Dupuis bowed. “If you wish.”
Ingrid clasped her hands behind her back, fingers woven tightly together. Constantine knew only the Daicrypta’s past failures. What if there had been recent successes?
“Has a Duster named Léon come to you yet?” Ingrid asked. Dupuis lifted his chin sharply.
“No.”
She didn’t know what it was about that brief answer that rang so false, but she didn’t trust him.
“My sister won’t be coming to you, or to your bloodletting carnival, either,” Gabby said. “All of her blood will be staying right where it belongs, thank you very much.”
Dupuis waited, expecting something more from Ingrid. She stayed quiet, letting Gabby’s response be hers.
He shrugged. “You will come to me in the end.”
He fell into another deep bow and then folded back into the crowd. Ingrid stayed on the terrace. She leaned over the curved iron railing, peering three stories below to the street, and saw the black tops of carriages, an aerial view of waiting horses, but no Luc. She’d expected him to be on the curb, eyes turned up toward their terrace.
“Ingrid?” Gabby touched her arm. “Please tell me you aren’t considering that man’s offer.”
Ingrid lifted her eyes and met her sister’s exacting glare.
“Never,” Ingrid answered. “I promise.”
The lie slipped out like oil. It left a greasy feel in Ingrid’s stomach, too.
Grayson knew he was in trouble when the hellhound’s growls came through as words. No. That wasn’t the right way to explain it. The growls coming from the demon hound still sounded like rocks being ground between two stone wheels, but Grayson could understand what they meant.
He had shifted. Fully and completely, there was no mistaking it. No denying the truth. Grayson looked down at what had once been his hands and saw in their place a pair of bulky, sharp-clawed paws planted in the slushy pavement of the back alley. His arms had lengthened until the cuffs of his coat had been brought up tight around his elbow joints. Exposed was the thick pale yellow fur that had enveloped his body. He felt more fur rubbing uncomfortably beneath the clothing he wore, like an unwanted skin. But he was still human. He still thought like one.
Mistress will be pleased.
The notion chimed through Grayson’s head, and he knew it had come from the other hellhound stalking a slow circle around him. Mistress. Axia.
“She is not my mistress,” Grayson tried to say. It came out an abrasive snarl.
Behind him, a startled cry squeaked from Chelle’s throat. He turned sharply to peer at her. She had both hira-shuriken in her hands, ready for flight.
“Grayson?” Chelle’s voice quavered. He smelled it then, stronger and more potent than it had been before. Her blood. It sluiced through her, fast, hot, and fragrant.
The other hellhound groaned. It knew Chelle was frightened, and that made it joyous. Grayson felt its ravening thirst mirrored within him—and then, in an instant, he remembered.
The fog that had cloaked his memory was gone, and he recalled everything that had happened in that back alley in London: The girl’s gargling screams, drowned by her own blood as Grayson’s fangs ripped into her jugular. Her fingernails digging into his face and shoulders but slipping through thick, greasy fur without purchase. And here he found himself in another dark alley with another girl.
Join me. Mistress desires it.
Grayson knew that the hellhound had been commanded to rip into Chelle—and that Axia wanted Grayson to take part.
He swallowed the spate of saliva that had pooled in his mouth, and closed his eyes. His body felt right. Utterly right. The new state of his muscles and bones was pure relief. He’d been fighting them, denying them the change for too long. But the other hellhound’s lusts, throbbing through Grayson like a tremor, weren’t right. They were base and cruel, and he didn’t give a damn what Axia desired.
“Stop,” Grayson said, stunned once again to hear his voice roll out as such an inhuman growl.
The hellhound turned its flaming eyes toward him. It wanted to know why. Behind him, Chelle’s boots scuffed nervously along the pavement. Grayson looked and saw that the fear had gone out of her eyes. She was ready to fight. The hellhound must have sensed it, too, because it abandoned its focus on Grayson and darted forward, straight for Chelle.