“The profane cemetery plot,” Luc said. “You didn’t trip on a headstone, did you?”
Ingrid started to wish she had.
“I don’t know what happened. Some sort of dizzy spell hit me and I … I saw someone.”
“Who?”
He was angry. She should have told him, she supposed, but until seeing Jonathan on that horse, she had hoped it had been a unique episode.
“My friend Anna Bettinger.”
Luc’s pale emerald eyes were too bright to be completely human. She shouldn’t have been able to see them squinting as he frowned, not from this distance and not in such murky light.
“She looked so real. Solid. As solid as the trees around her. But then … she was gone.”
“And tonight?” Luc asked. “You called the rider Jonathan. Who is he?”
Ingrid looked out over rue Dante, toward the Seine.
“Anna’s betrothed,” she answered, rubbing her fingers over the casement ledge in an attempt to distract herself. She didn’t care. Not anymore. Jonathan was in the past. Ingrid took a long breath, realizing that the old excuse she’d used time and again was no longer an excuse.
“But he’s in London with Anna, not here.” Ingrid turned back to face Luc. “Grayson came the closest to him, but he said he was too angry, that he only saw red. So who was it really? Am I delirious?”
Luc left the corner of the belfry and came toward her, his palm running along the open ledge. The moonlight, free from the clouds for the moment, lit his face. It was drawn into a fierce scowl. “No. You did see Anna and Jonathan.”
“I did?” Ingrid asked, more confused than before.
Luc stopped and braced both palms against the ledge. He hunched his shoulders and hung his head, muttering a string of oaths.
“Luc, what is it?”
He pushed himself up. “A mimic demon. They latch on to humans and within a few seconds dig through memories, soaking up everything. Your dizzy spell? That was the mimic searching through your memory.”
She remembered feeling the nausea slam into her, then blacking out. A demon had been inside her mind? She ran her fingers through her hair and massaged the back of her head.
“Why?” she asked.
“To find out how to play with you,” Luc answered darkly. “It saw Anna and Jonathan in your memories and knew who they were. What they meant to you. And then it used your memories, down to the last detail, to look like them.”
Ingrid dropped her hand. “But how is any of that playing with me? It nearly trampled me in the street! It could have killed any one of us.”
Luc shook his head. “A mimic won’t harm anyone other than its target. And it won’t kill you outright. It takes its time teasing and confusing you first. Scaring the hell out of you. Once it’s finished playing, that’s when it kills you.”
Ingrid turned back toward the open sky. “Perhaps it’s just me, but that doesn’t sound very fun at all.”
She thought she heard Luc laugh, but when she looked over, she saw he was just as serious as before.
“How do I get rid of it?” she asked.
If this thing had targeted and attached itself to her, did that mean it could pop up anytime, anyplace?
“I don’t know.” Regret pulled Luc’s voice. “They’re rare, though. I know about them, but I’ve never dealt with one myself.”
“Do you think it could have something to do with Axia?”
She whispered the fallen angel’s name, as if Axia might be able to hear Ingrid speak in her dry, hellish hive in the Underneath.
“It could. I suppose—” Luc paused. “I suppose we could ask the Alliance what they think.”
And by Alliance, he meant Vander. She thought it might actually be the first time Luc had alluded to Vander since he’d made his pledge to stay away from her. To act only as her gargoyle.
“I could ask Constantine, too,” she said, but this only seemed to sharpen Luc’s stare.
“I had a visit from Gaston tonight,” he said. She recalled Constantine’s gargoyle. “I think you should stay away from Clos du Vie for now.”
Ingrid wanted to throw up her hands. First Vander, and now Luc?
“Why? What did Gaston say?”
Luc took a few steps closer as he told her about the man named Robert Dupuis and his unsavory interest in her.
“And then Constantine sent him away?” Ingrid asked.
“Yes, but he could come back.”
“And if he did, he’d try to what, kidnap me? Wrap me up in one of Constantine’s Persian rugs and smuggle me into his carriage?” Ingrid couldn’t help but laugh at her own wit.
Luc, however, didn’t laugh.
“No. Gaston wouldn’t allow it. But—”