Grayson wasn’t sure where he was, but he knew there was blood nearby. A lot of blood. Freshly spilled.
He’d crossed the Ile de la Cité to the Right Bank and had started wandering through a few middle-class neighborhoods and squares. He wore his suit and tie from that evening’s dinner, his coat draped over his arm. The heat was unbearable, like blue-hot coals being stoked inside his stomach and chest. He’d cooled down a little since leaving Ingrid on the rectory lawns, but the flecks of ice were still a relief against his sweltering skin.
Why the devil had he told her?
He’d only wanted her company while walking a circuit around the churchyard. He hadn’t wanted to talk. Hadn’t planned on confessing the one secret that could destroy the way everyone, including his twin, saw him. He had only wanted her there beside him while he’d cooled down. She had always been able to steady him, and he’d needed that desperately. Father hadn’t said a decent word to him all day, and then that reckless rider after dinner had sent Grayson plunging over the edge.
The uncontrollable trembling had set in after that. His muscles had coiled painfully and his bones had ached as if some great weight from within them were pushing out, trying to break free. He’d had the sensation of trying to hold himself in. Hold himself together. He’d thought a bit of cold air and his twin’s presence would help.
But he’d gone and told her the truth. His darkest sin. And then he’d needed to run.
Now the smell of blood stopped him short.
He slowly ducked into the opening of a mews. The slim alley stretched behind one side of a residential square. High walls enclosed each home’s backyard, so no one could see Grayson creeping along the bricked road, which was slanted toward the center to allow horse waste to run freely toward the sewers.
He followed his nose, allowing it to root out the source of the smell. He pushed aside the niggling thought that he was sniffing like a hound when he came to the arched entrance of one family’s stable. The doors stood ajar. The coppery bite of blood landed hard on the back of Grayson’s tongue. The origin of the scent he’d been tracking was inside.
He listened for a moment before pushing a door open and slipping in. A small carriage was parked inside, the single horse pointed toward the far wall, as if it had been led in. The animal was still hitched, and a pair of beveled-glass lamps sputtered on both sides of the driver’s bench. The horse tossed its head nervously and stomped the cobbled floor. With good reason—two slumped figures sat upon the bench.
The driver, a man, had fallen against the seat back, his arms limp at his sides. His head lolled toward his spine at an unnatural resting point. The passenger, a woman, had fallen forward against the curved dashboard, her profile craned toward the quivery light of one carriage lamp. Her eyes were wide, her lips parted. And on the ground beside her was yet another figure. A young man, Grayson noted as he edged closer.
The smell of their blood thickened Grayson’s throat, though thankfully not with thirst. Splattered as it was over the slumped bodies, carriage, and cobbled floors, the blood didn’t affect him the way it did trapped within a person’s veins. He breathed out, relaxing a bit.
But there was still the matter of the three bodies.
Something moved in the corner of the stable, near a pile of stacked hay and bags of feed. A quick, darting motion. By the time Grayson focused, it was gone, replaced by a scratching sound, like nails on stone. It came from the driver’s side of the carriage. A dog? Grayson slowly went around the back of the carriage and a foul odor hit on top of all the blood. Sour milk and fetid meat.
A creature scuttled out from behind a crate and under the chassis. The horse whinnied and stomped, lashing its tail back and forth. Grayson leaped back.
That was no dog.
The thing had darted by on three sets of pitchfork-type legs, its nails clicking on the cobbles. A wicked spike tipped its long, curled tail, which resembled a scorpion’s.
Grayson had seen something like it in the Underneath.
The demon shot straight toward Grayson’s feet. He staggered backward into a long workbench. Tools rattled on the surface and Grayson swept his hand over them, searching for a heavy, blunt object to swing at the miniature beast. He closed his fingers around something just as the spiked tail whipped forward over the demon’s ratlike skull and snapping teeth. The spike struck the stone an inch from Grayson’s foot. He smashed a long wrench into the demon’s tail, but the demon only recoiled, uninjured, and immediately dove forward again.
Grayson braced himself against the worktable and tucked up his legs. The stable doors flew open and a gleam of silver spun low through the air, inches above the cobbles. The silver embedded itself in the demon’s ridged back and the creature flashed into a cloud of death sparks.
Grayson lowered his feet when he saw Chelle and Vander standing in the doorway. The two Alliance members looked at Grayson, then the bodies, and then back at Grayson.
“What are you doing here?” Grayson, Chelle, and Vander all asked in unison.
Chelle sighed and closed the doors behind them. “We were out patrolling when Vander caught the scorpling’s dust trail. What were you doing?”
Grayson set the wrench back on the worktable. He took deep breaths, willing his heart to calm. He didn’t need Luc showing up right now. If Luc could sense that Grayson was no longer in danger, perhaps the gargoyle would turn right back around for the abbey.
He crouched to pick up Chelle’s silver star. “I, ah … I was taking a walk.”
Chelle propped a hand on her slim hip. “And this is where you ended up?” She took a suspicious glance at the dead bodies.
Grayson set his jaw. He didn’t want to admit the truth, but there was no excuse he could give that would make sense.
“I smelled them,” he said softly, gesturing toward the carriage with the razor-edged star. “I tracked them.”
Chelle stood still, her frown frozen in place. Vander crossed behind her, heading toward the bodies.
“Their blood, you mean?” he asked.
Grayson nodded, his throat cinched tight.
“Well, there’s a lot of it,” Vander said casually. He crouched by the boy’s body, careful to keep his boot soles out of the surrounding pool of blood.
Chelle watched Grayson as he left the workbench and extended his hand. He half expected her to take the weapon back and immediately fling it at him. She only tucked it inside her red sash and appraised him in silence.
“The slashes at his wrists are deep,” Vander said evenly, as though he worked with dead bodies all day instead of books. “They look self-inflicted.”
“And these two?” Chelle asked, nodding toward the adults in the bench seat.
“I doubt either of them would have had the fortitude to cut their own throats,” Vander answered. Chelle made a sickened sound when she saw the gaping dark smiles across their necks.
“The boy’s parents?” Grayson asked. Vander shrugged.
“All I know for certain is that he was a Duster.”
Grayson stood back, staring at the boy’s body with new interest, unable to trace the demon dust that Vander could so plainly see.
“You’re sure it’s his own dust? What about that thing? The scorpling?” he asked.
Vander stood and pushed up his spectacles again. “The boy’s dust is a different shade from the scorpling’s.” He circled the boy’s still frame and ran his hand soothingly along the horse’s trembling haunch.
“What is it?” Chelle asked, apparently seeing some conflict in Vander that Grayson didn’t.
“Constantine. He has a student who killed his entire family a few nights ago. And now …” Vander crossed his arms, circling back around the pool of blood. “It looks like another Duster might have done the same thing.”
“But the scorpling,” Grayson said, picturing the spiked tail. Could it have made clean sweeps across two throats and then the boy’s wrists?
“It’s nothing but a bottom feeder,” Chelle replied. “That thing was here for the dead flesh. It didn’t kill them.”
Grayson didn’t know this boy at all, but the fact that he was a Duster—or had been one, he supposed—made him a little less of a stranger. It made the boy something much closer to Grayson himself.
“We can’t stay here,” Chelle announced.
“What, we’re just leaving them?” Grayson asked.
Chelle pulled her cap lower. “Before the police are summoned? Yes. Definitely.”
She was right, of course. None of them had any right to be there, and no clear reason, either. Grayson didn’t need to attract any attention from the police, French or English.
“Did you drop anything?” Chelle asked.
Grayson saw his coat lying on the floor near the workbench. He scooped it up and then helped them scatter a few armfuls of hay around the stable floor where their shoes had made slushy footprints.
“Thanks,” Grayson said as Vander checked up and down the mews to be sure they wouldn’t be seen leaving the stable.
“For what? Making sure you weren’t implicated in a triple murder?” Chelle asked, eyeing his coat.
They slipped outside, dragging their feet in a messy line so no specific prints would be left behind.
“No,” Grayson answered. “For saving my life. Gabby said you were pretty good with those stars.”
Chelle snorted. And even though it was a snort, she somehow managed to make it lovely. “They’re called hira-shuriken. And I’m better than ‘pretty good.’ ”
“She also said you were extremely insecure,” he replied.
Chelle scowled at him from under the short brim of her cap as they turned out of the mews, away from the dead Duster.
Had he lost control? Had the boy’s anger overrun his senses? Grayson could understand, if so. It made him shiver with nausea. Perhaps this boy just hadn’t been able to get away fast enough to simmer down. As they walked toward the Seine, Grayson wondered how many more Dusters were out there, perched on the edge of a killing spree.