The abbey vaults were the only part of the church that had not yet undergone drastic changes. As Grayson led Chelle into one of the larger spaces in the underground level, he smelled the cold stone of the walls and columns, which split the vaults into domed rooms, much like a piece of honeycomb. He scented the musty air, long trapped beneath the abbey, and the faint tang of rotting wood. But that was it. For the first time, he couldn’t scent Chelle’s blood.
The mersian blood injection had worked. Vander’s blood had somehow rubbed out everything: the ability to smell blood, the disgusting thirst for it. The aching, itching urge to shift into hellhound form. It was better even than dust reduction. He felt like himself again. He felt happy. So happy, in fact, that he was actually looking forward to Chelle’s teaching him how to wield a blessed silver sword.
Grayson stopped within a large domed space. There was a solid wall of stone behind him, and three arches in front and on either side, leading out into the maze of vaults. He set the glass lantern in a beehive-shaped niche in the wall and then turned to Chelle. He spread out his arms.
“I am yours to command,” he quipped, earning from her a suspicious—yet good-humored—glare.
“You sound strange,” she said, setting the lantern she had been carrying in another one of the alcoves.
“I feel strange. Strangely wonderful,” he replied.
This time, Chelle actually smiled wide enough that he saw the slim gap between her two front teeth.
“Should I ask why?” She shook her head. “Never mind. We have work to do.”
She had arrived with a long, hard-sided case. She placed it carefully on the floor now and undid the latch.
Meeting at Hôtel Bastian would not have been too risky—the idea of Chelle’s teaching Grayson how to protect himself with a sword wouldn’t have been far-fetched, especially with the sense of subdued panic and focused preparation among the Alliance fighters now that the Roman troops and Directorate representatives were en route to Paris. However, Grayson had thought it wiser to avoid Alliance headquarters altogether. He imagined that if Chelle’s plan to attack and destroy offending Chimeras was discovered, the consequences would be severe.
Grayson had suggested the vaults, which were quiet, private, and safe. And he didn’t mind having Chelle all to himself for a little while, either.
From the case she removed two rapiers of equal length and size and handed one to him. His palm grasped the handle inside the intricate silver hand guard, a feature meant to protect his hand from an opponent’s blade.
“I’m suddenly wishing I’d taken up fencing back in England,” he said, the leather-wrapped handle slipping around inside his sweaty palm.
“These are dull, and only for practice. You will require a sharpened sword to pierce a gargoyle’s scales,” Chelle said.
Grayson tried to catch her eye to see if the words she’d just uttered had bothered her at all. They had bothered him. He couldn’t imagine using any weapon to pierce a gargoyle’s scales.
For he and Chelle to go out on their own and kill gargoyles bordered on insane. It wasn’t that Grayson didn’t want revenge for what those Chimeras had done—they’d taken Léon’s life and the lives of other Dusters. But Chelle’s passion for this plan, her insistence that it happen, still felt unsubstantiated. It seemed to Grayson that she must have had more than just one reason to put it into action.
Chelle stepped away and rolled her wrist, cutting her rapier through the air at angles. Grayson removed his jacket, shifting his rapier from one hand to the other before tossing the jacket to the dusty floor.
“Are you truly ready to kill a gargoyle in cold blood?” he asked.
She used his distraction to cut her blade up through the air and lunge toward him. He swung his rapier like a cricket bat and knocked the oncoming blade aside.
“Yes,” she answered. The lack of hesitation or doubt unsettled him.
“If you really think killing them is the way to solve the problem, what makes us any better than the Chimeras?” he asked.
Chelle hardened her gaze at being likened to the Dispossessed.
“The gargoyles don’t care about stopping Axia. They are doing this to prove their power and strength.” She swung her blade again, this time in a downward, diagonal slice.
Grayson clashed his blade into hers and held it level.
“They are doing it because they will take any opportunity of unrest to lash out at humans,” Chelle continued, her teeth gritted with the effort of throwing off the pressure of Grayson’s rapier.
He loosened the tension in his arm and their blades swung toward the floor. Chelle breathed heavily, her nostrils flaring, and not just from physical exertion. His accusing the Alliance of being no better than the ruthless Chimeras had upset her more than he’d intended.
“What is it?” he asked, surprising her with a lunge and thrust of his own. Chelle intercepted the point of his blade, but not before it came dangerously close to her throat. “Why do you despise the Dispossessed the way you do?”
She’d never tried to hide how she felt about the gargoyles. She didn’t trust them, and was definitely in favor of the proposed regulations to put the Dispossessed on shorter leashes.
The fire in Chelle’s expression sputtered, and though it was only for a moment, Grayson thought he saw a touch of sad vulnerability. She glazed it back over with indignation before knocking Grayson’s blade aside. She moved swiftly, the point of her rapier now nudging his pectorals.
“Something happened,” he wagered, knowing full well Chelle might nick him for it.
She didn’t. Instead, she let the tip glide down the front of his waistcoat. The distant sadness came back.
“My father was a hunter. One of the best,” she said, her voice no longer gruff or defensive. The changing light of the two lanterns cast fingers of shadows across her face. “He was on patrol in the Marais one night when a gargoyle … it just attacked. No warning. No reason. The gargoyle’s talons ripped through his arms, shearing muscle and breaking bone.”
Chelle squeezed her eyes shut against the unbearable drain of memories. Grayson knew what it felt like to remember awful things and experience them again and again.
“There was too much damage. Even after he’d healed he wasn’t able to hold a sword without it trembling and then clattering to the ground. His hands just couldn’t stay closed around the handle. After that, they stuck him in the weapons room. His new duty was to polish and sharpen the blades he’d once wielded with such grace and skill.”
Grayson watched as Chelle’s face, screwed up like a prune, began to soften.
“What happened to him?” he asked.
Eyes still closed, Chelle swiped at a tear before Grayson could see it fall past her lashes.
“What do you think happened to him?” she bit off, the return of her defensive style oddly comforting.
Chelle’s father was dead. If he had been alive, he would have still been in the weapons room at Hôtel Bastian polishing silver. How he’d died wasn’t much of a mystery, either.
“And the gargoyle? What was done about him?” Grayson asked.
Chelle, though diminutive in height and weight, seemed to grow larger with the return of her anger.
“Lennier assured us that he was dealt with,” she replied tartly enough to express her doubt.
This was the key, he realized. He didn’t know how old she’d been when her father had been attacked, but from that moment on it had changed her. She didn’t want to go out there now and stop the Chimeras just to protect Dusters. She was doing it because of what had happened to her father.
Grayson, still holding the rapier slack at his side, gently knocked his blade against hers. The joined silver sang out and lifted some of the weight in the air.
“You miss him.” Saying anything else, like I’m sorry, would have been too empty a response for what she’d just shared.
Her rapier caught his and shoved. The unexpected attack threw his arm up high to the side, leaving his whole front unprotected. The tip of her rapier landed on the underside of his chin, the point pressing against his skin.
“More than you miss your father, I’m sure,” she said, a victorious smile tugging at her lips.
“You’re right,” he answered, the motion of his jaw pushing the tip of her blade more firmly against his skin. He didn’t miss his father one bit.
“But, Chelle,” he started to say, unwilling to walk away from all she’d revealed just yet. “Not all gargoyles are like the one who hurt your father. Or the ones who have killed Dusters. Think about Luc. He’s trustworthy, and there have to be others like him.”
She kept her blade at his chin but eased off a bit. “Perhaps. However, the majority of them are simply criminals being punished for their sins.”
Her eyes quickly darted to view Grayson’s mouth, and in that moment her carefully composed guard faltered. She parted her lips, unable to shield her interest in the shape of his mouth.
“I’m a criminal,” Grayson said, his heart gaining speed and his body growing warm from the way Chelle was looking at him. “I took a life, just as brutally as any rogue gargoyle. Why trust me?”
She knew what he’d done in London, and yet here she stood with him in the abbey vaults, wanting him at her side. Standing so close.
Grayson acted before he could think, and before Chelle’s unusual vulnerability disappeared. He leaned forward and kissed her, fast and hard. He pulled back almost immediately, certain he would see her closed fist coming toward his nose. It wasn’t. Her lips were soft and parted in surprise, her eyes fixed on his.
So he kissed her again, more gently this time, his hand hitching up her chin so he had a better angle. Chelle tasted like tea and sugar, like the fresh snap of spearmint leaf. He wanted to kiss her forever. He couldn’t believe he’d actually found the courage to do it.
They dropped their rapiers, which fell to the floor with a clatter that echoed through the vaults. Her fingers, small but fierce, pressed against his stomach and curled into his waistcoat. She pulled her mouth away from his, but, to his continued surprise, she didn’t appear angry.
“Who says I trust you?” she asked before rising onto her toes and kissing him again.
Hôtel Bastian was nearly as tense as gargoyle common grounds had been the afternoon before. Ingrid had been summoned there with a blood-red square of thick cardstock that required no signature—it was the color of the Alliance, and the few words in black ink were in Vander’s script: Come to rue de Sèvres as soon as you can. It’s important.
Mama had been busy in the abbey, and so, before Ingrid had needed to explain another outing, Marco had whisked her away in the landau.
Alliance headquarters practically throbbed with apprehension. Whether from Axia’s impending Harvest or the anticipated arrival of the group from Rome as early as the next day, Ingrid wasn’t sure. Vander had shown her quickly to the medical room, which provided an escape from the hum of unrest throughout the town home.
“This was important?” Ingrid now asked, seated on one of the metal tables with her legs stretched out before her. The hem of her dress and petticoats were bunched up around her knee, exposing her calf. She had reluctantly rolled her silk stocking to her ankle so that Vander could inspect the fang marks that had punctured the two strawberry ovals.
“See? I told you they had healed,” she said, as Vander’s spectacled eyes ran over her calf one last time. The demon mark was still there, as plain as ever, but the wounds inflicted by Axia’s demonic fangs were gone.
Ingrid tugged up the stocking while Vander watched. Her face grew warm.
“Good,” Vander replied. “I was hoping you were well enough, because I need you to leave Paris. Tonight, if possible.”
Her hand stalled out and she stared at him. “Vander, what is it?”
He stood in front of her, his arms crossed over the brass buttons of his waistcoat. He looked a little green around the gills.
“The Directorate wants every dossier Nolan and I have on the Dusters here in Paris. The files we’ve been gathering on every demon-marked human, every stranger I’ve spotted with dust.”
She finished quickly with her stocking and slid to the edge of the table. “How many files do you have?”
“Nearly fifty,” he answered. “Nolan keeps them in his room here. Some have just addresses and physical descriptions; others have names. Many are Constantine’s students, but there are many more who aren’t. We’ve been keeping an eye on them when we can.”
The old Ingrid would have accepted her first, optimistic theory right away: that the Directorate must plan to protect these Dusters somehow, either from Axia or from the gargoyles’ picking them off one by one. Her time with the Alliance and the Dispossessed had made her skeptical, however, and a second, far less optimistic theory chilled her.
“They’re afraid of the Dusters,” she said. The Directorate had wanted Ingrid dead so that Axia couldn’t reclaim her blood and come here, to Earth. Now that she’d succeeded, the only way to cut off Axia’s power was to take away her army.
“I think the Directorate’s idea of securing Paris is to get rid of the Dusters, yes. And I think the troops arriving tomorrow have orders to do just that.” Vander uncrossed his arms and braced himself against the table. His arms bracketed Ingrid’s body.
“I don’t trust them, not after what Carrick confessed, and especially not after that assassin.”
“But they wouldn’t kill us,” Ingrid said, then immediately felt naïve. “I mean, they tried to kill me, but they wouldn’t kill all of us. Would they?”
Vander hung his head. His back and ribs expanded with a deep breath.
“When we take our Alliance oaths, we vow to protect the human race against the Underneath despite personal risk, and to accept the necessity for small sacrifices in favor of the greater good.” Vander lifted his head, looking as if he wanted to say something more. Give her some further explanation. Ingrid didn’t require it.
“Sacrificing Axia’s seedlings would protect humankind,” she said. Like thinning out a garden row of vegetable sprouts. Leave all the seedlings in and the row will grow wild and unmanageable, the plants stunted. Pull out half of the seedlings and the other half will have room to thrive.
Vander pushed off the table and stood straight, tall enough for Ingrid to have to crane her neck to watch his reaction. She wanted him to deny her theory, but he didn’t.
He cupped her cheek, his fingers pressing against her skin with urgent determination. “They already know where to find you, so you can’t be at the rectory when they arrive in Paris.”
Ingrid tried to shake her head, but he took hold of her other cheek and stilled her.
“I could send you to my uncle’s home in Vichy, or you could join Gabby in London—”
“I won’t leave. I can’t. What about Grayson?”
“I’ll find him tonight and let him know what’s happening.”
And what about Luc? Ingrid closed her eyes. She didn’t want to leave Paris, not even to save her own skin. She felt as tied to the city as Luc was. If he couldn’t leave, neither should she.
“I know you only want to protect me,” she said, looking up at Vander again. “But I won’t run.”
He didn’t appear surprised by her defiance, only thoroughly vexed.
Just then the door to the medical room swung in on its hinges and Hans, the new Paris faction leader, rushed in. He took in the sight of Vander, whose hands were belatedly coming away from Ingrid’s face, with only mild interest. He shifted his intense, searching glare behind them, toward the corner of the room.
“Where is it?” Hans barked, and started toward the back corner.
Ingrid hoisted herself from the table and turned to follow Hans’s rigid figure.
“Where is what?” Vander asked.
“Enough, Burke. I want the blood.”
Hans stopped at the squat refrigerated cabinet set in the corner. Ingrid stared at the padlocked zinc doors. She’d completely forgotten about the blood samples that Vander and Nolan had been storing.
“I’m handing it over to the Directorate representative tomorrow,” Vander replied, plainly discontented to be doing so.
They wanted the Duster files and the leftover angel blood?
“Show it to me,” Hans demanded, still strung tight as an acrobat’s wire. “I want to see it.”
Vander took slow steps toward the cabinet, which only seemed to grate on Hans’s nerves. Ingrid followed him, just as curious.
“What’s going on, Hans?” he asked, even more slowly reaching into his waistcoat pocket for the key Ingrid knew he kept there.
Hans didn’t reply. He stood aside and waited while Vander crouched to unlock the zinc doors, which opened to a plume of cold white vapor.
The blood stores, the three frosted glass containers, were gone.
Vander leaped up and stepped back, nearly treading on Ingrid’s toes. He caught her arm and kept a firm grasp, as if preparing for Hans to draw a weapon. But the faction leader only read her and Vander’s shocked expressions.
“I’ve already been through the file cabinets in Nolan’s room,” Hans said. “The Duster dossiers were missing. But we found them.”
Hans glanced toward the door, and Ingrid saw that two more Alliance members had joined them.
“They’re a pile of scraps and ash in the kitchen stove,” Hans finished.
Vander’s grip on Ingrid’s arm went slack.
“When did you last see Nolan Quinn?” Hans asked.
Nolan. He’d had a key to the cabinet as well. Ingrid had seen him lock and unlock it time and again.
“Yesterday,” Vander said, muttering a curse under his breath. “Yesterday morning. After the Directorate’s telegram arrived.”
Nolan had taken the blood? He’d destroyed the Duster dossiers? He’d defied direct orders from the Directorate and what … gone into hiding?
“The blood was still there, at least until noon,” Vander added.
“So he’s had over twenty-four hours on the run,” Hans said, kicking back into action and heading toward the door.
Vander’s voice bellowed after Hans, stopping the faction leader in his tracks. “Whatever Nolan is doing, it’s for the Alliance.”
Hans swiveled back around. “Nolan Quinn is a traitor, and he’ll be dealt with. We have our orders. The Directorate expects those orders to be obeyed. Follow them, Burke, and you, even with your demon blood, might find yourself on the right side of things when all is said and done. But they want the rest of the Dusters.” His steely gaze landed on Ingrid, then shifted back to Vander. “And we will deliver.”
Hans left the room, the other two Alliance members following in his wake. Ingrid stepped forward and touched Vander’s wrist, his hand propped on his hip. He looked down at her fingers and stared at them as if they might offer answers.
“Nolan’s protecting us,” she whispered. “He burned the files and took the blood because he knew something was wrong. But, Vander, what will they do to him?”
He’ll be dealt with, Hans had said. The Alliance had thrown Tomas, a traitorous member, into prison for the rest of his life. Nolan’s freedom could be on the line.
Vander covered Ingrid’s hand. “I don’t know. But I do know that I won’t give them a single Duster.”
And then he’d likely wind up charged with treason as well. It made her grip his wrist tighter. How had the Alliance gone from something good to something so corrupt and wrong?
Or perhaps, Ingrid reasoned, it had never been completely good in the first place.