“I don’t know whom to trust,” he said, his head still tilted toward hers.
A smile pulled at her lips. “That’s easy. You can trust Nolan and Chelle and Constantine. And don’t forget Marco.” Vander scowled and Ingrid gently nudged him. “You don’t have to like him.”
Vander caught her hand against his chest before she could pull it away. Now that she knew what his dust did, she could feel the subtle shift in her own body whenever he stood too close to her: the rise of gooseflesh along her arms and legs and the comforting warmth low in her stomach. He hadn’t risked absorbing this much of her dust in a long while.
Ingrid’s eyes flitted to his mouth. He was going to kiss her. It had happened twice before. Both times, the touch of his lips had weakened her, and then she’d felt guilty when her thoughts had inevitably meandered to Luc. Yet kissing Vander had felt good. So wrongly good.
She forced her hand out from under his and stepped away.
“Ingrid—”
“And me,” she whispered before he could say anything more. “You can trust me as well.”
“I already knew that,” Vander said, accepting her rebuff like a gentleman. He stayed out of her dust, or what was left of it, but the intensity of his stare made Ingrid feel as if she were being drawn back to him. “And I hope you know that if it ever comes down to keeping loyal to the Alliance or protecting you, I’ll choose you.”
It will always be you. Vander had made this vow to her before. They had been devising a way to rescue her father from the corrupt Daicrypta doyen, Robert Dupuis, and Vander had brusquely admitted that he didn’t give a damn about Ingrid’s father. He only cared about her. He would choose her. Always.
“I do know,” she said.
Vander Burke loved her. She knew this, even though he hadn’t said the words straight out, the way Luc had. Luc. There he was again, always stepping into every thought, every conversation and meeting she had with Vander.
He was gone. Vander was here. And he wanted Ingrid.
“The best thing for us to do,” he said, finally resuming their stroll, “is to keep working on the draining machine.”
Carrick Quinn’s secret partnership with the Daicrypta had allowed him access to the designs for a dreadful blood-draining machine Dupuis had planned to hook Ingrid up to. The machine, Dupuis had explained, would draw out Ingrid’s blood, separate whatever inhuman cells it recognized, and then return Ingrid’s pure human blood to her body. The only problem had been that angel and demon blood made up most of Ingrid’s blood cells, and the human blood returned to her would have most likely not been enough to keep her alive. Dupuis hadn’t cared about that, though. All he’d wanted was the angel blood.
“I can come to H?tel Bastian today if you want to draw some more of my blood,” Ingrid offered.
She had been steadily letting Vander draw and store her blood over the last month while Nolan constructed the machinery. So far, they had three pints stored. Robert Dupuis’s invention wasn’t completely evil. If it was used safely and tested appropriately, they could remove the angel blood from Ingrid’s body and then destroy it. And if they could do that, Axia would have no reason to come after her. Neither would the Alliance.
Nolan and Vander planned to test the machine on the stored pints of blood before actually hooking the needles and tubing up to Ingrid herself.
Vander picked up his pace. “Not today,” he said, his eyes on the Chateau d’Eau straight ahead.
Ingrid waited for him to explain why today wasn’t a good day for a visit, but he stayed quiet.
“Is everything all right?” she asked. Perhaps she had offended him when she’d evaded his kiss after all.
“It’s just … I have to be at the church tonight,” he answered. “I’m being ordained Sunday, remember.”
As if she could have forgotten. Vander Burke: bookseller, demon hunter, budding scientist, and reverend. He truly was amazing.
“Of course I remember. Can I attend?”
He visibly brightened. “Would you?”
“I’d love to. Vander, I think it’s so wonder—”
Ingrid had gone two more strides before she realized he had stopped walking. She turned to look at him, but his eyes weren’t on her. They were trained on the esplanade before them.
“What is it?”
He pushed his round, wire-framed spectacles higher on the straight, strong bridge of his nose.
“Dusters” was all he said.
Ingrid followed the direction of his gaze. The exposition architects and construction teams had left trees and grass between the esplanade and the quickly built plaster buildings, and right now Vander watched a small group of people congregating beneath one such tree. Three young men and a woman, all roughly the same age as Vander and Ingrid.
“All of them?” she whispered.