Gabby let out her breath. Yann was right. Luc had told them that another Dispossessed would be coming to live at the abbey, but so far, the Angelic Order had not sent anyone.
Gabby lowered her chin and started to walk around Yann, who stood like a pillar in the middle of the bridge. He followed her with his dark, inquisitive eyes. She saw them hitch on her crescent of scars. They throbbed, as if each scar knew it was being inspected. Yann’s throat made a mean little gurgle as she rushed past him.
This was what Gabby had feared. Not the unlimited supply of demons she might come face to face with when she became a member of the Alliance. She could fight those demons; she could send them back to the Underneath, where they belonged. She couldn’t do the same with the marks on her skin. They would always be right there: the first things people noticed about her. If a creature like Yann—a gargoyle, for heaven’s sake!—looked at her with such disgust, how would others see her?
How would Nolan see her? He’d left before the bandages had come off. Would he change his mind about her when he returned to Paris and saw the scars for the first time?
Gabby brought down the black tulle of her veil, which she’d rolled atop the brim of her hat while battling the rattilus. Covered, she felt better. She felt more like the old Gabby, the Gabby who’d been pretty and confident.
She wanted that Gabby back more than anything.
CHAPTER THREE
Hope was a futile thing.
Luc had known better than to harbor any, even after two months had passed and he remained the only Dispossessed at l’Abbaye Saint-Dismas.
Irindi had promised the arrival of another gargoyle, and the angel of heavenly law had finally kept her word. That morning, just as the servants were finishing up their breakfast in the rectory kitchen, Luc had felt the telltale chime at the base of his skull. He’d set his fork down, taken one last sip of his coffee, and raised his eyes as the new groom entered the kitchen with the butler.
Gustav had gone around with introductions. Dimitrie was his name, with some long surname Luc couldn’t care less about. The Dispossessed had no use for last names.
The boy’s eyes rested only a half beat longer on Luc than the other servants. A boy indeed. Dimitrie matched Luc’s height, but he was gangly and smooth-cheeked. No older than fourteen, Luc had suspected at the time, but now, as he followed the boy into the stables, he gave him the benefit of perhaps another year. Dimitrie had just enough breadth around the shoulders for fifteen.
Luc closed the stable doors behind him to shut out the kicking wind. Dimitrie had entered a stall and was speaking in soft tones to the snuffling mare.
“She doesn’t like you,” came Dimitrie’s voice from within.
Luc approached the stall entrance and crossed his arms. Fourteen. The boy’s voice was still a warbling pitch.
“The mare. She doesn’t like you. See how nervous you make her?” Dimitrie went on. He ran his slender fingers down the horse’s meaty shoulder, then along its back. He finally looked at Luc.
“Irindi sent you?” Luc asked. A little warning would have been nice.
Dimitrie didn’t so much as blink. “You required help.”
From an infant? Luc wanted to reply. He stayed quiet. Dimitrie could have been trapped within his fourteen-year-old body for one year or one hundred. Maybe more. There was no way to tell without asking, and it wasn’t a question one Dispossessed asked another so soon after meeting. Luc himself had been seventeen for 327 years. This was the first time he’d met another gargoyle whose human age was younger than his.
His age didn’t matter, though. Neither did it matter how awkward and spindly the boy looked. He was no innocent—Dimitrie had committed the same crime every other gargoyle had: the cold-blooded murder of a man of the cloth. Priest. Reverend. Bishop. It didn’t matter their title or rank. If a man killed an ordained soul, he was barred from heaven upon his death and cast into the ranks of the Dispossessed.
Luc was a murderer. They all were, even this waif of a boy.
“I understand. This has been your territory,” Dimitrie said.
Luc had been guarding this place on his own ever since his first day as a gargoyle. When the abbey had been a functioning church, Luc had protected all its parishioners while they were on sacred ground. The priests usually lived alone, except for a few servants here and there. Even when the abbey fell out of use before Luc’s last hibernation and an old Sorbonne professor and his blind wife had taken up residence in the rectory, Luc hadn’t had much trouble seeing to their safety.
He had shaken free of a thirty-year hibernation just over four months before, and almost immediately he’d been challenged with humans who were pure disasters: in league with the Alliance, completely aware of the Underneath, two of them with demon dust and one with an appetite for demon hunting.… Luc did need help. And he should have been relieved to have it.