Luc caught Ingrid around the waist as her frenzied screams for Grayson grated through his skull. He shrieked for Marco to follow, and with one last lash of his tail toward the hellhound he’d been battling, launched himself over the railing. His single wing hadn’t been strong enough to beat his way up to the second level—he’d had to climb the stairwell set alongside the tracks for the lift—and it wasn’t able to glide them safely to the ground now, either.
Marco’s talons clamped around the bony wing stump and leveled out Luc’s twirling fall. The Wolf guided them to the ground, Ingrid still screaming her brother’s name.
Grayson had hit a few yards from where Luc and Marco touched down. Luc spun around and unfurled his wing, wanting to shield Ingrid from the sight that had just cleaved through Luc like a dull axe.
“Don’t look,” he said, though his vocal cords mangled the words. Had Ingrid understood them, she wouldn’t have obeyed. She writhed in Luc’s grasp and he let her go, not wanting his talons to accidentally slide along her arms in his attempt to hold her still.
She jerked out to the side, beyond his wing—and saw.
Ingrid fell forward, one arm braced across her stomach as her face crumpled, her mouth opening to a silent scream. Luc couldn’t protect her, not from this. He could do nothing more than stand beside her as she stumbled to her brother’s broken body, his arms and legs splayed at odd angles, his head turned toward Ingrid’s approach. His eyes were open and empty, and Ingrid crashed onto her knees at his side. She dug the heels of her palms into her temples, drew in a breath of air, and screamed.
Marco doubled over as her wail echoed across the Champs de Mars, her anguish cutting through the Wolf.
Luc knew this pain. He’d experienced it the wintry day Suzette’s body had been delivered home, her soaked dress frozen stiff, her skin the color of ash. He’d clung to her rigid body as his parents had dissolved into shouts and sobs, the men who’d dragged her out of the Seine muttering useless apologies. Luc had rocked her, shook her, railed at her to wake up just as Ingrid was now screaming at Grayson to not be dead.
Her high, keening wail had paralyzed those in battle nearby on the esplanade, though only for a moment. The Dusters, having been released from Axia’s spell, had merged back into their huddles. A new influx of Alliance fighters and Dispossessed continued to clash with the demons—gaining ground in their direction, Luc noted. They had to move, and he knew he’d have to drag Ingrid away from Grayson’s side.
“Such a pity.”
Axia’s bellowing voice split through the battle, as clear and powerful as a bell. Luc couldn’t see her, but in the next second, he felt her. The familiar weight of an angel’s presence drove Luc and Marco and all gargoyles on the ground to their knees. The Dispossessed churning in the sky over the Champs de Mars plunged toward the earth.
Though the all-out battle slowed, the Alliance and demons continued to clash in intermittent bursts. A light started to brighten near the fountains of the Chateau d’Eau, and Luc heard a strange humming sound. The growls of hellhounds and the clicking of Drainer wings were closer, though. Stuck like this, Luc and the other gargoyles would be at the mercy of whatever demon wished to tear into them.
“I grow weary of this resistance,” Axia said, and straining to crane his neck, Luc saw her gliding down the center of the esplanade. She had pushed back her hood, and though he couldn’t look directly at her, he saw that she had changed from what she’d been in the Underneath. Her body had become more human. “You have all been so accommodating,” she went on, “to come here and allow me to extinguish it.”
She glowed, though not like Irindi, whose figure was always completely hidden within her shuddering ball of white light. Axia merely shimmered, as if she had conjured stage lights to hover over her. Her hellhound guards, still at her sides, enclosed her like two granite walls. Vander needed a better shot than that.
The strange humming sound had grown steadily louder, and Luc realized Ingrid had ceased screaming. She’d ceased sobbing. He curled around to see her. Ingrid no longer knelt beside Grayson’s body. She stood beside it, facing up the esplanade. Her arms hung limply at her side, her chin tucked into her neck, her wrathful eyes locked on Axia.
Ingrid wasn’t breathing. She didn’t need air. She didn’t need anything but vengeance, hot, ruthless, and swift. When she had seen her twin lying still on the cold ground, something deep inside her had splintered off. A part of her that she would never get back. It had belonged to Grayson, and he had taken it with him.
He was dead. He was gone. The pain was too much, too uncontrollable, to be real.