Luc moved without thought. Without plan. He hurtled into the slim gap between the Seer and Vincent and planted his foot on Vander’s chest. He shoved him away, perhaps with more force than necessary, and turned to face Vincent head-on—a move he should have made first.
Fire tore down Luc’s left wing, rending through leathery membrane and thin cartilage. Vincent’s claws sheared into Luc’s wing, wrenching him down onto the terra-cotta tiles. The agony was worse than the white-hot scorch of an angel’s burn, but what turned Luc’s stomach and brought on a pulse of panic was the sudden featherlight weight of his left wing. Luc rolled to his right and stole a glance, but he looked away and faced Vincent before he could fully understand what he’d seen: his wing, still attached to the thick bone base in his back, but except for the first peaked gable, it had been almost completely sheared off. The wing drooped, lifeless, on the floor, hanging by only a finger’s length of scaled membrane.
“This is an unexpected windfall,” Vincent snarled. He shook his claws and spattered Luc’s obsidian blood onto the fronds of a palm tree. “Destroying you should be much easier now.”
He used his beak to slash at Luc—a predictable advance Luc easily avoided, even while in agony. He caught the ungainly beak around its wider center, hooking it tight between his forearm and bicep while swinging himself onto Vincent’s white-feathered head. The Chimera bucked and squawked, but Luc held on, giving up a fraction of his hold in order to rake his talons across Vincent’s down-covered neck.
Vincent’s paws crashed onto Luc’s hanging wing. He felt it catch and twist, and with another crack of pain, the final few inches of scales and membrane severed. Vincent threw Luc off, pinwheeling him through the air, into the stand of palms.
“Luc!”
The Seer. Coming back. The idiot. A grating shriek followed the Seer’s shout. Vincent loped to the side, a gleaming silver crossbow bolt lodged in the muscle of his front left leg. Vincent roared at the Seer but, instead of resuming his earlier attack, shot upward, through the combatants above, and out through one of the shattered roof panes.
Luc clambered from the destroyed palms, slick with his own blood, and attempted to lift off after the Chimera. His remaining wing propelled him into a drastic slant, and unable to sustain flight, he thudded back down into the palms.
“Luc—” Vander approached the palms, his eyes riveted to the mangled remains of his wing.
“No pity,” Luc growled. Vander didn’t need to understand the words. He nodded and backed away.
Luc plunged through the broken palms on foot toward the orangery door. Once outside, he’d try to fly again. By fleeing, Vincent had showed the true coward he was. Hopefully his followers had been witnesses to his retreat.
A brassy ridge of light pushed up over the bare trees beyond Constantine’s vineyards, the lawns and trellised rows of pruned vines deserted. Luc fluttered his one wing and the bony base of the one he’d lost. The motion jolted pain through his back. It reached into his arms and legs, and he stumbled, his heart pumping out a panicked rhythm. He’d had scratches along his wings before, and a mercurite-dipped rod jammed through both, but never anything this grave. Wings could heal and regenerate, but Luc didn’t know how long it would take.
Movement to the right of the orangery walls attracted his attention. Vincent was there, on the frosted brown grass, the Seer’s dagger gone from his leg. Luc fought the urge to close his eyes, to sink to his knees and breathe through the agony. He had to pay attention. Had to fight. Giving in now would mean losing everything, including his life.
It’s only pain, he told himself. Luc blinked away the fogged corners of his vision and focused on Vincent with new determination. The sleek curves of his panther’s body began just below the bloody gouges Luc had made in his lithe pelican neck. Luc had seen some horrid Chimera blends, and Vincent’s was one of them.
“Do you actually believe you can have her?” Vincent said, his meaty black paws gliding over the grass toward Luc. The tip of his tail rolled with the suppressed excitement a real panther would show while stalking its prey.
“When you are dead and I am elder,” Vincent began as he herded Luc backward, “I will enjoy making an example of your beloved abomination. However … I may stop to investigate what the bother is all about first.”
Luc’s snout crinkled back, but he kept his teeth ground together. He wasn’t game for the distraction of a verbal fracas, which seemed to be exactly what Vincent was attempting to incite. He believed he had a leg up on Luc. Luc, with one wing and one bloody stump. Wings were as important to gargoyles as air and blood. Wings were strength and majesty. They were feared. What use was a gargoyle without them?