“Mistress is there,” he whispered, his chin jerking in the direction of the Eiffel Tower.
It was time. Grayson’s pulse throbbed in his ears as he started along the gravel esplanade toward the tower. When he had entered, there had been a low, breathy roar within the exhibition space—Axia’s nest. There had to be at least a hundred or more Dusters here, and just as many creatures scraped up from the Underneath, to guard them. Crowds like that made noise. Yet as Grayson took measured steps toward the iron behemoth, a silence settled in. He kept his chin lifted and his sights on the tower. Of all the demons present—from rattilus demons and crypsis serpents to corvites and the flylike beings Luc had once called Drainers—hellhounds were the most prominent. They stopped pacing as Grayson walked past. Their ember-red eyes watched him intently.
He still had his hands in his pockets, his right hand closed around the warm glass barrel of the syringe. The glass was slippery; his palms were damp. Suddenly every last nerve in his body jumped to attention.
“You have come to me at last.”
The Dusters and demons in Grayson’s side vision pressed themselves toward the ground. He saw her then, emerging from behind two of her hounds. Her hooded figure was the only one that did not stoop. Axia glided toward him. A black corvite swooped overhead, its growling call echoing off the fa?ades of the surrounding buildings.
For a moment, he forgot that he had been the one to design this meeting, and felt trapped again, a prisoner inside her Underneath hive. His skin itched along his arms and legs with the memory of the fanged man—one of these beastly hounds, he realized—and how he’d punctured Grayson’s skin again and again, injecting him with black demon poison.
Axia lifted her arm, the sleeve of her robe long enough to cover her fingers, and pushed back the cavernous hood. He tensed, remembering how in the Underneath she’d been bald, her skin stretched tight over the sharp bones of her face, emphasizing her unnaturally round black eyes and her lipless mouth. He prepared himself to be struck by her hideous visage again.
But when her hood fell around her shoulders, that wasn’t what Grayson saw at all. She wasn’t the decrepit creature she’d been in the Underneath. She had lips, full and pink. She had dark brown eyes instead of all-black, fathomless pupils. And her hair cascaded around her shoulders in wild golden ringlets. It wasn’t just her hair that was golden—she was. Axia had a luminescent glow that seemed to leak out of her very skin.
“Do you bring a weapon into my nest, Grayson Waverly?” she asked.
He froze under a sweep of panic.
“Lay it down,” Axia commanded after his beat of guilty silence.
He cautiously removed both hands from his pockets, though only one extracted a weapon. He let the dagger drop to the ground, where it thudded dully. Grayson damn well hoped she didn’t have him turn out his other pocket. Thankfully, she seemed appeased.
“I wish you had come of your own accord.” She spoke in the same honey-sweet voice he remembered from before. It chimed through his ears, leaving behind something like the faint peal of bells.
I have, he thought, but instead replied, “I won’t be your slave.”
Axia’s laugh tinkled through the air, wrongly bright within the solemn, fear-filled Champs de Mars. “You refer to the mersian blood cure. I admit my decision to bestow such a gift on Evander Burke was erroneous. Mersians are unto themselves in the Underneath, as I learned during my imprisonment there, and are indifferent to my influence. However, he is but one seedling. It seems Evander Burke will have to be weeded out.”
So that was why Vander—or Evander, or whatever his full name was—had not fallen under Axia’s spell. That only presented yet another pressing reason Grayson knew he must succeed: to protect Vander—and the mersian blood. He settled his hands back inside his trouser pockets, hoping the action appeared casual.
Axia’s golden brows slanted and her lips puckered into a moue. “Do not worry so, Grayson Waverly. The mersian blood within you will soon fade, and you will give yourself over to me. You will become what you have always been meant to be.”
He and Ingrid had never been the sort to speak without first weighing their choice of words. Gabby would have begun arguing with Axia immediately, and a part of Grayson longed to do the same. To assert that he would never give himself over to her, no matter how easy it would be. He’d felt the draw before, the overwhelming urge to shift and settle into the form that, if he allowed himself to admit it, felt more comfortable than the one he currently held.
He couldn’t argue with Axia. It did seem, in many ways, that he was meant to be a hellhound, or at least part hound. But he also knew he would never allow himself to be owned.