The ground beneath his feet dropped into a stepped slope, and Luc stumbled into the sunken garden sited beside the orangery. Vincent laughed, and with the sound, an icy spike hammered through Luc’s stomach. Was he too wounded to fight?
Vincent bounded into the garden. The winter had claimed whatever flowers the garden usually had, but there were still carefully pruned boxwoods, and stone and marble statuary was scattered along the crosshatched brick walkways. Constantine had a penchant for armless Italian women, or so it appeared. Luc stopped beside one statue, raised upon a stone pillar.
“Ingrid is more powerful than both of us. Touch her and she’ll bake your insides.”
Vincent sprang forward and spread his wings, his speed lifting him into the air. Luc wrapped his arm around the stone pillar and heaved it down into Vincent’s path. The Chimera reared back to avoid the falling statue while Luc planted his foot on the overturned pillar and launched himself into the air. He didn’t need to fly. He just needed to level the playing field.
Luc caught Vincent’s wing as he fell back to the earth and with a swipe of his talons carved through tough skin and flexible cartilage. White feathers speckled with black blood clouded the air as Vincent and Luc thudded onto the upended Italian statue, cracking it into several pieces. Vincent’s bottom bill ballooned as he screamed, his black paws pummeling Luc in the chest. Luc’s steely plates protected him, but he still sailed backward, his talons ripping free of Vincent’s wing. It hung, useless and bloodied, but Vincent came at Luc again, swinging his beak side to side like a scythe. Luc dodged it once, twice, but on the third swing, the pointed tip raked into his abdomen, tearing a long gash through his scales.
His heel slammed into something and he lost his balance. He fell backward into a fountain, the stump of his wing grinding into the stone of the dry basin. Vincent placed his paws on the rim of the fountain, and his garish pelican’s head, his small black eyes ringed by yellow feathers, loomed over Luc.
He screeched as he drew back, preparing, Luc knew, to impale him with his beak. When he lunged, Luc rolled to the side and Vincent’s bill hammered into the stone basin instead. The Chimera’s paws slid out from underneath him, as if he were a cat on ice. He slipped forward, momentarily stunned.
Luc knew he wouldn’t get another chance like this.
He hooked the talons on one hand and drove them through Vincent’s chest. He clasped the Chimera around the neck and gritted his teeth as he punctured skin, tendon, muscle, and finally, bone. Vincent went rigid. With a twist of his wrist, Luc’s talons sheared through a defiant swath of gristly sinew and ligaments, enlarging the wound. Grunting with resolve, his throat tight with disgust, Luc plunged the rest of his hand into the cavity of Vincent’s rib cage. The Chimera’s black eyes went wide as Luc’s palm filled with what he’d gone in for. He didn’t know if it was pity for Vincent or for himself that made his own chest feel as if it were being torn apart.
“We were human once,” Luc whispered, his hand hot and wet and throbbing with every thrash of Vincent’s heart. “You forgot that. I didn’t.”
He pulled his hand free. Vincent’s body drooped and Luc shoved him to the side with an easy thrust. His Chimera form flopped over the rim of the fountain, his pelican half draped inside the basin. Luc heaved himself to his feet and climbed out of the fountain, his muscles strung tight and bile rising high into his throat. Vincent’s true form deteriorated rapidly; ivory down and black fur pulled back into his skin, leaving him pale and naked; his vicious beak shrank into his face, reshaping into a mouth, chin, and nose; his eyes were still black, but they were human once again. They stared blankly into the basin.
The heart had gone still in Luc’s hand. He backed away, toward the slope of the sunken garden. Inside the orangery he could hear chaos, and when he walked in, Luc found he didn’t have the slightest urge to do more than stand and watch. Alliance fighters were quarreling among themselves on the floor of the orangery, while the gargoyles were still brawling in the air, though no longer physically. They screeched back and forth, arguing about Dusters and Axia and the fate of the city. They all just wanted answers, Luc knew, and no one had them, human or Dispossessed.
Vander saw Luc first. He held his hand up to a Roman, red-faced and shouting, and stepped away from him. That Roman fighter followed Vander’s attention, and then another one beside him did, and so on and so on. Within a minute, the rest of the Alliance had gone quiet. All of them stared at what Luc held in his hand. Gaston dropped from the bowers of the orangery jungle and landed on the tiles in front of Luc.
Constantine’s gargoyle pinned his eyes on Luc’s dripping hand, his expression as inscrutable as ever. Luc stayed where he was as one by one, every last gargoyle dropped to the floor and stared. The silence stretched on, but it wasn’t an expectant kind of quiet. No one waited for Luc to speak or explain.