“Is there word of a new elder?” Rory asked.
The gargoyle cut his eyes away from Gabby and spared the demon hunter an indifferent look. “Marco says two Dispossessed are vying for elder, and one of them would gladly use a vengeance kill to claim the role. That’s why you should, in his words, ‘stay the hell out of Paris.’ ”
Finished with his message, the gargoyle started back for the slipway opening. Only one of the two contenders would kill her? Gabby moved past Rory, jumped over a few stacked boards, and followed the gargoyle.
“Why would the other gargoyle not kill me?” she asked, hope blooming and leaving her a little light-headed. If he didn’t wish for her death and he became the new elder, perhaps he would allow her to return and live in Paris safely.
“Because you were his human once,” the gargoyle replied.
Startled into distraction, Gabby tripped over a bowed floorboard and narrowly missed plunging her foot through a rotted section of the floor along the slipway, the spooling waters of the Thames showing below.
“Marco is vying for elder?” she asked.
“No,” the gargoyle answered, stopping at the entrance to glance back at her. “The Dog called Luc.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Luc wasn’t in the mood for visitors. He never had been, not when he’d resided at l’Abbaye Saint-Dismas, and definitely not now. Visitors were forced upon him anyway, a constant stream of them coming and going at all hours of the day and night, sauntering through the arcaded entrance off the Luxembourg Gardens and dropping down from the sky into the courtyard.
How had Lennier withstood it?
After the elder’s death, H?tel du Maurier had been in urgent need of a guardian. And in the eyes of the Order, Luc had been in urgent need of reassignment. Still, when Irindi, the angel of heavenly law, had directed him here, to this ramshackle residence that had been abandoned by its human owners decades ago, Luc had laughed. The Order couldn’t be serious. They wanted him to take over gargoyle common grounds?
It had been a month now, and Luc still hoped Irindi would appear and send him to his true reassigned territory. This just had to be an extra dose of punishment for breaking all the rules the Dispossessed were supposed to live by.
Luc stood at a window inside Lennier’s second-floor apartments and braced his arms against the cold glass. There were at least fifteen men in the small, enclosed courtyard below. Had it been night and not afternoon, they would have been in their gargoyle forms, crowded wing to wing around the cracked and dry Hydra monstress fountain.
Their eyes were all turned toward Luc, watching and waiting for their leader, Vincent, Luc’s current and most unwelcome visitor. He turned and faced the Notre Dame gargoyle that had intruded on him a half an hour before.
“You’re wasting your time,” Luc said. “I’ve been given Lennier’s territory, not his role as elder.”
Across the room, Vincent sat on a sofa in front of the marble fireplace. He kept his eyes on the cold ashes in the hearth.
“That is obvious. At least, to me it is,” he replied. “The new elder must earn the title. The Order cannot hand it out like a prize.”
It was a title Vincent had been coveting. When word had traveled through the Dispossessed that Luc had been given guardianship of H?tel du Maurier, the rumor that he was also to be the new elder had somehow been fanned into existence. Gargoyles and their damned gossip.
Once ignited, the rumor had spread like wildfire. It had all seemed to happen around Luc rather than to him. The first few weeks in his new territory had passed as if he were being held underwater. He’d seen the gargoyles swarming the grounds of H?tel du Maurier at night. He’d known they’d come to see him, the gargoyle that had taken Lennier’s place. He just hadn’t cared enough to speak to them or tell them that they were wrong.
“Irindi didn’t say anything about being elder. She gave me a territory, nothing more.”
They were the same words he’d finally been able to grind out two weeks after being removed from the abbey. He’d said them again and again since then, to anyone who would listen. Had he been more coherent in the days after leaving the abbey, perhaps he would have been able to stamp out the whispered assumptions. Instead, he’d sat brooding in silence at the head of the dining room table Lennier had never used, ignoring the visitors flooding into the front sitting room.
The only one he’d spoken to had been Marco. Luc had asked if Ingrid was safe. And then he’d told Marco to keep her away.