by Page Morgan
His eyes were closed, but he wasn’t dead. His ribs still expanded with shallow breaths every few seconds.
Luc shook Marco’s shoulder, not caring if it inflicted pain. “Goddamn it, Marco, wake up! Where is Ingrid?”
The Wolf’s eyes opened to slits. “Ouch.”
“Where is she?” Luc asked again.
Marco pushed himself to his hands and knees, and a rasp of pain whistled out of his throat. Luc had endured only one angel’s burn at a time. To receive dozens … he wasn’t surprised Marco had lost consciousness. Irindi wouldn’t have done this.
“You’re elder,” Marco groaned, and before Luc could ask how he knew this, he continued, “I feel it. Every gargoyle will feel it. Congratulations, brother.”
“I don’t want congratulations. I want to know where Ingrid is.”
“The rectory,” Marco answered. “In her room.”
Luc stood up, his eyes going to Marco’s back once again. “It was Axia, wasn’t it?”
The Wolf held out his hand for assistance. “And we thought Irindi was a bitch.”
Luc gripped his hand and pulled him to his feet. A shot rang out and a chunk of stone from the nearby fountain exploded in a rain of dust. Luc dropped into a crouch. He scanned the square until his eyes came to rest on one of the gendarmes who had retreated earlier. He was behind one of the church’s arcade columns now, his rifle aimed at them.
“No one likes it when you’re naked, Marco,” Luc said, positioning himself behind the shelter of the fountain. Marco remained upright, his hands on his hips.
“Everyone likes it when I’m naked,” he replied as another shot cracked off and hit the smooth yellow marble less than a yard from his bare feet. “I imagine he objects to the color of my blood. Let’s fly.”
Luc swore under his breath. “I can’t.”
Marco stared at him.
“Vincent,” Luc said, hoping it was enough of an explanation for now.
“I’ve helped you fly before,” Marco said. He rolled his head and shoulders and then, wincing from the pain of the angel’s burns, shuddered into his cinnamon scales. The policeman opened up a volley of shots, and a second rifle joined in from another corner of the square. Luc didn’t have time to undress. His true form burst through the borrowed livery, though with only half of its usual grandeur. Marco surged into the air, the talons of one foot clamped tight around the bony stump of Luc’s lost wing. He beat the air with his one wing, his speed slower than Marco’s, making their rhythm choppy, but at least Luc didn’t spin into a dive.
The reports of the rifles faded as the two gargoyles glided into the thick orange smog. To be elder, Luc thought, and yet be dragged through the air like this, like some useless, decrepit invalid, was pathetic. By the time the abbey’s bell towers came into sight, Luc was certain he’d never been more humiliated. Marco released the remains of Luc’s wing as they crossed over the flat hedgerow top; then he veered toward the carriage house loft, presumably to search for clothes. Scores of weeping black ridges ribbed his back between his wings, mirroring his flayed human skin.
Luc coasted toward Ingrid’s bedroom window, where the gauzy white curtains had been tied back. He’d just started to dip into a slanted fall when his talons caught the wooden ledge. He lost his balance, overcorrected, and splintered off a piece of pulpy wood. The casement windows flew inward, revealing Ingrid, her mouth open in alarm. Luc fell inside, his humiliation complete.
“Luc!”
Her hands wrapped around his arm and tugged in a fruitless attempt to lift his bulky form from the floor.
“Oh, Luc, what happ—”
She let out a shriek and he guessed she had noticed his destroyed wing.
Luc pushed himself to his feet and angled his back away from her. He didn’t want her to see him struggle, or to stare at the pitiful stump. She’d covered her mouth with her hands, and her eyes burned with unshed tears. He shook his head, trying to tell her not to cry. She took her hands from her mouth and laid them flat against the plates of his chest.
“Will you be all right?” She fanned her hands over his chest, down the hard swells of muscle over his abdomen, and then dragged them to his arms. She touched him as though inspecting him for damage, her fingers light as a breeze against the thickness of his scales.
Luc nodded. He had to shift back—he had to tell her about the battle, about becoming elder. He wanted to know what had happened to her out there with Axia as well. The painful memory of his torn wing sinking back into his body on a reverse shift was still fresh enough to make him hesitate.
Ingrid’s fingertips came to Luc’s mouth. Her thumb brushed across the leather of his bottom lip, and then her satiny palms cupped the lines of his jaw. She was so soft. So fragile, and yet here she stood making contact with a beast.
Ingrid had touched his mouth before—in the underground shopping arcade after the mimic demon attack. Luc had jerked away, ashamed of how ugly he was. But he knew now that she wasn’t touching him to explore something grotesque. She loved him. She loved all of him, every scale, every monstrous detail, right down to his hard leather lips. Still, he wasn’t prepared for her to stand on the tips of her toes and press her mouth to them.
Her kiss was just a whisper. Nothing more than a promise. A reassurance. He faced the pain of his wing and shed his scales, trimming down into his human form while Ingrid’s hands were still against him. She sucked in a breath as his steel plates dissolved under her palms, to be replaced with the smooth, pale skin of his chest.
Once his talons had formed into blunt fingers, with no danger of shearing through her skin, Luc curled them around her waist and brought her against his body. Her dress, the same wilted silk she’d worn for more than two days now, brushed his bare skin. Nothing had ever felt so fine. She kissed the shallow canyon running between his pectorals and let her lips linger.
“I’m elder,” he told her. Saying it made it real, so he said it again. “I’m elder. Ingrid, you can be mine again. Come to common grounds with me.”
The tip of her nose drew a line across his chest as she shook her head. “I can’t. It’s still forbidden to take a human. Being elder doesn’t change that.” Her eyes lifted to his. “Does it?”
Gaston had likely only been telling Luc what he’d wanted to hear, to get him motivated to move against Vincent. But it had lit something within him, a hope that refused to burn out.
“Lennier changed everything for the Dispossessed hundreds of years ago. We went from being hunted by the Alliance to being their ally. I have the chance now to change things between us and the rest of the humans.” He raked his fingers through her loose golden tresses. “I can’t believe I’m the only one who’s ever felt like this. There have to be others … others who want the same things I do.”
Ingrid closed her eyes and tilted her head into his hand. “But the Angelic Order—”
“Punished me for having an affinity—a preference for one human over another. If you were to be my only human …” He let his thought trail off. He knew it was selfish, asking her to be his and to live with him alone, without another human under his roof at Hôtel du Maurier. It wouldn’t last. It couldn’t last. But he also couldn’t give her up to reality just yet.
“My body is cursed. I can’t be with you, but I can love you. I can love you for as long as you’ll have me.”
Luc kissed her temple and buried his nose in her hair. He breathed her in, smelling salt and faint rosewater, sweat and woodsmoke. It wasn’t the sweet spring grass and dark, fertile soil he’d known, and it didn’t matter. It was her. Just her.
“I don’t want what happened to René to happen to you,” she whispered, her breath stirring against his bare skin.
“I can’t promise any—”
The door to Ingrid’s bedroom burst open. Luc heard the scream before his eyes registered Lady Brickton standing within the doorway, her hands slapping over her mouth. With his arms still around Ingrid’s body, Luc quaked into his reptilian scales. Too late. Vander B
urke had already pushed past Ingrid’s mother and into the room.
Vander raged across Ingrid’s bedroom, his brutal gaze locked on Luc. Ingrid threw out her arms, as if they could actually block Luc’s gigantic form behind her.
“Stop!”
If Vander got any closer she didn’t know what Luc might do. She didn’t know what Vander might do.
“What in God’s name is going on in here?” Mama demanded.
Vander pulled up just short of slamming into Ingrid, his glare still fixed on Luc. “You know what happens to humans caught up with gargoyles. You know and you don’t care, you selfish bastard.” He took Ingrid’s arm and jerked her aside, his other hand reaching into his coat and closing around the handle of his sword.
“Vander, no!” Ingrid screamed.
Luc swatted down Vander’s sword hand with what looked and sounded like enough force to break bone.
“Luc, stop!” she screamed again. She would have stunned them both had her lectrux blood not been subdued.
The room became smaller as Nolan darted inside. He grabbed Vander’s arm and heaved him back to a safe distance. “Use that brain of yours, Burke. He is elder. You do not challenge him.”
Ingrid slipped back in front of Luc and put her palms flat against his chest.
“You should go,” she whispered.
His phosphorescent green eyes met hers for a moment before something over her shoulder drew his attention. She followed his gaze, but only until she saw her mother in her side vision. Oh God. Mama. And what she’d seen.
“Our former driver is one of them?” Lady Brickton asked, painfully shrill this time. Ingrid winced.
“Mama—”
Ingrid had no idea how to continue. The usual excuses—It wasn’t what it looked like or I can explain—would be pathetic. It was exactly as it had looked, and no, truly, she could not explain. Not without sounding like a complete lunatic.
Ingrid was saved by a voice calling her name from the hallway.
“Griddy?”
No. It couldn’t be.
“Gabby?” Ingrid turned to face the door, resisting the magnetic pull of her mother’s ferocious glare.
And there her sister was, entering the bedroom with her rum-colored hair falling out of combs and pins, a bright, rosy flush upon her cheeks, and no slanted veil to mask her scars.
Gabby’s smile trembled as she skirted their mother, Nolan, and Vander, and rushed into Ingrid’s arms. Her smile fell away completely as she backed out of their brief embrace and looked between Luc’s true form and Mama.
Gabby angled her head so no one could read her lips. Why is he in your room? she mouthed. Ingrid shook her head stiffly.
“Yann is still out there,” Vander boomed. “He and a few Chimeras who haven’t bowed down to the great and mighty elder just yet. You should be out there finding them, Luc, not in here where you don’t belong.”
“I won’t pretend to understand who and what Mr. Burke is referring to. However,” Mama began, her tone now calm, yet no less severe, “I agree with him. You do not belong in my daughter’s room, Mr. Rousseau, and most certainly not in the state in which I found you.”
Gabby gasped, likely deducing in what state Luc had been found. It was all going to pieces. Ingrid felt Luc’s talons against the small of her back. He nodded once and backed toward the open casement window.
“But you can’t fly like this,” Ingrid said, her stomach coiling again as she looked at the tattered remains of his wing, which had been shorn neatly to the curved-in arch along the bottom. There, it looked like the stringy bands of a celery stalk, pulled and stretched and finally ripped off. Black blood crusted the stump.
Luc snorted a low hufft in answer, and she presumed he was telling her not to worry. He tucked his long black talons into his calloused palm and gently swept his knuckles down Ingrid’s cheek. He then lifted himself onto the windowsill, furled his remaining wing, and jumped.
Ingrid watched his landing and the heavy, locomotive strides he took toward the carriage house. He was such a beast. So inhuman and impossible, and she knew from the silence behind her that every last stomach in the room was tight with disgust, every tongue numbed by mystification.
Ingrid turned around and met a host of different reactions. Gabby’s jaw hung loose, her brows pressed together the way they were whenever she was fighting tears. Nolan had his hands on his hips, his eyes on the floor. Mama’s pallor had gone ghostly white. And Vander … well, he glared at her with barely contained fire. The only person missing from this display was her brother.
“Where is Grayson?” Ingrid asked. She wanted to know, but she also couldn’t think of anything else to end the insufferable silence.
Gabby blinked and cleared her throat. “Vander said he’d been in the basement of Hôtel Bastian but that he escaped.”
Ingrid had too many questions. About Grayson and Chelle and why Vander’s shirt was torn and bloody, and where Nolan had been for so long, and what on earth Gabby was thinking coming back to Paris in the middle of this insanity. Nolan didn’t allow her time to ask questions, however.
“We’re going to Clos du Vie. We think we have a way to stop Axia.” He glanced over at Vander and hooked his arm again. “Come on.”
Vander’s hot glare never wavered from Ingrid’s face. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
Ingrid shrank back a step. Oh no.
Nolan sighed. “Remember your vows,” he murmured, and then released Vander’s arm.
Gabby spun on her heel and touched Mama’s hand. “Let’s get your coat.”
Mama inhaled deeply but didn’t object. She let Gabby lead her into the hallway, and Nolan followed. He shut the door behind him, and almost immediately the air turned dry and suffocating.
“Vander—”
“You’re choosing him. A gargoyle.”
It was the disappointment in his voice that crushed her, a palm on her heart, pressing and twisting.
“I …” Ingrid took a breath and it became a cracking sob. “I love him.”
He lowered his head and turned it sharply to the side, as if it had just been slapped. “And you feel nothing for me.”
“No, that’s not true,” she insisted. “You know it isn’t true.”
He belted out a grim laugh. “I see. You want us to be friends.”
He started toward the door.
“No! I mean … well, yes, but no, it’s not like that, either,” she stammered. “You mean more to me than that. The few times we’ve kissed, Vander, you’ve made me feel … I don’t know how to explain it.”
Vander stormed back to the bedpost where he’d been standing. “It’s not something that requires explanation. It only requires two mouths, two bodies, and two people who want one another.” He left the bedpost and took the last strides toward her. “My mouth wants you. My body wants you. I want you.”
There was nothing left inside her when he stopped speaking. No hot guilt roiling in her chest and stomach, no anxiety shivering along her arms and legs. There was only a tranquil sort of weightlessness. Those precious few seconds when your mind and body haven’t quite realized the peril of gravity. When you can see with utter clarity and be brutally honest and you have to act before you plummet toward the ground.
“I want you, too.” She closed her eyes when his hand cupped her cheek and his thumb brushed along her lower lip. “But I want Luc more.”
His hand froze. Ingrid, her eyes still shut, jerked her cheek out of his palm and slid past him, accidentally ramming into his side. She opened her eyes and stumbled around the bed, toward the door. Away. She couldn’t look at him, not after driving in that dagger. She’d had to do it, though. She’d put it off for far too long.
Ingrid was halfway down the stairwell when she saw Marco, wearing fresh livery, on the step below her.
“Lady Ingrid—”
She grabbed two fistfuls of his dark gray merino jacket and, before he could say anything more, buried her forehead against his crisp white,
buttoned shirt. His chest muffled her sob. Her outburst caught them both off guard. He stood stiffly while she took a shuddering breath. His hand clunked down onto her shoulder and he gave it an awkward pat. Ingrid eased herself back.
“I’m sorry,” she said, stepping away. “Are you injured?”
Marco frowned and smoothed the merino where she’d clutched it. “A sniffling human does little more than fray my nerves.”
“I meant did Axia hurt you very much?” Ingrid said, listening to the landing above for Vander’s approach. How was she going to face him?
“She’s caused a bit of a problem for me,” Marco conceded as they stepped into the foyer.
Ingrid allowed Marco to drape her cloak over her shoulders. “For all of us. Are you coming to Clos du Vie?” she asked.
“Do I have a choice?” he retorted.
He didn’t. None of them did. Axia held sway over them all, or so it seemed. Ingrid could only hope that Nolan had been right: that they had a way to stop her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Getting to Vander’s flat on rue de Berri hadn’t been easy. Grayson had gone on foot, preferring to have the freedom of ducking into a building or the mouth of an alleyway whenever he might require it. The only demons he’d crossed paths with had been corvites. There had been one on every street he’d traversed so far, and he had started to wonder if it was in fact only one bird, following him, landing atop a fence or hitching post or standing in the center of the street. Its red-rimmed pupils would watch him intently as he moved past, toward his next turn.
He hoped this was the case. They were Axia’s messengers, and he wanted a specific message delivered. Grayson had forced himself to maintain eye contact with the demon bird, even though the corvite’s stare left an oily feeling in his stomach.
Demons weren’t the only danger on the streets, either. Grayson had encountered three different gangs of looters, smashing storefront windows, swinging off lampposts, climbing to upper-story balconies to wrench shutters open and kick in doors. For the last year or so he’d been hearing nervous chatter about some priest’s prophecy that the new century would bring on a doomsday event. The end of the world, an apocalypse. Religious fanatics everywhere had latched on to the idea. Perhaps the prediction had been on the mark after all, Grayson had considered as he’d jogged up the Champs Élysées, the wide boulevard eerily empty and quiet. Perhaps people had the right to go a little mad now that hellish demons had started feeding on humans in plain sight.