“Your scent is delectable,” the boy said.
Ingrid frowned. “Excuse me?”
“Your scent, my lady,” he replied.
“My what?” she asked, her cheeks quickly heating.
Luc stepped between Ingrid and Dimitrie, glaring at the new groom with the kind of ferocity he might show a hellhound.
“Irindi sent him,” Luc explained. Ingrid felt herself inch back a step. She inspected Dimitrie again. He was a gargoyle? But he was so young.
“Oh,” she replied, unable to think of anything else to say at first. But then, “I have a scent?”
Dimitrie, unfazed, nodded eagerly. “Of course. We keep our humans’ individual scents in a kind of olfactory memory,” he said with a nervous laugh. “It’s how we trace you. How we call you up inside ourselves.”
Ingrid immediately looked at Luc. He hadn’t told her any of this, and yet, here Dimitrie was spilling forth information less than a minute into their first meeting. Why had Luc held back? She’d already known that he could trace her, but she hadn’t known how. Her scent was the key.
Luc ground his jaw, clearly annoyed. She recalled Luc’s words the last time she’d been in his loft, in December. You’re just a human. You’re not supposed to know.
Dimitrie caught Luc’s harsh stare and seemed to shrink back.
“Go inside,” Luc said. Ingrid startled when she saw that he was looking at her, not the new gargoyle. “And stay out of that cemetery.”
Ingrid bristled. How dare he? Luc couldn’t order her to stay on hallowed ground forever. She marched past him, keeping her gaze locked on his. “I will go where I please.”
She turned away and stormed through the snowy back lawns, her ire stoked high enough to keep her raging hot from head to toe. Luc might be her gargoyle, but he wasn’t her master. Ingrid wouldn’t be returning to that profane cemetery plot anytime soon, but not because he’d ordered it. Something had happened to her there. It was as if she’d been attacked somehow, and then that vision of Anna … a trick. Something had played a trick on her.
It had been a quiet two months, and Axia seemed to have forgotten about Ingrid. There hadn’t been a single attempt to reclaim Ingrid’s angel blood. Axia had said that if she ever got it back, it would give her enough power to challenge the Angelic Order. She would be an untouchable fusion of demon, human, and angel. But how she planned to wield her power was still a matter of speculation among the Alliance and gargoyles.
Ingrid had known the quiet wouldn’t last forever. Axia had already reclaimed the angel blood Grayson had harbored all his life, and if angel blood turned toxic in the Underneath, Axia had to be desperate for the rest of her blood. She needed Ingrid.
Perhaps she’d just made her first strike.
CHAPTER SIX
Gabby crushed the small note in her fist. The carriage wheels rolled along boulevard Saint-Germain, lurching up and sideways over frost heaves, jostling Ingrid, Grayson, and Gabby.
The note had arrived via messenger less than an hour before, just after luncheon. The envelope had been blood red, the single square of cardstock inside matching crimson. Red was the color of the Alliance, and it never failed to stir her, filling her head with a whooshing roar.
“Luc just passed Café Julius,” Grayson said, leaning forward and following the café with his eyes as they trotted past. He groaned. “Where are we going, Gabby?”
“I apologize for the ruse,” she replied. “Having you with us was the only way we could leave the house without Mama or Papa objecting.”
Grayson would have never agreed to a call on Alliance headquarters, but he would also have never turned down a chance to glimpse Chelle at the café. Gabby had done what she’d needed to do, and no accusatory glare from her brother would make her feel sorry for it. The note had made her too elated to feel guilty about anything.
Nolan had returned!
He was back from Rome and he wanted to see her. Immediately.
Fortunately, Gabby had been alone in the music room when the note arrived, tapping distractedly on the ivories of an old, out-of-tune piano. She hardly ever went to the music room—it was musty and the light was dim, and really, her musical skills were as poor as Ingrid’s French. However, in the forty-eight hours since her father had arrived, Gabby had been trying to find places to hide from him. No. Not just him, but the way he looked at her. He couldn’t meet her eyes, not without first frowning at her left cheek and the track of scars there.
She had reread Nolan’s slanted script and noticed, with a slight dip in excitement, that he’d requested that Ingrid and Grayson come, too. So it wouldn’t be a private reunion, then. It didn’t matter. Nolan was back, and she was more than ready to set eyes on him again.
“We’re going to H?tel Bastian, aren’t we?” Grayson asked.
Ingrid bit back her grin, though not very successfully. “Don’t be angry with Gabby.”