“You made Mama a promise,” Ingrid said. “What was it?”
Grayson quit fiddling with her ring and stood up. His light blond hair flopped forward and nearly covered his brows. It had grown past his ears and had an easy wave to it at this length.
“I can’t come back here to live, Ingrid. Accepting the rectory as my home again will bind Marco to me.” He said the gargoyle’s name with a heavy dose of acid. “I don’t want him, and he doesn’t need another human to guard right now anyway. But do you really think Mother would let me go off without having a place lined up?”
“I can’t imagine she would,” Ingrid replied, refraining from saying anything more. Like how worried their mother had been over his absence.
Grayson seemed to hear the words anyway.
“I don’t know if you’re safe with me,” he said.
“I wish you trusted yourself as much I trust you.”
He couldn’t make a reply to that, it seemed, so instead, he leaned over and kissed her forehead.
“Mother’s already found a flat across the street for me to let. I promise I won’t disappear again.”
She jabbed him lightly in the stomach before he could straighten back up. He pretended to double over in pain.
“See that you don’t,” she said. “Now that Axia has all of her blood back, I have a feeling we’ll need one another.”
CHAPTER NINE
Grayson leaned against one of the steel tables inside H?tel Bastian’s medical room, his right sleeve rolled up and cuffed past his elbow. It was the same shirt he’d been wearing for the past month: white linen with small ivory buttons and a short club collar. Grayson had never had to wash his own clothes before, and he was certain the numerous times he’d plunged the thing into brown tap water at the flat hadn’t done the expensive bespoke shirt, made just for him on London’s Savile Row, much good. But he was also sure it wouldn’t have caused it to shrink.
Grayson’s muscles had bulked over the last few weeks, causing the seams to bite into his shoulders and the buttons at his chest to pull when fastened. It couldn’t be blamed on an abundance of food—he and Léon had scraped by, living on bread and cheese, eating well only on visits to Constantine’s chateau. The change in his musculature had to be attributed to the numerous times he’d changed from human to hellhound. Sometimes the shift had been on purpose. Other times, he hadn’t been able to fight his body’s urge to let go. Grayson wondered if his muscles had hung on to a little bit of the hellhound bulk to make shifting less of an ordeal.
“I’m glad you went to her,” Vander said from where he stood at one of the glassed in cabinets. He had his kit out and was drawing blood from a vial into the glass barrel of a syringe.
Grayson hadn’t gone to H?tel Bastian for his first mersian blood injection, as he and Vander had planned. The massacre at the flat and Ingrid’s abduction into the Underneath had made them both forget. Seeing Vander in Ingrid’s room at the rectory that morning had reminded Grayson, so he’d made his way to Alliance headquarters after tucking Ingrid into bed to rest some more.
Grayson flexed his bicep. The length of red tubing tied tightly around his arm stretched and whitened to pale rose.
“You were right. I should have gone back to the abbey a long time ago. If I had, she wouldn’t have followed my friends to the flat. She wouldn’t have been anywhere near that alley,” Grayson said.
Vander came toward the table with the barrel full of what Grayson knew was mersian blood. “ ‘That which hath been is named already.’ ” Vander glanced up with a wry grin. “Ecclesiastes.”
“I could use a translation.” Grayson held out his arm and attempted not to look at the long, thin steel needle.
Vander positioned Grayson’s arm and rubbed the bulging blue vein he intended to stick.
“What’s done is done,” he said, piercing Grayson’s skin without hesitation. A press of the plunger and the barrel’s contents slowly emptied.
“Please, Reverend, no more biblical code,” Grayson teased.
The last drop of mersian blood disappeared from the glass barrel and Vander removed the needle tip. A bead of blood welled up on the injection site and gravity pulled it down Grayson’s forearm.
“It’s always about blood,” he said as Vander removed the rubber tourniquet and held out a wad of linen. Grayson staunched the blood and began to wrap the linen around his elbow. “Angel blood, demon blood, Duster blood. For once I’d like it to be about something else. Like, I don’t know … food. Or whiskey. Why couldn’t Axia just crave a shot of good whiskey?”
Vander smiled but didn’t laugh. He was taking apart the needle and syringe, preparing to dip the pieces in a jar of carbolic acid.