Gabby lifted her skirts and ran as fast as her heeled boots could take her to the exit and outdoors onto the portico. She ignored the startled glances of two nurses in long white skirts and starched hats and dashed through the same door Nolan had entered. Just in time. He was slipping through a pair of swinging doors farther down the hallway.
Gabby considered her father for all of two seconds before she headed straight for those doors. The wonderful thing about a hospital, she realized, was that anyone who passed her had problems of their own to tend to. No one paid her any mind as she got to the doors and went through. They opened onto a descending set of stairs that twisted to the left. Nolan’s footfalls were still audible.
Gabby opened her mouth to call out to him but stopped. Instinct told her that neither she nor Nolan belonged down here. She took the steps quickly and quietly, making it to the bottom in time to see Nolan darting through yet another pair of doors ahead to the left.
The air was markedly colder on this level, and Gabby had the creeping suspicion it wasn’t just because they were underground. The sign above the door Nolan had passed through confirmed it.
MORGUE.
What was Nolan doing in there?
She pushed the door open an inch and the chill of the vast room hit her in the nose. White-sheeted bodies topped rows of steel tables. Pale feet stuck out everywhere, an identification tag hanging from each body’s big toe. Nolan was the only person inside. Well, the only living person.
He was walking through the maze of tables, flipping up toe tags. Gabby shoved the door open wide.
“What on earth are you doing?”
Nolan nearly ripped the tag off one corpse’s toe. “Gabby! Christ in heaven, don’t sneak up on a man like that.”
“Says the person who is clearly in a place he shouldn’t be,” she retorted, closing the door behind her.
He recovered with a roll of his shoulders. “I happen to be on Alliance business. Benoit is diverting the mortician, so I have a time limit.”
The Alliance’s trusted doctor friend, Benoit, had been the one who’d cleaned and stitched Gabby’s scars.
Nolan flipped another toe tag and read the name. “And how is it you just happen to be at the hospital?” Nolan let go of the tag and stood up straight, his eyes suddenly bright with concern. “Is it your shoulder? What’s wrong?”
“No, it’s fine,” Gabby said. “I mean, it hurts, but I’m fine.”
She cringed at the idea of telling him the true reason her father had dragged her here. The two times she and Nolan had seen each other since his return from Rome, neither of them had mentioned the state of her cheek. Broaching the subject was too uncomfortable. And what if he thought surgery was a good idea?
Gabby cleared her throat. “It’s my father. He’s feeling a touch of rheumatism about the knees.”
Nolan spared her feeble answer a moment of deliberation before lifting another toe tag.
“Are you looking for a specific corpse, or will any serve?” she asked, and to her horror, he tossed back the sheet on one body, exposing a pale thigh and buttock.
“Here he is,” he answered, and then, to Gabby’s further horror, Nolan reached inside his coat and removed a needle and syringe. Without a second’s hesitation, he stuck the dead flesh with the tip.
“You can’t do that!”
Nolan proceeded to draw up the plunger, sucking the corpse’s blood into a clear glass barrel. Gabby’s stomach rolled. The body belonged to a man—the clinging drape of the white sheet failed to conceal that much—and the exposed skin showed a mottled kind of bruising on the flesh pressed flat against the metal table.
“Stop it, Nolan!” she said again.
“When Carrick Quinn gives an order, it’s wise to obey,” he replied as the barrel reached capacity. He extracted the needle and capped it.
“What could he possibly want with a dead man’s blood?” Gabby asked with a quick check of the door. Could they be arrested for this?
Nolan tucked the filled syringe back into his coat pocket. “He’s a Duster, and he murdered his parents before killing himself last night.” He replaced the sheet but then turned down the edge covering the man’s head. Gabby shrank back. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen a dead body, but the experience hadn’t gotten any more pleasant.
“What’s his name?” she asked. He was younger than she expected, perhaps right around Grayson and Ingrid’s age. His bloodless skin looked like rice paper, his brown hair a shock of color in contrast.
“Gilbert DeChamps,” Nolan answered, before draping the boy’s head once again. “You weren’t the only one who sneaked off abbey grounds last night. Grayson found the boy and his parents.”
Well. Her brother had kept that juicy bit of information to himself all morning.
A pungent odor filled her nostrils: ammonia, and something else. It was sickly sweet, and Gabby somehow knew it was coming from the cold, decaying flesh all around them.
Nolan must have seen her color drain. He took her by the arm and steered her toward the door.
“I’m fine,” she said, and meant it once they’d left the morgue.
“Right as rain,” he said in that sarcastic tone of his. Only this time, Gabby didn’t smile.