“Were you—I mean, did your hellhound blood have anything to do with it?”
She wanted to know everything. Who it had been, what had happened and why. Perhaps it was self-defense. Or an accident. Or—
“Stop. I know what you’re doing. You’re going to tell me it wasn’t my fault. That it was the demon blood. Well, the demon blood is me. I am it. You can work all you please at taming your demon half, but you’re nothing like me. Your demon half doesn’t transform you into a bloodthirsty animal.”
Ingrid forced herself into his line of vision. “I don’t know what Axia did to you in the Underneath to make you become that hellhound, but she can’t touch you here. Your demon half might not transform you again.”
“I don’t want to find out,” Grayson murmured, unable to look her in the eye. “I just know I don’t want to live this way.”
He pivoted on his heel and jogged toward the stables. She started after him, but her blasted heeled boots slipped on the snowy lawn, her right leg sliding out into an ungainly split. She cursed as she righted herself and saw Grayson dash around the stables and into the thicket of trees bordering the abbey property.
I don’t want to live this way.
What did he mean by that? Ingrid’s pulse fluttered. He’d taken a life. Ingrid stood still and wrapped her chilled arms around her chest beneath her cloak. No wonder he’d been so distant. He’d cut himself off from her and Gabby and everyone else because he loathed himself. The fire Ingrid had started in Anna’s ballroom didn’t seem so terrible all of a sudden.
Grayson’s guilt had to be eating away at him. He wouldn’t do anything rash. Would he? The old Grayson, the one she knew, never would. But this Grayson? Honestly, Ingrid wasn’t sure.
She began to follow him again. His footprints were firmly marked in the snow. The moon was nearly full, though hidden behind a misty cloud cover.
Luc came out from behind an angelic statue just ahead of her. “If he needs me, I’ll go to him.”
“But he said—”
“I know what he said,” Luc cut in.
“You were spying on us?”
“I prefer to call it ‘observing,’ ” Luc replied coolly. Then, finished with preamble, he said, “I want to talk to you.”
He walked away. Just as Grayson’s invitation to take a stroll with him had been irresistible, so was Luc’s. But Luc’s was a command rather than an invitation, and Ingrid built up to a simmer while she followed him around the abbey, to the far, western transept.
“Where exactly are we going?” she asked as Luc opened the door for her. She was blind as soon as he shut it behind them. The gem-colored stained-glass windows on either side of the long nave and the massive rose window behind the pulpit weren’t letting in a single drop of moonlight.
“Luc?” Ingrid’s voice echoed off the vaulted ceilings. For all the cleaning Mama’s hired workers had been doing inside the abbey, it still smelled like an old hatbox.
A warm, dry hand snaked under hers and grasped it. Luc led her through the blackness, his speed notched just enough to convey irritation.
“I apologize if my eyesight isn’t on par with yours,” she muttered.
He didn’t reply, only led her through the rest of the cold abbey, toward the narthex and the new arched front doors, the first things Mama had replaced. Once there, their direction shifted to the right. Ingrid’s vision was beginning to adjust, and she could make out the black stamp of a doorway ahead.
“Stairs” was all Luc supplied before her feet stumbled upon the first step. He steadied her with his arm. It felt like falling against a solid block of granite.
“I’ve got it,” she assured him, and after another moment, he apparently decided to believe her.
They climbed what Ingrid now realized was one of the bell towers. The stone steps spiraled up and up, with narrow arrow slits in the wall every other turn. Even in the dark, the constant rotation made her dizzy.
Ingrid had an idea what Luc wanted to talk about, and it put her on edge.
“Why here?” she asked, a little breathless from the steep climb. They must have taken at least a hundred, if not two hundred, steps.
“Privacy.” Luc was a whole rotation ahead of her. He didn’t sound breathless, either.
Ingrid trudged up the last few steps and emerged onto a thin walkway that ran the square perimeter of the belfry. The top of the bell tower was open on all four sides. The night sky was surprisingly bright. An enormous bell, twice her height and three times her width, hung in the center of the belfry. Ingrid could smell its rust from where she stood, her hand on the open, waist-high ledge. Directly below the bell was a series of steel wheels that, with rope and pulley, she guessed, had once been used to mechanically ring the bell.
She searched for Luc and found him tucked into the corner of the belfry.
“That wasn’t a man tonight,” he said. “It was a demon.”
“I thought so,” she whispered.