“What now?” Grayson asked, and somehow Vander knew he wasn’t thinking about the mersian blood spreading through his system. He was asking about Axia. About the Harvest.
“Word has come from Rome.” Vander let the needle’s components settle into the jar of syrupy, red-tinged antiseptic. “The Directorate is sending us an emergency troop of Alliance hunters. They want Paris secured if Axia is to make a strike.”
Grayson finished with his bandage and rolled down his cuff. He would have thought the more hunters, the better, but Vander didn’t sound relieved.
“You don’t want them here?” Grayson asked.
Vander wiped his hands on some linen toweling and, without a reply, moved to a squat, freestanding zinc cabinet tucked into the corner of the room. He then took a key from his waistcoat and crouched to insert it into the padlock latching the doors.
“Two mornings ago, an Alliance assassin tried to kill Ingrid. Assassins don’t work on their own; the Directorate gives them their targets.” The padlock fell open and Vander swung the zinc doors wide. He stood up and allowed Grayson to see inside. There were three shelves, and on the center shelf were three glass jars filled with red liquid. He couldn’t smell the blood; the jars looked airtight. He just knew the color by now. The cabinet must have had a vapor compression system. Each jar was covered in a swirling pattern of frost.
“I’ve been drawing Ingrid’s blood every three or four days for about a month,” Vander said before further explaining about the blood-separating machine the Daicrypta had developed and how he and Nolan were creating something similar here in a room on the fourth floor.
Grayson eyed the contained blood with dawning realization. “You have angel blood in those jars.”
Vander closed the cabinet doors and replaced the padlock. “The Directorate has ordered us to hand Ingrid’s blood over when the troops and their representative arrive.”
He twisted the key and then dropped it back into the pocket of his baize-green waistcoat.
“Why do they want it?” Grayson asked, though he could think of a few reasons on his own. Power, for example. Ingrid had been able to push gargoyles into submission a couple of times, and Grayson had heard about the Alliance’s recent proposed gargoyle regulations.
“I imagine they plan to use the machine Nolan and I have been building to separate it and draw out the angelic blood. Maybe they have another machine in Rome that already works. I don’t know, but after that assassin, I don’t trust the Directorate,” Vander answered, hushing his voice and glancing toward the closed door.
“You could waste it. Pour it into the Seine or down a drain, into the sewers, even.”
Vander was shaking his head before Grayson had stopped suggesting methods of destruction.
“It’s angel blood,” he said, perking up as footsteps approached the medical-room door. “There has to be some good we can do with it.”
The doorknob turned, cutting off Grayson’s chance to argue. Monsieur Constantine let himself in and immediately dropped into a graceful bow.
“Messieurs,” he greeted them, his charcoal derby in hand. His usual gray palette matched the mood in the room perfectly.
“What are you doing here?” Vander asked, absent his usual good manners.
“I’ve informed Monsieur Hans that lessons at Clos du Vie have been suspended. My home is being watched, the comings and goings of my students observed. I think it would be wise for all Dusters to maintain low visibility for the time being. Lord Fairfax,” Constantine said, addressing Grayson by the courtesy title that his place in the British peerage afforded him. He loathed it, and wished Constantine would simply call him Grayson or Mr. Waverly. “I am very sorry about our friend Léon.”
Grayson wanted to rewind the days, go back to when he and Léon had parted on the Champs-élysées. He would change things. He’d invite Léon to go with him to see Chelle. Let their friends wait for them in one of the cafés near the flat, he’d say.
Grayson wasn’t sure his voice would remain steady if he tried to say anything about Léon. Instead, he tapped into a resource that was always plentiful: anger.
“Does your gargoyle know who’s doing this to us?” he asked.
Constantine surprised him with a ready answer. “Members of the Chimera caste.”
So Gaston did know. And if he knew, then so did Luc and Marco and all the others.
“Well, then we have to do something,” Grayson said. Vander and Constantine exchanged glances, but neither of them spoke. “We know who to stop,” Grayson insisted. “So let’s go. Let’s do it.”
“Do what?” Vander asked. “Track down every Chimera we have a file on and ask if he’s killed a Duster recently? They won’t speak to us. We have no sway over them, not with Lennier, our one link to the Dispossessed, gone.”
Grayson usually appreciated cool logic, but right then it was hard to stomach.