Why was Axia sending her little messengers here? Gabby pushed back her chair and stood.
“Get out of here!” She waved her arms. “I’m not a Duster, and I don’t have angel blood, so leave me alone!” She rushed at the window and threw up the sash.
The demon bird squawked and beat its wings at her before leaping from the sill. It swooped toward the back lawns, its throaty caw trailing off into a low growl. A draft of wet wind raised the hairs along Gabby’s arms as the corvite’s wings flapped deeper into the night. It would be back eventually. Gabby left the window open. She’d be ready for it.
Two solid knocks landed on her bedroom door. Gabby glanced at the mantel clock, the hands lit by the fire in the grate. What did Rory want at half past ten? She moved across the white-carpeted room, knowing her new lady’s maid, Kendall, had a gentler touch on the wood, and had already taken her leave for the night besides. Her father, whenever he was home, never sought her out at all.
Her guess had been correct. Rory stood on the other side of the threshold, dressed in a dark charcoal hunting kit: checked trousers and a four-button jacket, a lighter gray linen shirt, and a gray bowler. He’d even exchanged his usual tan vest for one of black leather.
“Where are you going?” she asked, her brow rising at the bulging canvas bag in his hand.
He’d been taking her in as well: she wore an emerald silk wrap cinched tight over a matching nightdress, with little white slippers poking out underneath the hem. In any other London residence, a young man simply could not knock on a lady’s bedroom door at this hour of the night and then proceed to stare so openly at her lack of proper clothing. But all the usual rules didn’t apply between Gabby and Rory. When he looked at her there were no flickers of admiration or desire. No curiosity. He had no intentions beyond protecting her, and for that reason she felt as comfortable with him as she did with Grayson.
Rory shook his head.
“Ye canna hunt wearin’ that.” He stepped into her room without an invitation.
Gabby closed the door. “Hunt?”
She followed Rory to her bed, where he promptly upended the canvas bag. The contents slid out and landed in a clinking heap on her pillowy duvet. Gabby gawked, instantly recognizing the strange-looking crossbow and a silver mesh net.
“Where did you get those?”
The last time she’d seen a net and crossbow like that, she’d been in the expansive courtyard within the Daicrypta mansion in Paris, surrounded by disciples who wanted to drain Ingrid’s blood. They had all been armed with this same weapon. Gabby remembered how the nets had sailed out of the crossbows, unfolding as they spun toward their targets.
“Chelle managed to nab it from the Daicrypta courtyard,” Rory answered. He lifted the crossbow and ran his hand down the stock’s straight silver plane. “The Alliance in Paris’ve been tryin’ to figure what it’s made of.”
Gabby approached her bed and noticed that the net had four long, slim metal bars in its center, like the ribs of an umbrella. One of those bars had been made slightly longer than the other three. The mesh between the bars was a simply done crosshatch, woven to leave rather large gaps, wide enough to put one’s hand through. The net wasn’t made of metal wire but of a strange, thin tubular material. And trimming the net was yet another tube, this one wider. She saw recurring slits along that tube and remembered how Ingrid and Vander had been sealed to the earth when they’d been captured beneath the nets. Gabby figured the tube had spikes hidden inside that came out to plunge into the ground.
She lifted a portion of the crosshatched net, expecting it to be heavy, but the material didn’t weigh more than one of her bed’s bolster pillows.
“Does the net gather up somehow? Before it’s shot out of the crossbow?” she asked.
Looking rather smug, Rory took the cumbersome netting from her by gripping the bottom of the longest metal bar. He pressed a steel-capped button located where all the bars joined in the center. Rory’s long bar stayed immobile, but whatever mechanism he’d engaged sent the other three bars swiveling around it, like ribbons on a Maypole. They wound tightly around the stationary bar, twisting and expertly tucking the mesh net as they closed. When it had all finished, Rory held what looked like an exceptionally long, thick crossbow bolt. Again, similar to a bound umbrella.
“Why did Chelle send it to you?” Gabby asked.
“She knows I like new toys,” Rory answered with a lopsided grin. He shrugged. “Suppose she thought we might have fun wi’ it, too.”