The Wondrous and the Wicked

by Page Morgan

  Ingrid paused in bringing her duvet up around her waist. “Marco? But I thought …”

  Vander went to the window and pushed back the gauzy drapes. “Luc was with Marco when he found you,” he said, his words clipped to sharpened points. “He couldn’t stay.”

  Ingrid propped herself against the pillows, relieved. She hadn’t imagined him, then.

  “He had to return to his territory,” she said.

  Vander stayed silent at the window, looking at the churchyard lawn as if there were actually something interesting to see there.

  “You know where he is. Don’t you?” Ingrid asked.

  She hadn’t had the nerve to bring up Luc’s name or ponder his new territory with Vander these last weeks. She’d also been careful to keep Luc’s stone talisman in her pocket and out of Vander’s sight. She knew his feelings for her, and he knew of hers for Luc. It would have been awkward to discuss her heartbreak with someone who was likely rejoicing inside, so she’d stayed quiet instead.

  “Lennier’s old territory,” Vander finally answered. He turned away from the window and added, “Luc didn’t want you to know.”

  She leaned into the pillows, stunned. He’d been close this whole time. Guardian of gargoyle common grounds, a mere ten-minute walk away. She pictured him in Lennier’s sitting room, in front of the hearth. In the guest bedroom where they had kissed and held one another in the four-poster bed—the very action that had decided Luc’s fate as guardian of l’Abbaye Saint-Dismas.

  Of course he hadn’t wanted Ingrid to know. He would understand how tempted she’d be to go to him, and he wouldn’t want her at gargoyle common grounds, not when any number of Dispossessed could be there.

  Vander left the window. “I have to get back to Hôtel Bastian. Things are … busy.”

  The way he’d hesitated took Ingrid from her thoughts of Luc. “What is it? Do you know which gargoyle killed Léon and the others?”

  He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair and avoided her eyes.

  “Vander, you can tell me. I can handle it.” Another thought stilled her. “Or is it Axia? Has something happened while I’ve been sleeping?”

  How long would it take for the fallen angel to set her Harvest in motion?

  Vander shrugged on his jacket, the blessed silver crossbow inside weighing down the faded tweed. “No and no. It’s Alliance matters, that’s all. You need to rest.”

  She pressed her lips tight and cocked her head, as if to say I don’t think so. Vander started to laugh a moment before the door to her bedroom creaked open. Ingrid’s mother stepped inside all smiles and bright eyes. Ingrid was about to ask why when someone else came in on Mama’s heels.

  “Grayson!” Ingrid pushed back the duvet once again and leaped up. Her brother reached the bed in time to catch her before she fell. Her leg didn’t hurt, but she wasn’t steady on her feet just yet, either.

  Her mind whirled, her vision spun, but it didn’t matter. Grayson was here and he was holding her. She breathed in deeply, and with the air came a rush of anger. She pulled back and cuffed his arm.

  “Where have you been? You could have at least sent a note saying you were still in Paris. That you were still alive.”

  Grayson sighed and hung his head, nodding once. “I know. I’m sorry, Ingrid.”

  Mama stood in the doorway, watching them. She was still smiling, without a trace of anger anywhere on her lightly lined face.

  “I have already spoken with him,” Lady Brickton said, her corseted figure cut into an hourglass. Plump and firm and trim all at once, like a pincushion, Ingrid often thought. “And I am holding him to the promise he has made me. Mr. Burke?”

  Mama held the door open, graciously indicating that it was time for Vander to take his leave. Grayson turned his head to watch Vander in his side vision. They didn’t make eye contact, and Vander, Ingrid noted, fled the room rather quickly, without so much as a hello for her brother. If he was upset about Luc, she would just have to worry about it later.

  Mama closed the door behind herself and Vander.

  “I was supposed to be there,” Grayson said the moment they were alone.

  He pulled away, his jaw tight. His eyes were red-rimmed, as if he’d been crying.

  “It was my flat. The one I share with Léon.”

  “Oh, Grayson.” She reached for his hand. He let her take it, wind her fingers through his, and squeeze.

  “I took an omnibus to Hôtel Bastian instead. To see Chelle.”

  She tried not to show her hurt. “You’ve been seeing Chelle?”

  He brought their joined hands into his lap and started twisting the ring on her center finger. The single pearl set in silver had been their grandmother’s.

  “No, and she wasn’t there, so I still haven’t seen her. By the time I made it back to the flat …”

  Even if he had been seeing Chelle, she couldn’t be upset with him. Not right then. He’d come too close to being among those slain Dusters.

  “You made Mama a promise,” Ingrid said. “What was it?”

  Grayson quit fiddling with her ring and stood up. His light blond hair flopped forward and nearly covered his brows. It had grown past his ears and had an easy wave to it at this length.

  “I can’t come back here to live, Ingrid. Accepting the rectory as my home again will bind Marco to me.” He said the gargoyle’s name with a heavy dose of acid. “I don’t want him, and he doesn’t need another human to guard right now anyway. But do you really think Mother would let me go off without having a place lined up?”

  “I can’t imagine she would,” Ingrid replied, refraining from saying anything more. Like how worried their mother had been over his absence.

  Grayson seemed to hear the words anyway.

  “I don’t know if you’re safe with me,” he said.

  “I wish you trusted yourself as much I trust you.”

  He couldn’t make a reply to that, it seemed, so instead, he leaned over and kissed her forehead.

  “Mother’s already found a flat across the street for me to let. I promise I won’t disappear again.”

  She jabbed him lightly in the stomach before he could straighten back up. He pretended to double over in pain.

  “See that you don’t,” she said. “Now that Axia has all of her blood back, I have a feeling we’ll need one another.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Grayson leaned against one of the steel tables inside Hôtel Bastian’s medical room, his right sleeve rolled up and cuffed past his elbow. It was the same shirt he’d been wearing for the past month: white linen with small ivory buttons and a short club collar. Grayson had never had to wash his own clothes before, and he was certain the numerous times he’d plunged the thing into brown tap water at the flat hadn’t done the expensive bespoke shirt, made just for him on London’s Savile Row, much good. But he was also sure it wouldn’t have caused it to shrink.

  Grayson’s muscles had bulked over the last few weeks, causing the seams to bite into his shoulders and the buttons at his chest to pull when fastened. It couldn’t be blamed on an abundance of food—he and Léon had scraped by, living on bread and cheese, eating well only on visits to Constantine’s chateau. The change in his musculature had to be attributed to the numerous times he’d changed from human to hellhound. Sometimes the shift had been on purpose. Other times, he hadn’t been able to fight his body’s urge to let go. Grayson wondered if his muscles had hung on to a little bit of the hellhound bulk to make shifting less of an ordeal.

  “I’m glad you went to her,” Vander said from where he stood at one of the glassed in cabinets. He had his kit out and was drawing blood from a vial into the glass barrel of a syringe.

  Grayson hadn’t gone to Hôtel Bastian for his first mersian blood injection, as he and Vander had planned. The massacre at the flat and Ingrid’s abduction into the Underneath had made them both forget. Seeing Vander in Ingrid’s room at the rectory that morning had reminded Grayson, so he’d made his way to Al
liance headquarters after tucking Ingrid into bed to rest some more.

  Grayson flexed his bicep. The length of red tubing tied tightly around his arm stretched and whitened to pale rose.

  “You were right. I should have gone back to the abbey a long time ago. If I had, she wouldn’t have followed my friends to the flat. She wouldn’t have been anywhere near that alley,” Grayson said.

  Vander came toward the table with the barrel full of what Grayson knew was mersian blood. “ ‘That which hath been is named already.’ ” Vander glanced up with a wry grin. “Ecclesiastes.”

  “I could use a translation.” Grayson held out his arm and attempted not to look at the long, thin steel needle.

  Vander positioned Grayson’s arm and rubbed the bulging blue vein he intended to stick.

  “What’s done is done,” he said, piercing Grayson’s skin without hesitation. A press of the plunger and the barrel’s contents slowly emptied.

  “Please, Reverend, no more biblical code,” Grayson teased.

  The last drop of mersian blood disappeared from the glass barrel and Vander removed the needle tip. A bead of blood welled up on the injection site and gravity pulled it down Grayson’s forearm.

  “It’s always about blood,” he said as Vander removed the rubber tourniquet and held out a wad of linen. Grayson staunched the blood and began to wrap the linen around his elbow. “Angel blood, demon blood, Duster blood. For once I’d like it to be about something else. Like, I don’t know … food. Or whiskey. Why couldn’t Axia just crave a shot of good whiskey?”

  Vander smiled but didn’t laugh. He was taking apart the needle and syringe, preparing to dip the pieces in a jar of carbolic acid.

  “What now?” Grayson asked, and somehow Vander knew he wasn’t thinking about the mersian blood spreading through his system. He was asking about Axia. About the Harvest.

  “Word has come from Rome.” Vander let the needle’s components settle into the jar of syrupy, red-tinged antiseptic. “The Directorate is sending us an emergency troop of Alliance hunters. They want Paris secured if Axia is to make a strike.”

  Grayson finished with his bandage and rolled down his cuff. He would have thought the more hunters, the better, but Vander didn’t sound relieved.

  “You don’t want them here?” Grayson asked.

  Vander wiped his hands on some linen toweling and, without a reply, moved to a squat, freestanding zinc cabinet tucked into the corner of the room. He then took a key from his waistcoat and crouched to insert it into the padlock latching the doors.

  “Two mornings ago, an Alliance assassin tried to kill Ingrid. Assassins don’t work on their own; the Directorate gives them their targets.” The padlock fell open and Vander swung the zinc doors wide. He stood up and allowed Grayson to see inside. There were three shelves, and on the center shelf were three glass jars filled with red liquid. He couldn’t smell the blood; the jars looked airtight. He just knew the color by now. The cabinet must have had a vapor compression system. Each jar was covered in a swirling pattern of frost.

  “I’ve been drawing Ingrid’s blood every three or four days for about a month,” Vander said before further explaining about the blood-separating machine the Daicrypta had developed and how he and Nolan were creating something similar here in a room on the fourth floor.

  Grayson eyed the contained blood with dawning realization. “You have angel blood in those jars.”

  Vander closed the cabinet doors and replaced the padlock. “The Directorate has ordered us to hand Ingrid’s blood over when the troops and their representative arrive.”

  He twisted the key and then dropped it back into the pocket of his baize-green waistcoat.

  “Why do they want it?” Grayson asked, though he could think of a few reasons on his own. Power, for example. Ingrid had been able to push gargoyles into submission a couple of times, and Grayson had heard about the Alliance’s recent proposed gargoyle regulations.

  “I imagine they plan to use the machine Nolan and I have been building to separate it and draw out the angelic blood. Maybe they have another machine in Rome that already works. I don’t know, but after that assassin, I don’t trust the Directorate,” Vander answered, hushing his voice and glancing toward the closed door.

  “You could waste it. Pour it into the Seine or down a drain, into the sewers, even.”

  Vander was shaking his head before Grayson had stopped suggesting methods of destruction.

  “It’s angel blood,” he said, perking up as footsteps approached the medical-room door. “There has to be some good we can do with it.”

  The doorknob turned, cutting off Grayson’s chance to argue. Monsieur Constantine let himself in and immediately dropped into a graceful bow.

  “Messieurs,” he greeted them, his charcoal derby in hand. His usual gray palette matched the mood in the room perfectly.

  “What are you doing here?” Vander asked, absent his usual good manners.

  “I’ve informed Monsieur Hans that lessons at Clos du Vie have been suspended. My home is being watched, the comings and goings of my students observed. I think it would be wise for all Dusters to maintain low visibility for the time being. Lord Fairfax,” Constantine said, addressing Grayson by the courtesy title that his place in the British peerage afforded him. He loathed it, and wished Constantine would simply call him Grayson or Mr. Waverly. “I am very sorry about our friend Léon.”

  Grayson wanted to rewind the days, go back to when he and Léon had parted on the Champs-Élysées. He would change things. He’d invite Léon to go with him to see Chelle. Let their friends wait for them in one of the cafés near the flat, he’d say.

  Grayson wasn’t sure his voice would remain steady if he tried to say anything about Léon. Instead, he tapped into a resource that was always plentiful: anger.

  “Does your gargoyle know who’s doing this to us?” he asked.

  Constantine surprised him with a ready answer. “Members of the Chimera caste.”

  So Gaston did know. And if he knew, then so did Luc and Marco and all the others.

  “Well, then we have to do something,” Grayson said. Vander and Constantine exchanged glances, but neither of them spoke. “We know who to stop,” Grayson insisted. “So let’s go. Let’s do it.”

  “Do what?” Vander asked. “Track down every Chimera we have a file on and ask if he’s killed a Duster recently? They won’t speak to us. We have no sway over them, not with Lennier, our one link to the Dispossessed, gone.”

  Grayson usually appreciated cool logic, but right then it was hard to stomach.

  “We don’t ask, then,” Grayson said. “We make them talk to us. We make them stop.”

  “Mr. Burke is correct,” Constantine said. The words only spiked Grayson’s temperature. “To attack a gargoyle would be to incite a war. It is more important right now to focus on Axia and what her first move might be.”

  The room was too hot, the air too thick. Grayson knew better than to utter another word, to shout that they clearly had more than one enemy to concern themselves with. He grabbed his coat from the steel examination table and pushed past Constantine. Vander might have called his name, but Grayson’s pulse had started beating loud in his ears, like it usually did before a shift.

  He bolted from the room so fast, eyes down, that he barreled straight into someone. A smaller someone. A girl.

  He grabbed Chelle’s arms to keep from knocking her flat onto the floor. She bucked off his hands as if he’d insulted her by thinking she needed assistance. Before he could say a word, she held a finger to her lips to hush him. Chelle pointed over his shoulder and then proceeded around him, past the half-closed door to the medical room. She didn’t wait to see if Grayson was coming. The girl was smart. She knew he’d follow her anywhere.

  As he fell into step behind her, Grayson took stock of himself. He’d never come down from an urge to shift so quickly. Seeing Chelle had doused the anger and the heat better than any of Constantine’s mind tricks. Or
perhaps it was the mersian blood already taking effect.

  They ascended a spiraling staircase. The metal clanged under his feet, but not hers. She stepped quietly, as if she wore slippers instead of army boots. He let himself smile, thankful she wasn’t peering over her shoulder to see it. He wasn’t foolish enough to believe that Chelle had actually missed him this past month. She wasn’t a girl to pine. But having her trim waist and the flare of her trousers right in front of his face as they climbed the steps made him happy.

  “Where are we going?” he whispered as they came to the top of the stairwell.

  Chelle glanced over her shoulder. “I was listening to your conversation with the old man and Vander.”

  “Eavesdropping seems rather sneaky for someone as frank as you,” he replied.

  Chelle stopped at a pair of double pocket doors. His heart thundered when she shot him a playful scowl.

  “I prefer to call it being pragmatic,” she said, rolling the pocket doors aside.

  Automatically, the overhead lightbulbs inside the room—which was about the size of the rectory’s front sitting room and dining room combined—flickered on. They clicked and hummed, growing brighter as Grayson followed Chelle inside. For a moment, he forgot the pretty girl standing in front of him, blinded as he was by all the silver hanging upon the walls.

  Swords, daggers, blades of every shape and size and purpose, all fastened to the room’s four walls in orderly rows. The silver, polished to perfection, reflected the electric light as well as a mirror would have.

  “I’m willing to bet this is a demon hunter’s favorite room,” Grayson said, turning his gaze back on Chelle. He’d never seen her with any weapons other than her hira-shuriken—flat silver disks edged with sharp, curved teeth. She never failed to send those throwing stars through the air with unbelievable dexterity and precision. As if he needed any more reasons to adore her.

  Chelle rolled back onto her heels and crossed her arms over her chest, gazing upon the displays of weaponry. She wasn’t well endowed, but Grayson never gave that part of her much thought. He liked how small she was, and more than once had imagined how her body might fit against his.