by Page Morgan
“My sincerest apologies,” Dupuis said, so close behind her that she flinched and started to turn.
His arm came toward her face and struck the side of her head. Ingrid went down into a swirling black fog.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Gabby and Vander had made it to the basement level, but not without a pack of disciples on their heels. The three men now trailed them through a maze of narrow corridors. For a bunch of students, they were suspiciously well armed.
“Here,” Vander hissed, and Gabby darted to the right, down another corridor.
The bulbs snapped and flickered as Vander and Gabby approached a new ruckus: the draining room. It had to be.
Vander slammed into the door, twisting the handle and throwing all his weight against the solid wood. It rattled but withstood his assault. He backed up and went at the door with the heel of his boot instead, kicking and stomping with crazed ferocity.
A disciple came around the corner and Gabby raised her sword in time to feel his blade bite into hers. His thrust was far more powerful than hers, and it shoved her blade down to the floor. Vander turned, buried his foot in the disciple’s gut, and cracked the crossbow against his temple.
“Thank you,” Gabby breathed.
“My pleasure,” he replied as he kicked the door again. Gabby heard wood splinter and the door flew open.
There were three people on the floor of the draining room. Though Gabby recognized them all—Dimitrie, Carrick Quinn, and a completely unclothed Marco—her eyes went straight for Ingrid, who was unconscious and strapped to a gurney that Dupuis was rolling out of the room through an open door along the far wall.
“Dupuis, stop!” Vander brought his crossbow up and aimed. But Dupuis ducked low behind Ingrid for cover, and then they were gone. The next second, another disciple charged into the draining room, his katana slashing through the air toward Vander.
Gabby intersected it with her blade, but the force of this man’s swing was also superior to her own. Her blade hit the stone floor and he shoved her back. Gabby tripped over Marco’s splayed form. She landed on her rump, her legs and skirts covering his backside.
“Oh, for the Lord’s sake! Can’t your clothing shift with you?” She struggled off him as Vander and the disciple crashed into a table and upset a host of medical tools.
“Last I was aware, it wasn’t my clothing that was cursed,” Marco growled. “Now, if you please, Lady Gabriella, I’ve got a mercurite dart in my spine. Take it out and let me kill some Daicrypta scum.”
Gabby turned toward the door Dupuis and her sister had disappeared through. It was shut, but that didn’t matter. Marco could get to Ingrid faster than any of them.
Gabby gripped the silver fletching feathers. She closed her eyes, and with a grimace, ripped the dart out of Marco’s back. His roar of pain drowned out the telltale sound of steel and silver clashing in the corridor. It had to be Nolan and Léon out there.
Carrick moaned from his spot on the floor by yet another overturned table. Dimitrie had been near Nolan’s father a moment ago, but he was gone now. Gabby made a beeline for the closed door across the room, stooping quickly to pick up an abandoned dagger. She recognized the dull pewter sheen of the blade: mercurite-dipped. She slipped it into her cape, making one of her dagger sheaths do double duty. If she found Dimitrie, she wouldn’t hesitate to use it.
Marco grasped the collar of the disciple Vander had been battling and threw him against the stone wall. The disciple crumpled to the floor.
Vander cleared his throat. “Yes, well … thank you.”
Marco reached the door Dupuis had escaped through just as Gabby did. It wasn’t a plank of wood like the rest of the doors she’d seen in this godforsaken mansion. It was made of thick, smooth stone and had no handle. She pushed it. Nothing happened. In her side vision, she saw Nolan and Léon barrel into the draining room.
Nolan went straight to his father’s miserable form. “What’s happened?”
Léon stayed at the entrance, facing the corridor. Silk streamed from his fingertips, and Gabby heard the muffled cries of more disciples.
She found a small gap between the door and the wall with her fingertips. She strained to pull the door out. Nothing. Marco knocked her hands aside and dug his own fingers into the gap. He hauled on the slab of stone, and slowly, it sank into the wall like a pocket door.
“You can’t stay here,” Nolan said to his father. “I have to get you to Benoit—”
“Listen to me,” Carrick interrupted. “The Directorate. Don’t trust them. Tell Rory.”
Gabby heard Carrick laboring for breath and felt a pang of worry. Her father. She had to find him, too, but Ingrid needed her more. In another few seconds she, Marco, and Vander would be able to squeeze through the gap and go after her. Traitor or not, she knew Nolan wouldn’t leave his father’s side.
“I can’t locate your sister,” Marco said, the muscles in his upper body cording as he heaved aside the slab door. “She accepted a room here and is Dimitrie’s human now.”
Vander slid in front of Gabby and helped push the slab with both hands, though Gabby was certain Marco didn’t require the added strength.
“We’ll find her,” he said, and finally, the gap was wide enough for them to go through.
“Nolan?” Léon called, his voice distracting Gabby before she could step inside the tunnel. There was a muffled silence out in the corridor. “There is something coming.”
Ingrid’s head jerked to the side. The fast creaking of wheels and the rocking motion of her body nearly lulled her back into the swirly black fog. Until she remembered.
Dupuis.
Ingrid wrenched herself to consciousness. She was on her back, moving through the dark. She turned her face away as a glaring lightbulb flashed overhead. She tried to sit up and realized in a sudden panic that she couldn’t. Dupuis had her restrained on a gurney. Leather straps buckled each wrist, thigh, and ankle, as well as the width of her chest. Cinched tight, her legs had gone numb. Her wrists ached.
But it was still there. The barest electrical current swarmed at the tip of each finger.
“I do wish you had not chosen to be so defiant.”
Dupuis’s voice came from near the crown of her head. He was behind her, pushing the gurney, and he sounded a touch breathless.
“Did you plan to have those silly Alliance friends of yours rush in at the last minute to rescue you?” Dupuis chuckled.
His breath wafted over her face. Paired with the musty, water-on-rock odor of the corridor they were winding through, it made Ingrid fight back a gag.
“Where are you taking me?” She wriggled her fingers. It wasn’t enough of an electric current. This was a languid Thames, whereas she needed Victoria Falls.
“Did you know, my lady, that we have spent decades draining the blood of demons? The discovery of demon-blooded humans such as yourself prompted us to develop mechanisms that would make the process far less lethal.” Dupuis took the gurney around a sharp bend. The metal frame scraped the wall.
“It is unfortunate that we have now been driven from those mechanisms. They might have spared your life. We do, however, maintain our original machinery.”
He was still going to drain her blood.
“Now I will have to take it all and separate it later,” he explained with the same sort of sigh a maid might give upon finding a just-cleaned floor dirty again.
“You were never going to destroy it,” she said, her voice shaking as the wheels traveled over uneven floor.
They were underneath the estate, in some twisting tunnel. Wherever they were going, Ingrid dreaded their arrival.
“Destroy it? No,” he said, amused. “It will be the Daicrypta’s most valuable leverage.”
They passed underneath another glaring bulb. Ingrid winced and felt the pressure in her hands build.
“Your blood can do the one thing the Alliance wishes it could do,” Dupuis went on. “They have their mercurite weapons and their drea
ms of regulations, but you saw your gargoyle back there—the threat of mercurite did not stop him from trying to help you. Gargoyles will never adhere to Alliance regulations unless they are forced to.”
Ingrid wriggled her fingers, remembering the courtyard at Hôtel du Maurier and the way she’d forced Vincent to submit. With her blood, the Alliance could control the Dispossessed?
“We have the technology to proliferate blood samples in the laboratory, you see,” Dupuis went on excitedly. “One or two liters of blood can become hundreds of liters, possibly thousands. Enough for every Alliance fighter. Can you not imagine what the Directorate would be willing to give for such power?”
Perhaps the Directorate would want it, though Ingrid couldn’t imagine those she knew, like Vander, Nolan, or Chelle, giving themselves angelic powers.
Dupuis rolled the gurney under another humming bulb, and Ingrid, instead of wincing, purposefully stared into the white glass as it rushed overhead. New static swelled within her arms.
“But these are details you need not worry yourself over,” Dupuis said dismissively.
Because she was going to die. There was no one coming for her now.
Dimitrie was her gargoyle, but he wasn’t going to help her. Marco had a mercurite dart in his spine, and if Luc was being held in mercurite as well …
The only person who could save her was her.
Another bend in the corridor and the metal rim of the gurney nicked the wall again. The friction threw off a spark. They passed another lightbulb and the slender bones in each of her fingers ached with another gradient of pressure.
Electricity begets electricity, Constantine had once said. She could absorb an electric current and let it fuel her own.
The lightbulb popped and flickered to black as they passed by.
Dupuis continued to push her, his hands gripping the metal of the gurney. Though Ingrid’s wrists were bound, her fingers were free. She clamped them around the cold rods at her side and unloosed the pools of electricity that had welled up in each fingertip. All she did was think it and the current traveled out, through the metal, singing past her ears. It shivered over her scalp and lifted her hair on end for a split second before it hit Dupuis. He stopped, made a strangled noise, and fell—taking the gurney with him.
Ingrid let go of the metal rods before her fingers could be crushed, but the impact still hurt. Her head snapped to the side, pulling tendons along her neck. The gurney leaned on its side, wheels spinning. Behind her, Dupuis moaned and cursed. The jolt hadn’t been strong enough. He’d be up and raging within a minute.
But she had controlled it. She had finally understood the electricity that had always seemed to ebb and flow as it saw fit. Even though she was still trapped, Ingrid felt like letting out a whoop of joy.
Dupuis crawled into view, his arms quivering as he held himself up.
“Metal and lightning,” he whispered. “Very clever, mademoiselle. Though you, like your Alliance friends, are shortsighted.”
Her eye caught on the next bare lightbulb ahead. Ingrid stared at it, pulling the light toward her, and the energy filled her, brimming in her fingertips.
There was a noise then. Something dragging along the floor. A rattling came next, followed by a low, shaky hiss. Ingrid’s focus on the lightbulb was severed as Axia’s serpent moved into the spill of light up ahead. Bleached of color, nearly translucent, its scales seemed so much paler than those of the mimic that had stalked her in the shopping arcades. And this one wasn’t moving with the same taunting rhythm. It skated toward them fast.
Dupuis stumbled to his feet just as the serpent reared up, flattened out its regal hood, unhinged its jaw, and struck. Ingrid watched in detached horror as Dupuis’s head disappeared, crown to neck, in the massive serpent’s mouth. Long fangs punched through Dupuis’s shoulders, and his arms went slack. The strength in his legs gave next, and when the serpent extracted its fangs, the man crumpled, twitching, to the floor. Ingrid let loose a scream.
“Ingrid!”
Vander’s shout sounded like it came from a great distance. Blood roared through her ears, and she hoped she’d imagined it. She didn’t want Vander here, with this demon serpent. It wasn’t the mimic—Luc had said that it wouldn’t harm anyone but Ingrid. This was the real serpent. Axia’s pet.
It curled toward her, sliding around Dupuis’s convulsing form. Though it was futile, Ingrid struggled against the leather straps until the snake’s fangs closed around her bound arm. They stabbed through her sleeve and into flesh. The searing burn of demon poison was instantaneous.
Feeling electricity under her skin was a patch of kitten fur compared to this. The burning intensified and climbed, carving wide, deep paths at a reckless speed. Ingrid gasped for air as it tore through her arm and obliterated any electric current the lightbulbs had given her.
The gurney wobbled as the serpent slid down the length of it, the tapered end of its tail coiling around the metal frame near Ingrid’s feet.
“Ingrid!” Vander’s voice came again. But it was just an echo. He wasn’t close.
The gurney started moving again, in the same direction Dupuis had been taking her. The metal side scratched along the floor, grinding and grating and sending vibrations through Ingrid’s body. With Dupuis, she hadn’t known where she’d been going, but there were no mysteries now. The demon poison burrowing into her, spreading far and wide, would allow Ingrid entry through a fissure somewhere in Paris, straight into the Underneath. Straight to Axia’s hive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Luc had followed the sounds of clanging metal, the screams and shouts, and the incessant throbbing at the base of his skull that assured him another Dispossessed was close. And Gabby. He’d followed her scent, a beacon cutting through a sea of gray, spooling waves.
He stepped over a writhing cocoon, one of at least a half dozen scattered throughout the corridor. It was the kind of destruction an arachnae demon would leave in its wake, but it wasn’t a giant spider standing in the doorway up ahead. It was a boy. A human boy with viscous silk dangling from each fingertip. It had to be the Duster everyone had been talking about.
The boy held his hands down as Luc struggled toward him. His muscles and bones had gone from tidal clay to beach sand, and his jacket of scales had come out over most of his human skin, but it was still an ugly patchwork. His motions were cleaner, less jerky and pathetic, but barely so.
When he came upon the Duster, the boy scuttled to the side.
“Luc? Good Lord, is that you?” Gabby was across the room, flanked by Vander Burke and Marco. They stood within the slim mouth of another doorway.
Luc couldn’t reply in any human way, so he kept heading toward them, his wings still dragging.
Marco stared gravely. “What did they do, bathe you in mercurite?”
He scanned the room. No Ingrid. No Dimitrie. The chime at the base of his skull had been for Marco.
Gabby looked from Luc to Nolan. He knelt beside the elder Quinn, who had blood streaked down his chin. “I’m staying with him,” Nolan said.
“But—” Gabby started.
“Go,” Nolan replied, then more gently, “We’ll be fine here, but Ingrid needs you.”
Luc’s body reacted on instinct. His wings spread open and the last patches of skin snapped into hard jet. He didn’t even feel the pain.
“Ingrid’s alive?” Luc asked. Only Marco could understand his gravelly cry.
“For the moment,” he replied.
Luc sagged forward. Alive. Ingrid was alive. He felt sick with relief. But why couldn’t he trace her? Bring up her scent, or feel her?
“I don’t know what they’ve done to you, Luc, but we have to go. Now,” Gabby said, her short sword clenched in her palm, her foot already inside the slim gap.
Vander’s patience broke. He pressed himself through the opening. Gabby immediately followed, and Luc started for the gap as well.
Marco blocked the opening. “You couldn’t feel her because she is
n’t our human any longer. She’s Dimitrie’s, though I doubt the Shadow bastard can do anything to protect her.”
“He promised to kill her,” Luc said, his shriek resounding off the stone walls.
“Well, he can’t do that now, can he?” Marco replied. Luc didn’t know what Dimitrie could or couldn’t do. The rules were blurry here.
“Get out of my way,” Luc growled, starting forward again. He could hear Vander shouting for Ingrid inside the tunnel and envy burned in his chest. That should be him in there, not Vander.
Marco blocked him once more. “Look at yourself. You aren’t in any condition to go with Lady Gabriella. I will.”
Luc stilled, suddenly seeing things the way Marco must. The way any other gargoyle would. He should have wanted to charge into that passageway to protect his human charge—Gabby.
Protecting her had not crossed Luc’s mind once.
Marco cocked his head as he realized it. “Lady Ingrid is not our human any longer. Your responsibility to her is severed. Go after her now and the Order will know, brother.”
They knew last time, when Luc had taken demon poison and gone into the Underneath to rescue Ingrid from Axia. He had chosen to put himself in danger for a human who wasn’t his own. Irindi had accused Luc of having an affinity for Ingrid and had warned him to curb it.
He’d tried.
Luc didn’t know what the Order’s punishment would be this time. It didn’t matter. “Let me pass,” he said.
Marco’s hooded eyes barely concealed his annoyance. “Luc, I’m trying to help—”
A scream pricked Marco’s sentence. It came from far away, buried by layers of stone, wood, and plaster. Yet even severed from Ingrid, Luc felt it keenly in the pit of his stomach.
He barred his forearm across Marco’s brawny chest and shoved him against the stone door. “She may not be mine, but I am still hers.”
Luc pushed off from the other gargoyle and bolted into the dark passageway. He conjured a trace on Gabby and followed it, spreading his wings as far as the walls would allow. His feet had barely left the floor when each injured wing collapsed. Luc’s bare soles hit the floor and he was forced to run after Gabby and Vander. He went as fast as he could but longed for his wings. Damned mercurite.