by Page Morgan
“None that I am tempted to accept,” Constantine replied, cutting his eyes toward Ingrid. “They cannot simply take you and perform their experiments. When you accepted me as your teacher, I laid claim to you. Even though I am an ex-disciple, they must honor my claim.”
His claim? Ingrid’s ears began to burn in spite of the buffeting wind.
“I am not a plot of land or some lost puppy you found in an alley. You have no claim over me, monsieur. No one does.”
Constantine put up his hands in surrender. “Forgive the phrasing. Let me say it this way: it is much like Luc’s claim over you and the humans within his territory. You are under my protection, that is all, and I give you my word that I will not betray your trust—or the trust of any of my students. You are, however, free to give yourself to the Daicrypta.”
“If Léon’s curse stems from his demon blood and they’ve promised to rid him of it …” Ingrid took Vander’s hand as she worked it out. “That’s what they’re going to do, isn’t it—drain his blood?”
The deepening frown on her teacher’s lips was answer enough.
“Speaking of blood,” Nolan said, pulling out a pocket watch and checking the hour, “I have an appointment to keep.”
“We’re discussing how an evil society is plotting to drain Ingrid’s blood, and you have an appointment?” Vander asked.
Nolan tucked the watch into his vest and shrugged. “It’s a pressing appointment. Besides, you heard the man: the evil society can’t touch her. I’ll see you at Hôtel Bastian tonight?”
Vander grumbled his assent, and with the tip of an invisible hat, Nolan headed toward the quay steps. He turned back as he took the stone steps two at a time. “And don’t go after spider boy!”
Vander squeezed Ingrid’s fingers. “I think he’s talking to you.”
Constantine eyed their joined hands and raised his brow. Ingrid and Vander unlaced their fingers, but as they parted, she felt something cold and sticky pull at the skin on the back of her hand. Looking down, she saw strings of white gossamer waving in the wind. Spider silk. It ran from Vander’s fingers to Ingrid’s hand like an undulating bridge.
“Is that—” Ingrid stopped and tried to shake the webbing free. Vander did the same, wrenching his hand back. The silk stretched, firmly affixed to the tips of his fingers.
Ingrid stared at him. “Is that coming from you?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
An E-flat wheezed from one of the abbey’s wooden organ pipes, belching yet another off-pitch note into the fan-vaulted ceilings. Gabby gritted her teeth as her linen cloth came off the ivory keys coated in gritty black dust. It had taken her the last half hour or more to clean the pipe organ’s dual keyboards, her fingers bringing up ages of dust and playing the keys with all the finesse of a toddler.
“You can cross butchering pipe organ music off your things-to-do-before-I-die list,” Grayson mocked from where he crouched, brushing the newly painted choir stalls with varnish. Their mother had reimagined the choir stalls as a spot to smoke, drink champagne, and mingle between viewing exhibits.
“How was I supposed to know the thing was still able to play?” she shot back.
That morning at the breakfast table, she and Grayson had promised their mother they would help with the abbey, and Lady Brickton had put them to task. It wouldn’t normally have taken Gabby an hour to clean fifty-six keys, even if they were the size of a giant’s knuckles. But the soreness in her shoulder slowed her down significantly. The stitches were small and neat—Nolan had seen to them himself—but they still pulled and stung.
Gabby supposed that was what one got when one tussled with an appendius demon.
“How did you get that wound?” Grayson asked.
Gabby crumpled the dusting linen and went still. She’d told Ingrid about the appendius before her sister had gone out that morning with Vander, but not Grayson.
“You’re left-handed, and yet you’re using your right to clean,” Grayson explained, popping up from between stalls. He wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his arm. “And I can smell your blood better than usual.”
For whatever reason, this didn’t surprise Gabby as it probably should have. Her brother had been acting strange for weeks, and knowing he had hellhound blood in him … well, heightened senses didn’t seem all that out of the ordinary.
“Because of your demon gift,” she said.
Grayson mashed the bristles of the varnishing brush against the ledge of the choir stall. “I wish people would stop calling it a gift. It’s a curse, not a gift.” He made a messy stroke of the brush. “And why, of all demons, did it have to be a bleeding hellhound? Why not a lectrux, like Ingrid? Or whatever it is Vander has the blood of?”
He jammed the brush back into the tin bucket and a wave of clear, tacky varnish slopped over the edge. Grayson swore.
Gabby wished she knew what to say, but she was caught with an open mouth and no words at all. Her brother didn’t usually speak so much to her, and definitely not about important things like this.
The sound of shoe soles on the tile floor made them both peer toward the narthex. Their father strode into the abbey foyer, the loose cowl of his black woolen great coat fluttering like a raven’s wings. He appraised the interior of the church with a wrinkled brow. He was not impressed. He would have been had he seen the wreck the place had been in early December. Then again, Gabby thought, had he seen it in early December, they would have all been home in London before Christmas.
“Papa?” Gabby’s voice carried far, echoing off the ceiling. She thought the ceiling might be the abbey’s most beautiful feature. Each fanned-out section had been painted into a mosaic of color: sapphire, viridian, iris, onyx, and ruby. She had often gazed at the patterns it made until her neck ached.
“Gabriella, you’re to come with me,” her father replied.
Blast. What had she done now? Gabby put down the dusting cloth, her mind racing. Had he found out about her sneaking out the night before? No. If that had been the case, that telling vein of his would have been standing out in the center of his forehead.
She took a quick glance toward the choir stalls. Grayson had sunk out of sight. The coward!
She brushed a few tufts of black dust from the front of her skirt, picked up her coat and gloves and followed her father outside to the rectory drive, where Luc waited with the landau. Luc avoided eye contact. He was probably still angry with her for sneaking out and getting injured. Gabby did feel awful about the angel’s burn. She’d said she was sorry the night before while he’d been flying her home—which was, Gabby had to note, the most exhilarating thing she had ever done in her life. But Luc had been in his scales and unable to respond. By the look of his stony face, he hadn’t accepted her apology yet.
Once in the carriage and rattling down rue Dante toward the Seine, Gabby could no longer stand the suspense.
“Where are we going?”
Her father tugged on the shade’s string and blocked out the milky sunlight.
“We’re paying a visit to Dr. Frederic Hauss,” he answered.
“I’m sorry … who?”
“Dr. Hauss is a renowned surgeon, Gabriella.”
The carriage jerked over a particularly deep rut. It shook her and set her injured shoulder blazing.
She didn’t understand. “A surgeon?”
Lord Brickton held out his hand and gestured toward her face. “You cannot possibly wish to endure such marks for the rest of your life. Dr. Hauss might be able to help you overcome this deformity.”
The carriage bucked again, providing nice cover for the look of pure shock spreading over her face. Was that how he saw her scars? As a deformity? Her father continued to ramble about Hauss’s celebrated rhinoplasties in Germany and in Great Britain and how fortunate Gabby should consider herself now that he was practicing here in Paris.
Her chest felt like it was caving in.
“I’m not deformed,” Gabby said, too hurt to put much fire behind the decl
aration. Her father ignored her.
“If anyone can fix you, my dear girl, Hauss is the one.”
Their landau slowed to a stop and her father sent the shade up. They’d pulled alongside the arcaded entrance of a fortresslike limestone building. Hôtel-Dieu. He’d taken her to the hospital.
Since the morning after the hellhound had shredded half of her face, Gabby had dreamed of being able to erase the damage. How miraculous and lucky she would be if she woke up one day to find the pink, waxy-looking scars gone and her supple, unblemished skin back.
But hearing that someone might be able to do it, hearing her father wish for it as well, hurt more deeply than Gabby could have imagined.
Luc opened the landau’s door and this time looked straight into Gabby’s eyes. He could feel what she did: the sensation of being turned inside out. Luc’s wrathful glare speared Lord Brickton, but Gabby’s father wasn’t paying his driver the slightest bit of attention.
“I’m not going in,” Gabby announced. She sat farther back on the bench.
“You needn’t be embarrassed,” her father replied. He rested his hand on her knee, and for the briefest of moments, she saw true compassion in him. He wasn’t trying to be cruel. He was just blinded by what he wanted. What he thought was best for an earl’s daughter.
“I’m not—” She was going to say embarrassed, but then he’d want to know what the problem was. She didn’t know how to explain it. “I’m not ready.”
Her father was clearly disappointed but agreed to let her wait inside the hospital while he and Dr. Hauss consulted alone this first time. As they entered the building and found their way into a vaulted corridor, her father admitted that perhaps he’d sprung this visit on her too suddenly. He gave her a moment to reconsider joining them—during which she stood resolute and silent—before entering Dr. Hauss’s office without her.
Left alone in the corridor, Gabby paced a small swath of floor. Her father’s rich baritone carried from behind the closed doors, but she didn’t want to listen to him talk about her. She moved away down the hall until her father’s voice faded.
A string of tall, arched windows running down the corridor overlooked a narrow inner courtyard and, across from that, the exterior of another wing of the hospital. The windows on that side were also arched, and she saw more people walking back and forth.
A head of thick black curls caught her attention. Gabby stopped. Practically pressed her nose to the glass as she watched Nolan Quinn march through the arcaded entrance into the courtyard portico and enter the opposite wing. She held her breath. What was he doing here?
Gabby lifted her skirts and ran as fast as her heeled boots could take her to the exit and outdoors onto the portico. She ignored the startled glances of two nurses in long white skirts and starched hats and dashed through the same door Nolan had entered. Just in time. He was slipping through a pair of swinging doors farther down the hallway.
Gabby considered her father for all of two seconds before she headed straight for those doors. The wonderful thing about a hospital, she realized, was that anyone who passed her had problems of their own to tend to. No one paid her any mind as she got to the doors and went through. They opened onto a descending set of stairs that twisted to the left. Nolan’s footfalls were still audible.
Gabby opened her mouth to call out to him but stopped. Instinct told her that neither she nor Nolan belonged down here. She took the steps quickly and quietly, making it to the bottom in time to see Nolan darting through yet another pair of doors ahead to the left.
The air was markedly colder on this level, and Gabby had the creeping suspicion it wasn’t just because they were underground. The sign above the door Nolan had passed through confirmed it.
MORGUE.
What was Nolan doing in there?
She pushed the door open an inch and the chill of the vast room hit her in the nose. White-sheeted bodies topped rows of steel tables. Pale feet stuck out everywhere, an identification tag hanging from each body’s big toe. Nolan was the only person inside. Well, the only living person.
He was walking through the maze of tables, flipping up toe tags. Gabby shoved the door open wide.
“What on earth are you doing?”
Nolan nearly ripped the tag off one corpse’s toe. “Gabby! Christ in heaven, don’t sneak up on a man like that.”
“Says the person who is clearly in a place he shouldn’t be,” she retorted, closing the door behind her.
He recovered with a roll of his shoulders. “I happen to be on Alliance business. Benoit is diverting the mortician, so I have a time limit.”
The Alliance’s trusted doctor friend, Benoit, had been the one who’d cleaned and stitched Gabby’s scars.
Nolan flipped another toe tag and read the name. “And how is it you just happen to be at the hospital?” Nolan let go of the tag and stood up straight, his eyes suddenly bright with concern. “Is it your shoulder? What’s wrong?”
“No, it’s fine,” Gabby said. “I mean, it hurts, but I’m fine.”
She cringed at the idea of telling him the true reason her father had dragged her here. The two times she and Nolan had seen each other since his return from Rome, neither of them had mentioned the state of her cheek. Broaching the subject was too uncomfortable. And what if he thought surgery was a good idea?
Gabby cleared her throat. “It’s my father. He’s feeling a touch of rheumatism about the knees.”
Nolan spared her feeble answer a moment of deliberation before lifting another toe tag.
“Are you looking for a specific corpse, or will any serve?” she asked, and to her horror, he tossed back the sheet on one body, exposing a pale thigh and buttock.
“Here he is,” he answered, and then, to Gabby’s further horror, Nolan reached inside his coat and removed a needle and syringe. Without a second’s hesitation, he stuck the dead flesh with the tip.
“You can’t do that!”
Nolan proceeded to draw up the plunger, sucking the corpse’s blood into a clear glass barrel. Gabby’s stomach rolled. The body belonged to a man—the clinging drape of the white sheet failed to conceal that much—and the exposed skin showed a mottled kind of bruising on the flesh pressed flat against the metal table.
“Stop it, Nolan!” she said again.
“When Carrick Quinn gives an order, it’s wise to obey,” he replied as the barrel reached capacity. He extracted the needle and capped it.
“What could he possibly want with a dead man’s blood?” Gabby asked with a quick check of the door. Could they be arrested for this?
Nolan tucked the filled syringe back into his coat pocket. “He’s a Duster, and he murdered his parents before killing himself last night.” He replaced the sheet but then turned down the edge covering the man’s head. Gabby shrank back. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen a dead body, but the experience hadn’t gotten any more pleasant.
“What’s his name?” she asked. He was younger than she expected, perhaps right around Grayson and Ingrid’s age. His bloodless skin looked like rice paper, his brown hair a shock of color in contrast.
“Gilbert DeChamps,” Nolan answered, before draping the boy’s head once again. “You weren’t the only one who sneaked off abbey grounds last night. Grayson found the boy and his parents.”
Well. Her brother had kept that juicy bit of information to himself all morning.
A pungent odor filled her nostrils: ammonia, and something else. It was sickly sweet, and Gabby somehow knew it was coming from the cold, decaying flesh all around them.
Nolan must have seen her color drain. He took her by the arm and steered her toward the door.
“I’m fine,” she said, and meant it once they’d left the morgue.
“Right as rain,” he said in that sarcastic tone of his. Only this time, Gabby didn’t smile.
She stepped out of his hold. “So you think I’m a fool, then?”
Nolan frowned. “For turning green around a bunch of stiffs?”
“No,” Gabby answered, thoroughly vexed. “For not obeying your father’s order to forget the Alliance. You said the wise obey Carrick Quinn. But I can’t. So that must mean I’m a fool.”
Nolan guided her toward the stairs, his palm at the small of her back. “Lass, I think my da’s the fool, not you.” He wrapped his hand around her waist and brought her to a halt, spinning her to face him. The cold focus he’d shown in the morgue while drawing the corpse’s blood had gone. “If I could, I’d start training you right now. I’d bring you all the way in, get your oaths ceremony lined up in Rome—everything.”
There would be an oaths ceremony? In Rome?
“Gabby, I don’t know how to change his mind. The mercurite’s made him something he isn’t. Or at least, something he never was.” He kept his hands away from her shoulders, remembering her wound, and settled for sweeping his fingers along her chin. He lowered them until he’d circled half of her slim neck in his palm. There was something entirely possessive about the way he touched her. Possessive and protective. Gabby liked it. “I want you with me.”
She didn’t care that they stood down the hall from a morgue. She would kiss him anywhere. Even had they still been standing beside the dead bodies, she would have kissed him. Well, all right. Maybe not right next to the dead bodies.
But it wasn’t to be. Nolan’s lips were still a few inches from hers when the morgue doors swung open and crashed against the corridor walls. Gabby shot back, and Nolan released her as they turned to see who’d caught them.
No one else had been in the morgue, Gabby reasoned in the split second before the interloper stumbled into the corridor. That he was naked was Gabby’s first thought. The second was that he was also very much dead.
“Bloody hell,” Nolan hissed.
Gilbert DeChamps shuffled out of the morgue, his waxy white arms hanging at his sides. There were long, gaping black slashes across his wrists.
“What did you do to him?” Gabby asked, suddenly and unreasonably angry. Nolan had stuck him with a needle and now he was up and stumbling around!