The Beautiful and the Cursed

by Page Morgan

  The dead boy surged forward a few graceless steps. Gabby tried not to look at his exposed bits and instead kept her eyes trained on his slack face, his unseeing blue eyes.

  “What’s a carcass demon?” Gabby asked, reaching for her own sword.

  “A demon that feeds on the dead flesh of anything recently touched by another demon,” Nolan answered, backing Gabby farther away from the shambling boy. “They usually feed quietly, but when disturbed, they can reanimate the dead bodies they’re in.”

  Gabby held her sword the way Chelle had taught her—with one hand, her elbow tight to her side.

  “What the— Gabriella, what are you doing? Put that away! Didn’t you learn your lesson last night?”

  “Let me take him,” Gabby said. “He doesn’t look all that silver-footed.”

  “Absolutely not! Carcass demons can be extremely deceiving. If you’re not careful—”

  Gilbert DeChamps lunged forward, arms outstretched. No longer stumbling awkwardly, his bare feet pounded the green-and-white-tiled floor of the corridor as he came at them.

  Nolan swung his broadsword in a clean upward stroke, on a straight path for the dead boy’s neck. But at the last moment, Gilbert’s body took an impossible detour.

  He planted one pale white foot, toe tag still affixed, on the wall to his right and propelled himself up. His other foot slapped against the next wall tile and he pushed off into an arcing leap over Nolan’s head. The broadsword connected with the wall just as the carcass demon landed in front of Gabby with stealthy precision.

  “Swing, Gabby!” Nolan barked. He needn’t have. Gabby knew what to do. She lunged forward and sliced into the corpse’s torso with the tip of her blade. The blessed silver melted away the flesh in a spit of green sparks, but the cut hadn’t been lethal.

  She swung again, the short sword feather-light compared to Nolan’s cumbersome broadsword. But Gilbert’s reanimated corpse had once again cartwheeled into the air over her head, landing adroitly at the base of the stairs. Heaven only knew what would happen if a naked dead body escaped into the upper floor of the hospital, or worse, out into the street.

  Gabby reached for her blessed dagger, strapped at the lip of her boot, and without thinking, hurled it at Gilbert. The dagger struck home between his ribs, and the flare of green sparks proved it had been a killing blow.

  Gilbert dropped to the floor, legs and arms bent at awkward angles, like a marionette with slackened strings.

  The corridor was probably silent, but Gabby’s heart rampaged; her blood cascaded through her ears. Nolan grabbed her arm and swung her around to face him, his expression a cross between fury and admiration.

  “Who taught you to do that?”

  She was saved from having to answer when Luc appeared at the base of the steps. He was in his human form, but barely. His cheekbones had shifted into sharply cut ridges beneath his skin, which was itself on the verge of becoming closely knit scales.

  “I’m not hurt, Luc,” she said, desperate to turn off whatever alarm was ringing inside him. “Really, I’m all right.”

  Luc took an indifferent glance at the dead body lying in a twisted heap. He didn’t say anything, and Gabby wondered if it was because his voice would have been gargled.

  “A carcass demon,” Nolan explained, his chest heaving. “The boy was a Duster.”

  “And you took a sample of his blood,” Gabby said. “You never answered me—why does your father want it?”

  Nolan raked his fingers through his hair. “The Alliance isn’t all about demon hunting. There’s a scientific element, and no, I can’t discuss it.” He sent a pointed look at Gabby. “Let’s just say this Duster’s blood is meant for research.”

  Voices traveled from down the hall, far past the morgue doors, which were still wide open. Nolan ushered Gabby toward Luc and the steps, stopping to retrieve Gabby’s dagger from Gilbert’s torso. They eased around his grotesquely used body and took the stairs two at a time.

  “Two Dusters within the last week have murdered their families,” Nolan said once they’d reached the main hallway. He bent to one knee and pretended to tie his bootlaces while slipping the dagger back into Gabby’s boot.

  She turned away from a passing doctor, who slowed and sent them a suspicious look. Her scars were all too noticeable, as would be the stain of color on her cheeks from having Nolan’s hands roving about her ankles.

  “One of them is running around the Paris sewers, and the other is at the bottom of those stairs,” Nolan continued.

  “Ingrid was in the sewers this morning,” Luc said, his voice hoarse.

  Nolan nodded. “She was worried you’d have to come after her.”

  “She wasn’t frightened,” Luc replied. “Just nervous for a moment.”

  Gabby frowned. Her sister and Nolan had gone into the sewers to search for a Duster, Grayson had discovered dead bodies, and Gabby had just taken down a carcass demon. They were all keeping rather busy.

  “She’s too trusting,” Nolan said. “First with Constantine, who turns out to be ex-Daicrypta—”

  Luc snapped to attention. “He’s Daicrypta?”

  “Ex,” Nolan stressed. Gabby watched the exchange with growing confusion. What was the Daicrypta? “He says an active Daicrypta, Robert Dupuis, wants Ingrid’s angel blood.”

  “Who is Robert Dupuis?” Gabby nearly screeched.

  Luc cocked his head and breathed in sharply. “Your father is leaving the meeting.”

  Without another word, he moved like the wind down the corridor, out onto the portico, and to the arcaded entrance.

  Nolan walked Gabby toward the exit onto the portico, his hand once more on the small of her back. Her skin responded with a pleasant throb. Glancing through the arched windows and across the courtyard, she saw her father in the opposite wing, passing by one of the windows there.

  Nolan brought his hand around the side of her cloak and patted the spot where her sword was sheathed inside. “Where did you learn how to use this?”

  Her father pushed open the door to the portico. He looked toward the arcaded entrance and then swept his eyes over the rest of the courtyard, searching for her. The muscles in her legs tensed, prepared to break into an unladylike trot. And yet the gentle touch of Nolan’s hand was powerful enough to hold her back.

  “I can see him turning purple from here,” she said. “I really must go.”

  Nolan pressed his lips together and dropped his hand. Gabby rushed forward to meet her father. She could feel Nolan’s eyes on her as she stormed outside and met her father’s irritated glare.

  “I became restless,” she explained lamely. He merely grunted before taking the stone steps down toward the entrance and their waiting landau.

  After they had climbed in and Luc had nudged the horses forward, her father told her all about the illustrious Dr. Hauss and the procedures they had discussed. Gabby blocked out her father’s voice easily. Her hands were still trembling from the fight with the carcass demon—and from being so close to cornered by Nolan’s question.

  The next time she saw him, she would need a ready answer. Preferably one that didn’t incriminate Chelle. At least Gabby had shown him what she could do. Perhaps he would take the account back to his father.

  It wasn’t meant for him, but the smile Gabby directed toward her father as he finished speaking wasn’t entirely false.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Humans called gargoyle common grounds Hôtel du Maurier. Luc was sure they called it a number of other things as well, like a disgraceful eyesore and a rubbish heap. They weren’t wrong. Lennier’s territory had been abandoned decades before, and what had once been an elegant four-story estate on the outer rim of the Luxembourg Gardens had slowly deteriorated into a ramshackle limestone shell.

  Overrun by ivy, rust, and shattered glass, it was the perfect meeting spot for the Dispossessed. Humans tended to turn away from the unsightly, and Hôtel du Maurier was unsightly indeed.

  Luc and Dimitrie fin
ished dressing in the courtyard. It was empty and quiet, and, except for the low dance of firelight in two windows on the second story, dark. The light wouldn’t be visible from the street. Lennier evaded hibernation only because of the vagrants and inebriates who often sheltered within his walls. Those kinds of humans weren’t a threat to him. Sober, curious passersby who could have sworn the place had been deserted for years were.

  “You’re going to tell them, aren’t you?” Dimitrie asked as they made their way into the shadowed town house. The ballroom’s double doors had been left wide open and were now banked in by snow.

  “Tell them what?” Luc’s breath steamed in front of him as he strode through the old ballroom. He heard the squeak of mice coming from under the lid of the rotting piano. The prisms of the chandelier chinked together as a squirrel hopped along its column to a hole in the ceiling plaster.

  “About the burns,” Dimitrie answered. “You’re going to tell them I’m a shadow gargoyle.”

  Luc led the boy down a hallway, his keen vision turning the utter blackness into grays and whites. He avoided an old credenza, several white-sheeted chairs, and a dead skin-and-bones cat before taking the carpeted steps up to the next level.

  “That’s your own burden to bear, no one else’s,” Luc returned.

  Being a shadow gargoyle wasn’t a crime. It was just pathetic.

  It had been a few days since Marco and Yann had told Luc to bring Dimitrie to common grounds. A few days since Gabby’s incidents with the appendius and then, less than twenty-four hours later, the reanimated corpse. The girl was starting to become more troublesome than her sister.

  With a mimic demon on Ingrid’s tail and the cultish Daicrypta wanting her blood, Luc had hesitated to take himself, or Dimitrie, very far from the rectory. But the last few days had been quiet, and Lennier was waiting.

  Luc knocked on the door to the elder gargoyle’s rooms. He expected Lennier’s raspy voice to command them to enter, but instead the door opened and another man appeared before them.

  Luc had seen him before at common ground gatherings. He was middle-aged, with a dartlike chin and nose, a wan complexion, and twiggy black hair. He regarded Luc the way Luc had regarded the dead cat downstairs: with narrowed eyes and flared nostrils.

  “You are the guardian at l’Abbaye Saint-Dismas,” the man stated.

  “Allow him in, Vincent,” came Lennier’s familiar voice. Vincent pulled the door wider and Luc stepped inside.

  Marco stood at a window, his arms crossed, a smile spreading slowly across his face.

  “This must be your new companion,” Marco quipped. “How’s the honeymoon going?”

  Again with that slow, lordly smile. Perfectly shaped for Luc’s fist.

  Dimitrie entered Lennier’s suite with hesitation. The decay eating away at the rest of the house stopped at the door to Lennier’s rooms. Instead of being covered with water stains and creeping ivy, the walls in these rooms were papered with a floral print. The bare wood floor had a high gloss, and the furniture, though aged, was well taken care of. A working tall case clock stood against one wall, and there was a leaping fire in the hearth. Lennier sat close to it in a Louis XIV chair. He held his hand up to Luc, a signal to wait. He then turned to Marco.

  “I am sorry to hear of this,” Lennier said, resuming a conversation Luc’s arrival had interrupted.

  Marco bowed to Lennier. “I only hope my hibernation won’t last long.”

  Luc moved forward into the apartment. “Your hibernation?”

  Marco pushed off from the window frame and went to the fire beside Lennier. “My humans won’t be returning to Hôtel Dugray this season.”

  Which would leave Marco too long without humans to protect. He was probably already feeling the sleep coming on. A weight in the chest, Luc remembered. Like a stone settling there, growing heavier with every passing day. The stone eventually made it impossible to move or breathe—or even care.

  “A shame,” Luc said, trying to keep the pleasure from his tone. Marco heard it anyway.

  “You’ll miss me, brother, I know you will,” he said. “And I have to admit, I’ll miss watching you scramble around trying to protect those pesky humans of yours. Such entertainment.”

  “The one with angel blood is particularly troubling,” Vincent piped up. He had remained near the door.

  Luc kept his back to him. “I don’t know why she should trouble you at all.”

  “She is unnatural,” Vincent said.

  Luc lifted his chin. He would not react. He would maintain a show of disinterest. Marco, however, knew a show when he saw one.

  “Careful, Vincent,” he said. “Luc turns a bit rabid whenever someone speaks ill of his favorite human.”

  Lennier, used to Marco’s snide remarks, continued to warm his bony hands by the fire. Vincent, though, snapped up the dangling bait.

  “You have a favorite human?” He balked. Luc wondered what he’d been in his first life. An overworked professor or an eccentric scientist, perhaps.

  “At least I have humans enough to keep me awake,” Luc said, simultaneously avoiding Vincent’s question and taunting Marco.

  Funny. Not too long ago, Luc had been wishing for hibernation. Now the idea of it was unnerving. Going into hibernation would mean Ingrid had gone away. The next time he woke, who knew where she would be? She would have aged. Married, perhaps. Had children, grandchildren. She might have even died.

  And Luc would still be this. He would still be the same. Never changing. Eternally damned.

  “Having a favorite human is just as unnatural as the one you favor,” Vincent retorted, a sneer spreading his thin-lipped mouth. “Not to mention her unfortunate ties to the Alliance.”

  Letting it stand that he had a favorite human could be dangerous, but Luc kept silent, his stare blistering. He would not grovel at this gargoyle’s feet.

  “The Alliance here have given us aid in the past,” Lennier said. He sat forward and propped his hands on the armrest. He probably wanted to rise, but his human movements were often torpid. At least his transformed figure, cut of albino scales and powerful wings, was something to be feared. “We shall continue to show them the same courtesy. Peace between us is paramount.”

  “And what about the abominations?” Vincent asked. “The ones with demon blood and dust? Surely you agree they should be considered our enemies.”

  Though Lennier said nothing, Vincent received a response.

  “But they’re still human.”

  Luc turned toward Dimitrie, having nearly forgotten that he was there. The boy started to wither under the other surprised looks he received. “Isn’t it our duty to protect the human part of them?”

  Luc was starting to understand why Dimitrie had so many angel’s burns. He was a diplomat. Diplomacy between nations was difficult enough; between different species it was almost impossible.

  “A point well made,” Lennier intoned. “Your name?”

  The boy ducked his head. “Dimitrie.”

  Lennier’s wrinkled lids shuttered his eyes. “I wish to speak with Dimitrie alone.”

  Marco and Luc exchanged dubious glances, but when Lennier wished something done, it was done. Without a word, Luc, Marco, and Vincent, the last sniffing at his dismissal, exited into the corridor.

  “The boy worries Lennier,” Marco said as soon as the door had closed.

  “Anyone with a weakness for humans worries me,” Vincent put in.

  Luc had had enough. He dove into Vincent’s space, close enough to smell the musty age of his cloak. “And gargoyles who mistake duty for weakness worry me. You’re not a residential Dispossessed, that much I know, or you wouldn’t have made that mistake. Where is your territory?”

  Luc’s boldness garnered a snort of amusement from Marco and a torrid glare from Vincent.

  “Notre Dame,” he answered with a curl of his lip.

  Of course. Those Notre Dame gargoyles were all the same. They strutted around as if guarding the most recogniz
able piece of architecture in Paris had made their wings turn to gold. Vincent was no doubt waiting to see the awe on Luc’s face.

  He’d be waiting for quite a while.

  “You’d best leave us lowly residential gargoyles to our shenanigans, then, wouldn’t you say, Vincent?” Marco asked, but the humor in his voice didn’t reach his eyes. They demanded Vincent’s departure.

  The older gargoyle drew up his cloak and heeded Marco’s words.

  “I don’t think he likes you,” Marco said once he’d fallen from view.

  “Does anyone?” Luc returned, realizing the answer was most likely no. That was fine by him. Dimitrie the diplomat couldn’t say as much, and look where it had gotten him.

  “I think I know of one person,” Marco said. “Though from what I’ve been hearing, she might like the Seer more than she does you. Or I should say, the future Reverend Seer.”

  Luc had been preparing to brush off Marco’s jab until that last sentence. “Reverend?”

  “The Alliance’s little pet aspires to the clergy, or didn’t you know? I have allies who tell me the Seer is studying under a reverend at the American Church.”

  Luc hadn’t known. He and Vander Burke weren’t exactly chatty.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Luc said, and it didn’t. The Seer could do as he wished. Though for some inexplicable reason, the fact that Vander would become an ordained man sat heavy in Luc’s stomach.

  He ignored it, throwing the attention from himself back to Marco. “Have a nice nap.”

  “It won’t be for a while yet,” Marco said, attempting to sound indifferent. It wasn’t working. Luc could tell Marco didn’t want to slip into the cold, dreamless sleep of hibernation. “Go back to your humans, Dog.” He started down the hallway, shoulders pressed down and chest thrust out. “And don’t trust the boy.”

  Luc stopped grinning. “What?”

  Marco kept walking toward the cherub-topped newel posts that marked the stairwell.

  “Dimitrie. I know a liar when I see one.” Marco took the stairs.

  Helpful as ever, Luc thought. He’d already known not to trust Dimitrie. But there was something satisfying in knowing Marco shared the sentiment. He was older, and though it pained Luc to admit it, he had unrivaled senses. Marco was a predator—sharp, skilled, and dangerous. So had he caught on to Dimitrie’s secret of being a shadow gargoyle? Or had he sensed something more?