The Wondrous and the Wicked (15 page)

Gabby turned away from him and moved toward the hearth. “I am afraid that general rule cannot apply to demon pets, Mr. Dupuis. And I didn’t kill it. Rory did—the man who was with me on the docks.”

Though there was no fire in the hearth, it was warm in the study. She felt a few beads of sweat gathering under her veil and wished to push back the tulle, but she didn’t want to expose her scars just yet.

“Your Alliance muscle is not with you this morning.”

Hugh leaned against his low desk and crossed his arms, appraising her silently. He wasn’t overtly handsome, but he had
distinctive features that might have been considered charming. Like full lips and wide, dark brown eyes. The most intriguing thing about him wasn’t any physical feature, however. It was the keen intelligence that glowed behind those wide eyes of his.

“You are Daicrypta.” Her statement required no further explanation.

Hugh didn’t appear offended. “Most Alliance would not knock upon my door.”

“I am not Alliance,” Gabby retorted, but then added, “Not yet, at least.”

He remained quiet, his inspection of her seeming to probe even deeper.

“I would like to know more about the diffuser nets,” she said, uncomfortable with the stretch of silence. “You said your father invented them?”

He clenched his jaw with what looked like displeasure. “He did.”

The thought of Robert Dupuis soured her expression as well. “Your father was a madman. If he hadn’t been stopped, he would have bled my sister dry for her angel blood.”

Gabby had plenty more to say on the subject of Hugh’s father, but she forced her mouth shut. She wanted information on the diffuser nets too badly to risk being tossed out.

To her surprise, after a moment, Hugh laughed. “I see we aren’t very different in our esteem of him, then. He
was
a madman, Miss Waverly. I left the Paris seat many years ago to put distance between us.”

He walked away from the perch, toward where Gabby stood in front of the sofa.

“You see, my father was a genius, but his moral compass was no more evolved than those of the demons he studied. What he wanted rose above all else, and what he wanted was power.”

“And you wouldn’t have done the same as your father? You
wouldn’t have tried to drain my sister’s blood so you could sell it to the Alliance?”

He huffed, as if offended. “It is not power and influence I seek, Miss Waverly. What I want is to understand the demons that come from that other realm. What do they want here? What are their patterns and desires? What are their limitations, their powers, and even their bodily compositions? The more we know, the better able we are to protect humankind.”

He sounded as passionate about his research as Nolan and other Alliance fighters did about the skill of demon hunting. Gabby was wary, though. He could have just been saying these things to appeal to her.

“You don’t perform
experiments
, as your father did?” she asked, stressing the word so that he knew exactly what sort of experiments she referred to.

“None that harm human beings,” he answered evenly. “I don’t believe Carver would take very kindly to such goings-on under his roof here, do you?”

The gargoyle protector at the Paris Daicrypta mansion, Dimitrie, had suffered endlessly for the things done to human test subjects under his roof. Both the victim and the villain were his human charges, putting Dimitrie between a rock and a hard place. He’d failed to protect his human charges—Robert Dupuis’s test subjects—so many times that the angel’s burns he’d received as punishment had scarred his back.

“If you’re so humane, why don’t the Alliance and Daicrypta work together in a much more visible fashion? It seems you both want the same things,” she said.

Instead of joining forces, though, the two underground societies held such contempt for one another that the only communication and partnerships seemed to happen behind closed doors.

Hugh continued around the sofa, toward the fireless hearth. “My father’s madness tainted the Daicrypta as a whole, and
unfortunately, his power extended all over Europe. Except here,” he said, reaching for a small iron knob set into the wood paneling beside the hearth. She hadn’t noticed it before he’d brought her attention to it.

“Why?” she asked.

Hugh puckered his brow as he opened the door. “The dynamics of our father-son relationship were, suffice it to say, strained. In short—pardon the pun—I was not his ideal heir.”

“Because of your height?” She only felt bold enough to mention it because he had done so first with that pun.

“No,” Hugh said, stepping through the door and into another room. “Because we could not see eye to eye—whoops, I’ve done it again—on what it meant to be Daicrypta.”

Gabby thought carefully about Hugh’s revelations as she followed him into the connected room, this one windowless, lit by electric wall sconces and glass-domed ceiling fixtures.

“And what does it mean to you?” she asked.

Hugh approached a long worktable in the center of the room, outfitted with a series of wide drawers underneath the zinc top.

“That is something I can only demonstrate over time. Now tell me: what about the diffuser nets are you interested in knowing more about?”

He rolled one drawer open and removed from it the familiar crossbow and the tucked-up net dart. He set them on the long table.

“I want to know how they work,” Gabby answered, no longer nervous. “I know they are meant to capture demons, and I’ve seen them hold gargoyles as well. But can these nets also detain other creatures?”

Hugh processed her request with another stretch of silence. He reminded her of Ingrid in that way. Thinking before reacting. Weighing words as carefully as a jeweler might weigh the value of a mound of gold dust.

He left the long table and turned to a tall metal filing cabinet
against the wall behind him. The six-drawer cabinet was covered in scraps of sketches and newspaper clippings, all fastened with thick, round magnets. Hugh pulled two magnets, currently out of use, free.

“Here, I want you to hold this,” he instructed, quickly walking back to the table and extending his hand over the zinc top. Gabby frowned at the circular magnet but did as he asked. The magnet was smooth and flat as a river stone.

He kept the second magnet and held it out in front of him. “Now hold yours out to mine.”

She kept her lips sealed and did as asked. Her magnet was less than an inch from his when she felt her magnet rear back and waver off to the side.

“Do you feel the magnetic field?” Hugh asked, their arms hovering over the table. “The way it balloons between your magnet and mine, rejecting their union even though they are made of the same material?”

Gabby felt her patience beginning to slip. “Yes, I know how magnets work. What does it have to do with the nets?”

Hugh gave his magnet a small push, forcing his way through the magnetic field and snapping the two black circles together.

“It’s lodestone,” he said. “A natural-forming magnet.”

He took the joined magnets and rolled them around in his palm. “When I was a boy, my science tutor brought me a nugget of lodestone one day. After he left, I was in my father’s laboratory, tossing the nugget from one hand to the next.” He did so now, tossing the joined magnets to his other palm and closing them in his fingers, which were also slightly stunted, she noted. “I neared one of the tables to peer at a beaker of demon blood—a substance that was not as easy to come by twenty years ago as it is today.

“I took a step closer to the table and the beaker flew toward me, smashing against the same hand I had fisted around the lodestone nugget. The shattered beaker glass fell to my feet,
but the demon blood”—Hugh held up a finger, as if this would be quite important—“the demon blood had congealed around my closed fist, sealing itself to my skin. The blood continued to move, pushing to slip through the gaps of my fingers and reach the lodestone. Frightened, of course, I opened my hand and dropped the stone. The blood followed, every last drop, and a moment later it had formed as a tumorlike mass around the lodestone on the floor.”

He told the story so well, Gabby could almost feel the same shock he must have experienced as a boy.

“Demon blood will seal itself to lodestone,” she said, and with a nod from Hugh, continued. “And the nets are made of lodestone? So the nets will … will seal to the demons they capture?”

She recalled how the net had closed around the mollug demon and the creature had not been able to move.

Hugh placed the magnets on the zinc tabletop. He lifted the net bolt by the longest of the four rods running through it, then pushed the steel-cap button on the tip of the bolt. The three other rods immediately lifted and spun, unraveling the tightly tucked net.

“The netting is crafted of hollow, transparent Parkesine,” Hugh explained, touching the tubular crosshatched net. “It’s flexible, easy to bend and twist. We inject a liquefied compound of lodestone into the Parkesine tubes. The same bond that happens between two magnets forced together also happens to the demon and the net. And on top of that, my father soon discovered that the lodestone also diffused whatever powers or energy the demon possessed. Their blood is simply no match for the magnetic force of the lodestone.”

The smaller slugs skittering away from the trapped mollug demon made sense now, as did the hellhound in the Daicrypta courtyard in Paris that had avoided the net tented around Ingrid. They would have felt the pull of the lodestone and known to avoid it.

“The nets don’t seal to Dusters,” Gabby said. Ingrid had been able to move beneath her netted prison, and Vander as well.

Hugh nodded while admiring the silvery net. “Not enough demon blood in their bloodstream, perhaps?”

And then Luc, Gabby remembered. He had screeched in pain as he’d pried the net’s stakes out of the ground to free Ingrid. “But what about gargoyles? It seems to hurt them.”

“That I can explain. The nets are dipped in a thin wash of mercurite.” He then whispered conspiratorially, “While I trust Carver, not all gargoyles are our friends.”

Gabby reached across the worktable and fingered the netting. This net … it held such promise. She licked her lips before glancing back up at Hugh, who still stood on the opposite side of the table.

“You know of Axia?”

Hugh lifted his chin and nodded. “I have my connections.”

“These nets,” she said, holding the handful of netting in her palm. “Could the lodestone seal itself to an angel?”

“I would have to have some angel blood to test that theory on. Unfortunately, from what I hear, Axia has recently depleted the only known source of angel blood on the planet.”

Gabby let her breath go and dropped the netting. Why couldn’t she have discovered these diffuser nets
before
? Frustrated, she backed away from the table, hopes dashed. Her time here had been wasted.

“Thank you for answering my questions, Mr. Dupuis,” she said, and began toward the door to his study.

“Miss Waverly—”

He was interrupted by a clamor outside the laboratory. Two raised voices, sharp and harsh. Hugh rushed past Gabby and out into the study, where the voices became clearer. They were right outside the study, in the hallway. Gabby groaned as she realized what was happening.

The door to the study crashed open and Rory and Carver
spilled into the room, each one shouting over the other. The corvite, still perched upon its stand, fluttered its wings and growled at the intrusion. Rory saw the bird and puzzled at it a moment before turning his attention to Gabby. He went quiet. Darkly and frighteningly quiet.

She knew excuses and apologies would only make things worse. Her tongue was sticking to the roof of her mouth anyhow.

Rory crossed the study with measured steps, his eyes briefly catching on Hugh Dupuis as he passed him. The look he sent the Daicrypta doyen was as cold and sharp as one of his blessed daggers.

“Miss Waverly has done nothing wrong,” Hugh said, surprising Gabby with his show of support.

Rory ignored him and stopped within inches of Gabby. He pulsed with so much barely contained fury that the space between them felt like the force field between the two magnets she and Hugh had held up against one another.

“Ye shouldna be here alone wi’ him,” Rory said softly, though not so softly that Hugh and Carver could not hear.

“I pose no threat to her—romantically or otherwise,” Hugh said, and Gabby knew what he said was true. He wouldn’t harm her, and he had not shown a glimmer of interest in her the way other men might have. Well,
before
her accident, at least.

Rory took a tentative glance over his broad shoulder, toward Hugh. The two locked stares, neither of them speaking. They seemed to be reaching some sort of silent understanding, Gabby observed, though she wasn’t sure what it was. She just knew it was time to leave. Before Rory or Carver, who remained in the doorway, his face pinched in disgust at the demon hunter, lost his temper.

“Good day, Mr. Dupuis,” Gabby said, her breath rushed. She hadn’t removed her cloak or gloves to begin with, so all she had to do was head for the door.

She heard Rory fall into step behind her, and with a brief
look up at Carver, she darted into the hallway, toward the foyer, and outside into the brisk Belgravia air.

“That was foolish,
laoch
,” Rory said as soon as the front door had shut behind them. “Ye should ha’ told me where ye were goin’.”

“You would have never allowed me to go,” she replied.

He stopped her from taking another step down the sidewalk with a hand on her elbow. Then he tugged her to face him.

“I ain’t yer keeper, Gabby. If ye wanted to go, all ye had to do was tell me.”

She didn’t quite know what to say. All of a sudden she felt incurably childish and embarrassed.

“Oh.”

He crinkled his forehead and grinned. “No more sneakin’ about, then?”

She shook her head. “No more sneaking about.” They walked side by side for another few moments before Gabby asked, “How did you know where to find me?”

Rory ducked under the overreaching branches of a holly hedge. “Nolan told me that if ye went off and did somethin’ reckless, to think of the one place I knew ye shouldna be.”