“Seer, I saved your life this morning,” Luc stated with unnecessary intensity.
“You won’t hear another thank-you from me,” Vander replied and started to follow Nolan. Luc held up his arm.
“Have you been ordained yet?”
Vander pulled back. The question seemed completely irrelevant to the situation at hand, and yet Luc looked desperate to know.
“He isn’t being ordained until …” Ingrid paused, trying to remember. It seemed like years since the afternoon they’d strolled the Champs de Mars and Vander had asked her to attend the ceremony. “Until Sunday. Isn’t that right, Vander?”
He wouldn’t want her there now.
Vander frowned, his attention still on Luc. “Today is Wednesday, Ingrid.”
“What? It is?” Ingrid shook her head. She couldn’t believe she’d lost track of the days.
“You’d just returned from the Underneath,” Vander said as Ingrid tried to calculate where she had been and how she could have forgotten. “I didn’t want to bother you about the ceremony.”
Vander had been ordained. He was officially a reverend.
Luc rubbed his cheek before scratching his fingers over his scalp. “Of course it was you.”
“You know what, Luc? I won’t pretend to care what you’re talking about.” With a short, icy nod toward Ingrid, Vander excused himself.
Until that moment, Ingrid had never felt relieved to part from his company. She watched him disappear behind Hans and Hathaway. Both men had their eyes trained on her and Luc. She knew Hathaway had voted for her death once, and there was little question that Hans, had he been a Directorate member, would have agreed.
She turned her back on them and navigated her way toward the glass doors where Hugh Dupuis had released the corvite. The afternoon light had taken on a jaundiced tint, painting the shingled roof of Constantine’s stables a light honey. The day was winding down, and once again she had no idea where her brother was.
It had been quite a while since Ingrid had felt ordinary, without the lashes of a sparking electric whip beneath her skin. Vander’s mersian blood had rid her of that, and even now on this second day since her injection, Ingrid felt nothing. But the mersian cure couldn’t subdue the twitching of the line that had always tethered her to Grayson. Perhaps he no longer felt it, and perhaps for her, the line had grown slack. It was still there, though, and she could feel the incessant thrum of the connection, as though someone were bouncing upon it.
“Where are you?” she whispered against the cold glass. A circle of fog bloomed.
“I wish I could tell you,” Luc said as he came up behind her. He’d read her mind yet again.
She drew an infinity symbol in the circle of fog, her finger dipping and curving again and again. “I hate to think of him out there alone. What if his mersian dose has worn off?”
“He knows where Vander keeps the vials,” Luc answered. His solid reasoning was exactly what she needed. “Speaking of which, Vander should give you another dose.”
“I’m doing fine,” she insisted, though mostly she just didn’t want to have to sit with Vander and take his cure now that she’d made it clear she could give him absolutely nothing in return.
Ingrid turned to look over her shoulder at Luc. “You’re not going to tell me what happened just now with Irindi.”
“No.” The reply was quick and hoarse—and final.
She resumed gazing at the well-kept stables, the wide barn boards meticulously trimmed and nailed, the Pegasus weathervane cast in polished copper.
“I saw her, Luc. No net is going to be able to take Axia down, especially not if she knows it’s coming.” She kept her voice hushed, not wanting to upset Gabby. Her sister had already looked panicked when Constantine and Hugh had explained the elements of a severix demon.
“Then we need to find another way.”
“We need to surprise her,” Ingrid said, remembering the sickening tremor that had gone through her when the dagger had sunk into Axia’s flesh and muscle.
“She knows we’re sitting here, waiting for Hugh’s corvite to return. She knows we have a net. She knows everything.” The flaw in their hasty plan gaped open before Ingrid. “Why should she come when she could send her demons and Dusters? We aren’t going to have a chance at her.”
Luc’s fingers closed around her elbow. “I think you’re right. We need to leave.”
Ingrid faced him, casting off his gentle grip. “Run? Where to this time, Luc? No. No, we must face her. We must … we must go to her. She won’t expect it.”
Luc bit back his instant retort and settled, Ingrid was sure, for something kinder. “Ingrid, none of us are strong enough to fight her. You saw what she did to Marco. The only hope we had rested with the Order.”