The lightbulb popped and flickered to black as they passed by.
Dupuis continued to push her, his hands gripping the metal of the gurney. Though Ingrid’s wrists were bound, her fingers were free. She clamped them around the cold rods at her side and unloosed the pools of electricity that had welled up in each fingertip. All she did was think it and the current traveled out, through the metal, singing past her ears. It shivered over her scalp and lifted her hair on end for a split second before it hit Dupuis. He stopped, made a strangled noise, and fell—taking the gurney with him.
Ingrid let go of the metal rods before her fingers could be crushed, but the impact still hurt. Her head snapped to the side, pulling tendons along her neck. The gurney leaned on its side, wheels spinning. Behind her, Dupuis moaned and cursed. The jolt hadn’t been strong enough. He’d be up and raging within a minute.
But she had controlled it. She had finally understood the electricity that had always seemed to ebb and flow as it saw fit. Even though she was still trapped, Ingrid felt like letting out a whoop of joy.
Dupuis crawled into view, his arms quivering as he held himself up.
“Metal and lightning,” he whispered. “Very clever, mademoiselle. Though you, like your Alliance friends, are shortsighted.”
Her eye caught on the next bare lightbulb ahead. Ingrid stared at it, pulling the light toward her, and the energy filled her, brimming in her fingertips.
There was a noise then. Something dragging along the floor. A rattling came next, followed by a low, shaky hiss. Ingrid’s focus on the lightbulb was severed as Axia’s serpent moved into the spill of light up ahead. Bleached of color, nearly translucent, its scales seemed so much paler than those of the mimic that had stalked her in the shopping arcades. And this one wasn’t moving with the same taunting rhythm. It skated toward them fast.
Dupuis stumbled to his feet just as the serpent reared up, flattened out its regal hood, unhinged its jaw, and struck. Ingrid watched in detached horror as Dupuis’s head disappeared, crown to neck, in the massive serpent’s mouth. Long fangs punched through Dupuis’s shoulders, and his arms went slack. The strength in his legs gave next, and when the serpent extracted its fangs, the man crumpled, twitching, to the floor. Ingrid let loose a scream.
“Ingrid!”
Vander’s shout sounded like it came from a great distance. Blood roared through her ears, and she hoped she’d imagined it. She didn’t want Vander here, with this demon serpent. It wasn’t the mimic—Luc had said that it wouldn’t harm anyone but Ingrid. This was the real serpent. Axia’s pet.
It curled toward her, sliding around Dupuis’s convulsing form. Though it was futile, Ingrid struggled against the leather straps until the snake’s fangs closed around her bound arm. They stabbed through her sleeve and into flesh. The searing burn of demon poison was instantaneous.
Feeling electricity under her skin was a patch of kitten fur compared to this. The burning intensified and climbed, carving wide, deep paths at a reckless speed. Ingrid gasped for air as it tore through her arm and obliterated any electric current the lightbulbs had given her.
The gurney wobbled as the serpent slid down the length of it, the tapered end of its tail coiling around the metal frame near Ingrid’s feet.
“Ingrid!” Vander’s voice came again. But it was just an echo. He wasn’t close.
The gurney started moving again, in the same direction Dupuis had been taking her. The metal side scratched along the floor, grinding and grating and sending vibrations through Ingrid’s body. With Dupuis, she hadn’t known where she’d been going, but there were no mysteries now. The demon poison burrowing into her, spreading far and wide, would allow Ingrid entry through a fissure somewhere in Paris, straight into the Underneath. Straight to Axia’s hive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Luc had followed the sounds of clanging metal, the screams and shouts, and the incessant throbbing at the base of his skull that assured him another Dispossessed was close. And Gabby. He’d followed her scent, a beacon cutting through a sea of gray, spooling waves.
He stepped over a writhing cocoon, one of at least a half dozen scattered throughout the corridor. It was the kind of destruction an arachnae demon would leave in its wake, but it wasn’t a giant spider standing in the doorway up ahead. It was a boy. A human boy with viscous silk dangling from each fingertip. It had to be the Duster everyone had been talking about.
The boy held his hands down as Luc struggled toward him. His muscles and bones had gone from tidal clay to beach sand, and his jacket of scales had come out over most of his human skin, but it was still an ugly patchwork. His motions were cleaner, less jerky and pathetic, but barely so.
When he came upon the Duster, the boy scuttled to the side.