He huffed, as if offended. “It is not power and influence I seek, Miss Waverly. What I want is to understand the demons that come from that other realm. What do they want here? What are their patterns and desires? What are their limitations, their powers, and even their bodily compositions? The more we know, the better able we are to protect humankind.”
He sounded as passionate about his research as Nolan and other Alliance fighters did about the skill of demon hunting. Gabby was wary, though. He could have just been saying these things to appeal to her.
“You don’t perform experiments, as your father did?” she asked, stressing the word so that he knew exactly what sort of experiments she referred to.
“None that harm human beings,” he answered evenly. “I don’t believe Carver would take very kindly to such goings-on under his roof here, do you?”
The gargoyle protector at the Paris Daicrypta mansion, Dimitrie, had suffered endlessly for the things done to human test subjects under his roof. Both the victim and the villain were his human charges, putting Dimitrie between a rock and a hard place. He’d failed to protect his human charges—Robert Dupuis’s test subjects—so many times that the angel’s burns he’d received as punishment had scarred his back.
“If you’re so humane, why don’t the Alliance and Daicrypta work together in a much more visible fashion? It seems you both want the same things,” she said.
Instead of joining forces, though, the two underground societies held such contempt for one another that the only communication and partnerships seemed to happen behind closed doors.
Hugh continued around the sofa, toward the fireless hearth. “My father’s madness tainted the Daicrypta as a whole, and unfortunately, his power extended all over Europe. Except here,” he said, reaching for a small iron knob set into the wood paneling beside the hearth. She hadn’t noticed it before he’d brought her attention to it.
“Why?” she asked.
Hugh puckered his brow as he opened the door. “The dynamics of our father-son relationship were, suffice it to say, strained. In short—pardon the pun—I was not his ideal heir.”
“Because of your height?” She only felt bold enough to mention it because he had done so first with that pun.
“No,” Hugh said, stepping through the door and into another room. “Because we could not see eye to eye—whoops, I’ve done it again—on what it meant to be Daicrypta.”
Gabby thought carefully about Hugh’s revelations as she followed him into the connected room, this one windowless, lit by electric wall sconces and glass-domed ceiling fixtures.
“And what does it mean to you?” she asked.
Hugh approached a long worktable in the center of the room, outfitted with a series of wide drawers underneath the zinc top.
“That is something I can only demonstrate over time. Now tell me: what about the diffuser nets are you interested in knowing more about?”
He rolled one drawer open and removed from it the familiar crossbow and the tucked-up net dart. He set them on the long table.
“I want to know how they work,” Gabby answered, no longer nervous. “I know they are meant to capture demons, and I’ve seen them hold gargoyles as well. But can these nets also detain other creatures?”
Hugh processed her request with another stretch of silence. He reminded her of Ingrid in that way. Thinking before reacting. Weighing words as carefully as a jeweler might weigh the value of a mound of gold dust.
He left the long table and turned to a tall metal filing cabinet against the wall behind him. The six-drawer cabinet was covered in scraps of sketches and newspaper clippings, all fastened with thick, round magnets. Hugh pulled two magnets, currently out of use, free.
“Here, I want you to hold this,” he instructed, quickly walking back to the table and extending his hand over the zinc top. Gabby frowned at the circular magnet but did as he asked. The magnet was smooth and flat as a river stone.
He kept the second magnet and held it out in front of him. “Now hold yours out to mine.”
She kept her lips sealed and did as asked. Her magnet was less than an inch from his when she felt her magnet rear back and waver off to the side.
“Do you feel the magnetic field?” Hugh asked, their arms hovering over the table. “The way it balloons between your magnet and mine, rejecting their union even though they are made of the same material?”
Gabby felt her patience beginning to slip. “Yes, I know how magnets work. What does it have to do with the nets?”
Hugh gave his magnet a small push, forcing his way through the magnetic field and snapping the two black circles together.
“It’s lodestone,” he said. “A natural-forming magnet.”