“Everyone likes it when I’m naked,” he replied as another shot cracked off and hit the smooth yellow marble less than a yard from his bare feet. “I imagine he objects to the color of my blood. Let’s fly.”
Luc swore under his breath. “I can’t.”
Marco stared at him.
“Vincent,” Luc said, hoping it was enough of an explanation for now.
“I’ve helped you fly before,” Marco said. He rolled his head and shoulders and then, wincing from the pain of the angel’s burns, shuddered into his cinnamon scales. The policeman opened up a volley of shots, and a second rifle joined in from another corner of the square. Luc didn’t have time to undress. His true form burst through the borrowed livery, though with only half of its usual grandeur. Marco surged into the air, the talons of one foot clamped tight around the bony stump of Luc’s lost wing. He beat the air with his one wing, his speed slower than Marco’s, making their rhythm choppy, but at least Luc didn’t spin into a dive.
The reports of the rifles faded as the two gargoyles glided into the thick orange smog. To be elder, Luc thought, and yet be dragged through the air like this, like some useless, decrepit invalid, was pathetic. By the time the abbey’s bell towers came into sight, Luc was certain he’d never been more humiliated. Marco released the remains of Luc’s wing as they crossed over the flat hedgerow top; then he veered toward the carriage house loft, presumably to search for clothes. Scores of weeping black ridges ribbed his back between his wings, mirroring his flayed human skin.
Luc coasted toward Ingrid’s bedroom window, where the gauzy white curtains had been tied back. He’d just started to dip into a slanted fall when his talons caught the wooden ledge. He lost his balance, overcorrected, and splintered off a piece of pulpy wood. The casement windows flew inward, revealing Ingrid, her mouth open in alarm. Luc fell inside, his humiliation complete.
“Luc!”
Her hands wrapped around his arm and tugged in a fruitless attempt to lift his bulky form from the floor.
“Oh, Luc, what happ—”
She let out a shriek and he guessed she had noticed his destroyed wing.
Luc pushed himself to his feet and angled his back away from her. He didn’t want her to see him struggle, or to stare at the pitiful stump. She’d covered her mouth with her hands, and her eyes burned with unshed tears. He shook his head, trying to tell her not to cry. She took her hands from her mouth and laid them flat against the plates of his chest.
“Will you be all right?” She fanned her hands over his chest, down the hard swells of muscle over his abdomen, and then dragged them to his arms. She touched him as though inspecting him for damage, her fingers light as a breeze against the thickness of his scales.
Luc nodded. He had to shift back—he had to tell her about the battle, about becoming elder. He wanted to know what had happened to her out there with Axia as well. The painful memory of his torn wing sinking back into his body on a reverse shift was still fresh enough to make him hesitate.
Ingrid’s fingertips came to Luc’s mouth. Her thumb brushed across the leather of his bottom lip, and then her satiny palms cupped the lines of his jaw. She was so soft. So fragile, and yet here she stood making contact with a beast.
Ingrid had touched his mouth before—in the underground shopping arcade after the mimic demon attack. Luc had jerked away, ashamed of how ugly he was. But he knew now that she wasn’t touching him to explore something grotesque. She loved him. She loved all of him, every scale, every monstrous detail, right down to his hard leather lips. Still, he wasn’t prepared for her to stand on the tips of her toes and press her mouth to them.
Her kiss was just a whisper. Nothing more than a promise. A reassurance. He faced the pain of his wing and shed his scales, trimming down into his human form while Ingrid’s hands were still against him. She sucked in a breath as his steel plates dissolved under her palms, to be replaced with the smooth, pale skin of his chest.
Once his talons had formed into blunt fingers, with no danger of shearing through her skin, Luc curled them around her waist and brought her against his body. Her dress, the same wilted silk she’d worn for more than two days now, brushed his bare skin. Nothing had ever felt so fine. She kissed the shallow canyon running between his pectorals and let her lips linger.
“I’m elder,” he told her. Saying it made it real, so he said it again. “I’m elder. Ingrid, you can be mine again. Come to common grounds with me.”
The tip of her nose drew a line across his chest as she shook her head. “I can’t. It’s still forbidden to take a human. Being elder doesn’t change that.” Her eyes lifted to his. “Does it?”