The brougham door whacked open. Without waiting for assistance, Ingrid jumped out. She stumbled on the landing. “Gabby! Are you all right?”
Vander pulled his mount to a stop and leaped from the saddle. He took one look at Nolan and swore.
“There’s demon dust everywhere. What happened?”
The shrill blare of a police whistle echoed down the block. Nolan ground his teeth and maneuvered himself to his side. “I think it was a possession demon.”
He saw his wrists then, the two shallow slices. “Nicely done, lass.”
“I’m so sorry.” Gabby reached for them. “I didn’t know what else to try.”
The whistle sounded again, and this time voices accompanied it. Gabby pulled her hands back. Their near accident had drawn attention.
A slapping noise, like the ripple of canvas sails, came from above. Luc’s massive jet body landed with a fierce whump on the street just inches from Ingrid.
“Go, Luc, you’ll be seen,” Vander said as a lamp quavered into view down the block.
Luc wound his arm around Ingrid’s waist and flushed out his wings.
Gabby held out her arm. “Wait, not with—”
Luc shot up, into the sky and out of view, taking her sister with him.
The smell of spring grass and rich black soil drove into him. Luc breathed it in. A litany of images and emotions stole him away from where he was. For a moment Luc forgot the grinding pain of the heavy mercurite chains twined around his body.
Ingrid.
The dank cellar hole where he’d been imprisoned most of the day blurred out of focus. Luc felt her—her yearning for air, the panicked cadence of her heart, the bitter tang of fear rising in her throat, choking her.
Ingrid was afraid. She needed him. And he couldn’t move.
The mercurite ate into his flesh. The muscle and skin under the thick chains had long since hardened to stone. With the chains wound around him from his shoulders to his knees, most of Luc’s body had crystallized, including his wings. Those had been pinned into place with a curved, mercurite-dipped rod.
The disciples had put Ingrid’s father on the roof of the Daicrypta den like bait. Tied to a chair, Lord Brickton had seen Luc and screamed in terror. Luc had thought him a fool, until he’d touched down on the roof, having rushed headlong into a trap.
They had been waiting for him, armed to the teeth with mercurite. Brickton wasn’t the fool—Luc was. And now here he sat, a useless pile of stone and flesh, naked, in the dark, and unable to protect. Unable to shift, though the urge hammered against him incessantly.
Gabby’s heady scent of water lily and hibiscus fluttered in but then left. What the hell was happening out there?
Honeyed light filtered through the door as it creaked opened. Dimitrie’s gangly figure stood within the entrance. Luc held still, already having learned that the more he struggled against the chains, the more they burned anew.
“Let me go,” he muttered. “My human needs me. I need to go.”
Dimitrie stepped inside and shut the door behind him. “I can’t.”
“Traitor,” Luc seethed.
His night vision showed Dimitrie’s outline in gray and white. His shoulders hung forward, his head slumped down so Luc saw the crown of his head.
“You know nothing,” Dimitrie replied.
“I know you’re keeping me from my human,” Luc growled. “I know that if anything happens to her I’ll shred you like a wet paper bag.”
Dimitrie lifted his head. “Would you?”
Luc sat on the dirt-packed floor with his head pressed against the damp cellar wall, his wings hanging limply behind him. Was it just the pain, or had Dimitrie actually sounded hopeful?
Dimitrie dropped into a crouch. His eyes looked like two black beads to Luc.
“You don’t know, do you? How lucky you are.” Dimitrie’s soprano voice cracked.
Luc barked a laugh, which shifted his shoulder, which burned like hell.
“Don’t laugh. Your abbey … your humans. You don’t know what I’d give to have what you do.”
Luc ground his teeth as the mercurite chain fixed around his chest tightened. The need to shift, to go to Ingrid, was making his ribs expand.
“So you thought you’d pretend for a little while, is that it?” Luc asked.
“I did what my humans told me to do,” he answered. “I’ve learned it’s better to give them what they want. And they want your human girl very badly.”
Marco. Luc had to depend on Marco. He wouldn’t let anything happen to Ingrid. He couldn’t.