She looked again at his dark gray hunting attire. “What, tonight? Rory, I’m not certain I’m ready.”
Practice sparring at the dry dock during daylight hours was one thing. Demon hunting at night was something altogether different. She’d gone out on her own in Paris one evening in February, wanting to prove to Carrick Quinn that she could hunt and be useful to the Alliance. Instead, she’d clashed with an appendius demon and gotten herself stuck with the poisonous horned tip of its arm. Nolan had needed to use mercurite to destroy the poison before it burned through her body and killed her. Gabby still wasn’t sure what had caused her the most anguish: the poison, the cure, or the humiliation of failure.
Rory packed the Daicrypta crossbow and bound net into his canvas bag.
“ ’Tis time to go out, Gabby.”
With startling finesse, Rory ripped a dagger from his vest. He pivoted on one heel while sinking into a crouch and chucked the dagger across the room, toward the open window. Gabby heard the short, surprised shriek of a corvite but didn’t see the demon bird itself before it exploded into a cloud of emerald death sparks. Rory straightened his legs and strode to the window.
“That thing was beginnin’ to annoy me,” he said, retrieving the dagger that had clattered onto the brick window ledge when the demon had vanished.
He took a cloth from one of his coat’s inner pockets and ran it along the blade, black with demon blood. He acted with such quiet certitude, such stealth. Gabby wished for the same skill. She knew he was right. It was time she moved to the next level.
Gabby nodded. “I’ll get dressed.”
The London docks were no place for a lady. Gabby walked along the Wapping Basin quay wishing she didn’t feel so much like an earl’s daughter. She hadn’t in Paris those few times she’d been out with Chelle tracking demons. But Paris had been more than just a new and different city. There, Gabby had entered an entirely different world. It had given her permission, in a way, to be an entirely different person. Here in London, in the city she had always known, the old Gabby kept trying to creep back in.
Her heeled boots clacked along the stone quay, and the river water slurped in and out of the dock’s entrance basin with a constant push and pull. The small, three-acre basin was silent otherwise, having mostly fallen out of use with the larger ships coming in to port farther upstream at the Shadwell entrance. Rory had chosen this spot for its privacy. He walked next to her, the two of them draped in near blackness. There was only a handful of lamps lighting the rows of four-story warehouses, and another string of them up ahead along the jetty and the Western Dock, where light ships and barges heaved gently in the water.
There were a few people milling about, but nothing like the pandemonium the docks must have been like during the day. Gabby saw shadows moving between warehouse lanes and around corners. Not demons, she thought. One had a sack thrown over his shoulder—a rag-and-bone man. Another had the messy upswept hair of a loitering prostitute. Muted laughter came from one of the ships moored to the Western Dock. Sailors.
“My cousin would spear my guts and roast ’em over an open flame if he knew I’d brought ye here,” Rory said, voice hushed. “He wouldna like that I’ve been trainin’ ye, either.”
His eyes roamed the docks and saw, Gabby knew, more than she did. Rory was competent, and she trusted him, but she still wished Nolan could be the one teaching her how to hunt. He had been going to. When his father had told Gabby she couldn’t be part of the Alliance, Nolan had vowed to train her in private.
“I don’t think he’d mind so much anymore,” Gabby said softly as they made a right and moved parallel to a row of brick warehouses. She breathed in the sweet scent of tobacco stores in the cool, still air.
“Nolan’s being a bloody dunderhead right now, but I know my cousin. He’s gone half daft he’s so in love wi’ ye, laoch. Just give him a little more—” Rory paused on the narrow walkway between the warehouses and the Western Dock’s high quay wall. His arm came up, level with Gabby’s shoulders, and stopped her from taking another step.
“Ye don’t want to step on it,” he whispered, his attention fixed on the ground before them.
Gabby followed his gaze. In the low light it appeared to be a slug. The largest slug she’d ever seen. It was about the length of her hand and the width of three fingers, and it moved with surprising speed, cinching and stretching, its two feelers pointed in the direction of the tobacco warehouse. It wasn’t alone. A line of them crawled up from where the quay wall dropped off into the watery Western Dock.
Without speaking, she and Rory stepped to the edge of the wall and leaned over. The slugs were climbing up the slick, mossy stone, coming from a pale mass floating in the water.