A light went on in her room. The sweet scent of spring replaced the dead bite of winter in his nose. He breathed her in and forgot the mercurite tainting his muscles and bones. Ingrid appeared in the window. She drew aside one panel of sheer gauze, and Luc felt her eyes searching the carriage house. Looking for him.
“If you continue to be so obvious, brother, you will surely die.”
Ingrid let the panel fall back into place. Luc watched her figure turn and disappear. He didn’t care. Let them rip him apart. Let them send him to hell or wherever dead gargoyles went.
Ingrid was alive. He’d killed another gargoyle, but he’d done what he’d needed to do to protect her. No gargoyle would mourn a shadow like Dimitrie or care to punish Luc for destroying him. Not when there was Lennier’s death to avenge. A new elder to be determined.
“Why don’t you do it yourself, then?” Luc asked. Marco could. He was bigger. Older.
Marco moved away from the open door. “Kill the only gargoyle I can trust to protect one of my humans with or without being compelled to do so?”
There was more to it than that. There had to be. Marco had destroyed René with relish. Luc still remembered the gleam of disgust in Marco’s eyes, the curl of his lip, when he’d discovered that René had consorted with a human girl. The difference, Luc figured, was that Marco had not known René’s girl. He knew Ingrid. Though Marco would never admit it, she intrigued him. If he destroyed Luc, he would only alienate her.
“Lady Gabriella is leaving, and I assume it will be with their dear father,” Marco said. “Her brother is no longer our concern.”
Luc felt the loss of Grayson as well, along with the pervasive sadness lingering in Ingrid’s chest because of it. There would be no feelings of regret when Brickton left, he was sure. That would leave Lady Brickton, Ingrid, and a single lady’s maid.
“Three humans. Two gargoyles. I like the new ratio, don’t you, brother?”
White light poured through the loft. It curled over Luc and threw him face-first onto the floor.
Luc had known it would come, but he still swore under his breath as his knees and forehead bashed into the wooden planks. Irindi’s burning presence sent Marco sprawling as well.
“This happens to you a lot, doesn’t it?” he muttered.
“Silence,” Irindi intoned.
They obeyed. Outside, the wind kicked up. It battered the old roof slates and thrashed the bare-limbed trees.
Luc tried to think whether any of their humans had been injured. The severed finger had not been Lord Brickton’s, and he had rubbed his own skin raw on those ropes. Ingrid had been bitten by a crypsis, but at that time she’d belonged to Dimitrie, not Luc or Marco. Gabby, by some miracle, hadn’t received so much as a scratch.
The angel of heavenly law wasn’t here to punish them with angel’s burns.
Then again, her presence never boded well.
“Luc Rousseau, you have erred.”
Of course he had.
“You have not heeded my warning regarding the child christened Ingrid Charlemagne Waverly.”
It always came back to her.
“Your affinity for her will no longer be tolerated.”
Lennier’s guest bedroom flashed into his mind with sharp focus. With everything that had happened since then, Luc had forgotten. Ingrid’s lips. His hands exploring her body. The two of them sinking onto the mattress. The way he’d fought the shift.
“You will be removed from l’Abbaye Saint-Dismas.”
Irindi’s hollow voice stabbed him like a mercurite-dipped blade. No. No.
“Irindi—”
“Your new territory awaits approval. That is all.”
Irindi’s departure was usually a relief. This time, however, Luc wanted to gather her light back. Keep her here and convince her she was wrong.
He and Marco breathed heavily as they straightened, their breath rolling out as fog in the cold loft.
This couldn’t be the end of everything.
The abbey was his. The rectory and carriage house, the cemetery and grounds. It all belonged to him. Ingrid belonged to him, and she wanted it that way. I want to be yours again, she’d said.
He’d done this to himself. He’d known the Order wouldn’t forgive him a second time, and yet he’d still kissed Ingrid. He had still desired her in a way no Dispossessed should ever desire a human.
“You have too much human left inside you,” Marco said, his tone curiously soft.
Luc growled. He was not human. No part of him was. What human had talons sharp enough to peel through the skin of a boy’s neck? What human was strong enough to shear through tendons and cartilage, vertebrae and a spinal cord, all to rip off a head? What human would be able to stomach such an act?
“I’m no human,” Luc said.
If Marco disagreed, he kept it to himself as he crossed to the loft stairs. This place would be his now. Luc didn’t know when he’d be severed from the abbey or the humans living on its sacred ground. He didn’t know where he’d be sent, or even whether his new territory would be within Paris. But it would happen. He’d have new humans, and their scents, their emotions, would settle right into the knowing place inside him where he’d kept Ingrid and her family.