Ingrid glared up the esplanade, her gaze unwavering as Axia drew to a halt. Grayson had stuck Axia with one of Vander’s needles, injected her with mersian blood. It had been his plan, the one he’d asked her to trust blindly. He’d meant to cancel out the angel’s severix powers and failed. Ingrid felt the last echoes of his sorrow, his disappointment. One final shared emotion.
And then Ingrid started to shake. Her body trembled. Not with cold or fury or shock, but with something else. Something much more useful. Behind the fallen angel, the lights inside the Palace of Electricity had brightened. Hugh Dupuis had done it. The generators inside had hummed to life, and inside Ingrid, her lectrux blood flared.
“Your brother could have been magnificent,” Axia said, her voice ringing out crisp and clear even as Alliance fighters and Underneath creatures continued to clash and the gargoyles, pinned to the ground, shrieked in frustration.
Ingrid moved forward, burning beneath her skin. The current rolled and twisted, licking down her arms and up again, curling past her shoulders. Whether because of natural depletion, grief, or the newly churning power underneath the Palace of Electricity’s glass ceiling, Vander’s mersian blood no longer held sway. The electricity fanned out into her chest, coursing down her spine into her legs. This was her fury, raw and untamed.
As Ingrid continued up the esplanade, lights began popping on inside the exhibition buildings. The electrical charge in the air notched, and Ingrid reached for it. She breathed it in. Gathered it close.
One of Axia’s hounds grew restless and lunged. Ingrid didn’t flinch. She simply held out her hand. Vines of electricity intercepted the beast and sent it sprawling backward. It had been so easy, so effortless, and Ingrid glided on toward Axia, her steps deliberate and controlled.
“You attempt to challenge me, Ingrid Waverly?” Axia threw her voice along the esplanade, where the subdued gargoyles all suddenly shot to their feet. No sooner had they lifted their wings for flight than they came crashing down again.
A weakness in Axia’s control. A ripple in her concentration.
The electric current had dammed up in Ingrid’s throat, and she couldn’t speak. She knew that at any moment Axia could reinstate her control over the Dusters—and that she herself was no longer safe from it.
“You believe your demon blood can best my own?” The fallen angel threw her arms up, her palms facing out—a signal for the rest of her demons to hold off. “I accept the challenge. My blood against yours. When I am finished, I will weed you out.”
Ingrid kept her concentration on the lights brightening the exhibition halls and on the fountainheads, now turned on and jetting water. Behind her, Ingrid felt the charge of thousands of lightbulbs as they winked on along the tower.
She held her arms out at her sides—pulled—and threw her arms forward. Lightning cracked from her fingertips with a blinding flash. But Axia had cast herself aside, leaving behind a fade, unscathed. The gargoyles rose and fell as the fallen angel’s attention slipped, then strengthened. Her wild laughter came from a few yards to the left.
“I am faster than lightning,” Axia trilled before severing herself yet again. She reappeared directly beside Ingrid, who unleashed another coil of lightning.
The Dispossessed surged up and crashed down yet again as the lightning burned through Axia’s fade.
“Faster than your brother’s fall,” Axia whispered in Ingrid’s ear.
Ingrid whipped around. The mention of her brother eviscerated her frustration and replenished her fury. Briars of electricity sizzled from her fingers, toward Axia, who predictably, cast a fade and vanished.
Ingrid was about to turn and search for her yet again when the fade did something different. It didn’t evaporate like mist. It became solid again. It wasn’t a fade. It was still Axia. Her smile wilted. Axia tried to sever herself once more, started to disappear—Ingrid saw the blurred lines of her form stretching out into another direction. But her body snapped right back, slamming into her fade, like an elastic band snapping back to its starting point.
Ingrid held Axia’s confounded stare. Her demon power wouldn’t work. The mersian blood. Grayson hadn’t failed. He’d done it!
“Vander—now!”
She heard Nolan’s shout and saw Luc and Marco pitch forward, released from Axia’s hold, just as a howling wind whipped through the esplanade. It thrashed the branches of the trees and sprayed the fountain water in angled sheets, the icy mist flecking Ingrid’s face.
No longer laughing, Axia threw down the full force of her angelic power, buckling Luc and Marco at the knees. Ingrid expected to feel the ground quaking, to see blackness seeping into the corners of her eyes as Axia dragged her under the Dusters’ spell. But Ingrid could still see, still stand. And then she remembered what Axia had said: I will weed you out.
A hellhound, a Drainer, and a rattilus bore down on Ingrid, their orders to hold back terminated. She could attempt to stun them all, the way she’d done to that first hellhound. But they would just keep coming, one demon after another, while Axia held the gargoyles in submission. Ingrid knew she could not electrocute every last demon here.