Dupuis had shaken himself off and stumbled to his feet. “Finish him, Dimitrie.”
“No!” Ingrid screamed, clawing at Dimitrie to let her go. Marco had only been trying to protect her, even though he wasn’t required to any longer. She had to do something to help him. “I’ll do it, I’ll give you the blood, just—just stop!”
With one easy shove, Dimitrie knocked her to her knees and sent her skidding to the far side of the room. He raised the crossbow toward Marco, who writhed on the floor, and fired again. A dart buried itself in Marco’s back, just under his right wing. His anguished shriek reverberated off the walls.
“I asked you to finish him,” Dupuis barked.
“The mercurite will hold him,” Dimitrie replied.
“Mercurite?” Ingrid pushed herself up from the cold floor, but she couldn’t reach Marco. Dimitrie stood between them.
“Our weapons are dipped in it,” Dimitrie answered. “It’s the only way humans can protect themselves against the Dispossessed.”
“But you’re one of them!” Ingrid screamed.
Marco growled on the floor. His body rippled out of true form until he lay naked, facedown. His wings folded and nearly disappeared into clean gashes just beneath his shoulder blades. The one closest to the mercurite dart remained half formed.
“No he isn’t. He’s a Shadow bastard and a traitor,” he spit, his grating voice tremulous.
Dimitrie didn’t deny it. He only grimaced. “Be thankful I didn’t aim for your heart, Wolf.”
Dupuis brushed off his coat and walked away from Marco’s prostrate form. The blood-draining machine droned on. “Get her ready, Dimitrie.”
Luc crawled out of the basement storeroom, his human body still a grotesque fusion of flesh and stone. He couldn’t scent Ingrid. She had been there one second and gone the next, and no matter how hard he tried, her rich, earthy essence wouldn’t come.
He dug his fingers into the rotting wooden doorframe and hauled himself up. It had been half an hour since Dimitrie had left with the promise of Ingrid’s death on his lips. Luc threw his head back and cracked it against the soft wood. If her scent was gone, that meant she was either in the Underneath with Axia and no longer his human charge, or she was dead.
If Axia had somehow snatched Ingrid back to the Underneath, Luc would simply go after her again. Surely he could find demon poison somewhere in this Daicrypta prison. He would ingest it and cross into the Underneath, and like last time, once he and Ingrid shared the same realm again, he would be able to scent and trace her.
But if she was dead … if Dimitrie had taken her from him … The boy had been right. Luc wasn’t going to let him rot here for eternity.
He felt the telling chime at the base of his skull. Dimitrie wasn’t far.
Luc forced himself to move forward. The darted tips of his leathery wings dragged along the floor. He was half naked and half scaled, and he could barely move. Where the mercurite had touched him, his jet scales had been frozen in place, calcified to flinty stone. In the last half hour they had softened to something more like wet cement. Still. How was he supposed to destroy Dimitrie like this? And if Ingrid wasn’t dead, if he had to go into the Underneath … how could he rescue her?
The single electric bulb lighting the dug-out corridor hummed and brightened before a wire inside snapped. The light fizzled, dropping the corridor into a tunnel of mixed grays.
He heard a voice.
“Is someone there?”
Brickton. His oiled-leather scent traveled fast up Luc’s nose. He was hard-pressed not to gag on it.
“Hello?” Ingrid’s father called again. There was a closed door to Luc’s right, with a chain draped through the handle and affixed to an iron ring driven into the stone. Luc stared at it a moment, considering. The man wasn’t in any danger. Luc sensed fear, but that was only because Ingrid’s father was a fool, and ignorant to everything going on around him.
Perhaps it was time to enlighten him.
Luc closed his hand around the chain and swore. Mercurite. Cursing again, he grabbed the iron ring staked into the stone and tore that out instead, then threw the door open. Brickton sat tied to a chair in the center of a small storeroom much like the one Luc had been kept in.
“Tell me who you are,” Brickton pleaded. His eyes darted around, blind in the dark. “Dimitrie?”
Luc tested his footing, shuffling forward awkwardly.
“I’m the one who can save you,” Luc whispered.
Brickton gasped. “Then by God, man, untie me. Get me out of here!”
He struggled with the ropes that bound his wrists. Blackness seeped down the tops of his hands, Luc saw. Blood. He’d chafed his skin raw trying to escape.
“I can’t say I’m inclined to do that yet.” Luc tested the slender bones framing his wings. They twitched as they straightened, making a popping sound. Lord Brickton stopped fidgeting.
“What do you want, then?” he asked.