Gabby wondered what they did talk about. How to aim lightning? How to put a stopper on it?
“There are many Dispossessed who knew,” Luc said, speaking for the first time. Rory and Chelle, along with a few Alliance Gabby didn’t know, looked at Luc with marked reproach.
“There you have it, then,” the same man who’d doubted Constantine said with a wave of his hand toward Luc.
“You can’t place blame on the gargoyles without proof,” Grayson said. “There were others who knew.”
Ready to argue, the man stood up from the chair in which he’d been reclining. Nolan held out a hand toward each of them.
“Grayson is right. There were others,” he said. “I told my father when we were in Rome. He could have told someone else.”
Gabby thought again of Carrick and wondered at his absence. Not that she wished to even look upon him, but still.
“Where is your father?” she asked.
Nolan lowered his hands. “He said he would be patrolling late tonight.”
To make up for time lost during their lovely dinner, no doubt. Gabby’s eyes traveled past Rory and caught on his puckered brow. He was scowling at the floor, his hands on his hips. As if feeling her eyes on him, Rory glanced up. He couldn’t hold her gaze very long.
“Rory?” she asked. “What is it?”
Nolan and the rest of the kitchen turned their attention toward him. Rory didn’t look as tall or threatening without all that blessed silver strapped to his chest. In fact, he looked a bit like a cornered cat.
“It happened while we were in Rome,” Rory began. “Uncle had a visitor. I didna think a thing of it—he’s part of the Directorate and deals wi’ peace ambassadors from time to time.”
Rory held the note Ingrid had brought aloft. “Uncle’s visitor was this man. Robert Dupuis.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The sun was slow to rise. At least, it felt slow. Ingrid took a restless turn around the roof of H?tel Bastian, running her hand over the curved wrought-iron balustrades. The roof gravel crunched under her feet, the pink dawn fully under way now. A few stories below, her family and members of the Alliance continued to convene. They were tossing around ideas on how to retrieve Lord Brickton, speculating about whether Carrick would have been in league with the Daicrypta, and why, and above all, about how to keep Ingrid away from Dupuis and his bloodletting machines.
She had said she’d needed air and gone to the roof. Really, though, she was trying to devise a way to sneak out of H?tel Bastian and give Dupuis exactly what he wanted.
How could she sit back and allow something awful to happen to her father when she could stop it? He’d been infuriating since he’d arrived in Paris, but before, in London, when Ingrid had been younger, he’d been different. Better. And right now his life was in her hands.
If she went to Dupuis, the risk of death was there, of course. She wasn’t too proud to admit that it scared her. The blood draining could go badly; her organs could quit if they were deprived of the blood needed to sustain them. Yes, she could die. But if she didn’t go to Dupuis, her father most certainly would.
The roof door opened as she was leaning against the corner balustrade, gazing down at the street below. Luc had let her go to the roof alone, but she knew he would be keeping watch, surfacing her scent time and again to make sure she was okay. She didn’t have to turn around to know it wasn’t Luc who’d come to the roof. She could always feel Luc’s eyes on her like two fingers pressing against her skin.
“They said you were up here.” Vander closed the door behind him.
“I’m going to Dupuis,” she said, dispensing with pleasantries.
“I thought you might try to,” he said.
Vander’s boots crunched over the gravel toward her. He stopped a distance away. Most likely to stay out of her field of dust and avoid sapping her of her lectrux power, the way he had been this whole time.
Ingrid turned away from the ledge, her arms crossed over her middle. It was cold, and she had left her coat in the apartment. “It’s my decision to make.”
Vander’s hair was unruly, from the wind and from his having been drawn from his bed at so early an hour. It tossed like wheat stalks in a summer storm.
“No one has ever had anything as powerful or … or extraordinary as angel blood before,” he said. “You can’t just hand it over to a member of the Daicrypta.”
“What if I don’t?” she asked. “What if, after it’s done, I’m able to destroy it somehow?”
It was a grasping theory. Was angel blood even destructible? Did it look like blood or was it something else entirely? No one knew. This would be the first procedure of its kind, and that was why everyone was so scared.
Vander’s response was predictable and irritating. “It’s too risky.”
“He’s my father,” Ingrid said. It was as simple as that. He wasn’t perfect. In fact, he’d been acting like a pompous old goat. But he was still her father.
“I don’t care about your father.”