The Beautiful and the Cursed: Marco's Story (3 page)

Grace had locked him out.

He supposed he deserved it.

With a creeping smile, Marco braced one foot on the balcony rail and heaved himself up. Standing on the rail, he peered down the five-story drop to the lawn.

Marco jumped. He didn’t need his wings for this.

There were far more than the one hundred guests Grace had expected in attendance at the Bartolis’ annual midsummer fête. More than two hundred invitations had gone out (not including Lady Arabella’s unsanctioned invitation extended to the mystery demon), and more than half of the recipients had replied in the positive.

Hôtel Dugray was an utter madhouse by eight o’clock that evening. The guests had started arriving a half an hour before, and with each addition, the weight of Marco’s responsibility increased.

Lady Arabella’s demon could arrive at any moment, and every one of the guests was Marco’s to protect.

When Marco came out of the butler’s pantry with a polished silver soup urn the cook had urgently requested to replace another marred by a deep scratch, he crossed paths with a liveried server.

“Take this to the cook,” Marco said, thrusting the urn in the server’s direction.

“Thanks, but I brought my own silver.”

Marco’s ears itched at the American accent. He glanced up and saw the Seer holding the panels of his footman’s jacket open. He had outfitted the black silk interior with sheaths for two daggers and straps for a hand crossbow and darts.

“I hope you don’t mind my alterations,” he said.

“Altered or not, the moment you put that livery on, you commenced taking orders from me.” Marco jammed the urn into Vander Burke’s stomach. “Take it. To. The. Cook.”

Coughing, Vander did as he was told. Unfortunately, he returned to Marco’s side less than a minute later.

“When can I see them?” he asked. The din in the kitchen and surrounding corridors was loud enough to keep their conversation private.

“What sort of demon would disguise itself as a human and meet secretly with a young lady in order to garner an invitation to a ball?” Marco’s question stopped the Seer cold. A kitchen maid rammed into Vander’s arm and nearly upset her balanced stack of china dishes.

“You’ve spoken to your humans, I take it,” Vander said once she had passed.

“Only one. The lady’s maid,” Marco replied, searching the bowels of the town house fruitlessly for Grace. “She told me Lady Arabella’s mystery companion would be attending the party tonight.”

“Are you certain her companion is a demon?”

Marco pulled the Seer out of the path of a footman holding a round tray of empty champagne flutes.

“Why else would my humans have returned with dust clinging to them?”

Vander averted his eyes. There was something he wasn’t telling Marco.

“If I could see Lady Arabella for myself?” he asked.

Pestilent human.

Marco snapped his fingers at another passing footman, this one with a tray of fluted glasses sparkling with champagne. He took the tray and handed it to Vander. The Seer’s elbow wobbled.

“Spill a single drop and you will be confined to the corridors,” Marco said, then jerked his head toward the stairs. Vander rushed up to the main floor. The guests swarmed the foyer, the sitting rooms, and the grand ballroom, where a string quartet played.

Marco followed him to the foyer, where footmen had been welcoming guests and manning the coatroom. Marco would have usually been at the door to greet visitors, but during an event like this, he was needed elsewhere. During this particular event, he was determined not to let the Alliance Seer out of his sight.

Vander’s hair wasn’t as neatly combed or oiled as the other footmen’s, and even in his spotless livery he came off as rumpled. None of the guests noticed him, however; they never noticed any of the servants. Marco walked the perimeter of the ballroom, one eye on the Seer and the other peeled for Lady Arabella.

He stopped as he came to a six-panel Chinese screen positioned in front of the swinging doors to the kitchens. He clasped his hands behind his back.

“I know you’re there,” he said.

“Shh,” Grace hissed through the half-inch gap between two panels. She was hiding behind the screen, observing the party.

“You aren’t supposed to be on the main floor, Grace.” Only footmen were to be seen during the baron’s parties.

“I couldn’t stand not knowing whether that man had arrived,” she whispered. “And don’t tell me it is none of my business.”

Marco grinned. “Don’t worry, I learned my lesson last night.”

No doubt she had puzzled all day over how he’d gotten down from the roof.

“If you’ll only look at him, you’ll see what I mean about—” Grace paused. “Oh! There. That’s him!”

Marco’s shoulders snapped down into a flat plane as a musty scent trickled under his nose, climbed his nostrils, and stuck in the back of his throat. Beneath his formal white dress shirt, black tailed coat, and pressed black trousers, Marco’s skin shivered with the threat of scales.

He didn’t require Grace’s confirmation that Lady Arabella’s guest had arrived. He could smell him. Sense him. A demon had just slipped through the doors of the Bartolis’ grand ballroom.

Grace had been correct. The disguise was better than most Marco had seen—a man in his twenties wearing a moderately fashionable suit. Pale skin. Slicked-back hair. Deep-set eyes that were nearly as black as the suit he wore. But there was still something wrong about him. Maybe it was the way he moved, as if his skin had been crafted out of stiff cardboard instead of malleable flesh. Or the way his black eyes darted from face to face with the speed of a hummingbird’s wings.

Lady Arabella was at his side, a pleasant little smile fixed upon her lips, her eyes gazing at the demon with adoration.

“We have a big problem.” Vander came up beside Marco’s shoulder. “It’s a drainer.”

A leech. Marco clenched his fists. It made sense now.

“It has to have hypnotized Lady Arabella,” Marco said.

Some misinformed humans would have called this thing a vampire. Drainer demons had only a few things in common with their fictional versions: impressive speed, an appetite for blood, and the ability to entrance their prey.

“My lady is hypnotized?” Grace asked from her place behind the screen.

Vander peered through the gap. “Who is this?” he asked.

“Nobody,” Marco answered tightly. He didn’t want Grace listening, but he also didn’t have time to escort her back to the kitchens. “What is it doing here?”

Vander turned back to the ballroom. The bedazzled Lady Arabella had left the leech’s side. It was conversing now with a small crowd of guests.

“It’s here to feast, what else?” the Seer replied.

Grace stepped out from behind the screen, her brows pressed together. “What are the two of you talking about?”

Marco kept his eyes on the leech. He had to destroy it before it could take its first victim. And yet the demon stood in the center of a ballroom with unsuspecting humans on all sides. How could Marco destroy this thing without exposing what he was to every person here?

“Marco,”
Grace pressed.

“You need to leave,” he said quietly.

“Fine. I’ll go back to the kitchens, but first tell me—”

“No. You need to leave Hôtel Dugray entirely,” Marco said. “Go out through the kitchens and to a corner café somewhere nearby. I’ll find you when it’s safe to return, but until then I need you to go.”

He couldn’t allow the leech to get anywhere near Grace. And if Marco was going to coalesce—his bones ached for it—he didn’t want her anywhere near
him
. Over the centuries he had learned how to stave off a shift. But like a pain threshold, there was only so much Marco could endure before shattering into gargoyle form.

“Leave?” Grace gaped. “I can’t! I don’t have permission.”

Marco turned to her, his hold on his shift loosening. His vision had sharpened, and by the gasp lodged in Grace’s throat, he figured his pupils had slimmed to vertical slits.

“You will leave or I will fire you right here, right now.
Go
.”

Grace’s arm slammed into the Chinese screen as she backed up and disappeared behind it, fear and hurt slackening the tight press of her lips.

“Not one to mince words, are you?” Vander murmured.

“Shut up.” Marco held back from driving his fist into the Seer’s teeth. “Distract it.”

Thankfully, the Seer didn’t ask for any ideas on how to do so. He turned from the crowd to face the Chinese screen and withdrew the silver dagger from inside his livery jacket. He hiked up his sleeve and swiftly scored the top of his forearm. Vander shook his sleeve back down before facing the crowd again.

Although the leech was halfway across the ballroom, its head jerked to attention. Its eyes stilled their incessant motion. The demon smelled freshly drawn blood. It would be impossible to resist.

“Shall we dispatch it on the rooftop?” Vander asked.

During a party like this, there wouldn’t be a more perfect spot. No one would see them up there.

“You know the way?” Marco asked.

Vander laughed as a splatter of his blood darkened the white marble floor. “Give me a little credit.”

He backed through the crowd, heading toward the foyer. Marco waited until the leech had trailed after Vander before he, too, departed.

Marco reached the kitchen garden and, once cloaked in darkness, started to remove his clothing. Shifting while dressed only destroyed whatever he was wearing. He happened to like his clothes.

Marco moved with precision, laying the livery as flat as possible on a garden bench for his return. He calmed himself by surfacing Grace’s scent. There had always been something sweetly soothing about it. As he let her scent glaze his throat and burrow inside him, her beacon pulsed bright and clear.

Marco, now naked in the garden, drew in a sharp breath.

Grace was on the roof.

Marco cursed as he forced his body to erupt. His spine ridged and lengthened to nearly double his human height; the muscles throughout his limbs and chest bulked and hardened beneath his coat of tempered-steel scales. From between his shoulder blades burst two sunset-red wings. He drove them down, pushing himself into the sky.

He shouldn’t have trusted that she would obey him, but of all the places to go right now … He spiraled over the rooftop and saw a light there. His night vision defined not one but two girls: Grace and Lady Arabella.

Both of their scents drove into Marco, carrying with them a confusing mixture of anger and desperation. Arabella held herself rigid, hands balled into tight fists at her side. She advanced on Grace, who shook her head while backing away from her mistress. There was nothing he could do but circle overhead, watching. Waiting. Vander would appear any moment now, and on his heels would be a hungry demon.

Marco’s clipped ears picked up Arabella’s voice. “You can’t leave. No one is allowed to leave.”

The leech must have charged her with keeping the humans corralled for the evening.
Waste not
, Marco thought as Grace stammered through an explanation as to where she had been going.

The metal steps rang with heavy footfalls. The Seer charged onto the rooftop, his crossbow, loaded with a blessed silver dart, in hand. Grace screamed, though Arabella simply looked upon the Alliance fighter with slight concern.

“No one is allowed to leave,” the girl repeated.

Vander Burke dug his heels in and looked up to the sky. He held his arms open as if to say
What do I do with them?
Unless Marco swooped down and plucked them up with his talons, the girls had no other way off the roof.

Startled by his unexpected witnesses, the Seer wasn’t ready for the leech. It rushed up the metal steps, and though Vander turned and fired his crossbow, his aim was skewed. The dart sliced the demon’s shoulder, stopping the leech only for as long as it took for the thing to shed its disguise. It sloughed off into a gluey pile of flesh and clothing, leaving the demon as it truly was: a stunted black, hairless, winged creature, half the height of its human camouflage. Its globular eyes were like a fly’s, with a number of glistening lenses. A dozen or more short, spiked fangs ringed the inside of the leech’s mouth.

Grace screamed again. This time, Arabella’s voice joined in, her trance at last broken.

Marco took a deep breath. Now that they’d seen a drainer demon up close and personal, what was he waiting for?

Vander loaded a second dart as Marco dove toward the roof, talons open. One of the leech’s wings lashed out at the crossbow and the second dart hurtled off into a dark corner of the roof. Vander threw down his weapon and withdrew a silver dagger instead. But the blade was too short; if Vander lunged too close, the leech would sink its fangs into his arm and bite it clean off. As much as it irritated Marco, the Seer was on his territory and was under his protection.

Marco batted the Seer back with a whip of his spiked tail and then slashed his hooked talons at the leech. The demon zinged out of reach, its little wings clicking and humming as it tore under one of Marco’s great sails. Marco arched his back, propelling himself after the leech, when a flower of pain seared his throat. Not his own pain. Her scent surfaced fast and strong: Arabella.

A blinding white cloud burst in front of Marco’s face. Though his night vision didn’t show color, Marco knew the sparks had been green—the signal that a demon had been destroyed.

“I got it,” the Seer confirmed, heaving for breath. “But she’s hurt.”

Marco saw Arabella lying on the roof, her hands curled in a tight grasp around her throat. Marco stared in disbelief. He had failed. The leech had ripped into his human in less time than it had taken Marco to turn around.

Grace huddled beside Arabella, her hands and arms shaking as she tried to stop the girl’s bleeding.

“What happened? Dear God, she needs help!” She got to her feet and started running for the steps. She pulled to a sticky stop when her eyes landed on Marco, who stood in her path.

“The girl needs your blood, Mar—” Vander caught himself.

Marco knew that no doctor would be able to help Lady Arabella. The gash in her throat might be repaired, but the demon poison would kill her. The Seer was right. If she had a chance at all, it would be with Marco’s blood. Other than the potent and dangerous mercurite the Alliance used, gargoyle blood was the only thing that could draw out the poison and heal a human’s wounds.