The Beautiful and the Cursed: Marco's Story

by Page Morgan

  Marco moved with precision, laying the livery as flat as possible on a garden bench for his return. He calmed himself by surfacing Grace’s scent. There had always been something sweetly soothing about it. As he let her scent glaze his throat and burrow inside him, her beacon pulsed bright and clear.

  Marco, now naked in the garden, drew in a sharp breath.

  Grace was on the roof.

  Marco cursed as he forced his body to erupt. His spine ridged and lengthened to nearly double his human height; the muscles throughout his limbs and chest bulked and hardened beneath his coat of tempered-steel scales. From between his shoulder blades burst two sunset-red wings. He drove them down, pushing himself into the sky.

  He shouldn’t have trusted that she would obey him, but of all the places to go right now … He spiraled over the rooftop and saw a light there. His night vision defined not one but two girls: Grace and Lady Arabella.

  Both of their scents drove into Marco, carrying with them a confusing mixture of anger and desperation. Arabella held herself rigid, hands balled into tight fists at her side. She advanced on Grace, who shook her head while backing away from her mistress. There was nothing he could do but circle overhead, watching. Waiting. Vander would appear any moment now, and on his heels would be a hungry demon.

  Marco’s clipped ears picked up Arabella’s voice. “You can’t leave. No one is allowed to leave.”

  The leech must have charged her with keeping the humans corralled for the evening. Waste not, Marco thought as Grace stammered through an explanation as to where she had been going.

  The metal steps rang with heavy footfalls. The Seer charged onto the rooftop, his crossbow, loaded with a blessed silver dart, in hand. Grace screamed, though Arabella simply looked upon the Alliance fighter with slight concern.

  “No one is allowed to leave,” the girl repeated.

  Vander Burke dug his heels in and looked up to the sky. He held his arms open as if to say What do I do with them? Unless Marco swooped down and plucked them up with his talons, the girls had no other way off the roof.

  Startled by his unexpected witnesses, the Seer wasn’t ready for the leech. It rushed up the metal steps, and though Vander turned and fired his crossbow, his aim was skewed. The dart sliced the demon’s shoulder, stopping the leech only for as long as it took for the thing to shed its disguise. It sloughed off into a gluey pile of flesh and clothing, leaving the demon as it truly was: a stunted black, hairless, winged creature, half the height of its human camouflage. Its globular eyes were like a fly’s, with a number of glistening lenses. A dozen or more short, spiked fangs ringed the inside of the leech’s mouth.

  Grace screamed again. This time, Arabella’s voice joined in, her trance at last broken.

  Marco took a deep breath. Now that they’d seen a drainer demon up close and personal, what was he waiting for?

  Vander loaded a second dart as Marco dove toward the roof, talons open. One of the leech’s wings lashed out at the crossbow and the second dart hurtled off into a dark corner of the roof. Vander threw down his weapon and withdrew a silver dagger instead. But the blade was too short; if Vander lunged too close, the leech would sink its fangs into his arm and bite it clean off. As much as it irritated Marco, the Seer was on his territory and was under his protection.

  Marco batted the Seer back with a whip of his spiked tail and then slashed his hooked talons at the leech. The demon zinged out of reach, its little wings clicking and humming as it tore under one of Marco’s great sails. Marco arched his back, propelling himself after the leech, when a flower of pain seared his throat. Not his own pain. Her scent surfaced fast and strong: Arabella.

  A blinding white cloud burst in front of Marco’s face. Though his night vision didn’t show color, Marco knew the sparks had been green—the signal that a demon had been destroyed.

  “I got it,” the Seer confirmed, heaving for breath. “But she’s hurt.”

  Marco saw Arabella lying on the roof, her hands curled in a tight grasp around her throat. Marco stared in disbelief. He had failed. The leech had ripped into his human in less time than it had taken Marco to turn around.

  Grace huddled beside Arabella, her hands and arms shaking as she tried to stop the girl’s bleeding.

  “What happened? Dear God, she needs help!” She got to her feet and started running for the steps. She pulled to a sticky stop when her eyes landed on Marco, who stood in her path.

  “The girl needs your blood, Mar—” Vander caught himself.

  Marco knew that no doctor would be able to help Lady Arabella. The gash in her throat might be repaired, but the demon poison would kill her. The Seer was right. If she had a chance at all, it would be with Marco’s blood. Other than the potent and dangerous mercurite the Alliance used, gargoyle blood was the only thing that could draw out the poison and heal a human’s wounds.

  Unfortunately, it had to be applied topically. And in his present state, Marco’s talons would only further mangle Arabella’s flesh.

  He needed to shift.

  Grace watched in rapt horror as Marco let his true form go. After so many centuries and so many shifts, his body moved between human and gargoyle form with swift fluidity. His scales retreated under the siege of tawny skin; the sharp ridges of his wolfish face crumbled into smooth curves; hooked talons became toes and fingers again; his wings pleated and sank into his back.

  He stood before Grace in his human skin. She trembled, her eyes pools of fear and confusion. He didn’t have time to soothe her.

  Marco crossed the roof to where Arabella lay bleeding. Vander was at her side, a handkerchief pressed to the side of her neck.

  “Your dagger,” Marco said. Vander held it out, blade first. Marco closed his palm around the silver edge and slid it down his hand in one stroke. The blade melted through his flesh and a flow of blood sprang up.

  “M-Marco? What … what are you?” Grace squeaked from where she stood near the rattan chaise.

  Vander withdrew the saturated handkerchief from Arabella’s neck. Marco crouched and clamped his hand over the wound. It could be too late. Gargoyle blood worked small miracles. It didn’t bring people back from the dead. Whatever happened now, Marco would still be getting a visit from Irindi. The angel of heavenly law would know that he had failed one of his humans. Her punishment—a scarring angel’s burn carved into his back—could be depended upon.

  Marco detested failing. He also detested that the Alliance Seer had been witness to it. And then there was Grace. Only once before had the humans living within Hôtel Dugray seen what he was. What he could do. They had called him the devil’s spawn, ordered him gone, and had even brought in a priest to bless each room and pray for protection from Marco’s return.

  Fools.

  Lady Arabella’s eyelids fluttered. She stared at Marco, her shallow breaths becoming steadily deeper and fuller. As gently as he could manage, he pressed and rubbed the blood into her wound. All the while he felt Grace’s eyes on his bared back.

  “Is it working?” the Seer asked.

  Marco had only received two angel’s burns in the centuries of his existence. The more a gargoyle was burned, the less his blood was able to heal. Marco’s blood was potent. He felt proof of its power as Arabella’s feeble heartbeat began to strengthen.

  “Mr. Angelis?” she whispered, her lips spattered with her own blood.

  Marco answered the Seer’s question. “She will live.” But Marco would have to go. Now that she had seen him. Now that Grace had. Watching and protecting from afar was a nuisance. He’d done it before but didn’t appreciate having to do so again.

  “Then I think now is a good time for me to leave,” Vander said.

  Marco remained crouched at Arabella’s side. He should thank the Seer. Vander had destroyed the leech when Marco had failed. The words were locked in his throat, though, bound by his pride.

  Marco took his hand from Arabella’s neck and stood. Smears of blood coated the wound, though the gash had already s
tarted to knit together.

  “Seer,” he managed to say.

  Vander paused near the metal steps. After a long, silent moment passed, he laughed. “If it’s your reputation you are worrying about, don’t. I was never here. This never happened. Oh … and you’re welcome.”

  Only when the clanging of Vander’s feet subsided did Marco see Grace creeping toward her mistress on the rooftop. She gave Marco’s naked form a wide berth.

  “Contrary to what you might be thinking right now,” he began, watching her from over his shoulder, “you need not fear me.”

  Grace helped Arabella sit up. “I know. You saved my lady’s life, but you … you were a …”

  “A monster?” he supplied.

  “I don’t know! But you weren’t human,” she replied, still trembling.

  He kept his back to her. It was dark here on the roof but not that dark.

  “No, I’m not human, and I’m not going to explain what I am, either. It’s not for you to know. I will tell you, however, that the moment I leave this roof you’ll never see me again.”

  Not having to look at her made it easier to sever the line.

  “You can’t—” Grace started, but Lady Arabella bit into her protest.

  “Yes, he can. He shall. I do not know what he is, but it is evil. If he does not leave, I shall tell Mama and Papa and they shall quit this house forever!”

  He’d liked her better when she’d been silent and bleeding.

  Marco swiveled just far enough to pin Arabella with a cold glare. “Then you should know something: I won’t truly be gone. I’ll still be here—watching you. Hiding. You won’t see me, but I’ll definitely see you.”

  That should take care of things. Mentally, Marco washed his hands of this mess. He’d rather have a territory filled with new humans than one filled with people who had seen him for what he was. He looked away from the refreshed fear closing over Arabella’s face and met Grace’s narrowed eyes. She inspected him with far less fear than he preferred to see.

  It wasn’t that he wished to frighten Grace. It was just that fear was easier to deal with than curiosity. She could not be a part of his world, and he had only one foot in her world to begin with. He’d been a fool to befriend her. To weaken himself like this. He was cursed. No longer meant for friendship with a human—and certainly not for anything more. That was the simple, stark truth. And it was unexpectedly painful.

  “Goodbye, Grace.” Without waiting to hear whether she called out to him, he pulled the trigger in his core and coalesced once again. His wings carried him off the rooftop and over the balustrades, down to the garden bench, where his talons carefully scraped up his waiting livery, and then back into the night sky. Alone.

  Two days later, Marco returned to Hôtel Dugray.

  They had all left by then. He had been watching from the street, from the roofs of other homes, wherever he could remain unnoticed, as the house quickly emptied. The rumor burning up Montparnasse had it that Hôtel Dugray was being quit for good.

  Marco walked along the roof as dusk settled. The windows of his territory grew dark while others up and down the street brightened. It felt good to be home. Though it left him empty, it was also good to be free of human charges.

  He kicked the foot of the old rattan chaise and sent it skittering across the roof, into one of the brick chimneys. A slap of something heavy and the fluttering of paper drew his eyes to the ground near the overturned chair: Grace’s sketchbook.

  Marco hadn’t wanted to think about her.

  He stooped to pick it up, resolved not to flip through its pages, but the temptation was too great. He pushed open the cover, annoyed with himself. Lines and dots filled the first many pages. The Pegasus constellation, done time and again. Marco settled onto his heels as he continued to page through. Constellations were not all that Grace had drawn. There were portraits of Lady Arabella, of other servants. The baroness. The building across the street.

  A self-portrait.

  Marco quickly turned that page and found a pencil sketch of himself—both incarnations. His human face filled the upper corner of the page, and at the bottom, there was a rough capturing of his wings and tail, his muscled legs and arms. She had erased and redrawn certain lines here and there.

  Grace hadn’t been afraid of him. The care with which she’d drawn his gargoyle form showed that.

  Marco turned the page and ran his finger along the roughened edge near the book’s seam. She’d torn out the last page.

  He closed the sketchbook, his jaw clenching as he tried to imagine what she had taken for herself. Another image of him? Human or gargoyle? Perhaps both. Perhaps neither.

  Marco reopened the book and flipped to Grace’s self-portrait. Graphite-gray lines, not the vivid red and green Marco remembered. He took the corner of the page and carefully ripped the sheet free.

  Marco folded the paper and tucked it into his coat pocket, knowing he was a fool. It didn’t matter.

  So long as he was the only one who knew it.

  About the Author

  Page Morgan has been fascinated with les grotesques ever since she came across a black-and-white photograph of a Notre Dame gargoyle keeping watch over the city of Paris. Her subsequent research fed her imagination, and she was inspired to piece together her own mythology for these remarkably complex stone figures. Page lives in New Hampshire with her husband and their three children.

  Look for the first full-length book in the Novels of the Dispossessed, The Beautiful and the Cursed, available from Delacorte Press.

  Turn the page for a look at the first book in the Dispossessed series!

  Excerpt copyright © 2013 by Angie Frazier. Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  PARIS

  FAUBOURG SAINT-GERMAIN

  LATE NOVEMBER 1899

  The boy was late.

  Brigitte crossed the folds of her sable cape to shut out the creeping frost. It was still and quiet within the walled garden, the hollow sort of quiet that arrives just past midnight. Swaths of snowy burlap covered the rose shrubs, making them look ghostly under the bright moon, and wisps of clouds scudded through the sky.

  She felt like a fool. She’d actually believed he would come.

  He had to have been trifling with her in the markets the day before, when they’d met. Brigitte usually sent servants there, but she was bored with the shopping arcades, and her friend Jacqueline had suggested they go. When Jacqui had wandered off to look at some inexpensive paste rings, Brigitte had noticed the boy standing behind his barrow of parsnips and potatoes.

  She had willfully overlooked his work-roughened hands, his threadbare tweed coat and trousers. Instead, she focused on everything north of his shoulders. He was glorious, his eyes and hair a golden shade of brown that put the finest tiger oak to shame. She knew the boy was unsuitable—he hawked vegetables!—and unworthy of her attention. Perhaps that was exactly why she so eagerly wished to bestow it. Before she knew it, she’d given him her address and a time to meet.

  And here she was.

  But where was he?

  Brigitte stared at the garden gate, the arched planks overrun by withered grapevines. She suddenly wanted nothing more than to be indoors, out of the cold, and safe. She started a slow retreat toward the house. If only the barrow boy had been of her class, they could have met during daylight. Even the garden of Brigitte’s family estate wasn’t completely safe, not now.

  The girls who had gone missing over the last two weeks had all disappeared from their own homes. The Blanche girl was the latest to have vanished. Brigitte had known of her, had seen her at parties once or twice. No one knew where the girls had gone, but the police were starting to suspect foul play. Perhaps it was better that the barrow boy had not come to take her from the walled garden.

  That was when she heard it: the sorrowful call of an owl. She stopped, her heart along with her feet, it seemed. The barrow boy ha
d said he’d give an owl’s hoot three times. After the third cry rang out, the owl fell silent. Uncertain but hopeful, Brigitte went back to the gate. She lifted the hinge, the iron latch cold through her soft kid gloves.

  “I’m sorry.” His voice came from the left. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.” He emerged from the shadows and once again Brigitte was struck mute. He was magnificent. She wanted to twist his hair around her fingers. Feel the silk of it.

  “I haven’t,” she managed to say. “Will you tell me your name now?”

  He hadn’t at the markets. A mystery to keep you tempted, he’d said. He looked like a Jean or a Hugo or an Amato. Whoever he was, he pulled her away from the gate and shut it with care. Brigitte felt a moment of hesitation as the latch fell into place. But the girls who had been taken had all been alone, with no one to protect them. She would not be alone.

  “You must guess my name,” he said, leading her down the short slope of lawn toward the orchard lane. His hand was a pocket of warmth, his touch heating her to her core. His long hair shimmered in the moonlight, as if each lock had been glossed with fairy dust.

  “Amato?” Brigitte instantly knew that it wasn’t right. He let go of her hand as if to punish her.

  “Try again,” he said, before slipping behind the craggy trunk of an apple tree. Its leafless limbs were black and bent. Brigitte’s heel crushed a frost-withered apple in the overgrown grass and slipped in the pulp.

  “Jean?”

  His silence lingered. No. Not Jean, then. The moon fell behind a knot of clouds and the orchard lane became an inky blot.

  “I am finished guessing,” she said, tired of the silly game.

  The lane stayed dark. The barrow boy made no noise at all. Where had he gone? “Tell me or … or I’ll go back.”

  The frost bit at the tip of her nose. Brigitte winced. Coming out here had been pure folly. This boy could be anyone, anyone at all, and his coyness was quickly curdling the thrill Brigitte had first felt.