The Wondrous and the Wicked (29 page)

Vander saw Luc first. He held his hand up to a Roman, red-faced and shouting, and stepped away from him. That Roman fighter followed Vander’s attention, and then another one beside him did, and so on and so on. Within a minute, the rest of the Alliance had gone quiet. All of them stared at what Luc held in his hand. Gaston dropped from the bowers of the orangery jungle and landed on the tiles in front of Luc.

Constantine’s gargoyle pinned his eyes on Luc’s dripping
hand, his expression as inscrutable as ever. Luc stayed where he was as one by one, every last gargoyle dropped to the floor and stared. The silence stretched on, but it wasn’t an expectant kind of quiet. No one waited for Luc to speak or explain.

Luc opened his talons, and the oil-black heart made a wet slap on the tiles.

Gaston lowered himself to one knee and bowed, his clipped ears pointed toward Luc’s feet. The rustle of wings and the scratch of talons echoed off the glass walls as the rest of the Dogs followed their leader’s show of fealty; then the Snakes did the same. Luc searched for Marco as the Wolves dropped to their knees next. Their leader was still gone. How long had it been? Luc wondered, his mind racing toward Ingrid even as the first Chimera got down onto one knee as well. Two more Chimeras knelt, then three more, then five, and then every last one of the Dispossessed had bent in bows of recognition. It was a significant moment, one that would change Luc’s existence forever, but it was weighted by a creeping unease.

The Seer came through the rows of kneeling gargoyles, taking deft steps to avoid brushing against any of them. As he passed, however, the gargoyles straightened. Luc sighed and began to shift back into his human form. The broken ridge of his injured wing sank into his back with such pain it made his vision swim.

“I’m glad it’s you,” Vander said a moment later, his eyes flickering away from Luc. He nodded toward Vincent’s heart. “I’m sure that was necessary in some ancient and ritualistic way.”

Luc shook his head. “Not really.”

Vander huffed a laugh and adjusted his spectacles. “You saved my life,” he mumbled, unable to meet Luc’s eyes. “Thank you.”

Luc looked over Vander’s shoulder. “I hope you savored the experience. It won’t happen again.”

Vander shook his head and started to speak. Luc cut him off.

“I can’t fly and I need to find Marco.”

Constantine’s cane preceded him through the lines of gargoyles. He cleared a space to step out between two Dogs, then coughed and straightened his hat.

“You may have one of my horses,” he said to Luc, and with another small cough, added, “as well as some clothing.”

“Is it Ingrid?” Vander kept his voice low so the Roman troops wouldn’t hear.

Luc followed Constantine, who had started to thread his way back through the Dispossessed.

“That’s what I’m going to find out,” he answered.

I
ngrid had not believed anything could be more frightening than coming face to face with Axia in the Underneath. That was before. As the fallen angel, covered as usual in an all-encompassing dark blue robe, glided across the stone square toward Ingrid, she knew she had been wrong. Coming face to face with Axia here, on earth, was absolutely terrifying.

“You were with me the day before last.” Axia’s voice tolled through the square. The vibrations tickled up through Ingrid’s feet. “However, now, you are absent.”

Ingrid gripped the handle of the dagger hidden within her skirt pocket so hard her knuckles ached. “How do you mean?”

“I can feel all of my seedlings,” Axia replied, her figure now gliding to the left.

The arms of her robes were crossed over her abdomen, the panels tied tightly with golden brocade. She had no notable shape underneath all those folds, and Ingrid worried that Grayson’s theory about Axia’s having taken on a corporeal form was wrong.

“You should not be able to ignore the call of the one who has created you,” Axia said. The writhing shudder of her robe ceased. “I do not understand. How do you defy me? Do traces of my blood linger within you, Ingrid Waverly? Have they magnified just enough to obstruct my will?”

Her deep voice turned shrill, and Ingrid winced. Axia’s robes began to ripple with blustery rolls. Her robes reflected her emotions, and right then they seemed to thrash with unharnessed anger.

“I thought I had reclaimed every drop, leaving none to mature within you,” Axia continued.

Ingrid parted her lips, uncertain what to say. She stammered through the beginnings of an appeal before feeling a rush of air whisper against her shoulder. She turned instinctively and startled backward. Axia stood beside her, her cavernous black hood an arm’s length away. Ingrid looked back to where Axia had just been standing and saw nothing but an evaporating blue mist, a few shades darker than the coming dawn.

“How did you—” she started.

“I will have all of my blood, Ingrid Waverly.”

The robed arm struck out and a pale hand emerged from within the sleeve. It grasped Ingrid’s arm with strength of a machine. Ingrid fumbled the dagger out of her pocket with her free hand and, what felt like a decade later, sliced the blade across Axia’s forearm. The blade never slowed, never met resistance, and then Axia’s robed sleeve was evaporating into another cloud of mist.

Ingrid staggered to the side as phantom laughter rumbled through the square. She swiveled around, her eyes catching on Axia, who was once again by the fountain.

“I cannot be ensnared,” the fallen angel said.

“But you just took hold of my arm. I felt you,” Ingrid said, her fingers clamped around the dagger’s handle. “You have a human body.”

More laughter resounded, and Axia’s robes rippled in harmony. Ingrid was still watching the sway of them when something pummeled into her side and knocked her to the ground. Axia was now hovering over her instead of standing by the fountain. She’d simply
appeared
at Ingrid’s side, with the same fading blue mist marking where she’d been a moment ago.

Axia started to laugh again. Ingrid found a new grip on the blade’s handle and plunged it through the bottom of her robes. The knife struck something definite—Axia’s leg. Her caterwaul stabbed at Ingrid’s eardrums, but the angel disappeared once more, the dagger no longer rooted in flesh.

So she
could
be caught if taken by surprise. Ingrid got to her feet as another scream filled the abandoned square. This one came from above. Its familiarity made her lightheaded with relief. A shadow raced overhead, and as it passed, a Herculean arm took her with it. Ingrid’s feet were torn from the ground, the single gasp of air in her lungs driven out.

She angled herself toward Marco’s body and clung to him, expecting him to soar up and over the buildings, away from the square. But his wings stopped, his body seized, and the ground rushed at them. Marco flipped midair, so that when they crashed, the prominent ridge of his spine cracked the yellow stone. He shoved her from his chest, propelling her toward the narrow steps leading down to the street that meandered around the raised square.

Marco rolled over and crouched against the stone, his wings sinking into his back, his body reversing into his human form.

Ingrid climbed the steps. “Marco!”

Axia’s hooded form still presided over the square, as if she, and not the church, were its centerpiece.

“Go,” he growled, his vocal cords not quite shifted yet.

Ingrid had seen him like this before, when she’d used her angelic blood to control him.

“You cannot fight me, gargoyle,” Axia said. Ingrid noticed
the difference in her voice when she spoke to him. There was no humor, no honey. There was only steel.

“And you cannot subdue me and chase my human at the same time,” Marco groaned, his face buried in the rubble of stone beneath him.

Axia said nothing, but almost immediately, a strident cry climbed up and out of Marco’s throat. His arms shook; his fingers curled into the fragments of stone as a line opened across his broad back. An invisible scalpel drew apart his skin, flaying him from shoulder blade to shoulder blade, directly underneath three similar white lines. Axia was inflicting an angel’s burn.

Marco grunted out a slew of curses as that burn ceased, black blood welled, and below it, another immediately began.

“Stop!” Ingrid screamed, but Axia was no longer focused on her.

Marco groaned and swore as the burn dragged slowly through his skin.

Ingrid backed down the steps toward the street, not wanting to leave him, and yet knowing she could do nothing if she stayed. Marco was buying her precious time to escape. She wouldn’t let it be for nothing.

Ingrid ran from the square, toward boulevard Saint-Michel, with the echoes of Marco’s screams knotting around her heart.

The reports of a Paris under siege had reached Gabby on the docks for the Dover-Calais ferry. The rumor Carver had relayed to Hugh about an incident in Paris had bothered her the eighty or so miles from London to the Dover docks. When Rory had placed a hand on the small of her back to usher her forward through a bottleneck of men and women at the end of the boarding ramp, however, she knew it was more than just a rumor.

“I don’t know what they were!” a woman had exclaimed in English while a French gentleman spouted off about enormous
chiens crocs
, or fanged dogs, and
monstres ailés
, or winged monsters. The clash of English and French had grown to a dull roar as Rory had shouldered their portmanteau, containing the finished angelic diffuser net, Ingrid’s blood stores, and a few common demon diffuser nets onto the ferry. Hugh, who had elected to bring his pet corvite in an enormous birdcage draped in black broadcloth, had led Gabby to seats far away from the excitement. The ferry had emptied as if it were going up in flames, the travelers for Paris converging around the ticketing office with demands of refunds. It had to be something else, something less absurd, people murmured as they moved away from the ferry—and yet they did not turn around and repurchase passage.

When, after a full day and night of hard travel without a single stop to rest, their train had pulled into Gare du Nord, Gabby could feel only relief that those people had decided to stay behind. The reports had not been exaggerated in the least.

Plumes of smoke chugged up from the city’s skyline, and the clouds above Paris were tinged a deep umber from the fires below. They’d fought through a riotous bevy of people at the station, all of them attempting to flee the city, and all of them wearing the same pale mask of panic and fear. On the curb outside the station, the price for a hack had risen to an absurd two francs per mile—if the drivers were going to die driving through a war zone, they at least wanted to die with a full purse.

Hugh had shelled out a small fortune to a cabriolet driver to transport him, their valuable portmanteau, and his pet corvite to Clos du Vie, while Gabby and Rory had headed for Hôtel Bastian. By the time they’d hit rue de Sèvres, Gabby had shrunk back from the window and welcomed the formidable steadiness of Rory’s arm against her own. They had both drawn their silver blades and sat with them at the ready. Outside, uniformed police and French military, fully outfitted with their own, ineffective weapons, had been trolling the streets from rue La Fayette to the Sorbonne. There had been a startling lack of citizens, however,
and even more eerily, a lack of noise. It was as if the smog clouding above the city had somehow muffled all sound, making the clap of hooves and the jangle of the hackney carriage’s tack louder than it should have been. It filled Gabby’s head and grated on her nerves.

She leaped from the hack as soon as it stopped. She and Rory dashed inside, up the curving stairwell, to the third-floor door. Gabby itched to go to the rectory—she wanted to see Ingrid and Mama and make sure nothing had happened to them. But right then, there was nothing more important than finding Nolan.

As a red-capped Roman Alliance saw them into the open loft, she thought her stomach might cast up what little food she’d consumed over the past day. What if they’d taken Nolan directly to Rome? What if he’d attempted something stupid—it was Nolan, after all—and they’d harmed him?

Benjamin stood from the sofa and faced them, temporarily allaying her worries. The London faction leader wouldn’t still be in Paris if Nolan had escaped, would he? Nadia was there as well, though she remained on her cushion, her arms crossed and legs relaxed. Vander was seated beside her, his shirtfront torn and bloodied.

“Gabby?” He stood up, a tender hand against his wounded side. “What are you doing here?”

She searched the room. “Is Ingrid with you?”

“What’s happened?” Rory asked before Vander could answer. Gabby didn’t see her sister. She did notice, however, that the dozen or more Alliance members present, both Roman and Parisian, looked ragged and drawn, and were just as blood-spattered as Vander.

“Axia happened. Her demons. The Dusters, fallen under her spell. The damned gargoyles,” a Paris Alliance member spat out as he crossed the loft toward them. He had intense gray eyes, silver-dusted black hair, and a rugged set to his chin.

“The Dispossessed are with us, Hans,” Vander replied, his voice hard. His flash of anger surprised Gabby.

Hans snorted and muttered something indecipherable. Behind him, in the hallway of curtained-off rooms, stood a willowy man in a crimson cape and matching crimson beret, his hair white as powder underneath. He would have resembled a Vatican cardinal had it not been for the brace of swords he wore at his hip.

“Where is Ingrid?” she asked again. If the Dusters were under Axia’s command, what did that mean for Ingrid and Grayson? Or Vander, for that matter?

Vander pursed his lips. “I don’t know.”

Gabby closed her eyes and forced her breathing to steady. Her sister would be fine. She had Marco. She would have Luc, even if the gargoyle was no longer her protector. Gabby had to remain focused, just as Ingrid would do.

“We’re here for Nolan,” she said, opening her eyes again.

“Quinn is a traitor and will be punished accordingly,” Hans replied.