The Beautiful and the Cursed

by Page Morgan

  “And my demon blood,” she said. “You would take that as well?”

  She didn’t need lectrux blood any more than she needed angel blood. What might it feel like to be normal?

  Dupuis bowed. “If you wish.”

  Ingrid clasped her hands behind her back, fingers woven tightly together. Constantine knew only the Daicrypta’s past failures. What if there had been recent successes?

  “Has a Duster named Léon come to you yet?” Ingrid asked. Dupuis lifted his chin sharply.

  “No.”

  She didn’t know what it was about that brief answer that rang so false, but she didn’t trust him.

  “My sister won’t be coming to you, or to your bloodletting carnival, either,” Gabby said. “All of her blood will be staying right where it belongs, thank you very much.”

  Dupuis waited, expecting something more from Ingrid. She stayed quiet, letting Gabby’s response be hers.

  He shrugged. “You will come to me in the end.”

  He fell into another deep bow and then folded back into the crowd. Ingrid stayed on the terrace. She leaned over the curved iron railing, peering three stories below to the street, and saw the black tops of carriages, an aerial view of waiting horses, but no Luc. She’d expected him to be on the curb, eyes turned up toward their terrace.

  “Ingrid?” Gabby touched her arm. “Please tell me you aren’t considering that man’s offer.”

  Ingrid lifted her eyes and met her sister’s exacting glare.

  “Never,” Ingrid answered. “I promise.”

  The lie slipped out like oil. It left a greasy feel in Ingrid’s stomach, too.

  Grayson knew he was in trouble when the hellhound’s growls came through as words. No. That wasn’t the right way to explain it. The growls coming from the demon hound still sounded like rocks being ground between two stone wheels, but Grayson could understand what they meant.

  He had shifted. Fully and completely, there was no mistaking it. No denying the truth. Grayson looked down at what had once been his hands and saw in their place a pair of bulky, sharp-clawed paws planted in the slushy pavement of the back alley. His arms had lengthened until the cuffs of his coat had been brought up tight around his elbow joints. Exposed was the thick pale yellow fur that had enveloped his body. He felt more fur rubbing uncomfortably beneath the clothing he wore, like an unwanted skin. But he was still human. He still thought like one.

  Mistress will be pleased.

  The notion chimed through Grayson’s head, and he knew it had come from the other hellhound stalking a slow circle around him. Mistress. Axia.

  “She is not my mistress,” Grayson tried to say. It came out an abrasive snarl.

  Behind him, a startled cry squeaked from Chelle’s throat. He turned sharply to peer at her. She had both hira-shuriken in her hands, ready for flight.

  “Grayson?” Chelle’s voice quavered. He smelled it then, stronger and more potent than it had been before. Her blood. It sluiced through her, fast, hot, and fragrant.

  The other hellhound groaned. It knew Chelle was frightened, and that made it joyous. Grayson felt its ravening thirst mirrored within him—and then, in an instant, he remembered.

  The fog that had cloaked his memory was gone, and he recalled everything that had happened in that back alley in London: The girl’s gargling screams, drowned by her own blood as Grayson’s fangs ripped into her jugular. Her fingernails digging into his face and shoulders but slipping through thick, greasy fur without purchase. And here he found himself in another dark alley with another girl.

  Join me. Mistress desires it.

  Grayson knew that the hellhound had been commanded to rip into Chelle—and that Axia wanted Grayson to take part.

  He swallowed the spate of saliva that had pooled in his mouth, and closed his eyes. His body felt right. Utterly right. The new state of his muscles and bones was pure relief. He’d been fighting them, denying them the change for too long. But the other hellhound’s lusts, throbbing through Grayson like a tremor, weren’t right. They were base and cruel, and he didn’t give a damn what Axia desired.

  “Stop,” Grayson said, stunned once again to hear his voice roll out as such an inhuman growl.

  The hellhound turned its flaming eyes toward him. It wanted to know why. Behind him, Chelle’s boots scuffed nervously along the pavement. Grayson looked and saw that the fear had gone out of her eyes. She was ready to fight. The hellhound must have sensed it, too, because it abandoned its focus on Grayson and darted forward, straight for Chelle.

  On all fours, Grayson surged to intercept it. He moved faster than he’d thought possible, skidding to a stumbling halt in front of the hound. It weighed at least three stone more than he did and had the powerful flanks of a Belgian horse. It was the demon, not Grayson, but he didn’t stop to think about what the hellhound could do to him. He lowered his head, keeping his eyes firmly on the hound.

  He didn’t need to say anything. If he could sense this hound’s wants, then it should be able to sense his. He would not allow it to attack Chelle. He moved toward the hound, his shoulders pressed into a flat, taut plane. If this beast came at him, so be it. He’d go down fighting, and Chelle might have enough time to run away.

  Grayson felt the slap of wind just seconds before a gargoyle landed on the pavement beside him. Luc screeched at the opposing hellhound, one of his great black wings coming down protectively in front of Grayson’s transformed figure. Grayson knew Luc was only doing his duty, but it still pricked his pride. He could do this himself.

  Grayson sidestepped the tip of Luc’s wing and advanced another few paces, receiving a warning screech from Luc in the process. The other hellhound’s growl faltered, then broke into a thin whine. The beast dropped low to the pavement, even lower than Grayson stood, and shambled backward. It had curled its great tail and tucked it between its legs. Was it submitting to him? Or to Luc? Grayson took another assertive lunge to be sure. With a final whine of dismay, the hound pivoted and disappeared into the shadowed turn behind a building.

  And then Grayson was empty, the hellhound’s intrusive presence inside him lost. He let his shoulders sag, his rugged form suddenly too heavy to bear. How had he done it? That hellhound could have ripped him to shreds. And yet it had fled the moment Grayson had opposed it.

  He collapsed to the pavement, hearing Chelle timidly call his name. He could still smell her blood, but its ripe fragrance was fading. He shivered as the sensation of a hundred fingers plucking at his skin, pinching and pulling and twisting, overtook him. He was going back to normal, and it felt like trying to stuff a foot into a shoe two sizes too small. He wasn’t going to fit back into his human form. How could he, when there had been such relief within this one?

  “Grayson?” Chelle said again.

  He lay still on the pavement, the wet snow melting through his clothes and chilling his skin.

  The fur. It had disappeared. He had skin again, and as he ran his tongue over his teeth, he felt blunt canines instead of wicked fangs.

  The two buildings lining the alley loomed over him, a strip of night sky between. Luc’s wings and long, dragonlike tail cut into view, sailing up, over the edge of the building, and out of sight. Luc had come—but Grayson hadn’t needed him.

  Chelle’s pale face hovered into view, as did her razor-edged hira-shuriken.

  “I won’t hurt you,” Grayson said, and though it was hoarse, it was his own voice.

  She held still, eyelashes fluttering in consideration. She then sheathed her weapons and reached one of her gloved hands toward Grayson.

  “How many times has this happened?” she asked once he’d stumbled to his feet. He was still shaking, and it made him feel like a palsy old drunkard.

  “It hasn’t. Although … I think I’ve wanted to.”

  His stomach churned. God, he wouldn’t be sick here, in front of Chelle. She’d just watched him become a monster, and now he stood in front of her with his clothes split at the seams in places; sh
e didn’t need to see him vomit, too.

  “When have you wanted to?” she asked.

  Grayson closed his arms around himself, trying to still his shaking. “Whenever I’m angry.” He forced himself to meet her gaze. “Whenever I smell blood. Which is … well, it’s pretty much all the time.”

  Chelle dropped her gaze and played nervously with the brim of her cap.

  “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” Grayson said, wishing she’d look up at him again. She had to believe what he said. “I won’t hurt you, Chelle.”

  She gave him what he wanted and met his stare. He wanted to promise her, wanted to ask her whether she trusted him enough to believe him. But there was no need. The way she looked at him, chin hiked, eyes softer than Grayson had yet seen, was her answer.

  “I know, Grayson,” she said, taking him by the arm and leading him back toward the alley entrance. “I know.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It was cold inside the landau, the sun not having risen high enough in the morning sky to warm it. In London, it would have been fodder for the scandal sheets for Ingrid to be out just after dawn without a chaperone. But here in Paris, the rules of the game had all changed. The only person who would have made a scene was her father.

  He thought her still asleep in bed at the rectory; Mama had made sure of that. Her mother had shocked her less than an hour before when she’d entered her room and woken her with a shake. It was Monday. The day Ingrid normally visited Clos du Vie. “You must go now,” her mother had whispered. “Before your father wakes.”

  Ingrid had been in a fog while dressing herself in the dark, her maid not yet up to assist. Her mother’s help was as foreign as it was thrilling. Lady Brickton had never interfered with Ingrid’s visits to Constantine. She knew what Ingrid was supposed to be learning, and though she never requested details, every now and again, Lady Brickton would pleasantly inquire how her lessons were progressing. But until that morning when she’d hustled Ingrid out of the house, she had never acknowledged her daughter’s need for them.

  Luc had been waiting with the landau on the curb, just beyond the hedgerow. And now here they were, parked outside a shopping arcade, killing time while the sun rose. It was far too early to call on Clos du Vie yet.

  “I didn’t think my mother understood,” she said to Luc, who sat awkwardly on the bench seat across from her. She’d made him come in, out of the drifting snow and bone-cold weather.

  “He’ll be furious when you return,” he replied. He was right. There would be the devil to pay, but perhaps Mama might have some excuse planned. Ingrid hoped so. She wouldn’t worry about that just yet.

  After a minute or two of silence, Ingrid started to wonder if she should have heeded Luc’s protestations about staying out on the driver’s bench. Each time she dared lift her eyes, he would shift his gaze to the floor, or the seat cushion, or the window. Ingrid was aware of him, of his every breath, the slide of his foot over the carriage floor, the way he tugged at his collar as if it were choking him.

  “Vander Burke is going to be a reverend?” he said, breaking the silence.

  The mention of Vander’s name suddenly made the carriage feel crowded.

  “He wants to become ordained, yes,” she answered. “Why do you ask?”

  Luc sat up taller. “It just seems like an odd choice for someone who’s always been so willing to work with the Dispossessed.”

  “Why should his becoming a reverend change that?” Ingrid asked. As far as she knew, Vander had no intention of quitting the Alliance. In fact, he’d said an Alliance reverend could be useful. The old reverend at the American Church had been blessing their silver weaponry for decades. When he died, Vander could take over the task.

  Luc held her gaze. “You don’t know, do you?”

  Ingrid frowned. At her confusion, Luc added, “Why we’re gargoyles? What we did to be cast into the Dispossessed?”

  It was her turn to shift uncomfortably on the bench.

  “I had wondered, but …” But she hadn’t had the courage to ask. Not just Luc. She knew she could have asked Vander or Constantine. Even Gabby would have known.

  Whatever it was, it had to be awful—an unforgivable sin. She had considered what it might have been time and again but hadn’t made any move to learn it explicitly. Knowing Luc’s sin might change the way she saw him. The way she thought of him.

  She was being a coward.

  Luc looked away from her, confessing to the window instead. “We’re all murderers, Ingrid.”

  She forgot the cold seeping in at the tips of her suede boots.

  “Priests. Reverends. Any man of the cloth. We all took a holy life in cold blood, and in doing so gave up our eternal souls, along with any chance of entering heaven.”

  He turned from the window to see how his confession had landed. Ingrid hoped she didn’t look as shocked as she felt.

  “Why did you do it?” she whispered.

  He didn’t hesitate to answer. “Vengeance.”

  “For what?”

  Now he hesitated. His eyes clouded over and went distant. He was somewhere else, remembering, and she could read his expression well enough to know he didn’t want to be there. Luc didn’t want to talk about what he’d done, and she was willing to bet that he hadn’t done so for a very long time. Perhaps never.

  “Did a priest do something to you?” she asked, then bumbled, “Or perhaps a reverend, or—”

  “To my sister,” he said, voice low and dangerous. “Suzette.”

  He said her name with unexpected gentleness. He’d loved her.

  “What happened?” Ingrid asked.

  The distance in Luc’s eyes closed, and he was back with her in the carriage. He stared at Ingrid, unflinching. He was going to tell her, and he wasn’t going to look away until he’d finished confessing.

  “He was the priest at our church. I liked him. My family trusted him. And Suzette … he seduced her. Got her with child. When my father turned her out, the bastard wouldn’t take her in. He denied everything. Said the babe inside her wasn’t his.”

  Ingrid listened, rapt. She wanted to move to the bench beside Luc but held still. Any movement and he might startle like a bird and fly away from her.

  “I didn’t get to her in time. She drowned herself in the Seine.”

  His voice had gone thick.

  “So I killed him.” The spell broke and he averted his eyes. “I was in a fury. I wasn’t careful.”

  She wanted him to look up at her again, but he wouldn’t.

  “They hanged me at Montfaucon in front of a crowd, every last one of them believing I’d murdered an innocent priest.”

  Luc huffed a laugh, but Ingrid felt sick. She could see it all. Luc, standing at a gallows with his hands bound behind his back, a noose around his neck. A jeering crowd the last thing he saw before a suffocating black hood was thrown over his head. And then the fall. The snap of his neck.

  “I didn’t repent then, and I still don’t,” he said.

  Ingrid no longer just felt sick. She worried she might actually be sick. She scrambled forward and shoved open the carriage door. The steps were already lowered and she took them, fast.

  “I’m sorry, I need some air,” she said, her hand clasped lightly at her throat. “I’m fine. You needn’t come with me.”

  She headed straight for the arcade entrance, a pair of glass doors under a fanned-out awning of iron and glass. To her relief, the doors were open, and she hurried inside.

  He had died.

  Of course, she’d known Luc had died and that he’d been young, but … she hadn’t been prepared to learn how. That he had been executed.

  The arcade’s main doors swung closed behind her. She slowed, the tap of her heels echoing along the long, empty corridor. The shopping arcade was an indoor plaza, with storefronts on either side of a wide corridor, topped by a glass roof. The stores weren’t open yet, and Ingrid hoped she wouldn’t come upon any vagrants taking shelter. Though she supposed
that was what she was doing, in a way.

  Ingrid started for the stone fountain up ahead. Here, in the warmth of the greenhouse-like building, water burbled from the fountain. There were benches nearby. She needed to sit and get the wretched image of Luc swinging from a gallows out of her mind.

  She walked along the marble-floored corridor, passing over a short stretch of glass and iron that was in fact the roof of an underground arcade directly below. Little stretches of glass-and-iron bridges allowed the sunlight down to the subterranean arcade where Ingrid and Gabby had once shopped for hats and gloves.

  She had nearly reached the benches when something moved near the tip of the fountain’s spout. The fountain was a basic tiered design with three bowls, the smallest at the top and the widest at the bottom. Water overflowed at each bowl’s rim, creating a cascade into the basin. Ingrid stopped walking and stared at the falling water. There was something moving through it, dropping from one bowl to the next. It looked like a white braided rope, thicker even than rope used to moor ships. But it wasn’t rope.

  It slinked from the widest bowl into the main basin and then up over the lip of the fountain edge. Ingrid froze.

  Axia’s serpent.

  The snake’s diamond-shaped eyes fixed on Ingrid, its pale scales glistening and wet. Ingrid had nearly forgotten about the serpent and the way it had darted out from Axia’s robes to attack Ingrid when she’d been in the Underneath.

  Axia couldn’t leave the demon realm, but her serpent clearly could. And it had come to fetch Ingrid.

  The front doorbell rang its grating trill throughout the rectory, and Gabby slouched with relief. The breakfast table had become a war zone. The opposing armies were her parents, and Gabby had somehow become the innocent citizen caught in the cross fire.

  “I don’t see the scandal in French lessons,” her mother said to Gabby, though her words were directed at her father. Lord Brickton sat at the opposite end of the table, the skin around his club collar mottled purple.