The Wondrous and the Wicked (16 page)

Imagining Nolan advising Rory like this made her slightly giddy. However, the feeling crashed before it could buoy her up. She didn’t want to talk of Nolan, or even think of him. She didn’t want to think of the nets, either, and how her one hope for them had, after just a quarter hour, been snuffed out.

Perhaps she truly was too far away to be of any use after all.

T
he 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.