by Page Morgan
“Are you certain you wish to drain your angel blood?” Yann asked. Lennier must have found him and sent him to common grounds.
Ingrid pushed herself up. The urge to go back to her guest room, crawl into the faded four-poster, and sleep overwhelmed her.
“I have to,” she said.
Yann continued to scrutinize her. Ingrid met his stare with a long stare of her own. His eyes were an impossibly flat cement-gray. When he transformed, the feathers of his eagle wings matched their coloring.
“When it’s gone, how will you protect yourself against gargoyles like Vincent?” he asked, and with a twitch of his lips added, “The kind that are nothing like Luc. The kind that would rather harm humans than help them.”
Ingrid recalled Luc saying the same thing. There were gargoyles that relished harming humans.
“Vincent is one of those gargoyles,” she guessed.
“And you’ve just made him very angry,” he replied.
A shriek from above drew their attention to the sky. A pair of blue-scaled wings circled the courtyard. Dimitrie. Gabby had mentioned how beautiful his scales were; how they matched the striking blue of his eyes. He looped through the air above the courtyard once more before hurtling up into a bank of gray clouds and out of sight. A second later, gravel scattered near the fountain. Dimitrie had dropped something.
Yann went for it. He crouched down to pick it up but stopped. Still crouching, he raised a hand and waved her over. Ingrid approached, wondering why he had hesitated. As soon as she cleared his shoulders and saw the object, she understood perfectly. Ingrid let out a short scream and clapped both hands over her mouth.
Lying on the gravel was a dismembered finger, leached of color except at the ragged, bloodied base. A signet ring circled the red fleshy stump. The flat black onyx oval showed a family crest in gold leaf. Her family crest. It was her father’s signet ring.
Her father’s severed finger.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“You shouldn’t be here.”
Gabby sat straight-backed on the driver’s bench of Constantine’s brougham and attempted to ignore Nolan’s statement. He slapped the reins and grumbled something else under his breath before raising his voice again.
“For the devil’s sake, Gabby, you haven’t had nearly enough training!”
She fought the urge to hit him over the head. She’d been fighting it all day, actually. Ever since he’d refused to allow her to accompany their caravan from gargoyle common grounds to the Daicrypta mansion.
“If my sister, who can’t so much as swing a butter knife effectively, is inside this brougham, then I can most definitely be here as well,” she said.
It had taken convincing Chelle, Vander, and Rory that she could be of use before Nolan had held up his hands in surrender. However, he hadn’t given up objecting.
“Your sister is part of the bargain. You are not. At least your mother had the good sense to stay at the abbey and wait.”
“My mother! You want me to sit at home with my mother! Nolan Quinn, you are the most infuriating man I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting.”
Ingrid must have been listening. She was just behind the driver’s box, enclosed within the slim, lacquered-wood brougham Constantine had lent them for the night. Luc had said he’d take Ingrid to Dupuis, but the more Gabby, Grayson, and the others had stewed over it, the more they had all realized that not helping was nothing short of neglect. So they had shown up at gargoyle common grounds at dusk and waited for the black velvet blanket to drop over the skyline.
“Would you stop complimenting me, lass—I thought we were arguing,” Nolan said.
Heaven help her, she was likely to commit murder tonight! Gabby shut her mouth and kept her eyes firmly ahead, on Vander and his horse. He led their caravan, with Lennier directly above the brougham and Yann in the sky behind it. Grayson, Chelle, and Rory were all positioned along the route to the address Dupuis had given them, and Marco was pacing the route in its entirety from the sky.
No other gargoyles had accepted Lennier’s invitation to help, and Luc had not returned to Hôtel du Maurier by the time they had left. Which had led Gabby to believe her father was still in danger.
“If Dupuis is torturing my father again …” Gabby touched the pommel of her sword, hidden within her cape. Two more daggers rested in makeshift sheaths, one in each cloak panel, and a third was safely tucked inside the lip of her boot.
She hadn’t been allowed to see the severed finger when she’d arrived at Hôtel du Maurier, but Ingrid had told her about it, saying Gabby shouldn’t look. For once, Gabby hadn’t argued.
“There’s no use worrying yourself. The only way to stop Dupuis now is to …”
Nolan’s words trailed off and Gabby waited for him to finish consoling her. The carriage light formed a bright aura around his dark profile, with steam curling off the hot glass lantern. Nolan stared straight ahead.
“Is there something the matter?” Gabby asked.
Nolan turned to her then. In the passing light of a streetlamp, Gabby saw his eyes. They looked at her in an empty, uninterested way.
“Nolan?”
Something was wrong with him. He turned back to the road and pulled hard on the right rein. The wheels cut sharply, veering off rue Tronchet and down a narrow branch road. Gabby braced herself to keep from sliding off the bench.
“This isn’t the way. Nolan, what are you doing?”
No reply came. He kept his gaze on the road ahead, slapping the reins and building speed, taking the carriage farther from the planned route.
“Nolan, stop!” she shouted. He didn’t so much as flinch.
It wasn’t him. Inside it wasn’t him.
She didn’t know who or what was at the reins, but it wasn’t Nolan Quinn.
Gabby reached inside her cape and grabbed hold of the sword’s handle.
It’s not Nolan, she told herself as the brougham careened down a second street and started back for the river. If some sort of possession demon had taken control of him, then would blessed silver work to draw it out again? Nolan had been right: she didn’t have nearly enough training.
She heard Ingrid pounding from inside the carriage, her muffled voice shouting. Her sister knew something was wrong. Marco would know, too. Gabby looked skyward, but the carriage jerked roughly. She had to do something. If Marco scented a demon inside Nolan, he wouldn’t be as hesitant to exorcise it as Gabby was. And he certainly wouldn’t do it gently.
Gabby pulled the sword from inside her cape and swiftly brought the blade edge down across the tops of Nolan’s wrists. It was a tap, really; hardly enough muscle behind it to slice a tender roast. Still, green sparks danced out of the flesh wound, and Nolan’s hands dropped the reins. He winged his arm and the point of his elbow jammed Gabby in the ribs, hard. The carriage wheels lurched to the right as they hit a raised sidewalk, sending the whole brougham into a dangerous tilt.
Gabby screamed, knowing what would come next. It had happened before in Vander’s phaeton, when the traitorous Alliance member Tomas had kidnapped Gabby and taken her to the Métro construction pit. They were going to crash and roll. Only this time, there wouldn’t be a slope of forgiving rock gravel and dirt to catch her.
She heard Ingrid’s muffled scream as the brougham, still speeding, teetered onto just two wheels. And then Gabby was out of her seat, falling toward the black pavement. She threw up her hands and hit—but not the ground. A pair of iron-strong arms slammed into her side, hooked around her, and swung her sideways out of her fall. She dug her fingernails into albino scales as the elder gargoyle, Lennier, threw out his white wings and dragged them to a stop.
Gabby clung hard to him and slowly looked up into his face. His scales had the luster of seed pearls, and his eyes—inexplicably human, even set as they were within scaled skin—were far gentler than Luc’s.
“Thank you,” Gabby whispered. Lennier’s lashless lids closed briefly in acceptance.
She rolled
out of his grip and, with a shaky landing, watched him spiral up into the sky. She looked back toward the brougham, expecting to see a wreck. Instead, Yann was underneath the nearly sideways carriage, his thick, furry lion’s arms raised overhead to keep it from crashing to the street. He pushed until it landed again on all four wheels, then followed Lennier into the sky.
On her next breath, Gabby saw the empty driver’s box.
In the center of the street, a sprawled body.
“Nolan!”
He stirred and moaned, his cheek flat against the street. Gabby ran to his side as Vander’s horse closed in.
She turned Nolan onto his back. “Are you badly hurt?”
He groaned again. Blood seeped from gashes on his forehead and lip, and his coat was torn at the shoulder.
The brougham door whacked open. Without waiting for assistance, Ingrid jumped out. She stumbled on the landing. “Gabby! Are you all right?”
Vander pulled his mount to a stop and leaped from the saddle. He took one look at Nolan and swore.
“There’s demon dust everywhere. What happened?”
The shrill blare of a police whistle echoed down the block. Nolan ground his teeth and maneuvered himself to his side. “I think it was a possession demon.”
He saw his wrists then, the two shallow slices. “Nicely done, lass.”
“I’m so sorry.” Gabby reached for them. “I didn’t know what else to try.”
The whistle sounded again, and this time voices accompanied it. Gabby pulled her hands back. Their near accident had drawn attention.
A slapping noise, like the ripple of canvas sails, came from above. Luc’s massive jet body landed with a fierce whump on the street just inches from Ingrid.
“Go, Luc, you’ll be seen,” Vander said as a lamp quavered into view down the block.
Luc wound his arm around Ingrid’s waist and flushed out his wings.
Gabby held out her arm. “Wait, not with—”
Luc shot up, into the sky and out of view, taking her sister with him.
The smell of spring grass and rich black soil drove into him. Luc breathed it in. A litany of images and emotions stole him away from where he was. For a moment Luc forgot the grinding pain of the heavy mercurite chains twined around his body.
Ingrid.
The dank cellar hole where he’d been imprisoned most of the day blurred out of focus. Luc felt her—her yearning for air, the panicked cadence of her heart, the bitter tang of fear rising in her throat, choking her.
Ingrid was afraid. She needed him. And he couldn’t move.
The mercurite ate into his flesh. The muscle and skin under the thick chains had long since hardened to stone. With the chains wound around him from his shoulders to his knees, most of Luc’s body had crystallized, including his wings. Those had been pinned into place with a curved, mercurite-dipped rod.
The disciples had put Ingrid’s father on the roof of the Daicrypta den like bait. Tied to a chair, Lord Brickton had seen Luc and screamed in terror. Luc had thought him a fool, until he’d touched down on the roof, having rushed headlong into a trap.
They had been waiting for him, armed to the teeth with mercurite. Brickton wasn’t the fool—Luc was. And now here he sat, a useless pile of stone and flesh, naked, in the dark, and unable to protect. Unable to shift, though the urge hammered against him incessantly.
Gabby’s heady scent of water lily and hibiscus fluttered in but then left. What the hell was happening out there?
Honeyed light filtered through the door as it creaked opened. Dimitrie’s gangly figure stood within the entrance. Luc held still, already having learned that the more he struggled against the chains, the more they burned anew.
“Let me go,” he muttered. “My human needs me. I need to go.”
Dimitrie stepped inside and shut the door behind him. “I can’t.”
“Traitor,” Luc seethed.
His night vision showed Dimitrie’s outline in gray and white. His shoulders hung forward, his head slumped down so Luc saw the crown of his head.
“You know nothing,” Dimitrie replied.
“I know you’re keeping me from my human,” Luc growled. “I know that if anything happens to her I’ll shred you like a wet paper bag.”
Dimitrie lifted his head. “Would you?”
Luc sat on the dirt-packed floor with his head pressed against the damp cellar wall, his wings hanging limply behind him. Was it just the pain, or had Dimitrie actually sounded hopeful?
Dimitrie dropped into a crouch. His eyes looked like two black beads to Luc.
“You don’t know, do you? How lucky you are.” Dimitrie’s soprano voice cracked.
Luc barked a laugh, which shifted his shoulder, which burned like hell.
“Don’t laugh. Your abbey … your humans. You don’t know what I’d give to have what you do.”
Luc ground his teeth as the mercurite chain fixed around his chest tightened. The need to shift, to go to Ingrid, was making his ribs expand.
“So you thought you’d pretend for a little while, is that it?” Luc asked.
“I did what my humans told me to do,” he answered. “I’ve learned it’s better to give them what they want. And they want your human girl very badly.”
Marco. Luc had to depend on Marco. He wouldn’t let anything happen to Ingrid. He couldn’t.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” Dimitrie went on. “I have many humans here, Luc. Scores of them, but not all are Daicrypta. The Duster chained to a bed in a third-floor guest room? She’s my human. The unconscious homeless man the disciples brought in off the street last night to try a serum on? He’s my human, too. Possessed humans, unwanted asylum patients, prostitutes—every kind that slips through the cracks without another person knowing or caring. Those are the people Dupuis and his disciples bring here. Those are the people they perform their experiments on.
“Protecting them would mean fighting Dupuis and the disciples. You know I couldn’t do that. Everything I am forbids me to touch them. So I have humans who are injured—sometimes even killed. And I have humans who do the killing. You tell me: what am I supposed to do?”
Luc stared at Dimitrie’s washed-out face. The poor bastard. The endless scores of angel’s burns along his back made sense now. Once, Luc had tried to plan what he might do if Grayson went after Lord Brickton, or vice versa. The two despised one another. Which human would Luc protect? Which would he fight?
“All those times Irindi punished you,” Luc said. “Didn’t you ask her what you should do?”
Dimitrie snorted and stood up. “I could ask all I wanted. Do you think she ever answered? Do you really think the Order cares?”
No gargoyle would be so asinine as to think the angels cared.
“They won’t help me, but you can,” Dimitrie said.
“What makes you think I’d help you with anything?” Luc asked, but then thought back to how hopeful Dimitrie had looked when Luc had threatened to kill him.
“If I let you go, you’ll do it. You’ll end me,” Dimitrie said.
“The Dispossessed has its rules. I can’t just kill you.”
Even though Luc wanted to. Half out of fury and half out of pity.
“You can if I endanger your humans,” Dimitrie replied, his gray lips pulling into a taunting sneer. He leaned over, coming closer to Luc. “If I killed one, Lennier would allow you your revenge. Which one will it be?” He tapped his chin. “Oh, wait. I think I know.”
Luc braced himself for the pain and swept his bound legs in an arc across the floor. He caught Dimitrie’s ankles and sent the shadow gargoyle flat against the dirt.
“If you kill her, I’ll make sure you rot here for eternity,” Luc said, his throat hoarse, his entire body gripped by the mercurite sting.
Dimitrie pushed himself up, laughing. He grabbed hold of the chains binding Luc’s legs. Luc saw the darker shade of gray around his hands and realized Dimitrie was wearing gloves.
“I don’t t
hink you will,” Dimitrie said. He started to unravel the coiled chains.
Luc’s body stayed stiff, a spiral of stone and flesh. If the trace amount of mercurite on Gabby’s wounded shoulder had left his hand frozen for nearly an hour, how long would it take for his body to recover from this amount of exposure?
“I’ll tell her something from you,” Dimitrie said. He tossed the chains aside and reached for the curved rod pinning Luc’s wings together. “If you have a message. Anything you want her to know before I kill her.”
He drew the rod out with one fast tug. Speed didn’t help. It hurt worse than when they’d thrust it in.
“You won’t do it,” Luc said. He tried to move his arms. They wouldn’t budge.
“You won’t be going anywhere for a while,” Dimitrie guessed. “With you here, and Ingrid about to arrive at my doorstep, who is going to stop me?”
Marco. Dimitrie didn’t know about Marco. Luc kept his lips sealed. He tried to test his wings, but the muscles along his back and shoulder blades had calcified.
“That’s what I thought,” Dimitrie said. He got up and walked to the door. “It’s a pity, Luc. I can tell she is your favorite. But I can’t exist like this.”
Dimitrie closed the door behind him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Ingrid dug her nails into the jet scales along Luc’s arms. It was like trying to puncture a hillside of shale. He held her tight against his concrete abdomen as they flew over the rooftops of Paris.
He’d come for her.
She still didn’t understand what had happened, but there had been demon dust. Vander had seen it, said it was everywhere. And then Luc had just landed, grabbed her, and flown away again, all before she could take a full breath.
“Luc!”
Wind tunneled down her throat and canceled out her scream. He had taken her from whatever danger lay on the ground, but what about Gabby? Why hadn’t he taken her sister as well?
Ingrid squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to flail. A bubble of nausea rode up her throat, and though they were flying straight, she still felt as if they were corkscrewing through the air. She had nearly fainted the first time she’d flown with Luc, but this dizzy spinning sensation was something different. It felt oddly familiar.
