London Daicrypta headquarters was nowhere near as impressive as the Parisian Daicrypta seat, a Montmartre mansion that must have once been home to royalty. The simple whitewashed Georgian home rested snugly in the heart of Belgravia, between Turk’s Row and Sloan Square. The place looked like every other building along the street: a clean stone fa?ade and four stories of tall, polished windows. There was no indication at all, from where Gabby stood on the well-swept front steps, that the people inside were demonologists with a penchant for controversial experiments involving both humans and creatures from the Underneath.
As she reached for the bronzed pineapple knocker, her gaze lifted and stuck on the triangular frieze above the door. A man’s face had been carved into the stone, his mouth wide with horror. A small, clownish-looking gargoyle protruding from the stone frieze was nibbling on the man’s ear with razor teeth. Gabby sighed and brought the knocker down hard, twice.
The other night, on their way back to Waverly House, Rory had been muttering a slew of crude epithets for Hugh Dupuis and the Daicrypta, while Gabby had been considering how to get her hands on some information. Namely, Hugh Dupuis’s home address.
The following morning she’d quietly asked the butler, Reeves, and with a stiff bow, he’d set off to fulfill her request. He’d returned with an address in less than an hour. Meanwhile, Rory had received a second coded telegram from Nolan, this one saying that Ingrid had been taken into the Underworld and drained of her angel blood. Gabby had immediately known two things: Axia would now be able to come here, into their realm, and so far, the Alliance had no weapon with which to fight her. Gabby’s mind had gone directly to the diffuser net. The Alliance had nothing like it in their weapons cache, but it could bond to a demon and seal it into place. What if the nets could work on other creatures that weren’t of this world? What if they could capture an angel?
The door to the London Daicrypta swung open on soundless hinges and Gabby’s eyes went wide.
“You!” She was looking up into the face of the gargoyle that had interrupted her and Rory’s sparring at the dry docks and delivered a message from Marco.
The man smirked down at her, his ginger beard and mustache appearing redder than they had in the sheltered light of the dry docks.
“Me,” he replied, a thumb pointing up over their heads, toward the frieze.
Gabby didn’t need to see it again. “You’re a clown gargoyle?”
His goading smirk fell off quickly.
“There ain’t no clown gargoyles,” he said with an irritated sniff. “I’m of the Primate caste.”
She raised her chin, suddenly amused. “You mean monkey.”
The gargoyle squared his shoulders. “I mean Primate. Now what’s your business here?”
Gabby bit her lip to stop herself from laughing. The poor man. She could only imagine what he looked like in true form.
“I am here to call on Hugh Dupuis,” she managed to say without cracking a smile.
The monkey man—oh, good heavens, it was too ridiculous, she thought—stood aside and allowed Gabby to step into the foyer. Though small, the interior was stylish, with mint-green walls and creamy trim, potted palms at the base of the curved stairwell, and a mahogany porter’s chair, where the gargoyle likely sat waiting for the door knocker to sound.
The increasingly put-out gargoyle led her from the foyer and down the hallway directly ahead. Underneath a section of ceiling that had been outfitted with a skylight—for there was an odd shaft that cut through the center of the home—he stopped and rapped on a door. A muffled reply came from within, and the gargoyle, with one last glower, opened the door and stood aside.
Gabby, having been distracted by seeing this gargoyle again, had temporarily forgotten her nerves. She knew what the Daicrypta was and remembered all too well fighting off the disciples who had been studying under Robert Dupuis. Paying Dupuis’s son a call without more than her short sword in her cape for protection was a risk. Rory would be furious. After the second telegram’s arrival, she had told him she wasn’t feeling well and wanted to take a long bath and rest for the day. He likely still thought her sleeping in her darkened room at Waverly House.
She stepped inside what appeared to be Hugh Dupuis’s study. Through the slanted crimson veil of her hat she saw bookshelves lining the walls, all of them stuffed with texts. Brown leather sofas and club chairs sat before a hearth, and there was a large desk in front of a bay window that jutted out over the slim lane between this home and the neighboring house. Hugh Dupuis was lounging in a chair behind the desk, his raised brows revealing his surprise at seeing her. Her brow lifted as well, for on his right arm was a leather falconry gauntlet, and perched upon it was a massive, oily black corvite demon.
“Thank you, Carver. That will be all,” Hugh said. The gargoyle grunted before slipping back into the hall and shutting the door loudly.
Gabby kept her eyes fastened on the Daicrypta doyen, who was dangling something that looked like an earthworm in front of the corvite’s sharp beak. She watched in horror, prepared to see the demon bird snip off Hugh’s fingers as it snatched the bait. Instead, it gently nibbled the squirming end of the worm before taking it from Hugh’s hand. He stroked the bird’s breast while it finished its snack.