Ingrid hated that she needed him so desperately. The first moment of fear and here she was, wishing for him to fly to her rescue. She’d started going to Constantine so she could learn to defend herself. She had the power. She’d defeated this serpent before, too, sending spikes of lightning through its boneless coils.
All she had to do was face it. Let Axia’s pet come at her. Her body would react, her lectrux blood would boil and surge all on its own, and she could make the lightning.
Ingrid slid to an abrupt stop on the glass-and-iron floor she’d just crossed a few minutes before. It was a gamble. She tried to imagine the sparks lighting at her shoulders, tried to feel the numbing current coming down her arms. She needed to feel it.
“Don’t fail me,” she whispered, and then spun on her heel to face the serpent.
But the demon was gone.
She let out a shallow breath and searched the corridor, eyes wild. A creature of that length and mass shouldn’t have been able to hide very well.
Ingrid let her shoulders drop, the urge to run overwhelming. It wasn’t gone. The thing was still here. She could feel it.
She took a step toward the entrance, but a strange squelching, like a sweaty palm dragging along a pane of glass, stopped her again. The sound resonated in her gums and made her cringe. It was coming from beneath her.
She lowered her gaze slowly, but she wasn’t prepared for what she saw.
Axia’s serpent was on the underside of the glass-and-iron floor, directly beneath her feet, stuck to the glass like a leech. How it had gotten into the underground arcade and maneuvered its way onto the stretch of ceiling wasn’t something Ingrid had to worry about for very long. Because at that moment the tip of the serpent’s tail reared back and smashed against the glass. Ingrid threw out her arms for balance as the floor shook—and then cracked.
She sucked in a breath as the fissure in the glass carved a path between her feet, branching out in fits and bursts like the overflow of a flooded river.
The serpent rubbed at the glass as it peeled free, curling down toward the strip of white marble floor that ran between the underground shops at least three stories below. Ingrid held still, her muscles seizing. If she shifted her weight, the weakened glass would shatter. Her lightning wouldn’t save her then. She needed Luc.
Where was he?
As the serpent hit the floor below, it coiled its body into a stack of thick corkscrew rounds. The pale scales flashed to gray, then black. And then the coils were gone. The serpent was gone.
Axia stood in the corridor below, her cloaked and hooded figure just as Ingrid remembered it. The fallen angel’s head tilted up until Ingrid was staring into the black cavern of her hood.
But it couldn’t be Axia. She couldn’t walk the earth, not without first taking back her blood from Ingrid. If this wasn’t Axia …
It uses your memories, down to the last detail. Luc’s words. First Anna, then Jonathan.
It was the mimic demon, using her memories of Axia. Her fear. Leading her like a lamb to slaughter.
The floor bowed under her feet and Ingrid yelped. A black mass filled the corridor below, racing in like dark smoke. Luc collided with the mimic, shearing through the black robes with his talons. A killing blow. Ingrid expected a burst of green sparks—every demon she’d seen destroyed had disappeared in such a manner. But this one simply vanished. No sparks. Nothing.
Luc was alone in the underground arcade corridor when the floor finally gave. Ingrid fell in a rain of glass shards, a scream locked in her throat. She squeezed her eyes shut against the grating chime of breaking glass, the whistle of air as it rushed past her ears. Her skirts billowed and flapped around her, and she prepared for the sickening crack of bone against marble.
She should have known better.
Luc caught her midair, his arms slamming into her back with such force it drove the breath from her lungs. It was an awkward catch, but once he had her in his arms, curled in tight against the hard, square plates of his chest, he folded in his wings and dropped to the floor.
Ingrid’s eyes were still squeezed shut, her hands balled into fists. Slowly, she opened both, but she couldn’t take a breath. She hadn’t been this close to Luc in ages. He was so warm, as if his dark reptilian scales had been exposed to glaring sun.
She turned her face up and saw his pale lime eyes flash with concern. They were the only part of Luc—the human Luc—that was left. The rest of him was monstrous, the featherless black wings looming over each of his hulking shoulders, the clipped ears of a dog set high on his bald skull, and small, tightly knit jet scales covering his face. They shimmered, even in the poor light of the underground arcade.
How could someone so handsome turn into something so hideous?
Ingrid uncurled the fingers of one hand and reached timidly toward the squared plane of his chin. Luc’s scales felt like slate. Ingrid let her fingertip travel lightly up the curve of his jaw and then in, toward his mouth. Luc’s gargoyle lips weren’t full and lush like his human ones. They were thin and black, and he kept his mouth in a tight seam, his eyes cautiously following the motions of her hand.