The Wondrous and the Wicked (12 page)

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.

“It is an essential room,” she replied.

“And why are you showing it to me?” he asked. There was no point in trying to charm Chelle. Better to be direct.

She responded by walking toward a waist-high shelf running along the wall to the right. The shelf, enclosed by locked glass lids, resembled a jeweler’s display case. Grayson followed her. The case held another assortment of weapons. Daggers, swords, crossbow bolts, and even a few
hira-shuriken.
He noticed the sheen—dull pewter instead of reflective silver—and knew what they were.

“These are mercurite dipped,” Grayson said. He’d learned from Léon and Monsieur Constantine that the Alliance had these weapons. First dipped in mercurite and then heated over flames to seal and harden the coating, a weapon like any of these would be able to debilitate a gargoyle. Kill it, if need be.

“The Chimera caste is behind the Duster murders,” Chelle said. She’d overheard Constantine.

“Why just one caste?” Grayson asked. He hadn’t thought of the question before now.

She leaned a hip against the shelf, a real scowl set upon her lips this time. “One of the Chimeras wants to be elder, and this is his show of power and leadership.”

It wasn’t speculation. Chelle’s answer sounded confident.

“How do you know?”

She lifted one shoulder, feigning nonchalance. “I have been called sneaky.”

He started to smile, until he lowered his eyes and saw the case of mercurite-dipped weapons. Because he now knew why Chelle had brought him to this room.

“You were right down there,” she said. “We need to stop the Chimeras.”

He met Chelle’s hazel eyes, each iris flecked with gold. “By killing them?”

She set her jaw, and Grayson knew she was mentally rolling up her sleeves, preparing for a fight.

“Would you rather wait for more Dusters to die? Who will be next? Ingrid? Perhaps even you?” she said, her French accent growing stronger with her anger. “And do you believe Dusters will be their only target? Once they’ve taken care of your kind, they will come after mine.”

Your kind.
Grayson dragged in a breath and tried not to let it bother him. Chelle hadn’t meant it as an insult. At least, he didn’t think she had. Still, it was as if she’d drawn a line between them and shoved his chest, pushing him away. Humans on this side, Dusters on that side.

“Word is spreading that Axia has reclaimed her blood from your sister. The gargoyles will be out in droves hunting Dusters, trying to destroy Axia’s little seedlings before she can use them for whatever it is she plans to do,” Chelle went on, her cheeks beginning to pink.

“Maybe they should,” Grayson heard himself say. Chelle squinted up at him, her lips parting in surprise.

“You think Dusters should die?” she asked.

Now he felt like an idiot. Of course he didn’t think all Dusters should die.

“Some of us deserve it,” he answered.

Chelle gathered a breath and walked around him, toward the opposite wall of blessed silver weapons. An unwieldy battle-axe hung at knee level, the buffed blade head so wide it showed the reflection of Chelle’s legs.

“I don’t know what happened in London. I mean, I do know, but I wasn’t there and I don’t know what happened to you, or what it must be to have something like that on your conscience. But, Grayson—” Chelle paused to face him. She didn’t usually tangle up her words, and she started to blush for having done so.

Grayson saw the prickles of red wash over her creamy skin
and stopped breathing. He didn’t want to smell her blood. He didn’t want to feel that disgusting clench of desire lock up his stomach and throat.

“You don’t deserve to die,” she continued as his lungs started to beg for air.

He gave up and let his body have what it needed. Though it wasn’t strong—Vander’s blood must have been working its magic—the air tasted sweet. Grayson moved toward her.

“You want to know what happened to me in London?”

Chelle’s soft expression turned wary. He was glad of it. She was smart and fast and trusted her gut.