Vander leaped up and stepped back, nearly treading on Ingrid’s toes. He caught her arm and kept a firm grasp, as if preparing for Hans to draw a weapon. But the faction leader only read her and Vander’s shocked expressions.
“I’ve already been through the file cabinets in Nolan’s room,” Hans said. “The Duster dossiers were missing. But we found them.”
Hans glanced toward the door, and Ingrid saw that two more Alliance members had joined them.
“They’re a pile of scraps and ash in the kitchen stove,” Hans finished.
Vander’s grip on Ingrid’s arm went slack.
“When did you last see Nolan Quinn?” Hans asked.
Nolan. He’d had a key to the cabinet as well. Ingrid had seen him lock and unlock it time and again.
“Yesterday,” Vander said, muttering a curse under his breath. “Yesterday morning. After the Directorate’s telegram arrived.”
Nolan had taken the blood? He’d destroyed the Duster dossiers? He’d defied direct orders from the Directorate and what … gone into hiding?
“The blood was still there, at least until noon,” Vander added.
“So he’s had over twenty-four hours on the run,” Hans said, kicking back into action and heading toward the door.
Vander’s voice bellowed after Hans, stopping the faction leader in his tracks. “Whatever Nolan is doing, it’s for the Alliance.”
Hans swiveled back around. “Nolan Quinn is a traitor, and he’ll be dealt with. We have our orders. The Directorate expects those orders to be obeyed. Follow them, Burke, and you, even with your demon blood, might find yourself on the right side of things when all is said and done. But they want the rest of the Dusters.” His steely gaze landed on Ingrid, then shifted back to Vander. “And we will deliver.”
Hans left the room, the other two Alliance members following in his wake. Ingrid stepped forward and touched Vander’s wrist, his hand propped on his hip. He looked down at her fingers and stared at them as if they might offer answers.
“Nolan’s protecting us,” she whispered. “He burned the files and took the blood because he knew something was wrong. But, Vander, what will they do to him?”
He’ll be dealt with, Hans had said. The Alliance had thrown Tomas, a traitorous member, into prison for the rest of his life. Nolan’s freedom could be on the line.
Vander covered Ingrid’s hand. “I don’t know. But I do know that I won’t give them a single Duster.”
And then he’d likely wind up charged with treason as well. It made her grip his wrist tighter. How had the Alliance gone from something good to something so corrupt and wrong?
Or perhaps, Ingrid reasoned, it had never been completely good in the first place.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The London Daicrypta headquarters had been two or three steps down in grandeur compared to its Parisian counterpart, but the London Alliance headquarters, compared to H?tel Bastian, was more like what awaited at the bottom of a refuse-laden gutter pipe.
The faction had set up shop in a century-old brick mill near Fleet Ditch, with a working front for the public as a storage facility for mechanical wares. They had even filled the first floor with all sorts of gears and engines, cogs and wheels, and other contraptions that were surely, Gabby thought, the iron and steel innards of some machinery, in order to make the building appear legitimate.
However, the next two floors of the building, which covered nearly an entire block, was the residence of some thirty Alliance members. It was, Gabby had noted in the few times she and Rory had visited, a much more organized and well-outfitted Alliance faction than what she’d witnessed in Paris. She had been welcomed earlier that month by their leader, Benjamin, a lean yet muscular man in his midforties who looked like he could still move and fight with the strength and agility of a fighter half his age. He’d assured her that the incident with Lennier would not be held against her here in London, and that she would be considered a friend of the Alliance. He’d stirred her hope that perhaps, with the right training, she could be more than a friend.
However, as Gabby sat with Benjamin and a few other upper-rank fighters in the second floor of the warehouse, discussing the demon trapping diffuser nets, she wondered if she was a fit for the Alliance at all.
“You don’t seem to understand what these nets can do,” she said, pushing herself up from the uncomfortable sofa Benjamin kept in the convening room, a glassed-in office that had perhaps once been used by a foreman. The office sat up a short flight of steps that looked over the open second-floor loft.
“They stop a demon in its tracks and diffuse its power, rendering it completely defenseless,” Gabby explained for what felt like the tenth time. She and Rory had been summoned to the Fleet Ditch warehouse to explain their visit to Hugh Dupuis’s home. Gabby wasn’t certain how Benjamin had learned of it, but she figured Hugh and his corvites weren’t the only ones keeping their eyes on her.