The Wondrous and the Wicked by Page Morgan
To my sisters, Lisa and Sarah, forever
PARIS
?LE DE LA CITé
LATE MARCH 1900
The lamps along the Quai des Orfèvres were dark. That was the first signal for Marianne that something wasn’t quite right. She moved with caution through the inky black. It was a familiar street, one she’d walked countless times, and yet the impenetrable dark made it feel like uncharted territory. Glass crunched under the soles of Marianne’s boots, and she stopped walking.
Had the lamps been smashed?
She drew her cloak tighter as wind rolled over the quay wall and shook the brittle leaves of some poplars lining the Seine. Vandals had likely pitched rocks at the lamps, nothing more. Had Marianne known, she would have asked Monsieur Constantine’s driver to let her off closer to her home at Place Dauphine. Instead, the slim brougham had stopped, as usual, a block away, on the Pont Saint-Michel. For a month she had been walking the extra few minutes home along the quay road to make sure her mother and father would not see Constantine’s fine carriage. They believed she spent two evenings a week giving piano lessons to a young girl in the Latin Quarter. Marianne could never tell them the truth: that she was, in fact, at a gentleman’s chateau on the outskirts of Paris, learning to curb her appetite for blood.
Marianne picked up her pace, wincing as her boots ground over more shattered glass beneath the next lamppost. If she could shift, like some of the other Dusters with hellhound blood, she wouldn’t be so nervous walking alone in the dark. But she hadn’t shifted yet, beyond a few instances of fur sprouting on her arms and a half inch of nail growth once. Marianne was impatient for it to be over and done with, but she prayed the first time wouldn’t happen until she was alone and far away from home.
Ahead, she saw the faint glow of lights from the residential square directly across from the law courts of the Palais de Justice. In their apartment, Papa would likely be smoking a cigarette and reading to Mama from Le Petit Journal as she arranged the table for supper. If Marianne hurried, she might be able to get home in time to listen to an article or two. For a moment, she forgot the dashed lamps along the quay road and thought only of her papa’s steady, clear voice.
A flicker of movement in the sky drew her gaze up to the roof of the law courts. Two imperial stone eagles, perched on either corner of the columned fa?ade, had cast their shadows over Place Dauphine for as long as Marianne could remember. Seeing them now, stamped darkly against the cloudless, moonlit sky, didn’t surprise her. What did was the third, unfamiliar winged statue set between them. It stopped her cold. Where had that come from?
The wings on the new statue snapped open and a long tail undulated into sight. Marianne barely had a moment to comprehend that it wasn’t a statue at all before the creature launched itself from the roof—and dove directly toward her.
Marianne screamed and whirled around. She wouldn’t be able to reach the square now, not without colliding head-on with the beast. She broke into a run down the center of the quay road, back toward the well-lit Pont Saint-Michel. There she could see passing carriages, pedestrians. Safety. The utter blackness … the smashed lamps … No one looking out their window right then would witness Marianne running from a winged beast. No one would see anything at all. We are likely being watched, Monsieur Constantine had cautioned her just that evening. Be vigilant.
A hawklike shriek rang out overhead, shearing through the whistle of wind in her ears and her own panting breath. She couldn’t run fast enough, couldn’t scream. There was no point. The creature was already upon her. A bright shock of pain carved into her back, punching through skin and muscle, and then two sharp talons cracked through her breast.
Marianne gasped for air as her body, impaled on the beast’s talons, was lifted from the street. But the air had turned to water. Warm, thick water that raced up her throat and pooled in her mouth. She coughed and struggled to breathe as the lights upon the Pont Saint-Michel grew fainter, her body colder. How strange. Blood had been all she’d wanted for months. And now she was drowning in it.
CHAPTER ONE
PARIS
LATE MARCH 1900
Ingrid should have brought a sword.