It was worse than Ingrid had imagined.
The style and warmth of the posh upper floors had deceived Ingrid into thinking the room where Dupuis planned to drain her blood would be just as elegant and charming.
It wasn’t.
The room, located in the basement, was a medical nightmare. A series of steel-topped tables lined one wall, and strewn about them were all sorts of beakers and tubes and sharp-edged instruments. The walls themselves were just the stone foundation, the low ceilings constructed of plaster and hewn beams. The harsh electric light only made the room feel more cramped, and the corners were draped in shadow.
Three wheeled gurneys, each outfitted with leather restraints, were positioned against the wall directly in front of Ingrid as she walked in, Marco on her heels. Beside each gurney were serpentine tangles of tubing attached to cylindrical copper-and-glass vats.
No wonder Léon had run away from this place.
“The average human body holds approximately five and a half liters of blood,” Dupuis explained as he came to stand beside the vats. His long fingers traveled over the twists of clear rubber tubing. “We shall draw out your blood, separate it in this system, and then immediately pump the filtered blood back into your body.”
He brought his hands back into a steepled position. “The transfusion will be lengthy, I am afraid.”
Ingrid tried to keep her trembling to a minimum. She had to do this. They were holding Luc against his will. Feeling her fear and being unable to come to her must have been excruciating for him.
“How will these machines know to withdraw my angel blood and leave the rest of it?” she asked.
Logic always calmed her. If she could have something to concentrate on, some specific focus, perhaps she could get through this. Because it was clear, now that she had followed them into this nightmare room, that if she didn’t give Dupuis her blood, her father and Luc would never leave this place alive.
“We’ve never drawn angel blood before, but we have drawn demon blood. It has a different cell structure. We’ve developed a way to magnetize and pull out those different cells,” Dupuis said, his cheeks flushed with either excitement or pride. Neither one suited the moment. “This separating system will draw out every cell that differs from your human cells, and will therefore only return those that are human,” he continued, lifting up a second tangle of tubing, which ended with a needle.
Ingrid held up her hand as his explanation settled. “Wait—all the cells that aren’t human?”
Carrick cleared his throat. He was leaning against a steel-topped table, one arm hooked around his stomach, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. She remembered that the mercurite poisoning was eating him from the inside.
“If you drain both her demon and angel blood, how much blood will she be left with?” Marco asked.
“She won’t survive,” Carrick said, his voice strained. “We agreed on the angel blood, Dupuis. You said you could remove it and leave the rest. The Alliance can still use her if she has her demon gift.”
Dupuis transformed his face into a carefully drawn mask of regret. “Yes, well, this is where the risk enters. I cannot guarantee she will survive.”
“But you can guarantee that you’ll have your angel blood,” Ingrid said. “You don’t care if I live or die.”
“Of course I do not care,” he replied, hardly concealing his amusement. “However, it would be better for our reputation should you live. So we shall try our hardest, yes?”
Carrick gritted his teeth as he tried to straighten. “What is this, Dupuis? The girl’s angel blood. That was the deal.”
Dupuis ignored him. He didn’t even glance his way as he reached for a white coat on a wall hook. “If you would remove your dress, mademoiselle. Your undergarments will be sufficient.”
Ingrid retreated a step. “No. Not until my father and Luc are released, and I want to see them leave.”
“Not at all,” Marco argued. His voice rose to where Ingrid knew it might cross over into a shriek. “I’ve heard enough. We’re leaving, Lady Ingrid. Should anyone attempt to stop us, brace yourself for the sight of blood.”
Dupuis began to turn switches and dials on the cylindrical vat, unmoved by Marco’s threat. “You sound quite protective, gargoyle. Take a moment to search yourself. What is the tie that binds you to this young woman?”
He flipped a lever and a humming sound shook the vat. The lightbulbs brightened.
“Lady Ingrid has come to me willingly,” Dupuis added, and with a glance toward Marco arched one of his brows. “She has accepted her room here. She is on my territory. By Daicrypta edict, she is now my ward, and the human charge of my Dispossessed.”
Marco came forward, stepping in front of Ingrid and staring hard at Dupuis. But he didn’t speak. Ingrid watched as the sinuous muscles along his ribs and torso stretched. He was breathing in. Scenting her. Marco exhaled and looked over his shoulder at her. “You are no longer my human.”
The room went cold around her. His bond to her had been severed. Marco was going to leave.
“Your dress, mademoiselle,” Dupuis repeated.
Ingrid kept her eyes locked on Marco’s, while in her unfocused side vision Dupuis slipped his arms into the sleeves of his white lab coat.
She couldn’t look away. The expression on Marco’s face was new; it didn’t seem to belong to him. Sadness melted into disappointment, and then changed again, this time into something much more familiar: anger.
He moved fast and mercilessly.
Marco had half shifted before he reached Dupuis and grabbed fistfuls of his white coat. He jerked him off the floor and, with a piercing shriek, threw Dupuis as he might a sack of potatoes straight into Carrick Quinn’s hunched frame. The two men landed on the stone floor in a heap of arms and legs, taking with them one of the steel tables and the instruments upon it.
Marco turned back to Ingrid as the scream of metal and breaking glass assaulted her ears. His wolfish snout crumpled back until his face was once again human. Marco surged toward her, his great wings folding into his body as his scales softened to skin.
“Lady Ingrid, come with—”
Marco stopped—and shattered out of his skin once again, transforming so quickly that Ingrid threw her arms up before her face. She heard a shriek, then two more, and when she lowered her arms, Marco was down flat on his back, a long knife handle protruding from his abdomen.
Dimitrie entered the room through the open door. He was in human form, and he held a crossbow, fitted with a dart.
“Marco!” Ingrid yelled as she rushed toward him.
Dimitrie caught her by the arm and pulled her back before she could reach the gargoyle. Marco screeched in pain, rolling onto his side as he grasped the knife and ripped it from his armored stomach.
Dupuis had shaken himself off and stumbled to his feet. “Finish him, Dimitrie.”
“No!” Ingrid screamed, clawing at Dimitrie to let her go. Marco had only been trying to protect her, even though he wasn’t required to any longer. She had to do something to help him. “I’ll do it, I’ll give you the blood, just—just stop!”
With one easy shove, Dimitrie knocked her to her knees and sent her skidding to the far side of the room. He raised the crossbow toward Marco, who writhed on the floor, and fired again. A dart buried itself in Marco’s back, just under his right wing. His anguished shriek reverberated off the walls.
“I asked you to finish him,” Dupuis barked.
“The mercurite will hold him,” Dimitrie replied.
“Mercurite?” Ingrid pushed herself up from the cold floor, but she couldn’t reach Marco. Dimitrie stood between them.
“Our weapons are dipped in it,” Dimitrie answered. “It’s the only way humans can protect themselves against the Dispossessed.”
“But you’re one of them!” Ingrid screamed.
Marco growled on the floor. His body rippled out of true form until he lay naked, facedown. His wings folded and nearly disappeared into clean gashes just beneath his shoulder blades. The one closest to the mercurite dart remained half formed.
“No he isn’t. He’s a Shadow bastard and a traitor,” he spit, his grating voice tremulous.
Dimitrie didn’t deny it. He only grimaced. “Be thankful I didn’t aim for your heart, Wolf.”
Dupuis brushed off his coat and walked away from Marco’s prostrate form. The blood-draining machine droned on. “Get her ready, Dimitrie.”
Luc crawled out of the basement storeroom, his human body still a grotesque fusion of flesh and stone. He couldn’t scent Ingrid. She had been there one second and gone the next, and no matter how hard he tried, her rich, earthy essence wouldn’t come.
He dug his fingers into the rotting wooden doorframe and hauled himself up. It had been half an hour since Dimitrie had left with the promise of Ingrid’s death on his lips. Luc threw his head back and cracked it against the soft wood. If her scent was gone, that meant she was either in the Underneath with Axia and no longer his human charge, or she was dead.
If Axia had somehow snatched Ingrid back to the Underneath, Luc would simply go after her again. Surely he could find demon poison somewhere in this Daicrypta prison. He would ingest it and cross into the Underneath, and like last time, once he and Ingrid shared the same realm again, he would be able to scent and trace her.
But if she was dead … if Dimitrie had taken her from him … The boy had been right. Luc wasn’t going to let him rot here for eternity.
He felt the telling chime at the base of his skull. Dimitrie wasn’t far.
Luc forced himself to move forward. The darted tips of his leathery wings dragged along the floor. He was half naked and half scaled, and he could barely move. Where the mercurite had touched him, his jet scales had been frozen in place, calcified to flinty stone. In the last half hour they had softened to something more like wet cement. Still. How was he supposed to destroy Dimitrie like this? And if Ingrid wasn’t dead, if he had to go into the Underneath … how could he rescue her?
The single electric bulb lighting the dug-out corridor hummed and brightened before a wire inside snapped. The light fizzled, dropping the corridor into a tunnel of mixed grays.
He heard a voice.
“Is someone there?”
Brickton. His oiled-leather scent traveled fast up Luc’s nose. He was hard-pressed not to gag on it.
“Hello?” Ingrid’s father called again. There was a closed door to Luc’s right, with a chain draped through the handle and affixed to an iron ring driven into the stone. Luc stared at it a moment, considering. The man wasn’t in any danger. Luc sensed fear, but that was only because Ingrid’s father was a fool, and ignorant to everything going on around him.
Perhaps it was time to enlighten him.
Luc closed his hand around the chain and swore. Mercurite. Cursing again, he grabbed the iron ring staked into the stone and tore that out instead, then threw the door open. Brickton sat tied to a chair in the center of a small storeroom much like the one Luc had been kept in.
“Tell me who you are,” Brickton pleaded. His eyes darted around, blind in the dark. “Dimitrie?”
Luc tested his footing, shuffling forward awkwardly.
“I’m the one who can save you,” Luc whispered.
Brickton gasped. “Then by God, man, untie me. Get me out of here!”
He struggled with the ropes that bound his wrists. Blackness seeped down the tops of his hands, Luc saw. Blood. He’d chafed his skin raw trying to escape.
“I can’t say I’m inclined to do that yet.” Luc tested the slender bones framing his wings. They twitched as they straightened, making a popping sound. Lord Brickton stopped fidgeting.
“What do you want, then?” he asked.
Luc lifted the bridge of one wing and touched Brickton’s flaccid cheek with the arrowed tip.
“I want you to leave Paris,” Luc answered.
He flexed his long, rigid talons, wet cement turning to tidal clay.
“I will, I will,” Brickton said, voice reedy with desperation. “I promise, I’ll take my family and—”
“Your family stays,” Luc said. “You leave. Forever.”
Brickton gargled an objection. “They will come with me. I cannot possibly leave them—”
“They stay in Paris, or you stay right here.”
This time Ingrid’s father swallowed his argument. He closed his eyes and nodded.
Luc sheared through the ropes that bound Brickton’s wrists and ankles.
“Go,” he snarled. Brickton didn’t waste a moment. He sprang from the chair and stumbled forward, arms outstretched to guide him through the darkness.
A muffled crash from somewhere else on the basement level drew Luc’s attention from his human’s staggered escape. He didn’t know how far the man would get, but that wasn’t his concern just then. Dimitrie was. Again Luc called up Ingrid’s scent. Reflex. Habit. Again, he was left hollow.
A scream followed the crash, and he lurched toward the door, the chime at the base of his skull driving him into motion. Luc pulled at the trigger in his core to coalesce, but he stayed disfigured, half gargoyle, half human, as he trudged through the corridor toward the pandemonium.