The peal of bells and police whistles drowned out Vander’s argument. The predictable roar of shouts and screams signaled that the bodies had been discovered.
“We need to leave,” Vander said. Luc was more than ready. He couldn’t stand to look at the Seer another second. With his shirt and boots back on, Luc turned toward the alley entrance. It wasn’t visible, the zigzagging line of the alleyway making this place a perfect doorway to the Underneath. He’d walk back to the abbey and wait. Marco, his clothing still a pile on the floor of the carriage house loft, would have to fly. Luc would go nowhere until Ingrid’s scent surfaced in Marco’s nose, signaling her return—and he didn’t care what the other Dispossessed thought.
Blue light flickered behind Ingrid’s closed lids. There was no place left for the demon poison to fill, no corner inside her spared. The pain had plowed so deep it had struck bone.
The flickering blue wasn’t cold like a winter tide or a shaded forest brook. It was hot and dry, and when Ingrid tried to move, she let out a moan. Lord, everything hurt.
She parted her lashes and the blue light grew brighter. She knew where she was. She had been here before, on this same hard-packed dirt floor. The small, cavelike room inside Axia’s hive hadn’t changed.
Ingrid should have been in a panic. Her pulse should have been hammering and her body sweating, and her mind should have been racing to assess the possibilities for escape. Instead, she lay on her side, her cheek against the floor, dirt caking her parched lips. All she felt was the crushing weight of failure. Axia had managed to trick her back into the Underneath after all. Hopelessness cramped around her chest and squeezed her stomach until she felt ill, on top of feeling defeated and incapacitated by pain.
Ingrid’s leg ached the most. As the fog of the demon poison began to clear, she recalled that the hellhound had raked its fang across her shoulder, not her leg. Another sharp twinge of pain assaulted her as she strained to lift her head. She peered down the length of her body and saw a dark mass huddled by her legs. Robes. They shuddered and writhed.
Ingrid’s stockings had been torn away and her skirts and petticoats bunched up to expose her pale knee. The agony of her calf seared brighter, the anguish radiating from one spot: her demon mark.
The robe’s wide hood obscured Axia’s face, but Ingrid could feel the fallen angel’s fangs lodged deep in the flesh of her calf. Pulling. Suckling. Reclaiming.
A swell of nausea and exhaustion, chased by more pain, brought Ingrid’s head back to the dirt floor. She couldn’t move. And if she couldn’t move, she certainly couldn’t fight. It was too late anyway. It was over. Axia had won.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Gabby sat at her writing desk with a candle in one hand and a stick of red sealing wax in the other. The candle’s flame turned the hard, squared-off tip of wax into a thick rain. It dripped onto the creamy linen envelope below. She let another few drops pool up before pressing the heavy pewter W monogram stamp into the quickly cooling wax. It was the second letter she’d written to Ingrid in as many days.
Gabby had returned from the Battersea dry dock the afternoon before in a tear to get up to her room and shout at her sister through the muted confines of a letter. Had Ingrid known that Luc was vying for the position of elder? If so, why had she not mentioned it? Gabby couldn’t imagine that her sister would overlook all the possibilities. If he was named elder, Luc could command the gargoyles in Paris to cease thinking about revenge for Lennier’s death. He could devise a way to bring Gabby back to Paris and keep her safe.
It was only after Gabby had sealed and addressed the letter and sent it off to the post that she realized she hadn’t written a proper greeting or inquired after Mama or Grayson. She hadn’t even asked if Ingrid was well after her run-in with the Alliance assassin.
As she addressed this second letter, the paper heavy with apologies, Gabby thought again about Luc as elder. The notion was difficult to imagine. Luc just seemed so … solitary. Quiet. Not like a leader at all.
There was a movement at Gabby’s bedroom window. She slapped her pen against the desk when she saw the bird perched on her windowsill. If the window hadn’t been closed to the drizzly snow, Gabby would have reached for the dagger sheathed under her skirts at her calf and hurled it at the bird’s oil-slick breast.
It wasn’t a raven, as it pretended to be, but a corvite. A demon messenger bird. And it had been spying on her for the last week.
“What do you want?” she asked it.
The corvite’s head turned toward the sound of her voice. Its long, hooked beak smacked into the glass. Anyone who stared into a corvite’s eyes would notice the blood-red ring around each black pupil. But really, who stared at birds all day? Gabby certainly hadn’t. Not until she’d known that not all birds were of this world.