“But you just took hold of my arm. I felt you,” Ingrid said, her fingers clamped around the dagger’s handle. “You have a human body.”
More laughter resounded, and Axia’s robes rippled in harmony. Ingrid was still watching the sway of them when something pummeled into her side and knocked her to the ground. Axia was now hovering over her instead of standing by the fountain. She’d simply appeared at Ingrid’s side, with the same fading blue mist marking where she’d been a moment ago.
Axia started to laugh again. Ingrid found a new grip on the blade’s handle and plunged it through the bottom of her robes. The knife struck something definite—Axia’s leg. Her caterwaul stabbed at Ingrid’s eardrums, but the angel disappeared once more, the dagger no longer rooted in flesh.
So she could be caught if taken by surprise. Ingrid got to her feet as another scream filled the abandoned square. This one came from above. Its familiarity made her lightheaded with relief. A shadow raced overhead, and as it passed, a Herculean arm took her with it. Ingrid’s feet were torn from the ground, the single gasp of air in her lungs driven out.
She angled herself toward Marco’s body and clung to him, expecting him to soar up and over the buildings, away from the square. But his wings stopped, his body seized, and the ground rushed at them. Marco flipped midair, so that when they crashed, the prominent ridge of his spine cracked the yellow stone. He shoved her from his chest, propelling her toward the narrow steps leading down to the street that meandered around the raised square.
Marco rolled over and crouched against the stone, his wings sinking into his back, his body reversing into his human form.
Ingrid climbed the steps. “Marco!”
Axia’s hooded form still presided over the square, as if she, and not the church, were its centerpiece.
“Go,” he growled, his vocal cords not quite shifted yet.
Ingrid had seen him like this before, when she’d used her angelic blood to control him.
“You cannot fight me, gargoyle,” Axia said. Ingrid noticed the difference in her voice when she spoke to him. There was no humor, no honey. There was only steel.
“And you cannot subdue me and chase my human at the same time,” Marco groaned, his face buried in the rubble of stone beneath him.
Axia said nothing, but almost immediately, a strident cry climbed up and out of Marco’s throat. His arms shook; his fingers curled into the fragments of stone as a line opened across his broad back. An invisible scalpel drew apart his skin, flaying him from shoulder blade to shoulder blade, directly underneath three similar white lines. Axia was inflicting an angel’s burn.
Marco grunted out a slew of curses as that burn ceased, black blood welled, and below it, another immediately began.
“Stop!” Ingrid screamed, but Axia was no longer focused on her.
Marco groaned and swore as the burn dragged slowly through his skin.
Ingrid backed down the steps toward the street, not wanting to leave him, and yet knowing she could do nothing if she stayed. Marco was buying her precious time to escape. She wouldn’t let it be for nothing.
Ingrid ran from the square, toward boulevard Saint-Michel, with the echoes of Marco’s screams knotting around her heart.
The reports of a Paris under siege had reached Gabby on the docks for the Dover-Calais ferry. The rumor Carver had relayed to Hugh about an incident in Paris had bothered her the eighty or so miles from London to the Dover docks. When Rory had placed a hand on the small of her back to usher her forward through a bottleneck of men and women at the end of the boarding ramp, however, she knew it was more than just a rumor.
“I don’t know what they were!” a woman had exclaimed in English while a French gentleman spouted off about enormous chiens crocs, or fanged dogs, and monstres ailés, or winged monsters. The clash of English and French had grown to a dull roar as Rory had shouldered their portmanteau, containing the finished angelic diffuser net, Ingrid’s blood stores, and a few common demon diffuser nets onto the ferry. Hugh, who had elected to bring his pet corvite in an enormous birdcage draped in black broadcloth, had led Gabby to seats far away from the excitement. The ferry had emptied as if it were going up in flames, the travelers for Paris converging around the ticketing office with demands of refunds. It had to be something else, something less absurd, people murmured as they moved away from the ferry—and yet they did not turn around and repurchase passage.