It was cold inside the landau, the sun not having risen high enough in the morning sky to warm it. In London, it would have been fodder for the scandal sheets for Ingrid to be out just after dawn without a chaperone. But here in Paris, the rules of the game had all changed. The only person who would have made a scene was her father.
He thought her still asleep in bed at the rectory; Mama had made sure of that. Her mother had shocked her less than an hour before when she’d entered her room and woken her with a shake. It was Monday. The day Ingrid normally visited Clos du Vie. “You must go now,” her mother had whispered. “Before your father wakes.”
Ingrid had been in a fog while dressing herself in the dark, her maid not yet up to assist. Her mother’s help was as foreign as it was thrilling. Lady Brickton had never interfered with Ingrid’s visits to Constantine. She knew what Ingrid was supposed to be learning, and though she never requested details, every now and again, Lady Brickton would pleasantly inquire how her lessons were progressing. But until that morning when she’d hustled Ingrid out of the house, she had never acknowledged her daughter’s need for them.
Luc had been waiting with the landau on the curb, just beyond the hedgerow. And now here they were, parked outside a shopping arcade, killing time while the sun rose. It was far too early to call on Clos du Vie yet.
“I didn’t think my mother understood,” she said to Luc, who sat awkwardly on the bench seat across from her. She’d made him come in, out of the drifting snow and bone-cold weather.
“He’ll be furious when you return,” he replied. He was right. There would be the devil to pay, but perhaps Mama might have some excuse planned. Ingrid hoped so. She wouldn’t worry about that just yet.
After a minute or two of silence, Ingrid started to wonder if she should have heeded Luc’s protestations about staying out on the driver’s bench. Each time she dared lift her eyes, he would shift his gaze to the floor, or the seat cushion, or the window. Ingrid was aware of him, of his every breath, the slide of his foot over the carriage floor, the way he tugged at his collar as if it were choking him.
“Vander Burke is going to be a reverend?” he said, breaking the silence.
The mention of Vander’s name suddenly made the carriage feel crowded.
“He wants to become ordained, yes,” she answered. “Why do you ask?”
Luc sat up taller. “It just seems like an odd choice for someone who’s always been so willing to work with the Dispossessed.”
“Why should his becoming a reverend change that?” Ingrid asked. As far as she knew, Vander had no intention of quitting the Alliance. In fact, he’d said an Alliance reverend could be useful. The old reverend at the American Church had been blessing their silver weaponry for decades. When he died, Vander could take over the task.
Luc held her gaze. “You don’t know, do you?”
Ingrid frowned. At her confusion, Luc added, “Why we’re gargoyles? What we did to be cast into the Dispossessed?”
It was her turn to shift uncomfortably on the bench.
“I had wondered, but …” But she hadn’t had the courage to ask. Not just Luc. She knew she could have asked Vander or Constantine. Even Gabby would have known.
Whatever it was, it had to be awful—an unforgivable sin. She had considered what it might have been time and again but hadn’t made any move to learn it explicitly. Knowing Luc’s sin might change the way she saw him. The way she thought of him.
She was being a coward.
Luc looked away from her, confessing to the window instead. “We’re all murderers, Ingrid.”
She forgot the cold seeping in at the tips of her suede boots.
“Priests. Reverends. Any man of the cloth. We all took a holy life in cold blood, and in doing so gave up our eternal souls, along with any chance of entering heaven.”
He turned from the window to see how his confession had landed. Ingrid hoped she didn’t look as shocked as she felt.
“Why did you do it?” she whispered.
He didn’t hesitate to answer. “Vengeance.”
“For what?”
Now he hesitated. His eyes clouded over and went distant. He was somewhere else, remembering, and she could read his expression well enough to know he didn’t want to be there. Luc didn’t want to talk about what he’d done, and she was willing to bet that he hadn’t done so for a very long time. Perhaps never.
“Did a priest do something to you?” she asked, then bumbled, “Or perhaps a reverend, or—”
“To my sister,” he said, voice low and dangerous. “Suzette.”
He said her name with unexpected gentleness. He’d loved her.
“What happened?” Ingrid asked.
The distance in Luc’s eyes closed, and he was back with her in the carriage. He stared at Ingrid, unflinching. He was going to tell her, and he wasn’t going to look away until he’d finished confessing.
“He was the priest at our church. I liked him. My family trusted him. And Suzette … he seduced her. Got her with child. When my father turned her out, the bastard wouldn’t take her in. He denied everything. Said the babe inside her wasn’t his.”
Ingrid listened, rapt. She wanted to move to the bench beside Luc but held still. Any movement and he might startle like a bird and fly away from her.
“I didn’t get to her in time. She drowned herself in the Seine.”
His voice had gone thick.
“So I killed him.” The spell broke and he averted his eyes. “I was in a fury. I wasn’t careful.”
She wanted him to look up at her again, but he wouldn’t.
“They hanged me at Montfaucon in front of a crowd, every last one of them believing I’d murdered an innocent priest.”
Luc huffed a laugh, but Ingrid felt sick. She could see it all. Luc, standing at a gallows with his hands bound behind his back, a noose around his neck. A jeering crowd the last thing he saw before a suffocating black hood was thrown over his head. And then the fall. The snap of his neck.
“I didn’t repent then, and I still don’t,” he said.
Ingrid no longer just felt sick. She worried she might actually be sick. “I’m sorry, I need some air,” she said, her hand clasped lightly at her throat. “I’m fine. You needn’t come with me.” She scrambled forward and shoved open the carriage door. The steps were already lowered and she took them, fast.
She headed straight for the arcade entrance, a pair of glass doors under a fanned-out awning of iron and glass. To her relief, the doors were open, and she hurried inside.
He had died.
Of course, she’d known Luc had died and that he’d been young, but … she hadn’t been prepared to learn how. That he had been executed.
The arcade’s main doors swung closed behind her. She slowed, the tap of her heels echoing along the long, empty corridor. The shopping arcade was an indoor plaza, with storefronts on either side of a wide corridor, topped by a glass roof. The stores weren’t open yet, and Ingrid hoped she wouldn’t come upon any vagrants taking shelter. Though she supposed that was what she was doing, in a way.
Ingrid started for the stone fountain up ahead. Here, in the warmth of the greenhouse-like building, water burbled from the fountain. There were benches nearby. She needed to sit and get the wretched image of Luc swinging from a gallows out of her mind.
She walked along the marble-floored corridor, passing over a short stretch of glass and iron that was in fact the roof of an underground arcade directly below. Little stretches of glass-and-iron bridges allowed the sunlight down to the subterranean arcade where Ingrid and Gabby had once shopped for hats and gloves.
She had nearly reached the benches when something moved near the tip of the fountain’s spout. The fountain was a basic tiered design with three bowls, the smallest at the top and the widest at the bottom. Water overflowed at each bowl’s rim, creating a cascade into the basin. Ingrid stopped walking and stared at the falling water. There was something moving through it, dropping from one bowl to the next. It looked like a white braided rope, thicker even than rope used to moor ships. But it wasn’t rope.
It slinked from the widest bowl into the main basin and then up over the lip of the fountain edge. Ingrid froze.
Axia’s serpent.
The snake’s diamond-shaped eyes fixed on Ingrid, its pale scales glistening and wet. Ingrid had nearly forgotten about the serpent and the way it had darted out from Axia’s robes to attack Ingrid when she’d been in the Underneath.
Axia couldn’t leave the demon realm, but her serpent clearly could. And it had come to fetch Ingrid.
The front doorbell rang its grating trill throughout the rectory, and Gabby slouched with relief. The breakfast table had become a war zone. The opposing armies were her parents, and Gabby had somehow become the innocent citizen caught in the cross fire.
“I don’t see the scandal in French lessons,” her mother said to Gabby, though her words were directed at her father. Lord Brickton sat at the opposite end of the table, the skin around his club collar mottled purple.
“Sending her off at the crack of dawn, without a chaperone and to a man’s home, isn’t scandalous?” he roared at Gabby, refusing to meet his wife’s eyes.
Gabby stared into her tea, which was far too milky, but her arm had jumped when her father had shouted earlier and she’d spilled in more than she preferred. Grayson had been smart enough not to come down to the dining room. The weasel had probably sneaked out altogether.
Their butler, Gustav, entered the dining room, his hands clasped behind his back. “My lord, my lady. Monsieur Quinn to see you.”
Gabby startled again, and this time a splash of tea crested the lip of her cup and sloshed onto her saucer. She sat with her back to the foyer entrance and heard Nolan’s footsteps as he entered. What on earth was he doing here? It was far too early to call, and Gabby hadn’t even pinned on one of her veiled hats yet. She resisted turning to face him.
“Detective Quinn, what a surprise,” Lady Brickton said, addressing him as she had in December when Nolan had pretended to be a detective searching for Grayson.
Her mother knew the truth now, of course, and her greeting had sounded cool.
“I apologize for arriving at such an early hour, my lady,” Nolan said. His voice set off an unexpected craving inside Gabby. As much as he vexed her, Nolan also had a way of making Gabby want more of him.
“I haven’t had the pleasure,” her father said from his chair. He peered at Nolan, who had moved almost directly behind Gabby. She was disturbingly aware of him, and it brought a most unwanted flush to her cheeks.
Her mother introduced Nolan, and when she explained that he was the detective who had helped her search for Grayson, humiliation hung on her every word. Her husband had thought her a fool for making such a fuss of their son’s disappearance, and it was clear that having to thus play the fool wounded Lady Brickton’s pride to no end.
“And Lord Fairfax is well?” Nolan inquired, using Grayson’s title with astounding propriety. No doubt he wanted to roll his eyes.
“As well as he’ll ever be,” Gabby’s father answered, making little attempt to mask the disdain he felt for his own son. If he felt this way about Grayson now, Gabby didn’t want to imagine how it would be should he learn about his son’s demon half.
“I apologize if my wife had you mucking about Paris trying to find the boy.”
Her brother straightened her back and leveled her chin. It was only a matter of time before she burst. Gabby didn’t wish to be there when it happened.
“No apology is necessary. She did nothing wrong. Any decent parent would have taken the same course of action,” Nolan replied.
The room fell silent and Gabby’s jaw went slack. Even the footman in the corner of the dining room raised his eyebrows at Nolan’s cutting insult. No one spoke to her father that way. Before she knew what she was doing, Gabby shifted slightly in her seat and peered up at him in awe. He and Lord Brickton had become locked in an arctic glare.
“I wanted to deliver an invitation to you personally, rather than through a messenger,” Nolan went on, as if he’d said nothing at all. “My father and I would like to request the pleasure of your family’s company at our home, Hôtel Bastian, tomorrow evening for dinner.”
Had Gabby been eating, she would have choked. Nolan must have gone utterly mad. He wanted her father at Alliance headquarters? Gabby’s mother seemed to be having the same concerns. Her lips twitched as she started, then stopped, and then started once more to respond.
“Oh, why … of course, that would be marvelous. Indeed, we shall come.”
Lord Brickton said nothing but continued to stew in his chair.
“Excellent,” Nolan said, at long last meeting Gabby’s eyes. “I know it’s early, but would you care for a stroll around the churchyard, Miss Waverly?”
His smooth manners unsettled her—she much preferred the improper Nolan Quinn who called her lass and winked devilishly at her. Gabby folded her napkin and set it on the table, avoiding her father’s eyes, which were no doubt simmering with displeasure. She stood up, half wishing her father would bluster and refuse to allow her to leave. Once she was alone with Nolan, she’d have to explain how she’d destroyed the carcass demon. But then, staying with her parents at the breakfast table wasn’t a much better prospect.
Gabby and Nolan left without hearing a word of objection. They stopped in the foyer to gather her cloak and gloves, but all of her hats were up in her room. She felt exposed as they walked outside onto the thin layer of crusty snow covering the drive. Nolan kept an arm’s length between them. He was silent, and when Gabby ventured a peek, she saw that his eyes were fastened on the abbey, his lips drawn into a taut line.
He was angry.
They were nearly to the transept doors when Nolan finally said, “It was Chelle, wasn’t it?”
It wasn’t worth the effort it would take to feign ignorance. Gabby nodded. “You don’t know what it was like, sitting around the rectory waiting, doing nothing. I’d catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror, see my face, and remember that hound … how powerless I was.” Gabby stopped at the doors while Nolan reached for the handles. “Don’t be angry with Chelle. I practically begged her to start training me.”
“I’m not upset with her.” Nolan gestured for Gabby to enter.
They weren’t alone in the eastern transept. A pair of workers were crouched along the aisle, scrubbing the white marble frescoes that had gone brown and yellow with age and neglect. They spared Nolan and Gabby a single glance before setting back to the delicate work of cleansing the carved robes of the portrayed saints.
“But you’re angry with me,” she whispered as they walked toward the pulpit.
Nolan didn’t reply. He took her by the arm and led her toward the ambulatory. Pink marble columns lined this rounded end of the abbey, creating a walkway past numerous small alcove chapels dedicated to individual saints. Nolan continued to lead Gabby deeper into the sanctuary, behind the freshly varnished choir stalls. The columns rushed past them, and Gabby’s slippers hit the tiles with echoing slaps. Finally, he jerked her to a stop underneath the great rose window, took her by the shoulders, and dragged her behind a column.
And then he kissed her.
It wasn’t a soft kiss, either. He backed Gabby up against the column and pinned her there, his lips hard against hers. She opened her mouth and he stole inside with a husky groan of satisfaction. Gabby tried to free her arms, longing to wind them around his neck, run her fingers through his black curls. But he held them firmly at her side.
“You’re not angry?” she gasped when he pulled away for a breath of air.
“Furious.” He kissed her again. Nolan released her arms and curled his own around her hips, pulling her away from the column and against him.
“You don’t seem furious,” she whispered, eyes closed, a smile tugging at her throbbing lips.
He held her so closely that the rumble of laughter in his chest passed to hers. “All right. I’m jealous. I wanted to be the one to train you.”
Gabby opened her eyes. The unexpected kiss had plunged her into a swirly kind of fog.
“But you can’t,” she said, an edge of sadness intruding. “Because your father won’t allow me to join the Alliance.” She closed her eyes. “And now I’m to dine with him so he can whisper enticing persuasions to Ingrid and Grayson so that they’ll join and wield their demon gifts for the greater good.”
Nolan leaned his forehead against hers and sighed. “My da’s decision is final, so no, lass, you can’t join the Alliance. Not yet.” He rubbed his nose against the tip of hers. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t keep learning how to fight. If it’s done between us, in private, there’s no reason anyone else has to know.”
Gabby liked how that sounded. She brought her mouth to his, kissing him first this time. She felt Nolan’s lips stretch into a smile. He captured her bottom lip with a soft nip of his teeth.
“Do you have anything you wish to confess?” he murmured.
Gabby drew back, confused by his question. She followed his gaze to an old, worn confessional tucked back in the closest alcove chapel. The two connected wooden booths, one for the priest and the other for the sinner, still had their solid doors attached.
Nolan snaked his arm around Gabby’s waist and stepped up onto the raised floor of the alcove chapel.
“You’re wicked,” she whispered. “May I remind you that we are in a house of the Lord?”
Nolan continued toward the confessional, pulling her with him. “And how hospitable of him. Look, he’s provided us a room of our very own.”
He reached for the small knob on the confessional door and twisted. It swung open with a groan of its rusted hinges.
Gabby peered into the dark booth. There was a small wooden seat inside, and a carved iron grate set in the wall. She thought of all the sins whispered through that latticed ironwork. She rose onto her toes and kissed Nolan, loving the feel of him. How he gathered her against him in that stubborn, unyielding way of his. What she felt for him wasn’t a sin.
“If you’ll remain a gentleman?” she asked.
Nolan swiveled on his heels and twirled her into the shadowy booth. He stepped inside the small space with her, their bodies forced even closer together. “Define gentleman,” he said, his breath already hot against her neck.
She giggled, feeling somewhat relieved when he left the confessional door open partway.
If she could, she’d stay tucked away like this all day. Just her and Nolan, kissing. But she’d soon be missed. If not by her mother, who kept busy most days with her gallery plans, then definitely by her father, who seemed far more idle than he ever had in London.
“I can’t,” she said. Nolan froze. Pulled back.
“You know me, Gabby. Of course I promise to be a gentleman,” he said, brow furrowed in earnest.
She laughed. “Not that. My training. It’s too difficult. My father watches me constantly, and if I keep sneaking out at night, I’m bound to get caught.”
Nolan loosened his arms from her waist. He probably hadn’t considered Gabby’s constraints. He’d never had them himself, she gathered. His father had raised him within the Alliance, after all. She bet he’d never even had a curfew.
“Then I’ll come to you,” he answered.
“But how?”
“You won’t have to sneak out at night. I’ll sneak in,” he said. “We can practice in your room at the rectory.”
“Don’t be absurd—you can’t come to my room in the middle of the night!”
He formed a slow, arrogant smile and began to reel her back in, closer to him. “You don’t want me there?”
The confessional booth was growing warmer by the second. “I—” She sealed her lips. She shouldn’t say yes, but of course she wanted him there. To train, she scolded herself.
“My room is on the upper floor. How will you get in?”
“I’ll fly him up.”
Nolan and Gabby tore out of their embrace and turned toward the booth’s open door. Dimitrie stepped into the alcove chapel and stood just outside the confessional. How long had he been watching them? Gabby flushed.
“My lady,” Dimitrie greeted her. “I can bring him to your window.”
As she and Nolan spilled out of the confessional, Gabby tried to imagine Dimitrie’s scrawny frame lifting Nolan’s muscled one. Of course, Dimitrie’s body in true form was a different thing altogether.
“Why would you do that?” she asked. Luc would never have offered to help.
Dimitrie shrugged. “Any human willing to fight demons is an asset to the Dispossessed.”
Gabby wanted to smile and say thank you, but she couldn’t stop remembering his pale back and the scars running the length of it like the ridges of a metal washboard. Nolan had called Dimitrie useless, but he wasn’t. He’d saved her from that appendius and had swallowed his pride by taking her to Hôtel Bastian for mercurite.
“All right,” Nolan said. “I’ll come to the carriage house tomorrow night, after midnight.”
“Thank you,” Gabby said quickly. Dimitrie bowed. He was so much more gracious than Luc. It was a bit disarming.
Nolan called after Dimitrie as he stepped down out of the alcove chapel. “One more thing. Can you trace Grayson for me? I’d like to speak to him.”
Dimitrie stilled. His fingers tensed into fists. He kept his back to Nolan, his head bowed forward. When he answered, it was through gritted teeth.
“I prefer not to use my abilities to please the whims of humans.”
He strode away without a look back at Nolan or Gabby. She immediately took back every kind thought she’d just had for the gargoyle.
“He’s a bit touchy,” Nolan muttered.
“He could have easily told you,” Gabby said.
Dimitrie’s refusal to trace Grayson didn’t make any sense, especially since he’d practically begged to fly Nolan up to Gabby’s window, as if facilitating some preternatural rendition of Romeo and Juliet.
“Never mind.” Nolan took Gabby’s wrist in hand and persuaded her back to his side. She liked it there, and promptly forgot Dimitrie.
“If I’m going to be coming to your room, I suppose we won’t need this relic,” Nolan said, kicking the confessional door closed with his foot.
Gabby jabbed a finger into his chest. “We’ll be training, not kissing.”
He nodded and sputtered promises of good behavior. Gabby didn’t believe him for a second.
“Why did you want to see Grayson?” she asked.
Nolan ran his thumb across the tender underside of Gabby’s wrist. “He hasn’t told you?”
“He doesn’t talk much lately,” Gabby said with a weary laugh. The sound caught in her throat as Nolan’s thumb coursed over her wrist again. “What happened?”
“He shifted into a hellhound last night,” Nolan answered with stark brevity. Gabby pulled her wrist away and stared, disbelieving.
“Chelle saw the whole thing. She said it wasn’t like before,” he went on. “He was a real hellhound. Smaller than most, but—he didn’t look human at all.”
“But it doesn’t make sense. Why would he shift fully? He hasn’t been in the Underneath, like last time.”
Nolan and Vander had determined that Axia must have done something to him there. Given him some sort of poison to make him shift. That was why his body had come out of the Underneath riddled with bite marks.
“I don’t know,” Nolan said. “But, Gabby, for now, it might be best if you kept your distance.”
She huffed, waving off his concern. “He’s my brother. He isn’t going to harm me.”
“No doubt you’d put him in a hospital bed should he attempt to,” Nolan said as he cupped her cheek, her puffy scars against his palm.
“Just be careful around him,” Nolan pressed. “And tell Ingrid as well.”
He kissed the tip of her nose before stealing back down the ambulatory, toward the transept. Kissing in a church. In a confessional booth! Gabby should have felt sinful. Instead, the only thing clenching in her stomach was dread. How was she supposed to tell Ingrid that Grayson had fully shifted? That their brother had become even less human than before?