The Wondrous and the Wicked Read online

  BOOKS BY PAGE MORGAN

  THE DISPOSSESSED TRILOGY

  The Beautiful and the Cursed

  The Lovely and the Lost

  The Wondrous and the Wicked

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2015 by Angie Frazier

  Front jacket photograph © 2015 by Anna Mutwil/Arcangel Images

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouseteens.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Morgan, Page.

  The Wondrous and the wicked / Page Morgan. — First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary: “Turn-of-the-century Paris is in turmoil, with demons prowling the streets, unless the Waverly sisters and their gargoyle protectors can stop them. Except there is an otherworldly power rising up that could mean the end”— Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-385-74315-0 (hc) — ISBN 978-0-307-98083-0 (ebook)

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Gargoyles—Fiction. 3. Sisters—Fiction.

  4. Demonology—Fiction. 5. Paris (France)—History—1870–1940—Fiction.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.M82623Won 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014012858

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  To my sisters, Lisa and Sarah, forever

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PARIS

  ÎLE DE LA CITÉ

  LATE MARCH 1900

  The lamps along the Quai des Orfèvres were dark. That was the first signal for Marianne that something wasn’t quite right. She moved with caution through the inky black. It was a familiar street, one she’d walked countless times, and yet the impenetrable dark made it feel like uncharted territory. Glass crunched under the soles of Marianne’s boots, and she stopped walking.

  Had the lamps been smashed?

  She drew her cloak tighter as wind rolled over the quay wall and shook the brittle leaves of some poplars lining the Seine. Vandals had likely pitched rocks at the lamps, nothing more. Had Marianne known, she would have asked Monsieur Constantine’s driver to let her off closer to her home at Place Dauphine. Instead, the slim brougham had stopped, as usual, a block away, on the Pont Saint-Michel. For a month she had been walking the extra few minutes home along the quay road to make sure her mother and father would not see Constantine’s fine carriage. They believed she spent two evenings a week giving piano lessons to a young girl in the Latin Quarter. Marianne could never tell them the truth: that she was, in fact, at a gentleman’s chateau on the outskirts of Paris, learning to curb her appetite for blood.

  Marianne picked up her pace, wincing as her boots ground over more shattered glass beneath the next lamppost. If she could shift, like some of the other Dusters with hellhound blood, she wouldn’t be so nervous walking alone in the dark. But she hadn’t shifted yet, beyond a few instances of fur sprouting on her arms and a half inch of nail growth once. Marianne was impatient for it to be over and done with, but she prayed the first time wouldn’t happen until she was alone and far away from home.

  Ahead, she saw the faint glow of lights from the residential square directly across from the law courts of the Palais de Justice. In their apartment, Papa would likely be smoking a cigarette and reading to Mama from Le Petit Journal as she arranged the table for supper. If Marianne hurried, she might be able to get home in time to listen to an article or two. For a moment, she forgot the dashed lamps along the quay road and thought only of her papa’s steady, clear voice.

  A flicker of movement in the sky drew her gaze up to the roof of the law courts. Two imperial stone eagles, perched on either corner of the columned façade, had cast their shadows over Place Dauphine for as long as Marianne could remember. Seeing them now, stamped darkly against the cloudless, moonlit sky, didn’t surprise her. What did was the third, unfamiliar winged statue set between them. It stopped her cold. Where had that come from?

  The wings on the new statue snapped open and a long tail undulated into sight. Marianne barely had a moment to comprehend that it wasn’t a statue at all before the creature launched itself from the roof—and dove directly toward her.

  Marianne screamed and whirled around. She wouldn’t be able to reach the square now, not without colliding head-on with the beast. She broke into a run down the center of the quay road, back toward the well-lit Pont Saint-Michel. There she could see passing carriages, pedestrians. Safety. The utter blackness … the smashed lamps … No one looking out their window right then would witness Marianne running from a winged beast. No one would see anything at all. We are likely being watched, Monsieur Constantine had cautioned her just that evening. Be vigilant.

  A hawklike shriek rang out overhead, shearing through the whistle of wind in her ears and her own panting breath. She couldn’t run fast enough, couldn’t scream. There was no point. The creature was already upon her. A bright shock of pain carved into her back, punching through skin and muscle, and then two sharp talons cracked through her breast.

  Marianne gasped for air as her body, impaled on the beast’s talons, was lifted from the street. But the air had turned to water. Warm, thick water that raced up her throat and pooled in her mouth. She coughed and struggled to breathe as the lights upon the Pont Saint-Michel grew fainter, her body colder. How strange. Blood had been all she’d wanted for months. And now she was drowning in it.

  CHAPTER ONE

  PARIS

  LATE MARCH 1900

  Ingrid should have brought a sword.

  She crouched in a most unladylike manner on the narrow quay beneath the Pont de l’Alma, considering ways to pry a manhole cover free. The tarnished brass disk had to weigh at least five stone. She needed to lever the blasted thing up if she wished to descend into the sewers before daylight broke over the city.

  Entering miles of dank, serpentine sewage tunnels alone was a risk at any time of the day, but Ingrid needed to slink her way i
n, and she preferred to do so without being seen. She had to find her brother. Grayson had been gone for nearly a month, and she’d started to have that old bubbling awareness again. The caged restlessness that always beset her when she simply knew her twin was in trouble.

  The sewers were as good a hiding place as any, and Grayson had most definitely been hiding. For a month he’d been on his own in Paris, avoiding Ingrid and their mother. Had Gabby still been in the city, instead of in London, Ingrid was certain he would have steered clear of their younger sister as well. Anything to avoid facing the reality of their grim situation: that he and Ingrid were Dusters—humans who had been given demon blood at birth. A rogue guardian angel had gifted them this blood, and with it, inhuman abilities. Ingrid could create electricity at her fingertips. As for Grayson … his ability was a bit more complicated, and much more dangerous.

  Well, she was finished waiting for him to come home. She needed her brother—even if he was a hellhound some of the time. Ingrid would find him and drag him back to the abbey by the ear if she had to.

  She untied the silk drawstring pouch cinched around her wrist and withdrew the petite hand dagger she kept for emergency use. When Vander Burke had given her the four-inch blade of blessed silver with its polished ebony handle a few weeks prior, he’d intended for her to use the weapon to fend off hungry Underneath demons trespassing in the human realm. Ingrid, however, was perfectly content using it to try to lift this sewer manhole cover.

  She scraped the point of the blade along the rim of the cover, searching for a gap. It was nearly impossible to see in the predawn darkness. The point slipped into a crevice and Ingrid pushed against the weight of the brass disk with all her strength.

  “You are not going down there.”

  She paused at the low, surly voice. She’d wondered if Marco might follow her. Butlers didn’t usually keep such close tabs on the members of the family they worked for, but Marco was more than just the butler at l’Abbaye Saint-Dismas. And Ingrid was more to him than just his employer’s daughter.

  The dagger had barely raised the cover an inch, but she continued to hold it propped open.

  “Not by myself,” she replied, glancing quickly over her shoulder to where he stood. “My gargoyle wouldn’t be so negligent as to allow that.”

  Marco came around to stand before her. The dark gray merino of his butler’s livery was a few shades darker than anything else around them. Sunrise was closer than she had thought.

  “If you’d help me with this, please?” she asked, pushing on the handle again. With his strength, Marco could easily rip the cover up and toss it aside.

  Instead, he set his foot on the cover, forcing it to slam shut and her dagger tip to pop free.

  “And as your gargoyle, I am forced, once again, to keep you from getting yourself killed.” He crouched down until his eyes met hers.

  Marco’s dark features were even darker than usual in the coming blue of dawn. Ingrid had once feared the scowling face before her. Even more, she’d feared him when he would take on his true form—a thick, cinnamon-red jacket of reptilian scales, featherless sienna wings, and long, wickedly sharp talons. At one point, not very long ago, Marco had considered killing her. That was before he’d been assigned to the abbey and become her gargoyle protector. Before everything that he was forbade him to harm her.

  “I’m not afraid of what I might find in the sewers,” Ingrid said, though the tunnels were rife with demons. Her last visit beneath the city had been with two demon hunters, Vander Burke and Nolan Quinn, and she hadn’t known the first thing about protecting herself.

  Things were different now. Ingrid knew how to use her demon half, powered by the blood of a lectrux demon. She knew how to summon electricity and store it in her fingertips, and more importantly, how to release a current of lightning without completely draining her reserves. If she came across a demon threat in the sewers, she was certain she could subdue it.

  Marco leaned forward. “Then why, Lady Ingrid, could I taste your fear in the back of my throat?”

  She clenched her teeth and beat back a wave of nausea. Marco himself didn’t make her uneasy. It was his vivid connection to her that did. He could sense her so intimately that if he held still and drew up her scent, catalogued within his memory, he could feel the beat of her heart echoing his own. He could feel her every breath, the shift in her pulse, even her emotions. He could find her and be at her side within moments.

  These things were all meant to help him keep his human charge from harm. Still, Ingrid didn’t want him to have such access. She didn’t want him to be her gargoyle.

  She wanted Luc.

  Ingrid turned her head toward the Seine to avoid Marco’s stare.

  “I’m worried for Grayson, you know that,” she said. “I have to find him.”

  “Human, your impatience is infuriating,” he growled, standing tall. “The only thing you’re going to find down there is a quick fissure straight to Axia’s hive.”

  Ingrid let out a sigh and stood up. The crown of her head reached just below the starched points of his white collar. Marco wasn’t entirely wrong. She was certain there were plenty of fissures in the sewers that led to the Underneath. She was also certain that Axia, the fallen angel who had created all of the Dusters, had not forgotten about Ingrid and the angel blood still circulating through her veins. Axia wanted that blood back. It was hers, after all.

  Axia had also given Ingrid and Grayson her angel blood at birth, unlike her other seedlings, thinking to safeguard it from the toxic Underneath should the Angelic Order ever banish her to that realm. After sixteen years, the angel blood had finally grown strong enough within the twins’ bodies for Axia to reclaim. With it, she could return to the human realm for something she called the Harvest. What that was, exactly, was still a mystery to Ingrid. It wouldn’t be good, that much she suspected.

  Axia had already reclaimed Grayson’s angel blood. If she reclaimed Ingrid’s portion, she would be able to begin her Harvest.

  “I’m not going to hide on sacred ground forever,” she said to Marco as she slipped her dagger back into her purse.

  “And your brother isn’t going to come back to you until he is ready.”

  Ingrid cinched her purse and curled her hands into fists at her sides. “He’s in trouble.”

  Her brother’s hellhound blood had made him do horrible things. He’d killed a girl in London. Ingrid couldn’t imagine the guilt Grayson had to be suffering. What if he couldn’t live with it? What if he decided not to live with it?

  “Think me cold and callous if you choose, but you are my human charge. He hasn’t been since he quit the rectory and started residing elsewhere,” Marco said. “I warn you: if you attempt to climb down that sewer hole again, I will strip off my clothes, coalesce, and fly you back to the abbey kicking and screaming. Trust me—you don’t want that.” His deadly serious gaze softened as he flashed his teeth. “Or perhaps you do. I am rather stunning when unclothed.”

  Even poor light couldn’t hide her blush from his night vision. Marco picked up on the pinches of color and laughed.

  “My mother should toss you out on your ear,” Ingrid said. “You are by far the worst butler I have ever met.”

  Marco gestured toward the wide stone steps that led to the street. She groaned and reluctantly started walking toward them.

  “Lady Brickton adores me,” Marco replied, following her. “And I am a marvelous butler.”

  She supposed he was rather efficient. He had no excuse not to be, not with over four hundred years of various servant duties under his belt at his former territory. That didn’t mean Ingrid felt the need to praise him.

  “Mama is terrified of you,” she said. Her mother knew what Marco was. She also knew that as the Dispossessed assigned to the abbey and rectory, he would not be going anywhere even should she dismiss him.

  “Terrified is exactly how I prefer my humans,” he countered. “I need to work on finding a way to frighten you into
obedience.”

  “Threatening to remove your clothes was quite enough. I—” Ingrid’s retort fell silent on her lips as a man appeared at the top of the quay steps.

  Since arriving under the bridge, she had only needed to pause for one vagrant who had shuffled by, wheeling along a wooden cart filled to the brim with his meager belongings. Ingrid had hidden in the shadows until he’d passed, the dark having been a much better veil a half an hour ago.

  There was no avoiding this new stranger. The rising light cast him in shades of blues and purples, and Ingrid could tell by the cut of his trousers and heavy greatcoat that he was not some ragtag vagrant. She paused at the bottom of the steps, thinking to stand aside and allow him to descend first. This isn’t London, she reminded herself. This man wasn’t going to recognize her. Though she’d been in Paris for over four months, she wasn’t a true part of society here. No one but her mother would care that she was on a quay this early in the morning.

  Marco stepped close behind Ingrid, his brawny chest brushing against her shoulders. Though he said nothing, she felt him rigid with menace as the stranger took the first few steps down.

  “Relax,” she whispered, but at the tail end of her plea came a familiar sharp twang.

  She knew the sound: the spring release of a crossbow.

  Marco caged Ingrid with his arms and with unnatural speed pivoted her away from the stone steps. He moved with such swiftness that he drove the breath from her lungs and her vision blurred. Marco stumbled as something hit him, and with a grunt and a growl, he shoved Ingrid.

  “Run,” he rasped. “Go!”

  His thrust propelled Ingrid forward, but she stumbled to a halt, disobeying her gargoyle yet again. Had that man actually shot at them? She turned back toward the steps in time to see Marco’s human body erupt into true form. His butler’s uniform ripped apart at the seams as his spine cracked and lengthened, his legs grew and bulked with muscle, and a pair of massive wings unfurled out of his back. He flexed those wings, raising them into great sails, and shredded the last clinging remnants of his jacket. Ingrid stared at the dart embedded in Marco’s ribs.