Free The Wondrous and the Wicked by Page Morgan Page B

what sort?”
    “Ingrid.”
    Marco turned his head, the muscle in his jaw jumping. “Threats against her?”
    There was a reason Marco led the Wolves. He was the strongest, fiercest, and fastest gargoyle Luc had ever met. Vincent should have been begging
him
for his favor instead of Luc.
    “If a certain rumor he decides to spread takes hold, I’ll be destroyed,” Luc said. “I need to know you’ll get her out of Paris.”
    Marco turned fully from the loft door now. “What does he know?”
    “He suspects,” Luc replied. The fewer words exchanged, the better.
    Loving a human was a shameful thing. It was one of the first rules Luc had learned after emerging from death into this new existence. As elder, Lennier had welcomed Luc with a short list of hard-and-fast rules. “You protect. You don’t have to like it, but you have to do it,” he had said, his long white hair flowing like twin silvery rivers over his shoulders. “You are no longer human like they are,” he had gone on. “You are of a higher order now, and attachments will not be tolerated.”
    Lennier had been ancient even then, and he had witnessed firsthand what resulted from such attachments. They weakened the gargoyle until he trusted his human enough to share his secret, in turn jeopardizing the rest of the Dispossessed.
    “We will act swiftly and without mercy, against both the gargoyle and his human,” Lennier had explained. All to stop the knowledge of their existence from spreading.
    At least, that had been the official reason spoken from the lips of authority. As the years, then decades, and finally centuries passed, that official reason had been practically buried beneath the brutal truth: there were many gargoyles who clung to excuses to satiate their base mob mentality. Luc had never participated in these mobs, and they had been happening less often as time wore on. However, Luc knew the Wolf’s talons were not so clean.
    “I will take her as far as my chains allow,” Marco said after a moment of silent deliberation. He then quirked his lips. “But don’t let that worry you, brother. I’m sure the Seer would be overjoyed to take her the rest of the way. He’s with her right now, as a matter of fact.”
    The thought of Vander Burke whisking Ingrid away to somesafe haven stabbed shards of glass into Luc’s chest. He must have been scowling, because Marco’s goading smirk fell off.
    “This is your own doing. You have my silence and my vow to keep Lady Ingrid safe. And that means safely away from
you
,” Marco said, good humor gone. “But if you continue to—”
    It took a second for Luc, his eyes fastened as they were on the rafters while Marco ranted, to realize something was wrong. That Marco wasn’t just searching for his next words. By the time Luc dragged his gaze down from the ceiling, Marco’s eyes had gone a deep umber, and his pupils had slimmed to vertical slits. He stared into a dark corner of the loft, and Luc knew he wasn’t seeing anything. He was
scenting
something.
    “Lady—” Marco’s human words cracked off into a grating shriek.
    Ingrid.
    Marco peeled off his clothing, too slow to save his trousers from ripping apart at the seams. Luc didn’t need Ingrid’s scent surging through him to know exactly what was happening. Daylight be damned.
    Luc pulled the trigger in his core and unloosed his true form. He shed his clothing in practiced harmony with the pull and coil of new muscle and lengthened bone, of sliding tendons and ridging vertebrae. His jet scales shimmered from crown to ankle like a form-fitting cloak, and then, with his clothing bundled under one arm, he was racing after Marco’s tail as it whipped through the open loft door and up into the sun-streaked clouds. The two of them were dark shadows racing through the sky, so fast, Luc knew, that in a blink of a human’s eye they would be there, then gone.
    But they would still be seen. Too large and fast to be birds. Too real to be figments of the