A shriek rent the air. The ground shook and Ingrid dropped to her knees, Gabby falling with her as the shriek died away to a pitched whine. It had come from the mimic. Ingrid and Gabby stared at the demon as it lit in a flurry of color. It was no longer Dimitrie, but a jet-scaled Luc, then a near-translucent serpent, then a man again: Jonathan. The mimic faded into Anna’s image before becoming someone Ingrid had never seen before. It continued to change, shuffling through image after image—all the disguises it had worn—until the very shape of the mimic began to dissolve. Like a sugar cube in tea, it disappeared a little more with every transformation.
It gave one final flicker and was gone.
Vander helped Ingrid up, then Gabby. Slowly, all three of them turned. Ingrid knew what Luc had done, but she wasn’t prepared to see it.
He had his back to them, his wings once again listless. He stood over Dimitrie’s still body, prostrate on the grass. Luc held something in his talons. Something round and strange, and Ingrid squinted to see what it was.
She bit back a scream.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Dimitrie’s head.
Luc held Dimitrie’s head, his talons curled into the boy’s mop of blond hair. Gabby lowered her sword. She wanted to vomit. The night couldn’t possibly get any worse.
It did, however, and promptly.
Gabby heard panting behind her. She held her sword aloft as another figure rushed down the length of the arcades, the slap of feet on the paving stones reverberating off the vaulted ceilings. She nearly dropped her weapon when her father stumbled past a column and slipped on the frosted grass.
“Papa!” Gabby and Ingrid exclaimed.
He looked at them with confusion before waving his hands wildly. “Go! Go! Run!”
Something must have been chasing him.
Gabby and Vander raised their weapons once again. Lord Brickton’s eyes landed on her sword.
“Gabriella, what are you—?” He didn’t finish his question but tore the handle of her sword out of her palm.
“Papa—give me that!”
Lord Brickton wheeled toward the arcades just as a hellhound streaked through and onto the lawn. Vander fired his crossbow a second too late; the dart missed and the hellhound ripped across the grass, toward Gabby, Ingrid, and their father, who chopped clumsily at the air with the sword.
Ingrid, however, threw her arms forward, palms flat, fingers splayed. Veins of lightning crackled through the air and hit the oncoming demon. The hellhound reared up onto its hind legs, then crashed backward as briars of electrostatic energy shivered over its fur.
The hound wasn’t down one second before a second dart from Vander’s crossbow speared its chest. Gabby’s father cried out as the beast burst into a green cloud and vanished. He staggered back when Ingrid turned to face him.
“What did you just do?” he said, his voice spiraling to a frantic pitch.
Ingrid looked to Gabby, her wide blue eyes pleading for help. How could they explain any of this to him? But just then the doors to each wing of the mansion swung open, and the Daicrypta disciples braved entering the courtyard. They flooded out, surrounding their quarry within moments. Gabby did a harried count and found a neat dozen. They each held odd-looking, crossbow-like contraptions. She didn’t know what they were but thought it wise to consider them deadly.
“Papa, give me my sword,” Gabby said through clenched teeth.
“Don’t be absurd,” her father countered. “Where did you get this to begin with?”
Yet another thing she couldn’t explain easily. The disciples advanced slowly. Dupuis was dead, but they clearly still wanted Ingrid’s blood.
“Vander?” Gabby called. “Please tell me you have a plan.”
“I was hoping we could make that a group effort,” he replied.
Gabby focused on the approaching disciples closest to her. Even if she had been holding her sword, there was absolutely no way she could take them on all at once. The closest one called out in French, ordering them to lay down their weapons. He had barely finished speaking when a tangle of white silken rope looped around his chest and arms and snapped him off his feet. The other two disciples went down next, each of them wreathed in thick silk.
Léon! The Duster was climbing out of the basement-level hatch with Nolan just behind him, and Carrick leaning heavily on his son’s shoulder. Léon cocooned yet another disciple, but not before the strange crossbow contraption went off. It fired not bullets or darts but a glittering, tightly woven net. Léon’s silken webbing snarled the net midair before it could come down on top of him, and he slung it aside.
“Behind you, Gabby!” Nolan shouted. She turned to see a second hellhound leap from the arcade roof, land atop a disciple, and with one massive paw, crush his head into the ground.
Luc let out a shriek and surged forward, even though his wings barely lifted him from the ground. He collided with the hellhound and scrabbled with it for a few paltry moments before the beast raked a claw through one of Luc’s already damaged wings. He went down, and the hellhound lunged toward Ingrid yet again. A glimmering net reached Ingrid first, clobbering her to the ground. Small spikes along the border of the net pierced the earth and held her flat to the grass.
The hellhound roared to a stop and, with an angry yowl, darted in another direction.