Dimitrie’s head.
Luc held Dimitrie’s head, his talons curled into the boy’s mop of blond hair. Gabby lowered her sword. She wanted to vomit. The night couldn’t possibly get any worse.
It did, however, and promptly.
Gabby heard panting behind her. She held her sword aloft as another figure rushed down the length of the arcades, the slap of feet on the paving stones reverberating off the vaulted ceilings. She nearly dropped her weapon when her father stumbled past a column and slipped on the frosted grass.
“Papa!” Gabby and Ingrid exclaimed.
He looked at them with confusion before waving his hands wildly. “Go! Go! Run!”
Something must have been chasing him.
Gabby and Vander raised their weapons once again. Lord Brickton’s eyes landed on her sword.
“Gabriella, what are you—?” He didn’t finish his question but tore the handle of her sword out of her palm.
“Papa—give me that!”
Lord Brickton wheeled toward the arcades just as a hellhound streaked through and onto the lawn. Vander fired his crossbow a second too late; the dart missed and the hellhound ripped across the grass, toward Gabby, Ingrid, and their father, who chopped clumsily at the air with the sword.
Ingrid, however, threw her arms forward, palms flat, fingers splayed. Veins of lightning crackled through the air and hit the oncoming demon. The hellhound reared up onto its hind legs, then crashed backward as briars of electrostatic energy shivered over its fur.
The hound wasn’t down one second before a second dart from Vander’s crossbow speared its chest. Gabby’s father cried out as the beast burst into a green cloud and vanished. He staggered back when Ingrid turned to face him.
“What did you just do?” he said, his voice spiraling to a frantic pitch.
Ingrid looked to Gabby, her wide blue eyes pleading for help. How could they explain any of this to him? But just then the doors to each wing of the mansion swung open, and the Daicrypta disciples braved entering the courtyard. They flooded out, surrounding their quarry within moments. Gabby did a harried count and found a neat dozen. They each held odd-looking, crossbow-like contraptions. She didn’t know what they were but thought it wise to consider them deadly.
“Papa, give me my sword,” Gabby said through clenched teeth.
“Don’t be absurd,” her father countered. “Where did you get this to begin with?”
Yet another thing she couldn’t explain easily. The disciples advanced slowly. Dupuis was dead, but they clearly still wanted Ingrid’s blood.
“Vander?” Gabby called. “Please tell me you have a plan.”
“I was hoping we could make that a group effort,” he replied.
Gabby focused on the approaching disciples closest to her. Even if she had been holding her sword, there was absolutely no way she could take them on all at once. The closest one called out in French, ordering them to lay down their weapons. He had barely finished speaking when a tangle of white silken rope looped around his chest and arms and snapped him off his feet. The other two disciples went down next, each of them wreathed in thick silk.
Léon! The Duster was climbing out of the basement-level hatch with Nolan just behind him, and Carrick leaning heavily on his son’s shoulder. Léon cocooned yet another disciple, but not before the strange crossbow contraption went off. It fired not bullets or darts but a glittering, tightly woven net. Léon’s silken webbing snarled the net midair before it could come down on top of him, and he slung it aside.
“Behind you, Gabby!” Nolan shouted. She turned to see a second hellhound leap from the arcade roof, land atop a disciple, and with one massive paw, crush his head into the ground.
Luc let out a shriek and surged forward, even though his wings barely lifted him from the ground. He collided with the hellhound and scrabbled with it for a few paltry moments before the beast raked a claw through one of Luc’s already damaged wings. He went down, and the hellhound lunged toward Ingrid yet again. A glimmering net reached Ingrid first, clobbering her to the ground. Small spikes along the border of the net pierced the earth and held her flat to the grass.
The hellhound roared to a stop and, with an angry yowl, darted in another direction.
A second net caught Vander in the side and took him down as well. Gabby heard a shrill ping as spikes shot out of the net’s border ring and bolted into the earth. She crouched, trying to pry up the spikes.
“Gabby!” Vander rolled beneath the strange net and aimed the silver bow straight at her. She screamed and ducked and a dart whirred past her. It struck an oncoming disciple in the shoulder.
As the disciple fell, Gabby saw Marco’s wings above the courtyard. His bestial talons snatched a disciple by the collar of his monkish smock. Marco spun him through the air and sent him crashing through one of the latticed windows.
Gabby’s father pulled her to her feet and started to drag her to Ingrid’s netted figure. Luc had struggled over to her and was prying up one side of the silver net while roaring in pain. Whatever the net was made of, it wasn’t gargoyle friendly. Ingrid crawled free and Luc collapsed. Brickton abruptly dug his heel in the ground and came to a halt, Gabby treading on his ankles.
Two red lantern eyes peered out from the dark of the arcades. Another hellhound.
This one hung back, however, watching the chaos unfurl in the courtyard.
“Stay away.” Her father’s order trembled on his lips.
The hellhound emerged slowly. Hesitantly. Not at all like the others.
“Lord Brickton, lower your sword,” Vander commanded.
“I will not!” he shouted.
“Papa, stop!” Ingrid cried. “It’s not a hellhound!”
It wasn’t. Even Gabby could see that. This one was smaller than the others. It was furred, but it wasn’t the same. It was wearing clothes.
“What in God’s name is it, then?” their father spluttered, the point of the sword still aligned with the beast.
Gabby slapped his wrist and yanked the sword down hard. “It’s your son. It’s Grayson.”
* * *
Grayson knew he should shift. His father stared at him, pure revulsion brimming in his eyes. This was his son. A monster. An aberration, and he most certainly wanted to kill it.
Grayson couldn’t shift, though, not with the remaining hellhound on a tear around the courtyard. He couldn’t understand. He’d had the hounds under his sway. He’d brought them to heel. What had happened?
We serve Mistress first.
The answer trickled into his mind with crystalline lucidity compared to the muffled, underwater voices of his sisters and father. Their arguing burbled around him while the hound’s thoughts continued clearly.
You serve her now as well. Bring the one Mistress wants.
Ingrid. They’d come for Ingrid. And Grayson had led them straight to her. The hounds had played him for a fool. They’d never been under his control at all.
He caught sight of the beast across the courtyard. It clambered onto the exterior limestone like a thorny vine, defying gravity as it ran along the stone façade, perpendicular to the ground. A disciple shot one of the Daicrypta’s gleaming nets, but the hound evaded it and the net shattered a window instead. The hellhound streaked along the exterior stone, clawing over windows and shutters and balcony railings, red eyes focused on its prey: Ingrid.
Silver flashes slashed the air over Grayson’s shoulders, announcing Chelle’s presence. One of her hira-shuriken gouged the limestone, but the other sheared through the hound’s flank. The beast stumbled and Grayson charged toward his twin. Axia’s pet would not succeed—she would not have Ingrid’s blood, and she would never be his mistress.
Chelle hadn’t hindered the beast. It arced off the wall, scoring the frozen ground with its claws upon landing. Someone was shouting, a new voice burbling up in a muffled pocket of air. And then someone else dove into the path of the oncoming hound.
Nolan’s father held no weapon, but he ran toward the demon with crazed determination. Grayson slid into position, blocking Ingrid, and watched in awe as Carrick Quinn ran full tilt into the hellhound’s enormous maw.
The beast clamped its jaws around the man’s torso and ripped him from the ground. Carrick’s war cry went silent as the hellhound darted past Grayson and Ingrid and disappeared through the dark arcades.