering mass of radiance. Irindi was what an angel of the Order was supposed to look like. Nothing like Axia and her grotesque form, stripped of her angelic glow and power.
The roof door opened, and to Luc’s deep humiliation, a human emerged. Here he was, stuck in his scales, bowing like a fool to something this Alliance human couldn’t see. To the human, the only change at all was an unexpected whipping wind. No light, no heat, no radiant shine, and certainly no chiming, monotone voice telling Luc that he had failed.
Irindi got on with it. The angel’s burn seared into Luc’s scales along his back. It ripped through the steel-like armor, and though he wanted to groan in pain, he swallowed the urge. He wouldn’t look any more of a fool in front of this Alliance member than he already did. At least the human stood back in silence, as if completely aware of what was happening to Luc.
And then Irindi’s glow was gone. All that was left was the sizzling echo of her punishment. Luc surged to his feet. Remaining in true form, he stalked toward the roof door and the Alliance member standing patiently on its threshold.
The man stood aside and allowed Luc to take the stairs first. Luc didn’t need to be shown the way. He had caught Gabby’s heady scent like a fist in the kidney earlier, and he’d been following it ever since. Her location had changed, though, and his destination had gone from a park along rue de Babylone to the town house along rue de Sèvres.
As soon as he crashed through the door and saw Gabby lying on the table, her eyes wide and cheeks burning, Luc felt the release of his true form. As if a finger had come off a trigger, everything inside him loosened and his muscles and bones shrank and slid back into their human places. His scales turned to skin.
Gabby jerked her chin up and fixed her eyes firmly on the ceiling.
“Ugh, why must you all be so naked?” she groaned, and Luc knew for certain that she was all right.
Dimitrie stepped away from Gabby’s table. He, too, was in human form. He looked even younger and scrawnier without clothing.
How had Dimitrie gotten to her first? Luc had only felt her fear in the moments before an echoing pain slammed into his shoulder, signaling her wound—and setting his punishment in stone.
“It was an appendius,” Nolan informed him, moving away from the table to give Luc space to work.
Without a word, the Alliance member from the roof plucked one of the knives strapped to his vest and held it out to Luc. He took it, drew the blade across his hand, and built a well of blood in his closed fist. He crossed the room, his eyes on Dimitrie—why hadn’t he given Gabby his own blood yet? Luc opened his hand and pressed his palm against the deep tear along her shoulder.
She squeaked in pain.
“It’s better than—” Luc stopped as his hand started to itch. Within a second, it felt like he’d pressed his hand against the glowing end of a cattle brand. He ripped his hand away and clutched it at the wrist.
Gabby lifted her head, concerned. “Luc?”
The skin covering his hand had turned a mottled gray, sickly and ancient compared to the skin that joined it at the wrist.
“Bloody hell,” Nolan ground out. “I’m sorry, Luc—I administered mercurite.”
Luc tucked his hand close to his body, his fingers stiffened open.
“You could have warned me,” Luc growled.
“What is it? What happened to him?” Gabby resisted Nolan’s attempts to keep her down on the table. She pushed herself up into a sitting position, though not without a grimace of pain.
“It’s nothing,” Luc said, just as Dimitrie said, “The mercurite.”
The glare with which Luc speared Dimitrie shut him up fast.
Nolan took over rubbing Luc’s blood into Gabby’s shoulder and explained to her anyway. “They can’t touch mercurite. The mercury and silver poisons them—a lot faster than it does us.”
Luc tried to bend his fingers, but they were too stiff. Like stone, he thought. Mercurite did more than just poison Dispossessed. It rendered them useless. As far as Luc knew, it was the only thing the human world had that could harm a gargoyle. Unfortunately, the Alliance also knew it, and they always kept a full stock. For healing, yes, but it was also a nice insurance policy.
“You shouldn’t have needed mercurite,” Luc said, again eyeing Dimitrie, who had shrunk even farther into the corner of the medical room. He shuffled around until he faced the corner like a schoolboy caught in some punishable act.
Luc forgot his stinging hand and his throbbing back. He had never seen so many angel’s burns on one gargoyle before. Line after line after line, so many that there wasn’t even one inch of smooth, bare skin.
Dimitrie was a shadow gargoyle. A failure. Incompetent and as useless as Luc’s stiff hand. Every angel’s burn weakened a gargoyle’s blood a little, but after being lashed by scores of them … Dimitrie’s blood was no longer able to heal at all.
“Why would Irindi send you?” Luc asked. This was her idea of help?
Dimitrie didn’t stay in his human form long enough to answer. He coalesced fast, the silvery-blue scales along his back turning every angel’s burn into a crusty ridge. Dimitrie fled the room, wings pleated behind him as he went.
“I’ll do the stitches and you can take her home,” Nolan said to Luc, ignoring the exchange. “You can’t be here when the patrols return.”
Luc knew gargoyles weren’t allowed inside Alliance headquarters, just as Alliance weren’t welcome at the Dispossessed’s common grounds, a territory held by the gargoyle elder Lennier.
He suddenly dreaded taking Dimitrie there. To be saddled with another Dispossessed was humiliating enough. When Marco and the others found out Dimitrie was a shadow gargoyle, there would be no end to the jesting.
It didn’t make any sense. Why would the Order send someone like Dimitrie? A gargoyle with no power to heal? Luc hadn’t trusted the boy in the first place, and now he questioned the Angelic Order’s decision even more. There was a reason behind it. What it was, however, Luc couldn’t begin to fathom.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“If this were a real date, I believe it would be our last.”
Ingrid shivered as the wind buffeted her cloak, every other gust carrying a frigid spray of water from the Seine.
Vander stood close beside her on the quay passing underneath pont de l’Alma. It had been overcast all morning, and now, standing beneath one of the numerous bridges that spanned the Seine, Ingrid thought it looked more like evening than early afternoon.
“If I must remind you,” Vander said, bouncing on his heels to keep warm, “this date was your idea.”
It had actually been Constantine’s. They were waiting for him now. Vander had picked Ingrid up at the rectory under the pretense of taking her for a carriage ride around the city. A bold, courting move, Ingrid thought, and one that had earned him a rigid interrogation from her father first.
Of course, it wasn’t a real date. It had all been a farce so they could meet Constantine as planned and search for Léon, the missing Duster. Still. Ingrid had felt strangely giddy when her father had ordered Vander into his study and the door had shut solidly behind them.
“For our next date, I was thinking we could tour one of the city’s slums,” Vander said lightly. “Considering dirty, smelly places of filth are your cup of tea and all.”
She lightly stomped on his foot and
then promptly ducked out of his reach as Nolan Quinn came scuffing down the stone quay steps. He had his hands in his pockets and dark circles under his eyes.
“You’re going to owe me one, Burke. I don’t generally like to spend my afternoons in the Parisian sewers.” Nolan joined them beneath the bridge. “What’s this all about?”
Constantine had sent Ingrid and Vander notes earlier that morning as well. Ingrid’s note had specified a meeting place and a time when Vander would be coming to fetch her. When he had arrived, Vander had told her he’d sent for Nolan, too. The more blessed silver they had in the sewers, the better.
“It’s about the missing Duster,” Ingrid answered Nolan.
“The one who killed his family?” he asked.
Vander exhaled long and hard. Ingrid knew he still objected to combing the sewers for Léon, but he’d agreed to help her find the boy anyway. If Léon was caught by the police, he would be tossed into prison, where he would no doubt cause more chaos. If they could find him before the police did, perhaps Constantine could truly help him.
Last night, Grayson had returned from his midnight walk unscathed, but what if he hadn’t? What if his life turned down the same path as Léon’s? He’d already killed someone. Ingrid still couldn’t comprehend it. How and why—and who—were the questions she desperately needed answered.
“The boy mentioned the sewers once.” Constantine had come up behind them, but Ingrid was the only one who’d jumped at his refined, unmistakably aristocratic voice.
“Léon said that if his family ever discovered what he had become, he would take refuge in the sewers like Jean Valjean. This entrance is relatively close to his home.”
Hearing that Léon had read Les Misérables, a book Ingrid had recently read, too, only made him all the more human to her.
“It has been a handful of days,” Constantine said, with an accusatory glance at Vander. “Perhaps by now he will have calmed a bit. He might even be willing to come to Clos du Vie.” He tapped his cane on a brass manhole cover at their feet. “Messieurs?”
