Humans called gargoyle common grounds H?tel du Maurier. Luc was sure they called it a number of other things as well, like a disgraceful eyesore and a rubbish heap. They weren’t wrong. Lennier’s territory had been abandoned decades before, and what had once been an elegant four-story estate on the outer rim of the Luxembourg Gardens had slowly deteriorated into a ramshackle limestone shell.
Overrun by ivy, rust, and shattered glass, it was the perfect meeting spot for the Dispossessed. Humans tended to turn away from the unsightly, and H?tel du Maurier was unsightly indeed.
Luc and Dimitrie finished dressing in the courtyard. It was empty and quiet, and, except for the low dance of firelight in two windows on the second story, dark. The light wouldn’t be visible from the street. Lennier evaded hibernation only because of the vagrants and inebriates who often sheltered within his walls. Those kinds of humans weren’t a threat to him. Sober, curious passersby who could have sworn the place had been deserted for years were.
“You’re going to tell them, aren’t you?” Dimitrie asked as they made their way into the shadowed town house. The ballroom’s double doors had been left wide open and were now banked in by snow.
“Tell them what?” Luc’s breath steamed in front of him as he strode through the old ballroom. He heard the squeak of mice coming from under the lid of the rotting piano. The prisms of the chandelier chinked together as a squirrel hopped along its column to a hole in the ceiling plaster.
“About the burns,” Dimitrie answered. “You’re going to tell them I’m a shadow gargoyle.”
Luc led the boy down a hallway, his keen vision turning the utter blackness into grays and whites. He avoided an old credenza, several white-sheeted chairs, and a dead skin-and-bones cat before taking the carpeted steps up to the next level.
“That’s your own burden to bear, no one else’s,” Luc returned.
Being a shadow gargoyle wasn’t a crime. It was just pathetic.
It had been a few days since Marco and Yann had told Luc to bring Dimitrie to common grounds. A few days since Gabby’s incidents with the appendius and then, less than twenty-four hours later, the reanimated corpse. The girl was starting to become more troublesome than her sister.
With a mimic demon on Ingrid’s tail and the cultish Daicrypta wanting her blood, Luc had hesitated to take himself, or Dimitrie, very far from the rectory. But the last few days had been quiet, and Lennier was waiting.
Luc knocked on the door to the elder gargoyle’s rooms. He expected Lennier’s raspy voice to command them to enter, but instead the door opened and another man appeared before them.
Luc had seen him before at common ground gatherings. He was middle-aged, with a dartlike chin and nose, a wan complexion, and twiggy black hair. He regarded Luc the way Luc had regarded the dead cat downstairs: with narrowed eyes and flared nostrils.
“You are the guardian at l’Abbaye Saint-Dismas,” the man stated.
“Allow him in, Vincent,” came Lennier’s familiar voice. Vincent pulled the door wider and Luc stepped inside.
Marco stood at a window, his arms crossed, a smile spreading slowly across his face.
“This must be your new companion,” Marco quipped. “How’s the honeymoon going?”
Again with that slow, lordly smile. Perfectly shaped for Luc’s fist.
Dimitrie entered Lennier’s suite with hesitation. The decay eating away at the rest of the house stopped at the door to Lennier’s rooms. Instead of being covered with water stains and creeping ivy, the walls in these rooms were papered with a floral print. The bare wood floor had a high gloss, and the furniture, though aged, was well taken care of. A working tall case clock stood against one wall, and there was a leaping fire in the hearth. Lennier sat close to it in a Louis XIV chair. He held his hand up to Luc, a signal to wait. He then turned to Marco.
“I am sorry to hear of this,” Lennier said, resuming a conversation Luc’s arrival had interrupted.
Marco bowed to Lennier. “I only hope my hibernation won’t last long.”
Luc moved forward into the apartment. “Your hibernation?”
Marco pushed off from the window frame and went to the fire beside Lennier. “My humans won’t be returning to H?tel Dugray this season.”
Which would leave Marco too long without humans to protect. He was probably already feeling the sleep coming on. A weight in the chest, Luc remembered. Like a stone settling there, growing heavier with every passing day. The stone eventually made it impossible to move or breathe—or even care.
“A shame,” Luc said, trying to keep the pleasure from his tone. Marco heard it anyway.
“You’ll miss me, brother, I know you will,” he said. “And I have to admit, I’ll miss watching you scramble around trying to protect those pesky humans of yours. Such entertainment.”