Ingrid gave him a push with her mind and his body responded. Vincent crawled back toward the stone arcades that led into the Luxembourg Gardens.
The glow she cast flickered. Her body started to fill back in. Ingrid strained against it, waiting for Vincent to pass under the arcades and out of sight. It was like fighting against a sunset. As soon as he disappeared into the park, Ingrid let go. She collapsed to the ground, onto her side, and a rush of cold air filled her chest. She shivered, her limbs heavy and tired. If Vincent rushed back into the courtyard right then, she would be finished.
And there it was, the crunch of gravel under a pair of approaching feet. She was too exhausted to feel afraid. I would be doing Luc a favor in the end. Perhaps he would be.
The boots that stopped next to her face, which was flat against the frozen ground, were not Vincent’s. Ingrid turned her eyes up and saw Yann staring down at her. He made no move to help her stand.
“Are you certain you wish to drain your angel blood?” Yann asked. Lennier must have found him and sent him to common grounds.
Ingrid pushed herself up. The urge to go back to her guest room, crawl into the faded four-poster, and sleep overwhelmed her.
“I have to,” she said.
Yann continued to scrutinize her. Ingrid met his stare with a long stare of her own. His eyes were an impossibly flat cement-gray. When he transformed, the feathers of his eagle wings matched their coloring.
“When it’s gone, how will you protect yourself against gargoyles like Vincent?” he asked, and with a twitch of his lips added, “The kind that are nothing like Luc. The kind that would rather harm humans than help them.”
Ingrid recalled Luc saying the same thing. There were gargoyles that relished harming humans.
“Vincent is one of those gargoyles,” she guessed.
“And you’ve just made him very angry,” he replied.
A shriek from above drew their attention to the sky. A pair of blue-scaled wings circled the courtyard. Dimitrie. Gabby had mentioned how beautiful his scales were; how they matched the striking blue of his eyes. He looped through the air above the courtyard once more before hurtling up into a bank of gray clouds and out of sight. A second later, gravel scattered near the fountain. Dimitrie had dropped something.
Yann went for it. He crouched down to pick it up but stopped. Still crouching, he raised a hand and waved her over. Ingrid approached, wondering why he had hesitated. As soon as she cleared his shoulders and saw the object, she understood perfectly. Ingrid let out a short scream and clapped both hands over her mouth.
Lying on the gravel was a dismembered finger, leached of color except at the ragged, bloodied base. A signet ring circled the red fleshy stump. The flat black onyx oval showed a family crest in gold leaf. Her family crest. It was her father’s signet ring.
Her father’s severed finger.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“You shouldn’t be here.”
Gabby sat straight-backed on the driver’s bench of Constantine’s brougham and attempted to ignore Nolan’s statement. He slapped the reins and grumbled something else under his breath before raising his voice again.
“For the devil’s sake, Gabby, you haven’t had nearly enough training!”
She fought the urge to hit him over the head. She’d been fighting it all day, actually. Ever since he’d refused to allow her to accompany their caravan from gargoyle common grounds to the Daicrypta mansion.
“If my sister, who can’t so much as swing a butter knife effectively, is inside this brougham, then I can most definitely be here as well,” she said.
It had taken convincing Chelle, Vander, and Rory that she could be of use before Nolan had held up his hands in surrender. However, he hadn’t given up objecting.
“Your sister is part of the bargain. You are not. At least your mother had the good sense to stay at the abbey and wait.”
“My mother! You want me to sit at home with my mother! Nolan Quinn, you are the most infuriating man I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting.”
Ingrid must have been listening. She was just behind the driver’s box, enclosed within the slim, lacquered-wood brougham Constantine had lent them for the night. Luc had said he’d take Ingrid to Dupuis, but the more Gabby, Grayson, and the others had stewed over it, the more they had all realized that not helping was nothing short of neglect. So they had shown up at gargoyle common grounds at dusk and waited for the black velvet blanket to drop over the skyline.
“Would you stop complimenting me, lass—I thought we were arguing,” Nolan said.