Ingrid could tell that Luc hadn’t wanted to leave. His expression had remained cool and unconcerned when he’d explained to her about Gaston’s visit and how something important regarding Vincent and the Chimeras was under way. It had to be now, he’d said, and would she please stay here, in front of the fire with the curtains drawn, until he returned?
“I’m not invited,” she’d stated.
Luc had given her a relaxed smile. “You’re safer here.”
When he’d taken her into his arms, however, she’d felt tension turning his muscles into steel rods. He’d kissed her forehead, breathing a long, warm sigh against her skin. Then he had pulled away and left in a rush, shutting her inside the second-floor sitting room.
He’d stacked wooden cabinet doors on the fire before leaving, so at least she’d have light and heat. No food, however, and Ingrid’s stomach complained. She paced before the fire and, after a quarter hour or so had passed, grew bored. There was nothing for her to do except worry and wonder. What was happening out there? What exactly did Luc and Gaston mean to do about Vincent and the Chimeras? Where were Grayson and Vander? Was Marco going to be with Luc and Gaston? If so, then her mother would be left unprotected at the rectory. The thoughts and doubts spiraled on and on as she paced, the first blue hints of dawn seeping through the gaps in the curtains.
She felt trapped and restless, and not having even a lick of a spark in her arms or hands for the last day and a half was not as welcome as Ingrid had imagined it would be. Not that she wanted to black out again and wake up in some strange place consumed by flames, but it would have been nice to know that she could protect herself.
She spent the next half hour trying to conjure up a current, the same way she had during lessons at Constantine’s home before she’d figured out her electricity could be fueled by other electric pulses. Fast-flowing water had electricity, as did dark, brooding thunderheads in the sky. Fire, too. Ingrid was staring into the flames eating away at the charred cupboard doors when she heard noises coming from outside. After the uneasy silence of the day before, when Paris itself had seemed to curl into a protective ball, the racket outside seemed unnaturally shrill.
She moved away from the fire and toward the windows overlooking the street. She widened the gap between two curtains. Dawn was much closer than she’d realized. The building across the street, with its terraces and tin smokestacks unevenly placed along the roof, was visible. The silhouettes of at least a dozen corvites lined the roof, a few more scattered along the balcony railings.
Something black, fast, and huge raced by the window. Ingrid jerked back and swallowed a scream. It hadn’t been one winged creature, but many. A whole flock of corvites, growling through the air, black and thick as a cloud of midnight. Ingrid went back to the window and looked out again, this time down toward the street. There were people out. More people than she and Luc had seen the afternoon before, when they’d last peered outside. One courageous shopkeeper had even opened his awning and set out a few baskets of bread. The shopkeeper and the people who had ventured from their homes had likely grown restless hiding away from something they most certainly could not understand. And if they didn’t understand it, they could not properly fear it.
A few mounted police officers trotted by, but the horses they were riding were shifting and snuffling loudly. Ingrid was just about to step away from the window when a carriage, pulled by two horses, clattered past, the horses whinnying and jumping, their bodies smacking into one another in panic. There was no driver at the reins, just a pale, nearly translucent crypsis serpent coiled on the roof of the carriage. Half of its body hung over the roof’s canvas edge and inside the window. The driverless carriage cut from one side of the road to the other in a deranged zigzag.
Ingrid tugged the curtains together and closed her eyes. The demons hadn’t left, and now people were chancing going out among them. It would be another bloodbath.
A tinkle of breaking glass sounded from above. Ingrid looked up at the ceiling, the white plaster moldings of vines and fruits cast in orange by the firelight. A second crash from upstairs had her backing toward the door. Someone—or something—was in the house with her. She couldn’t stay. Yes, if she left she would be in danger, but she couldn’t just sit and wait for whatever it was—demon or human or gargoyle—to sniff her out.
Ingrid left the sitting room and stumbled through the inky-blue corridor. She didn’t have Luc’s hand to hold this time, but a set of stairs appeared on her left and she flew down them, the clumsy thudding of her boot heels padded by carpet. She heard the sound of cracking wood upstairs as she came into the foyer instead of the kitchens. Ingrid unlocked the bolt on the front door and raced into the cold dawn. She stopped on the sidewalk and craned her neck to see the windows of the town house. Sure enough, there were two on the third floor that had been smashed.
Digging into her skirt pocket, her fingers found Vander’s dagger. The tip grazed her palm before her fumbling hand got a grip on the handle. She started for rue de Vaugirard. As a main road it promised more people; perhaps there would be strength in numbers. Besides, it would be a more direct route toward boulevard Saint-Michel and eventually the abbey and rectory. The Alliance members searching for her would have already gone there and left, she hoped, and she had to let Mama know that she was well. Besides, when Luc returned to Marco’s old territory and realized she was gone, the first place he’d look for her would be the rectory.
Ingrid kept her pace at a fast clip; she didn’t want to run and draw attention to herself, from people or demons. There were few others about. A kitchen maid quickly filling a basket of bakery goods at another open shop; two old men in some sort of military costumes standing on a corner, each of them wearing a brace of highly polished pistols; a fast-moving hackney, this one with a driver, coming down rue de Vaugirard.
She’d never felt more exposed. The hackney was bearing down on her, the horses’ heavy breaths panting out steamy clouds. She had a little money and considered hailing the hack. The crypsis rooting around through the window of that other carriage gave her pause, but it was a long walk to the rectory from here. Ingrid put up her arm and waved to the driver. He clattered by without sparing her more than a glance. Ingrid cursed beneath her breath and walked on, allowing her pace to advance to a half jog. Wherever he was, Marco was likely pitching a fit right then. She was attempting to keep her fear under control, but she knew he would be able to sense something amiss. She kept glancing up, expecting to see his winged form at any moment.
Two streets ahead, an enormous black beetle scuttled into the road, its body easily the size and girth of an Irish wolfhound. Ingrid stopped moving and stared at the beetle’s antennae. Two black rods as thick as her arms passed a blue electric current from one tip to the other. The tips sparked and spit, and barbs of electricity shivered down each long feeler, encasing them in spirals of blue.
A lectrux demon, it had to be. The demon she shared blood with. Ingrid felt a fast, and odd, sense of understanding and, even more fleetingly, kinship as the lectrux paused in the middle of the road. It lowered its feelers to the pavement and swept them side to side. Her arms were her antennae, she realized. They projected the current the same way the lectrux’s feelers projected it. The demon perked up and its giant beetle body shifted in Ingrid’s direction.
The connection she’d felt severed instantly. Ingrid took the immediate right up ahead. Without her own electric pulses at her command, she would be nothing more than prey. Ingrid threw caution to the wind and ran, her lungs tight and her legs burning with exertion. The street meandered to the left, cutting around a raised square set in front of a church. Narrow stone steps, crafted of pale yellow marble to match the façade of the church, led to the square. There were no trees or gardens, just a matching yellow marble fountain and scattered benches. The square was empty, so Ingrid took the steps, keeping her pace just as quick.
Her boots scraped to a stop as someone stepped out from behind the fountain and into her path. The cloaked and hooded figure remained still. There was nothing more than a dark, cavernous hole where the face should have been. Ingrid stared, unable to breathe.
Axia’s robes undulated. “I have been searching for you, Ingrid Waverly.”
The orangery glowed with electric light, casting a flood over the snow-crusted shrubs that trimmed the glass-and-iron walls. Luc stood among the trellised rows of Clos du Vie’s vineyard with Gaston and Marco and the rest of the Dogs, Wolves, and Snakes, watching the chateau from afar. They were all in true form, and quieted by somber determination. Luc had not cobbled this plan together with any sense of levity, and he did not stand here now, waiting for the Chimeras to arrive, with a featherlight conscience. None of them did. The decision to attack fellow Dispossessed was not an easy one to make. It had to be done, though. Vincent could not keep killing humans, and the sooner he was stopped, the sooner the rest of the Chimeras would see they had been led astray.
Luc hoped for this result, at least.
Constantine had unwittingly helped their plans. Gaston’s human had taken in at least a dozen dazed and frightened Dusters under his roof at Clos du Vie. Without a doubt the Chimeras knew about this as well. So many Dusters in one place made for an irresistible target, Gaston had reckoned. Luc had agreed and called all of the gargoyles standing with him to surround the chateau. He’d also ordered the others to leave Vincent to him.
Their monotonous wait came to an unexpected end as a clamor resounded from the chateau. It pierced the stillness of the morning, and to Luc’s right, Gaston’s wings sprang open. A second later the gargoyle shuttled into the air. He raced low to the ground toward the glass orangery while Luc held his arm aloft—a signal for everyone else to stay where they were. There must have been trouble within the chateau. Something having to do with Gaston’s humans.
Over the next minute or two, the clamor grew to a discordant mélange of screams, clipped shouts, and breaking glass. It wasn’t until Marco sank into a crouch, grunting as though he’d been punched in the abdomen, that Luc began to suspect the problem stretched beyond the walls of Constantine’s chateau.
“What is it?” Luc asked, his high-pitched shriek shattering over the quiet slopes of the vineyard.
Marco stayed in his crouch, but his scaled wings cracked open.
“You are needed here, brother,” Marco gargled low in his throat. He rocketed into the sky, and his wings melted into the coming dawn.
Ingrid. Something was happening to her, and like before, when Axia had succeeded in dragging her into the Underneath, Luc was completely blind as to what. He had followed Marco that time, but he couldn’t now. He was leading this attack. If he were to go after Marco, he would forfeit his bid for elder. A bid he hadn’t made for himself, and yet it was his all the same.
Finally, after not wanting it for so long, a position of such power made sense. No one will challenge you, Gaston had said. And if Vincent were to claim the position, no one would challenge him, either. He’d plunge the Dispossessed and all of Paris into days darker than the ones Lennier had lifted them out of centuries ago.
No. Luc had to stay here, and he had to trust in Marco. He filled his lungs, his plated chest expanding, and realized that putting his faith in the Wolf was easier than he’d expected.
The racket at the chateau had died down, but there was still something off. In the distance, the blare of whistles and the tolling of church bells were waking the city. There was something else, too. It appeared to be a dense black cloud racing toward the chateau from the direction of the city. The cloud split, created gaps, and then merged again. It swayed through the sky, and when it reached the space above the front lawns of Clos du Vie, Luc saw that the cloud was as wide as the chateau itself.
Luc hadn’t expected this many Chimeras. They circled the roof, a tornado of wings and tails, paws and talons, fur and scales. Luc searched the rotating horde of gargoyles for Vincent’s long, pointed pelican’s beak, while the gargoyles beside and behind him shook their wings with nervous anticipation. He understood his brothers’ sense of urgency but wanted to sight Vincent before moving them up and out of the vineyards. The Chimeras were swarming and spinning too quickly for that, though. The frenzy of wings spun toward the orangery, and a Chimera bashed through the slanted glass roof.
Luc was the first one into the air and fleeting across the lawns. Chimera after Chimera smashed through glass panels and poured into the orangery. Luc plunged after them, nicking his wings on the jagged entrance. He dropped through a green bower of moss and his talons cracked the terra-cotta tiles below. The electric lights in the orangery, still shining, exposed a swarm of Chimeras overhead, circling two Dusters like vultures. One of the Dusters still looked human, though his teeth had lengthened into fangs and no longer fit within the confines of his mouth. Strings of saliva dripped past the boy’s jaw. The other Duster had shifted into a ginger-furred hellhound, its clothing in tatters around its shoulders and waist.
They hissed and spat at the circling Chimeras—Vincent not among them. A snake-headed goat, its scales bright green, made the first dive. Its tail swiped the fanged Duster off of his feet.
“Stop!” Luc’s shriek blared through the orangery. It distracted the snake Chimera long enough for Luc to swoop low and wrap his talons around the tapered, fur-tipped end of its tail. He pivoted fast, slinging the Chimera into a stand of bamboo.
Above him, an eagle-winged, double-headed antelope with curled horns made a dive. A Dog gargoyle slammed into it, driving the Chimera off course and straight into a glass garden table and set of wicker chairs. Dogs, Wolves, and Snakes clashed overhead with the Chimeras, and the orangery throbbed with high-pitched caterwauls.
“Vincent!” Luc strained to be heard above the pandemonium.
The Chimera had to be here. This was his army, his orders. Vincent would want to see his bidding done.
Something thudded against Luc’s back and knocked him off balance. He swung out of his fall and hurdled into the air, barely evading the swipe of the hellhound Duster’s fangs. He resisted the urge to sink his talons into the greasy ginger fur. The Duster was just a spellbound girl, the stretched and ripped amethyst silk gown speckled by dried blood.
A silver gleam parted the air and the hellhound girl went down, howling, a dagger embedded in her flank. A throng of well-armed and red-capped Roman Alliance wearing crisp black suits had entered the orangery. Interspersed among them were nonuniformed and more familiar Alliance members, including Vander Burke.
The Seer saw the injured Duster and jammed his hand crossbow into the chest of one red-capped soldier. “Only the Chimeras, you idiot!”
“We came here for the Dusters!” the red-capped fighter bellowed, and then with a flash of silver, raked a dagger along Vander’s shirtfront. The blade flayed the fabric and sprang blood.
Luc flew over the mewling hellhound Duster with every intention of bowling into the Roman fighter, talons out. Constantine’s short gray form sidled up next to the fighter first, however, and Luc threw out his wings to avoid colliding with the old man. Constantine twisted the round knob of his cane and pulled a thin rapier from within. He raised it to the fighter’s throat and said something lost to Luc’s ears. With a quick nod to Constantine, Vander set his spectacled eyes on Luc and started toward him.
“Where is Ingrid?” Vander shouted, his hand testing the shallow wounds on his chest. What did the fool think? That Luc was going to change back into human form so he could hold a conversation?
Gaston flew between Vander and Luc, his black pennant wings completely blocking the Seer from view.
“Yann isn’t here,” Gaston announced, his vocal cords grinding through three shrill keys.
“I haven’t seen Vincent, either, but he’ll be close,” Luc replied. “I’m leaving to find him.”
Luc surged into the air, his wings brushing against the heavy limbs of a lemon tree and rustling up a bright citrus scent. He’d thought to use one of the gargoyle-sized holes in the glass and iron roof as an exit but met with an impenetrable barrier of gargoyles above the bower of Constantine’s jungle. Neither side seemed to be dealing deadly blows, and Luc felt a twinge of relief. They needed to end Vincent, not his followers.
The orangery’s ground-level door would have to serve. Luc dove back through the maze of shrubbery and trees, which was thinning out now as wings bent and snapped limbs and stalks and as swords hacked into the greenery. The sweet odor of crushed berries, citrus, and tropical blooms being mashed under boots and shredded by talons hit him as he dipped under the dome of a pink flowering tree and then plowed through to the other side. Luc reeled to a stop. The Seer had made his way deeper into the orangery, and now, less than ten yards from Luc, he staggered away from a Chimera—part pelican, part panther. Vincent.
Luc’s mind went blank. His body seized with indecision. He knew what he had to do. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t killed another gargoyle before. But this gargoyle wouldn’t stand still and allow death to come, as Dimitrie had.
Vander clutched his stomach with one hand while holding a short silver sword in the other. The blade dripped with an oily black substance—gargoyle blood—and Vincent’s pickax of a beak wore a thin wash of crimson. It took another vicious stroke toward Vander’s body. The Seer deflected the strike with his sword, but the beak’s rugged cartilage barely received a nick. Vincent’s long, fleshy orange bill came back and slammed into Vander’s sword hand. The blade disappeared into a white-berried shrub. The Seer grappled with his hand crossbow, attempting to load a bolt, while Vincent’s front paw drew back, his black claws extended and hooked for the kill.
Luc moved without thought. Without plan. He hurtled into the slim gap between the Seer and Vincent and planted his foot on Vander’s chest. He shoved him away, perhaps with more force than necessary, and turned to face Vincent head-on—a move he should have made first.
Fire tore down Luc’s left wing, rending through leathery membrane and thin cartilage. Vincent’s claws sheared into Luc’s wing, wrenching him down onto the terra-cotta tiles. The agony was worse than the white-hot scorch of an angel’s burn, but what turned Luc’s stomach and brought on a pulse of panic was the sudden featherlight weight of his left wing. Luc rolled to his right and stole a glance, but he looked away and faced Vincent before he could fully understand what he’d seen: his wing, still attached to the thick bone base in his back, but except for the first peaked gable, it had been almost completely sheared off. The wing drooped, lifeless, on the floor, hanging by only a finger’s length of scaled membrane.
“This is an unexpected windfall,” Vincent snarled. He shook his claws and spattered Luc’s obsidian blood onto the fronds of a palm tree. “Destroying you should be much easier now.”
He used his beak to slash at Luc—a predictable advance Luc easily avoided, even while in agony. He caught the ungainly beak around its wider center, hooking it tight between his forearm and bicep while swinging himself onto Vincent’s white-feathered head. The Chimera bucked and squawked, but Luc held on, giving up a fraction of his hold in order to rake his talons across Vincent’s down-covered neck.
Vincent’s paws crashed onto Luc’s hanging wing. He felt it catch and twist, and with another crack of pain, the final few inches of scales and membrane severed. Vincent threw Luc off, pinwheeling him through the air, into the stand of palms.
“Luc!”
The Seer. Coming back. The idiot. A grating shriek followed the Seer’s shout. Vincent loped to the side, a gleaming silver crossbow bolt lodged in the muscle of his front left leg. Vincent roared at the Seer but, instead of resuming his earlier attack, shot upward, through the combatants above, and out through one of the shattered roof panes.
Luc clambered from the destroyed palms, slick with his own blood, and attempted to lift off after the Chimera. His remaining wing propelled him into a drastic slant, and unable to sustain flight, he thudded back down into the palms.
“Luc—” Vander approached the palms, his eyes riveted to the mangled remains of his wing.
“No pity,” Luc growled. Vander didn’t need to understand the words. He nodded and backed away.
Luc plunged through the broken palms on foot toward the orangery door. Once outside, he’d try to fly again. By fleeing, Vincent had showed the true coward he was. Hopefully his followers had been witnesses to his retreat.
A brassy ridge of light pushed up over the bare trees beyond Constantine’s vineyards, the lawns and trellised rows of pruned vines deserted. Luc fluttered his one wing and the bony base of the one he’d lost. The motion jolted pain through his back. It reached into his arms and legs, and he stumbled, his heart pumping out a panicked rhythm. He’d had scratches along his wings before, and a mercurite-dipped rod jammed through both, but never anything this grave. Wings could heal and regenerate, but Luc didn’t know how long it would take.
Movement to the right of the orangery walls attracted his attention. Vincent was there, on the frosted brown grass, the Seer’s dagger gone from his leg. Luc fought the urge to close his eyes, to sink to his knees and breathe through the agony. He had to pay attention. Had to fight. Giving in now would mean losing everything, including his life.
It’s only pain, he told himself. Luc blinked away the fogged corners of his vision and focused on Vincent with new determination. The sleek curves of his panther’s body began just below the bloody gouges Luc had made in his lithe pelican neck. Luc had seen some horrid Chimera blends, and Vincent’s was one of them.
“Do you actually believe you can have her?” Vincent said, his meaty black paws gliding over the grass toward Luc. The tip of his tail rolled with the suppressed excitement a real panther would show while stalking its prey.
“When you are dead and I am elder,” Vincent began as he herded Luc backward, “I will enjoy making an example of your beloved abomination. However … I may stop to investigate what the bother is all about first.”
Luc’s snout crinkled back, but he kept his teeth ground together. He wasn’t game for the distraction of a verbal fracas, which seemed to be exactly what Vincent was attempting to incite. He believed he had a leg up on Luc. Luc, with one wing and one bloody stump. Wings were as important to gargoyles as air and blood. Wings were strength and majesty. They were feared. What use was a gargoyle without them?
The ground beneath his feet dropped into a stepped slope, and Luc stumbled into the sunken garden sited beside the orangery. Vincent laughed, and with the sound, an icy spike hammered through Luc’s stomach. Was he too wounded to fight?
Vincent bounded into the garden. The winter had claimed whatever flowers the garden usually had, but there were still carefully pruned boxwoods, and stone and marble statuary was scattered along the crosshatched brick walkways. Constantine had a penchant for armless Italian women, or so it appeared. Luc stopped beside one statue, raised upon a stone pillar.
“Ingrid is more powerful than both of us. Touch her and she’ll bake your insides.”
Vincent sprang forward and spread his wings, his speed lifting him into the air. Luc wrapped his arm around the stone pillar and heaved it down into Vincent’s path. The Chimera reared back to avoid the falling statue while Luc planted his foot on the overturned pillar and launched himself into the air. He didn’t need to fly. He just needed to level the playing field.
Luc caught Vincent’s wing as he fell back to the earth and with a swipe of his talons carved through tough skin and flexible cartilage. White feathers speckled with black blood clouded the air as Vincent and Luc thudded onto the upended Italian statue, cracking it into several pieces. Vincent’s bottom bill ballooned as he screamed, his black paws pummeling Luc in the chest. Luc’s steely plates protected him, but he still sailed backward, his talons ripping free of Vincent’s wing. It hung, useless and bloodied, but Vincent came at Luc again, swinging his beak side to side like a scythe. Luc dodged it once, twice, but on the third swing, the pointed tip raked into his abdomen, tearing a long gash through his scales.
His heel slammed into something and he lost his balance. He fell backward into a fountain, the stump of his wing grinding into the stone of the dry basin. Vincent placed his paws on the rim of the fountain, and his garish pelican’s head, his small black eyes ringed by yellow feathers, loomed over Luc.
He screeched as he drew back, preparing, Luc knew, to impale him with his beak. When he lunged, Luc rolled to the side and Vincent’s bill hammered into the stone basin instead. The Chimera’s paws slid out from underneath him, as if he were a cat on ice. He slipped forward, momentarily stunned.
Luc knew he wouldn’t get another chance like this.
He hooked the talons on one hand and drove them through Vincent’s chest. He clasped the Chimera around the neck and gritted his teeth as he punctured skin, tendon, muscle, and finally, bone. Vincent went rigid. With a twist of his wrist, Luc’s talons sheared through a defiant swath of gristly sinew and ligaments, enlarging the wound. Grunting with resolve, his throat tight with disgust, Luc plunged the rest of his hand into the cavity of Vincent’s rib cage. The Chimera’s black eyes went wide as Luc’s palm filled with what he’d gone in for. He didn’t know if it was pity for Vincent or for himself that made his own chest feel as if it were being torn apart.
“We were human once,” Luc whispered, his hand hot and wet and throbbing with every thrash of Vincent’s heart. “You forgot that. I didn’t.”
He pulled his hand free. Vincent’s body drooped and Luc shoved him to the side with an easy thrust. His Chimera form flopped over the rim of the fountain, his pelican half draped inside the basin. Luc heaved himself to his feet and climbed out of the fountain, his muscles strung tight and bile rising high into his throat. Vincent’s true form deteriorated rapidly; ivory down and black fur pulled back into his skin, leaving him pale and naked; his vicious beak shrank into his face, reshaping into a mouth, chin, and nose; his eyes were still black, but they were human once again. They stared blankly into the basin.
The heart had gone still in Luc’s hand. He backed away, toward the slope of the sunken garden. Inside the orangery he could hear chaos, and when he walked in, Luc found he didn’t have the slightest urge to do more than stand and watch. Alliance fighters were quarreling among themselves on the floor of the orangery, while the gargoyles were still brawling in the air, though no longer physically. They screeched back and forth, arguing about Dusters and Axia and the fate of the city. They all just wanted answers, Luc knew, and no one had them, human or Dispossessed.
Vander saw Luc first. He held his hand up to a Roman, red-faced and shouting, and stepped away from him. That Roman fighter followed Vander’s attention, and then another one beside him did, and so on and so on. Within a minute, the rest of the Alliance had gone quiet. All of them stared at what Luc held in his hand. Gaston dropped from the bowers of the orangery jungle and landed on the tiles in front of Luc.
Constantine’s gargoyle pinned his eyes on Luc’s dripping hand, his expression as inscrutable as ever. Luc stayed where he was as one by one, every last gargoyle dropped to the floor and stared. The silence stretched on, but it wasn’t an expectant kind of quiet. No one waited for Luc to speak or explain.
Luc opened his talons, and the oil-black heart made a wet slap on the tiles.
Gaston lowered himself to one knee and bowed, his clipped ears pointed toward Luc’s feet. The rustle of wings and the scratch of talons echoed off the glass walls as the rest of the Dogs followed their leader’s show of fealty; then the Snakes did the same. Luc searched for Marco as the Wolves dropped to their knees next. Their leader was still gone. How long had it been? Luc wondered, his mind racing toward Ingrid even as the first Chimera got down onto one knee as well. Two more Chimeras knelt, then three more, then five, and then every last one of the Dispossessed had bent in bows of recognition. It was a significant moment, one that would change Luc’s existence forever, but it was weighted by a creeping unease.
The Seer came through the rows of kneeling gargoyles, taking deft steps to avoid brushing against any of them. As he passed, however, the gargoyles straightened. Luc sighed and began to shift back into his human form. The broken ridge of his injured wing sank into his back with such pain it made his vision swim.
“I’m glad it’s you,” Vander said a moment later, his eyes flickering away from Luc. He nodded toward Vincent’s heart. “I’m sure that was necessary in some ancient and ritualistic way.”
Luc shook his head. “Not really.”
Vander huffed a laugh and adjusted his spectacles. “You saved my life,” he mumbled, unable to meet Luc’s eyes. “Thank you.”
Luc looked over Vander’s shoulder. “I hope you savored the experience. It won’t happen again.”
Vander shook his head and started to speak. Luc cut him off.
“I can’t fly and I need to find Marco.”
Constantine’s cane preceded him through the lines of gargoyles. He cleared a space to step out between two Dogs, then coughed and straightened his hat.
“You may have one of my horses,” he said to Luc, and with another small cough, added, “as well as some clothing.”
“Is it Ingrid?” Vander kept his voice low so the Roman troops wouldn’t hear.
Luc followed Constantine, who had started to thread his way back through the Dispossessed.
“That’s what I’m going to find out,” he answered.