The Wondrous and the Wicked (17 page)

“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.

T
he London Daicrypta headquarters had been two or three steps down in grandeur compared to its Parisian counterpart, but the London Alliance headquarters, compared to Hôtel Bastian, was more like what awaited at the bottom of a refuse-laden gutter pipe.

The faction had set up shop in a century-old brick mill near Fleet Ditch, with a working front for the public as a storage facility for mechanical wares. They had even filled the first floor with all sorts of gears and engines, cogs and wheels, and other contraptions that were surely, Gabby thought, the iron and steel innards of some machinery, in order to make the building appear legitimate.

However, the next two floors of the building, which covered nearly an entire block, was the residence of some thirty Alliance members. It was, Gabby had noted in the few times she and Rory had visited, a much more organized and well-outfitted Alliance faction than what she’d witnessed in Paris. She had been welcomed
earlier that month by their leader, Benjamin, a lean yet muscular man in his midforties who looked like he could still move and fight with the strength and agility of a fighter half his age. He’d assured her that the incident with Lennier would not be held against her here in London, and that she would be considered a friend of the Alliance. He’d stirred her hope that perhaps, with the right training, she could be more than a friend.

However, as Gabby sat with Benjamin and a few other upper-rank fighters in the second floor of the warehouse, discussing the demon trapping diffuser nets, she wondered if she was a fit for the Alliance at all.

“You don’t seem to understand what these nets can do,” she said, pushing herself up from the uncomfortable sofa Benjamin kept in the convening room, a glassed-in office that had perhaps once been used by a foreman. The office sat up a short flight of steps that looked over the open second-floor loft.

“They stop a demon in its tracks and diffuse its power, rendering it completely defenseless,” Gabby explained for what felt like the tenth time. She and Rory had been summoned to the Fleet Ditch warehouse to explain their visit to Hugh Dupuis’s home. Gabby wasn’t certain how Benjamin had learned of it, but she figured Hugh and his corvites weren’t the only ones keeping their eyes on her.

“Dupuis told you all this?” Benjamin asked, leaning against the wavy glass, his back to the activity below.

Portions of the loft had been sectioned off as meeting spaces, open training areas, even a kitchen and dining hall, and there were probably a dozen or more people milling about. Each one had glanced up toward the glass-faced office every now and then during the past fifteen minutes.

“Yes, but Rory and I saw it on our own as well,” she answered. They’d already explained how they’d met Hugh Dupuis on the London docks. “Mr. Dupuis simply explained the nets in more detail to me yesterday during my visit.”

Nadia, a middle-aged woman with close-cropped, mostly gray hair, lifted her booted foot onto the seat of a low stool and leaned forward. “And you thought nothing of going inside a Daicrypta doyen’s home alone?”

She, like Chelle, dressed as a man, in trousers and a jacket, but unlike Chelle, Nadia truly had no feminine features and, Gabby had learned, went by the name of Ned outside these warehouse walls.

“I was never in any danger,” Gabby said with a sigh. “I truly don’t believe Hugh Dupuis is a threat.”

“He’s Daicrypta,” Nadia threw back, as if the single word were enough of an argument. To the Alliance, perhaps it was.

“Yes, but he goes about things much differently than his father did.”

Nadia put her foot back down and mumbled “Or so he says” under her breath. Gabby ignored it. There was no way to convince Nadia or Benjamin or the handful of others in the room of what Gabby had felt while in Hugh’s presence: that he wanted to help.

“I think he would share these nets with the Alliance if you expressed an interest,” Gabby said. “They could be useful in demon hunting.”

Benjamin stood free of the window and paced the creaky cork floor. “We don’t have a use for nets,” he said. “We hunt and destroy demons. We don’t trap them or experiment on them.”

She looked at Rory, who stood beside the door, working the tip of one of his daggers underneath his nails and doing a smashing job of ignoring the conversation.

“But you
do
hold demons for experimentation,” she argued. “There’s a whole room in Paris at Hôtel Bastian dedicated to it!”

“Well, there isn’t one here,” Benjamin said, flashing her the universal expression for
don’t argue with me.

He was the leader in London, but perhaps he was still in the dark about the Directorate’s dealings with the Daicrypta. Or
perhaps he did know about them but wasn’t authorized to say so. Really, the Alliance was starting to give Gabby a headache.

“I expect you both to show consideration for the way we do things here. Neither of you is part of my faction, but you’re still Alliance.” Benjamin tilted his head toward Gabby. “
Almost
, as far as you’re concerned. And we do not work in tandem with the Daicrypta. Especially a Daicrypta with the name Dupuis.”

Gabby wasn’t sure whom she was more frustrated with: Benjamin, for his unwavering shortsightedness, or Rory, for keeping his mouth shut and his head down for the entire meeting. She told Rory as much as soon as they’d been escorted out through the side door.

“There’s no arguin’ wi’ the leader of another faction,” Rory explained as he helped her into the enclosed carriage that had been waiting for them outside the warehouse. They settled in, and the driver didn’t waste a moment directing the horses onward, out of this part of the city.

“He’s right, Gabby, we should stay away from the Daicrypta.”

There was no arguing with Rory, either. He was as stubborn as his cousin. If Gabby told him exactly what was going through her mind—that she had found herself liking Hugh Dupuis’s company infinitely more than Benjamin’s or Nadia’s—he might have guessed that she had no intention of staying away from the Daicrypta simply because someone had told her to. If she wanted to pay another visit, then she would.

It made her wish she actually had a reason to go back.

The nets were only proven to capture full-blooded demons, though. Who knew how much demon blood Axia had developed while in the Underneath? It might not be enough for the nets to seal to her, the same way they hadn’t sealed to Ingrid or Vander.

Gabby leaned against the cushioned wall, which jostled her even more now that the carriage traveled along a road that felt like it had been pockmarked by a rain of meteorites. She wished for one useful thing to do. How had she suffered through her
days before Paris? Teas and parties and dress fittings and dancing lessons and nothing but luxurious ridiculousness.

“I see I’ve got to do something drastic to keep ye from trouble, don’t I,
laoch
?”

The words sounded playful, but Rory gave too much worry away with his watchful eyes. To her body’s relief, the carriage stopped. The grumblings of their driver, raised voices from other nearby carriages, and a chorus of braying, agitated horses all pointed to a cluster of traffic.

“I don’t require handling,” she replied.

“I’ll take ye out again tonight. We’ll find plenty of demons to dispatch in Whitechapel—”

Gabby’s interest had just been hooked when the door to the carriage swung open and then closed again, and suddenly there was a person on the seat next to Rory. Her right hand went to her boot and the dagger she kept there, but she was slower than Rory. The tip of his blade was already pricking the stranger’s throat.

The stranger’s hands went up in a gesture of surrender, the square case he’d been holding clunking to the floor at his feet. He wore a hat with a wide, floppy front brim, pulled low to obscure his face. As soon as Gabby’s heart had slowed a notch, her eyes noticed details again—like the broad shape of the man’s shoulders and the calluses on his palms. She knew those hands.

“Nothing like a warm Alliance welcome,” he said, one hand slowly moving to push up the brim of his cap.

Nolan Quinn paid no attention to the knife falling away from his throat or to the curses Rory threw at him. He held Gabby’s shocked gaze, his lips pressed into an uncertain frown. Waiting, she thought, to see how she would react. There were too many thoughts all at once. So many that Gabby, floundering in Nolan’s blue stare, found that there was nothing at all she could say or do. So she sat back against the cushions, folded her hands in her lap, lifted her chin imperiously, and said nothing.