The Beautiful and the Cursed

by Page Morgan

  “Into the carriage!” their father ordered, herding them all out of the center of the road and toward the curb. There were people enough staring at them from the pavement, some having pulled carriages to complete halts in order to look on.

  “We shouldn’t be made to cross a filthy, dangerous street, boy!” he railed at Luc.

  Luc ignored him, though, his attention solely on Ingrid. He peered at her the same way he had before, right after Ingrid had thought she’d seen Anna in the cemetery. She didn’t know what was happening, but she was willing to bet her dowry that Luc did.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “What a fright that must have been for you, my lady,” Cherie said as she unbuttoned the first of a dozen satin-covered buttons along the back of Ingrid’s dress.

  Ingrid stood within the flickering light from the fireplace in her room, the flames too small to provide any real warmth. She stared into them. Nearly getting trampled in the street had been upsetting, yes. But even more worrisome was the fact that the incident hadn’t produced a single lick of electricity. If she’d been getting anywhere at all with her training, she should have been able to use it for protection. A few staggered jolts of lightning would have dropped that rider straight out of his saddle. The fact that the rider couldn’t have possibly been Jonathan made her all the more quiet and confused as Cherie worked at the buttons.

  “Are you cold, my lady? I’ll warm a pan for your bed,” the maid said timidly. Cherie had been her lady’s maid for four years, but now that she knew Ingrid could fire off electricity, she acted as if Ingrid would lose her mind at any moment and do just that.

  “Yes, thank you,” Ingrid said distractedly. There was a knock on her door and Cherie abandoned her unbuttoning to answer it.

  “Lord Fairfax.” Cherie bobbed into a curtsy before Grayson, who stood on the other side of the door.

  “Grayson?” Ingrid clutched the shoulders of her loose dress to hold it up.

  Her brother hadn’t sought her out in weeks. In fact, she’d felt completely separated from him lately. Their connection, the one she’d always counted on while growing up, had withered away to practically nothing.

  “I wondered if you would walk with me a bit around the churchyard,” he said.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Ingrid asked Cherie to close the door and redo the buttons on her dress. If Grayson offered to spend time with her, then she would gladly accept.

  Maybe he had changed his mind about visiting Constantine.

  As soon as they were outside the rectory’s front door, Grayson held out his elbow for Ingrid to grasp. She took it, feeling as if they were back in London, stepping out to take a stroll through Hyde Park like they used to every Sunday. Attached at the hip, I see or Two eggs in a basket, as always had been a couple of the comments they’d grown used to receiving each week.

  But after an entire turn around the rectory with little more than a few words passed between them, Ingrid began to feel desperate. How could she not know what was happening inside her brother’s head? She’d always been so intuitive with him before, and he with her. How was it possible that her own twin now felt like a distant relative?

  Well, she was finished with it. Finished treading so carefully around him. Besides, it was still misting flecks of ice and it had to be close to midnight.

  “Why did you ask me out here if you weren’t going to speak to me?”

  “If you’d rather go back inside … ,” he replied testily. Ingrid sighed.

  “No. I’d rather talk with you for once. Grayson—” Ingrid stopped to gather the right words. Something soothing. Something heartfelt. But nothing came to her.

  “What happened between you and Papa? I need to know.” She hooked his arm and brought him to a halt. “He called you a fiend. He thought you were the one who’d harmed Gabby. Why would he think that?”

  Grayson hunched deeper inside his fine woolen coat.

  “I can’t tell you.” He swallowed hard. “You have no idea how badly I want to go back to the way things were, but … I’m different. I’ve changed.”

  “We’ve all changed.”

  “Not like I have.” He jerked his arm free.

  They were behind the rectory, near the ell where the servants were housed. No doubt their voices were carrying, providing bits of juicy gossip to be passed around the next morning.

  “Would you stop?” she said, exasperated. “Grayson, I’m not afraid of you. None of us is. You haven’t shifted in weeks. You’re controlling it, so please—stop setting yourself apart like this. You’re a Duster, just like I am. Just like Vander is. There are more of us, and if you’d just try—”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you knew what I’ve done,” he said, pulling even farther away.

  The icy mist had built up on her skin. It beaded and rolled like teardrops down her cheeks.

  “We’ve all done things, Grayson. I set a ballroom on fire. I could have killed someone.”

  “I did kill someone!”

  Ingrid stared at his black outline, unable to blink. No. He couldn’t have.

  “How? When? My God, Grayson—” Ingrid stepped forward and reached for him. He sidestepped her.

  “It was in London. It’s why Father sent me here instead of to university like he’d planned. He knows what I did, and he’s right. I am a fiend.”

  She heard the sob trapped in his chest, strangling each word.

  “Were you—I mean, did your hellhound blood have anything to do with it?”

  She wanted to know everything. Who it had been, what had happened and why. Perhaps it was self-defense. Or an accident. Or—

  “Stop. I know what you’re doing. You’re going to tell me it wasn’t my fault. That it was the demon blood. Well, the demon blood is me. I am it. You can work all you please at taming your demon half, but you’re nothing like me. Your demon half doesn’t transform you into a bloodthirsty animal.”

  Ingrid forced herself into his line of vision. “I don’t know what Axia did to you in the Underneath to make you become that hellhound, but she can’t touch you here. Your demon half might not transform you again.”

  “I don’t want to find out,” Grayson murmured, unable to look her in the eye. “I just know I don’t want to live this way.”

  He pivoted on his heel and jogged toward the stables. She started after him, but her blasted heeled boots slipped on the snowy lawn, her right leg sliding out into an ungainly split. She cursed as she righted herself and saw Grayson dash around the stables and into the thicket of trees bordering the abbey property.

  I don’t want to live this way.

  What did he mean by that? Ingrid’s pulse fluttered. He’d taken a life. Ingrid stood still and wrapped her chilled arms around her chest beneath her cloak. No wonder he’d been so distant. He’d cut himself off from her and Gabby and everyone else because he loathed himself. The fire Ingrid had started in Anna’s ballroom didn’t seem so terrible all of a sudden.

  Grayson’s guilt had to be eating away at him. He wouldn’t do anything rash. Would he? The old Grayson, the one she knew, never would. But this Grayson? Honestly, Ingrid wasn’t sure.

  She began to follow him again. His footprints were firmly marked in the snow. The moon was nearly full, though hidden behind a misty cloud cover.

  Luc came out from behind an angelic statue just ahead of her. “If he needs me, I’ll go to him.”

  “But he said—”

  “I know what he said,” Luc cut in.

  “You were spying on us?”

  “I prefer to call it ‘observing,’ ” Luc replied coolly. Then, finished with preamble, he said, “I want to talk to you.”

  He walked away. Just as Grayson’s invitation to take a stroll with him had been irresistible, so was Luc’s. But Luc’s was a command rather than an invitation, and Ingrid built up to a simmer while she followed him around the abbey, to the far, western transept.

  “Where exactly are we going?” she asked as Luc opened the door for her.
She was blind as soon as he shut it behind them. The gem-colored stained-glass windows on either side of the long nave and the massive rose window behind the pulpit weren’t letting in a single drop of moonlight.

  “Luc?” Ingrid’s voice echoed off the vaulted ceilings. For all the cleaning Mama’s hired workers had been doing inside the abbey, it still smelled like an old hatbox.

  A warm, dry hand snaked under hers and grasped it. Luc led her through the blackness, his speed notched just enough to convey irritation.

  “I apologize if my eyesight isn’t on par with yours,” she muttered.

  He didn’t reply, only led her through the rest of the cold abbey, toward the narthex and the new arched front doors, the first things Mama had replaced. Once there, their direction shifted to the right. Ingrid’s vision was beginning to adjust, and she could make out the black stamp of a doorway ahead.

  “Stairs” was all Luc supplied before her feet stumbled upon the first step. He steadied her with his arm. It felt like falling against a solid block of granite.

  “I’ve got it,” she assured him, and after another moment, he apparently decided to believe her.

  They climbed what Ingrid now realized was one of the bell towers. The stone steps spiraled up and up, with narrow arrow slits in the wall every other turn. Even in the dark, the constant rotation made her dizzy.

  Ingrid had an idea what Luc wanted to talk about, and it put her on edge.

  “Why here?” she asked, a little breathless from the steep climb. They must have taken at least a hundred, if not two hundred, steps.

  “Privacy.” Luc was a whole rotation ahead of her. He didn’t sound breathless, either.

  Ingrid trudged up the last few steps and emerged onto a thin walkway that ran the square perimeter of the belfry. The top of the bell tower was open on all four sides. The night sky was surprisingly bright. An enormous bell, twice her height and three times her width, hung in the center of the belfry. Ingrid could smell its rust from where she stood, her hand on the open, waist-high ledge. Directly below the bell was a series of steel wheels that, with rope and pulley, she guessed, had once been used to mechanically ring the bell.

  She searched for Luc and found him tucked into the corner of the belfry.

  “That wasn’t a man tonight,” he said. “It was a demon.”

  “I thought so,” she whispered.

  “The profane cemetery plot,” Luc said. “You didn’t trip on a headstone, did you?”

  Ingrid started to wish she had.

  “I don’t know what happened. Some sort of dizzy spell hit me and I … I saw someone.”

  “Who?”

  He was angry. She should have told him, she supposed, but until seeing Jonathan on that horse, she had hoped it had been a unique episode.

  “My friend Anna Bettinger.”

  Luc’s pale emerald eyes were too bright to be completely human. She shouldn’t have been able to see them squinting as he frowned, not from this distance and not in such murky light.

  “She looked so real. Solid. As solid as the trees around her. But then … she was gone.”

  “And tonight?” Luc asked. “You called the rider Jonathan. Who is he?”

  Ingrid looked out over rue Dante, toward the Seine.

  “Anna’s betrothed,” she answered, rubbing her fingers over the casement ledge in an attempt to distract herself. She didn’t care. Not anymore. Jonathan was in the past. Ingrid took a long breath, realizing that the old excuse she’d used time and again was no longer an excuse.

  “But he’s in London with Anna, not here.” Ingrid turned back to face Luc. “Grayson came the closest to him, but he said he was too angry, that he only saw red. So who was it really? Am I delirious?”

  Luc left the corner of the belfry and came toward her, his palm running along the open ledge. The moonlight, free from the clouds for the moment, lit his face. It was drawn into a fierce scowl. “No. You did see Anna and Jonathan.”

  “I did?” Ingrid asked, more confused than before.

  Luc stopped and braced both palms against the ledge. He hunched his shoulders and hung his head, muttering a string of oaths.

  “Luc, what is it?”

  He pushed himself up. “A mimic demon. They latch on to humans and within a few seconds dig through memories, soaking up everything. Your dizzy spell? That was the mimic searching through your memory.”

  She remembered feeling the nausea slam into her, then blacking out. A demon had been inside her mind? She ran her fingers through her hair and massaged the back of her head.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “To find out how to play with you,” Luc answered darkly. “It saw Anna and Jonathan in your memories and knew who they were. What they meant to you. And then it used your memories, down to the last detail, to look like them.”

  Ingrid dropped her hand. “But how is any of that playing with me? It nearly trampled me in the street! It could have killed any one of us.”

  Luc shook his head. “A mimic won’t harm anyone other than its target. And it won’t kill you outright. It takes its time teasing and confusing you first. Scaring the hell out of you. Once it’s finished playing, that’s when it kills you.”

  Ingrid turned back toward the open sky. “Perhaps it’s just me, but that doesn’t sound very fun at all.”

  She thought she heard Luc laugh, but when she looked over, she saw he was just as serious as before.

  “How do I get rid of it?” she asked.

  If this thing had targeted and attached itself to her, did that mean it could pop up anytime, anyplace?

  “I don’t know.” Regret pulled Luc’s voice. “They’re rare, though. I know about them, but I’ve never dealt with one myself.”

  “Do you think it could have something to do with Axia?”

  She whispered the fallen angel’s name, as if Axia might be able to hear Ingrid speak in her dry, hellish hive in the Underneath.

  “It could. I suppose—” Luc paused. “I suppose we could ask the Alliance what they think.”

  And by Alliance, he meant Vander. She thought it might actually be the first time Luc had alluded to Vander since he’d made his pledge to stay away from her. To act only as her gargoyle.

  “I could ask Constantine, too,” she said, but this only seemed to sharpen Luc’s stare.

  “I had a visit from Gaston tonight,” he said. She recalled Constantine’s gargoyle. “I think you should stay away from Clos du Vie for now.”

  Ingrid wanted to throw up her hands. First Vander, and now Luc?

  “Why? What did Gaston say?”

  Luc took a few steps closer as he told her about the man named Robert Dupuis and his unsavory interest in her.

  “And then Constantine sent him away?” Ingrid asked.

  “Yes, but he could come back.”

  “And if he did, he’d try to what, kidnap me? Wrap me up in one of Constantine’s Persian rugs and smuggle me into his carriage?” Ingrid couldn’t help but laugh at her own wit.

  Luc, however, didn’t laugh.

  “No. Gaston wouldn’t allow it. But—”

  “Let me ask Constantine who this Dupuis is. If he refuses to tell me, then perhaps I won’t go back. But for right now …” She shook her head, not sure she could explain it. “I have to go. I have to do something about this.” She rubbed her hands and then clasped them together in front of her skirts. Her life had been in peril tonight, and she’d failed to protect herself. Conjuring the lightning on her own the other morning at Clos du Vie must have been a fluke.

  The cords in Luc’s neck stood out as he tensed. He cocked his head and seemed to be listening to something in the distance.

  “Dimitrie?” she asked.

  “Your lady’s maid. She’s anxious. You should go back.”

  The adjacent bell tower blocked the view of the rectory, and yet Luc was connected to the people inside it. Connected to Cherie. Because of her scent, Ingrid thought, remembering what Dimitrie had told her.
/>   “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked. “About our scents?”

  Luc hesitated. He didn’t seem to like that she knew about this ability of his. But it was fascinating the way he could tap into someone’s consciousness using something as natural as his sense of smell.

  When Luc continued his silence, Ingrid added, “He said my scent was delectable. What does that mean? What exactly do I smell like, food?”

  Luc smiled. “No, not food. It’s sweet grass, the kind that flowers in the summer, and if you tug up a strand and chew on it, it tastes sweet, almost like vanilla. And then, underneath that, your scent is like rich, black soil. Earth that will grow anything seeded there.”

  Ingrid knew she had been the one to ask, but she hadn’t expected Luc’s reply to be so intimate or detailed. It was almost as if he could taste her, rather than just scent her. He turned away from her after a moment.

  “I’m not used to sharing my secrets with humans,” he grumbled.

  “Dimitrie was probably only trying to be friendly,” she said.

  Luc leaned both elbows on the ledge and peered down. “A waste of time.”

  Ingrid jerked back, stung, especially after the tender way he’d described her scent. “If he’s anything like you, he’ll learn it’s much easier to be heartless.”

  She stumbled toward the stairwell and took the first step down. Luc seized her arm before her foot could land and pulled her back up onto the walkway. His hand lingered, his fingers tight around her elbow.

  “I don’t trust him,” he whispered.

  She recalled how young Dimitrie appeared. “He’s just a boy.”

  Luc, his hand still clasped around her arm, shook his head. “He’s a gargoyle.”

  Trust between the two Dispossessed seemed like it should be a given, considering they both held guardianship over the same humans.

  “But he’s our gargoyle, isn’t he?” Ingrid asked. “He’s compelled to protect us just like you are.”

  Luc let go of her only to take her shoulders this time. His strength didn’t surprise her, but the way he pressed her shoulders together did. There was passion in it. Urgency in the downward slant of his brow, his pale lime eyes lit as if from within.