She stepped out of his hold. “So you think I’m a fool, then?”
Nolan frowned. “For turning green around a bunch of stiffs?”
“No,” Gabby answered, thoroughly vexed. “For not obeying your father’s order to forget the Alliance. You said the wise obey Carrick Quinn. But I can’t. So that must mean I’m a fool.”
Nolan guided her toward the stairs, his palm at the small of her back. “Lass, I think my da’s the fool, not you.” He wrapped his hand around her waist and brought her to a halt, spinning her to face him. The cold focus he’d shown in the morgue while drawing the corpse’s blood had gone. “If I could, I’d start training you right now. I’d bring you all the way in, get your oaths ceremony lined up in Rome—everything.”
There would be an oaths ceremony? In Rome?
“Gabby, I don’t know how to change his mind. The mercurite’s made him something he isn’t. Or at least, something he never was.” He kept his hands away from her shoulders, remembering her wound, and settled for sweeping his fingers along her chin. He lowered them until he’d circled half of her slim neck in his palm. There was something entirely possessive about the way he touched her. Possessive and protective. Gabby liked it. “I want you with me.”
She didn’t care that they stood down the hall from a morgue. She would kiss him anywhere. Even had they still been standing beside the dead bodies, she would have kissed him. Well, all right. Maybe not right next to the dead bodies.
But it wasn’t to be. Nolan’s lips were still a few inches from hers when the morgue doors swung open and crashed against the corridor walls. Gabby shot back, and Nolan released her as they turned to see who’d caught them.
No one else had been in the morgue, Gabby reasoned in the split second before the interloper stumbled into the corridor. That he was naked was Gabby’s first thought. The second was that he was also very much dead.
“Bloody hell,” Nolan hissed.
Gilbert DeChamps shuffled out of the morgue, his waxy white arms hanging at his sides. There were long, gaping black slashes across his wrists.
“What did you do to him?” Gabby asked, suddenly and unreasonably angry. Nolan had stuck him with a needle and now he was up and stumbling around!
“I didn’t do anything,” Nolan answered. The boy swung his head toward them. His jaw hung loose, his eyes heavily lidded.
“It’s a carcass demon, Gabby. Get back.” Nolan unsheathed his broadsword from inside his ankle-length coat.
The dead boy surged forward a few graceless steps. Gabby tried not to look at his exposed bits and instead kept her eyes trained on his slack face, his unseeing blue eyes.
“What’s a carcass demon?” Gabby asked, reaching for her own sword.
“A demon that feeds on the dead flesh of anything recently touched by another demon,” Nolan answered, backing Gabby farther away from the shambling boy. “They usually feed quietly, but when disturbed, they can reanimate the dead bodies they’re in.”
Gabby held her sword the way Chelle had taught her—with one hand, her elbow tight to her side.
“What the—Gabriella, what are you doing? Put that away! Didn’t you learn your lesson last night?”
“Let me take him,” Gabby said. “He doesn’t look all that silver-footed.”
“Absolutely not! Carcass demons can be extremely deceiving. If you’re not careful—”
Gilbert DeChamps lunged forward, arms outstretched. No longer stumbling awkwardly, his bare feet pounded the green-and-white-tiled floor of the corridor as he came at them.
Nolan swung his broadsword in a clean upward stroke, on a straight path for the dead boy’s neck. But at the last moment, Gilbert’s body took an impossible detour.
He planted one pale white foot, toe tag still affixed, on the wall to his right and propelled himself up. His other foot slapped against the next wall tile and he pushed off into an arcing leap over Nolan’s head. The broadsword connected with the wall just as the carcass demon landed in front of Gabby with stealthy precision.
“Swing, Gabby!” Nolan barked. He needn’t have. Gabby knew what to do. She lunged forward and sliced into the corpse’s torso with the tip of her blade. The blessed silver melted away the flesh in a spit of green sparks, but the cut hadn’t been lethal.
She swung again, the short sword feather-light compared to Nolan’s cumbersome broadsword. But Gilbert’s reanimated corpse had once again cartwheeled into the air over her head, landing adroitly at the base of the stairs. Heaven only knew what would happen if a naked dead body escaped into the upper floor of the hospital, or worse, out into the street.
Gabby reached for her blessed dagger, strapped at the lip of her boot, and without thinking, hurled it at Gilbert. The dagger struck home between his ribs, and the flare of green sparks proved it had been a killing blow.