“I don’t require handling,” she replied.
“I’ll take ye out again tonight. We’ll find plenty of demons to dispatch in Whitechapel—”
Gabby’s interest had just been hooked when the door to the carriage swung open and then closed again, and suddenly there was a person on the seat next to Rory. Her right hand went to her boot and the dagger she kept there, but she was slower than Rory. The tip of his blade was already pricking the stranger’s throat.
The stranger’s hands went up in a gesture of surrender, the square case he’d been holding clunking to the floor at his feet. He wore a hat with a wide, floppy front brim, pulled low to obscure his face. As soon as Gabby’s heart had slowed a notch, her eyes noticed details again—like the broad shape of the man’s shoulders and the calluses on his palms. She knew those hands.
“Nothing like a warm Alliance welcome,” he said, one hand slowly moving to push up the brim of his cap.
Nolan Quinn paid no attention to the knife falling away from his throat or to the curses Rory threw at him. He held Gabby’s shocked gaze, his lips pressed into an uncertain frown. Waiting, she thought, to see how she would react. There were too many thoughts all at once. So many that Gabby, floundering in Nolan’s blue stare, found that there was nothing at all she could say or do. So she sat back against the cushions, folded her hands in her lap, lifted her chin imperiously, and said nothing.
“Ye look like hell,” Rory said to break the tension.
He most certainly did. Nolan hadn’t shaved in days. Gabby had never seen him with so much dark stubble. His clothing wasn’t dirty but definitely looked as if it had been slept in. Well, perhaps just traveled hard in, for the shadows beneath his eyes hinted that he’d slept little.
Even with these defects, plus the scent of sweat and burnt coal that clung to him, Nolan looked so deliciously handsome that Gabby had to remind herself to breathe. And that he had spurned her.
“Listen,” Nolan said, too tense for a witty rejoinder. “I probably shouldn’t have come here, but there was nowhere else I could think to go. I had to act fast.”
Rory sheathed his knife and pulled his coat closed. “What’s happened?”
The traffic must have cleared up, for their driver slapped the reins and the carriage started rocking again.
Gabby attempted to keep her expression cool. Nolan flicked his gaze toward her a few times as he explained how the Directorate had wanted Ingrid’s leftover angel blood and the Duster files, and how his instinct had started tolling like a bell, telling him to avoid giving either to the arriving representative at all costs. When Nolan told them of tossing the files into the burning stove and then taking the blood stores, Gabby’s mask of disinterest cracked and finally fell apart.
“You took the blood?” she asked, even though the answer was quite clear. Here Nolan sat, inside her carriage in London, and at his feet was a square leather case, about the size of one of Gabby’s hatboxes.
“Jesus, Cousin,” Rory breathed. “Ye defied Directorate orders. Have ye gone mad?”
Nolan ripped off his hat and his black hair fell around his forehead. He raked it back.
“It was instinct, Rory,” he said. “I had to follow it. We’re hunters. We survive on instinct. Mine screamed at me to take that blood and run, and so I did. I’ll worry about the consequences later, all right?”
At that word—consequences—Gabby’s stomach slipped into a knot. What would they do to Nolan when they found him?
“You think the Directorate means to harm the Dusters,” she said, the vision of Nolan tossing file after file into the stove at H?tel Bastian playing through her mind.
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “They’re Axia’s pawns. Who knows what she’s going to use them for, but it won’t be good.” He opened his eyes and fixed them on hers. “Yes. I think they plan to harm the Dusters. If only to cut Axia’s plans off at the knees.”
Gabby sprang forward, sliding to the edge of her seat. “What about my sister? And Grayson? Why didn’t you bring them with you?”
“Your sister has the best protection the universe has to offer, lass. And do you really believe your brother would have gone sneaking off with me anywhere?”
No. Not after their last encounter, when Nolan had threatened Grayson’s life for leading a hellhound into the Daicrypta courtyard.
“Ye could have burned the blood with the files,” Rory said, all calmness and logic, whereas Gabby’s head swam with the confusing muddle of deceit and politics.
“No,” Nolan replied. He tapped the case with the side of his foot. “Just as instinct told me to keep it out of the Directorate’s hands, it also told me to keep it safe. I don’t know why or how, but …” He sighed, sounding exhausted. “It’s got to help us.”