She mumbled something in French, too fast and breathy for Grayson to understand. He got the gist of it, though: she regretted having fetched him.
“Useful how?” Other than engaging the architects and laborers who were refurbishing the abbey, Grayson hadn’t felt useful here in Paris at all.
“Your nose,” Chelle answered, and then, without a beat of hesitation, “Can you scent more than just blood?”
Grayson stopped in his tracks. So that was what she meant by useful. “You want me to sniff out demons so you can kill them.”
She faced him. Her jacket was too thin, he noted. She had to be freezing.
“Would that be a bad thing?”
“I thought I’d made it clear that I don’t want anything to do with the Alliance,” he answered.
Chelle lifted her chin and crossed her arms, trying to look down her nose at him. Their difference in height made it a challenge.
“Bonsoir, then,” she said, and left him standing there.
She looked like a petulant child storming off in a fit of temper. A child with blessed silver hidden in the folds of her clothing and a highly skilled and lethal aim. He didn’t have to worry about her. Chelle would be fine on her own.
Still, he found himself catching up and swinging in front of her, blocking her way. “That doesn’t mean I want you roaming the streets at night alone.”
Chelle stared hard at him before doing the oddest thing: she laughed.
“You are a gentleman, aren’t you?” she said, as if it were the silliest thing he could possibly be.
It almost made him relieved to deny it. “Trust me—I am no gentleman.”
Gentlemen didn’t turn into monsters and kill prostitutes in back alleys like demonic versions of Jack the Ripper. Again he regretted having told Ingrid what he’d done. She only knew half of his evil deed, but that was enough to have built an awkward wall between them the past few days.
He wouldn’t make that same mistake with Chelle. Or anyone else.
Chelle walked beside him, her pace slowed. They’d passed rue Lagrange and had come to the wide boulevard Saint-Germain. For one of the main thoroughfares in Paris, the traffic was slim. A buggy puttered by, along with a horse or two, and a covered carriage coming from the other direction.
“What exactly do you do on patrol?” Grayson asked to fill the silence. It wasn’t an awkward silence, but he certainly didn’t want Chelle to grow bored with his presence.
“We look for demons,” she said.
“I’m not that slow,” Grayson replied. “What I mean is, if demons come in every shape, even in human form, how do you know what’s a demon and what isn’t?”
She kept her hand at the red sash tied around her slim waist, where she hid her throwing stars. Her hira-shuriken, he corrected himself.
“Every demon has a trademark,” Chelle explained, her eyes never straying from the street or sidewalk. “Some are more intelligent than others, and are better able to acclimate to the human realm. But most demons are base creatures, unable to think beyond want and attain. They don’t work hard enough to cover up the trademarks that Alliance are trained to spot.”
Chelle crossed in front of him and hitched her foot on the bottom rail of a length of iron fence. She pulled herself up to peer over the spikes, into a private garden.
“Appendius demons can shorten or lengthen their bodies and legs, allowing them to crawl low to the ground, through grass and beneath shrubbery, until they rear up and attack unsuspecting humans.”
Chelle let go of the fence and landed beside Grayson.
“But their horns leave specific impressions on the ground, making it easy for Alliance to track them.”
Grayson listened intently. Chelle had an alluring voice. It was steady and confident, and completely devoid of the acerbic sweetness that plagued so many debutantes back in London.
“Corvites are like demon messenger birds. They carry information to and from the Underneath. They look like ravens or crows, but their calls set them apart. A corvite’s call breaks off in a growl.”
They turned onto a winding side street off Saint-Germain. The lack of streetlamps and the resulting shadows slowed him, but Chelle kept her confident pace. She must have come this way alone plenty of times before. Grayson didn’t like that thought at all.
“Demons with enough power to glamour themselves into human form are working so hard to maintain that glamour that they usually fail to mask their behavior. They froth at the mouth or hobble around.… I can’t explain it. They just look uncomfortable in their skin,” she said, and then shrugged. “We know what to look for, and when we see it, we close in.”
“And have you ever made a mistake?” he asked. “Have you ever attacked what you thought was a demon but was really just a hobbling, frothing-at-the-mouth human?”