The Beautiful and the Cursed: Marco's Story (7 page)

Unblinking, Léon turned his head. The lacey trim of the tablecloth hung low, but not low enough to block the sight of his mother’s cocoon as it wriggled on the floor. And moaned.

Léon jumped to his feet and crashed back into his chair. A third, smaller silken cocoon, the one imprisoning his younger brother, had already gone still. The venom had worked its way through his sticklike limbs the quickest. Léon’s wriggling mother would stop moving next. But his father, whose meaty frame was fully upright in his chair, might remain conscious another few minutes. Five at the most.

Léon hadn’t wanted to hurt them. But he’d lost his temper when his father had started to shout the way he always did whenever Léon had done something wrong in their
pâtisserie
downstairs. He had thought he’d become immune to his father’s blustering, but lately, things had started to change. With every flare of Léon’s temper, Léon
himself
had started to change: the swelling pressure at each of his fingertips and the piercing pain in the roots of his eyeteeth were always the first signals.

Tonight, they had come on too quickly.

With his father’s insults pounding in his ears, the white drops had pushed through Léon’s skin and beaded at each of his fingertips. Within seconds, marble-sized globules had dripped free like white icing, distending toward the floor as long ribbons of silken web.

Léon’s eyeteeth had erupted from his gums next. They had pushed past his lips into plain view, shocking his silent father, his openmouthed mother, and his trembling brother, transforming into thin, hooked pincers.

And then the screams had shattered the air.

Léon had wanted to assure them that this body wasn’t his. That the sticky tangle of webbing was as repulsive to him as it was to them. But they had all kept wailing, and Léon had lost himself. It was the only way to describe it. It hadn’t been
Léon
sinking his pincers into his father’s neck, or his brother’s forearm, or his mother’s shoulder. It hadn’t been
Léon
who had then used the endless strands of silken thread oozing from his fingers to swathe each of them in tightly wound pods.

But this was Léon now, eyes blurred by tears, body shivering. There was no way to help them. The antivenin Monsieur Constantine had promised was still at least a week away from being complete. There was nothing Léon could do. Nowhere he could go. Constantine had said Léon would be able to get better, that he’d be able to control himself. All he’d wanted to do was hide what he’d become from his family—and now they were dying. Because of
him
.

Léon gasped for air and stumbled away from the table, toward the dining room door. He whimpered as he passed the white cocoons, trying to ignore the way they twitched.

Ingrid’s body had gone numb in the snow. She lay on her back, staring up at steel skies, and wondered how long this was going to take. The grounds surrounding Monsieur Constantine’s home, set in the airy outskirts of the city, within the Bois de Boulogne, were quiet, just as he had promised. Ingrid needed privacy, and here, she could have as much as she wished.

If any of her old London friends were to see her now, splayed out in the snow, they would likely think she’d gone mad. A smile tugged the corner of her lips. Maybe she had. If that was the case, then mad she would remain, because chilled to the bone was the only way Ingrid could feel anything at all.

The clouds rumbled like a hungry belly, promising not snow but a cold February rain. It would likely wash away the hard, thin blanket of snow that had fallen the night before. Ingrid closed her eyes and ordered the first spark to light. She cried out at the sharp twinge in her shoulder, which was followed by a burst of heat. Pain crackled down one arm, coming alive with an electric rush. With her gloves already cast aside, a serrated line of lightning sputtered from her splayed fingertips. It hit the trunk of a poplar less than a body’s length away. Simultaneously, a quick, bright flash of lightning stabbed down from the brooding clouds and struck the poplar. From each striking point, thin trails of smoke eddied toward the sky.

Ingrid’s eyes flew open and she belted out a laugh. She’d done it! After nearly two months of visits to Constantine’s chateau, spending hours upon hours practicing control over this new side of her—a side that her London friends would most definitely believe insane—she had finally done it!

Ingrid pushed herself up, her violet woolen cape and fur-lined hood damp from the ground. The motion set her slushy blood back into circulation, and more tingles pricked at her shoulders. They flooded her arms, pooled at her elbows, and fanned out toward her fingertips. The sudden rush of feeling gave her arms the sensation of being large and unwieldy compared to the rest of her body. But it had happened. For the first time, the electric pulses hadn’t come of their own volition. They hadn’t been ruled by her temper or by fear or any other emotion. She had commanded them.

Ingrid had finally grasped a sliver of power over her demon half.

She still sometimes thought it was preposterous that she had anything other than human blood coursing through her veins, and that demons were real creatures with unspeakable appetites. Some mornings, Ingrid would wake and, for the first few seconds of consciousness, forget that she belonged to two worlds—one of ordinary humans, with their duties and titles, families and responsibilities, the other filled with demon hunters wielding blessed silver weapons, steel-scaled gargoyles protecting territories and humans, untouchable angels that enslaved those gargoyles, and of course, people like Ingrid herself: Dusters, humans gifted at birth with demon blood.

The damp cold closed in as her mind hitched on the memory of one dark-scaled gargoyle in particular. Reluctantly, she let the memory go. Learning that demons were real had thrown Ingrid’s life into a spin. But it had been the reality of living, breathing gargoyles that had surprised her the most. They were far more complex than demons. Shape-shifting slaves to the angels, gargoyles were charged with protecting the humans living within their designated territories. Most humans didn’t know gargoyles were anything more than stone statues or waterspouts, like the ones scattered about Notre Dame. Sometimes Ingrid wished she could still count herself among the ignorant.

She was in too deep to turn back now, though.

Behind her, the brittle layer of icy crust broke underfoot. “I didn’t realize making snow angels would be part of your education.”

She really ought to have been used to his American accent by now. It was fast and efficient, though softened by his rich, satiny tenor. It warmed her blood a few more degrees.

Ingrid picked up her gloves and got to her feet, the leather of her bright ocher boots stiff from the cold. She quickly flipped back the hood of her cape and shook the snow free before turning to greet Vander Burke. His pale brown eyes were especially radiant in this moody light. She’d first met Vander two months before, inside his cramped Saint-Germain-des-Prés bookshop. Her younger sister, Gabby, had deemed him a handsome bore, much too intellectual and staid.

Gabby had been partially correct. Vander
was
handsome. He stood a full head taller than Ingrid, with athletically broad shoulders and classic Roman features weakened only by the wire-rimmed spectacles he wore. He
was
intellectual and staid, aiming—surprisingly enough—to become a reverend. He’d even quit the apartment above his bookshop to live and study at the American Church. But a bore he most certainly was not.

How could any handsome bookseller-cum-demon-hunter who aspired to the clergy be boring?

“You’re not usually this early,” she said, but then stopped to think. Just how long had she been prostrate in the snow? Vander met her at Clos du Vie after each of her lessons to drive her home, but he usually waited for her in Monsieur Constantine’s foyer. She peered at him. “Are you checking up on me?”

Ingrid wasn’t the only Duster who came to Clos du Vie to explore the powers of demon blood. There were others, Constantine had told her, but he was always careful to schedule their visits so none of them overlapped.

Vander nudged his spectacles higher on his nose and smiled. “I’m checking up on Constantine.”

Ingrid sighed. Vander had made it clear that he didn’t trust Constantine. Not that Ingrid blamed him for his skepticism. Monsieur Constantine had fooled them all, beginning with her twin brother, Grayson. Masquerading as an estate agent, he had helped Grayson select a property for their new residence and their mother’s future art gallery here in Paris. He’d led Grayson to L’Abbaye Saint-Dismas, which consisted of an old, crumbling stone church, a cold stone rectory, and a dilapidated carriage house, all of which had been adorned with a number of
les grotesques—
gargoyles.

Then, when Ingrid, Gabby, and their mother, Lady Charlotte Brickton, had arrived, it had been Constantine who had informed them that Grayson had gone missing. Constantine had been at Lady Brickton’s beck and call, playing the helpfully ignorant family acquaintance, when in reality, he had known just about everything.

He’d known about Ingrid and Grayson’s demon dust; that Ingrid and Gabby had started working with the Alliance, a well-established underground society of demon hunters, to find their missing brother; and that Ingrid’s demon blood had given her a supernatural ability, one that she had no control over. He’d even known about gargoyles; that L’Abbaye Saint-Dismas, with its sacred ground and the stone gargoyles covering the place like creeping ivy, would doubly protect whoever lived there.

Constantine had bided his time, observing Ingrid from a distance, and then, when she’d needed it most, he had offered his assistance. She was glad he had, even if Vander wasn’t.

“Monsieur Constantine is a gentleman, Vander. He’s helping me.” She hesitated to tell him about the electricity she’d just conjured. It had only happened once. She didn’t want to brag prematurely.

“Perfect gentlemen allow their guests to lounge in snowdrifts?” he returned, but she caught the mischievous gleam behind those spectacles of his.

“It helps, believe it or not,” she answered, avoiding his gaze as she shook snow from one of her ocher gloves. “When I can’t feel anything at all … it’s like having a blank slate before me. I don’t understand it, but Constantine suggested it might help me focus. And it did.”

She dropped a glove, her fingers too stiff to hold it. Vander stooped to snatch it up.

He held it out to her. “It might also help you catch your death.”

Ingrid tried to take the glove, but Vander must have seen her blanched skin and purplish-blue fingernails. He slipped the glove onto her hand himself and then lifted her palms to his lips. She felt his hot breath through the soft kid, and the warmth brought out an embarrassing moan of relief.

She gathered her wits and pulled her hands away from the press of his lips. “I won’t catch my death.”

It was the truth, and it was also a reminder of how different Ingrid was from other Dusters. Axia, the guardian angel who had been cast into the Underneath for her sinful gifts to the babies she had guided into the human world—who had gifted all Dusters with strains of blood from Underneath demons—had given Ingrid and her twin something more: she had hidden her own blood within their veins.

Axia had needed to safeguard her blood from the toxic Underneath, where it would wither. She had chosen Ingrid and Grayson to harbor her angel blood, and for all of their lives, the two had been blessed with good and fast-healing bruises and cuts. Recently, Ingrid had discovered something more. She didn’t know why or how, but on two occasions, she had been able to force gargoyles into submission. And once, she had actually
glowed
. All this because of the angel blood.

So no, a little time in the snow wasn’t going to give her pneumonia. The only thing Ingrid had to fear was Axia herself. The angel wanted her blood back, and she’d already proven she had the power to get it.

“All right, so you’re healthy as an ox,” Vander said, taking her by the elbow. “But what about Constantine?”

“I think he’s rather healthy himself, for a man of his age,” she said, knowing full well that she was being cheeky. She liked making Vander smile.

“Minx,” he muttered. “You know what I mean. Have you figured out his mystery? Why does he have my demon gift when I can’t trace a speck of dust around him?”

That was yet another reason Ingrid felt so at ease with Vander Burke. He was a Duster as well; his gift was the ability to see the colorful dust particles demons left in their wakes. Constantine had once told her that his students’ demon gifts ranged all over the map. There was an endless variety of demon breeds, it seemed, and Vander hadn’t yet discovered what demon he shared blood with. Whatever it was, his was a useful gift for a demon hunter.

“I don’t know why Constantine can see dust,” she answered, knowing her comment would only cause Vander’s brow to pull together into a frown.

Constantine shared Vander’s ability, but he himself wasn’t a Duster, so Vander’s question remained: why could Constantine see dust?

“I’m sorry,” Vander began as they slowly retraced their footprints in the snow back to the chateau. “I know this is important to you, but, Ingrid … I’m not alone in this. The rest of the Alliance here in Paris, your sister, even Grayson … we’re all suspicious of Constantine’s motives.”

“Well, I’m not,” she replied.

Constantine, a man of about fifty years, had devoted his life to the study of demons and their influences on the human world. When he had discovered the existence of Dusters, however, he’d also discovered a new purpose. A whole new field of study.

“What could he possibly receive in return for showing me how to control myself? He doesn’t ask for compensation. He doesn’t ask for anything at all,” she said as the chateau’s slanted glass-and-iron orangery roof came into view.

“Doesn’t that make you suspicious?” Vander asked. “It was enough for Grayson to turn down Constantine’s offer.”