“How are you supposed to learn if you are dead?”
Gabby got to her feet, her backside cold from the frozen pavement. The bridge had been the perfect place for Chelle and Gabby to stand about idly for the last half hour or so, looking like a pair of stupidly innocent humans and luring any demon worth its salt. The bridge repairs had been postponed long ago, the city workers engrossed in constructing scores of palatial exhibition halls and pavilions along the riverfront and the Champs de Mars for the Exposition Universelle. The world’s fair would open in April, as would Gabby’s mother’s gallery.
Gabby only hoped that by April, she’d be able to kill a demon without Chelle’s help.
She sheathed her sword in the leather straps she’d sewn into the lining of her cape as Chelle tucked her twin stars back into the folds of the red scarf wrapped around her waist.
“I should not be doing this,” Chelle muttered.
“But you are,” Gabby said. “And you have to admit that you need me.”
Chelle gawked at Gabby, her round eyes made wider. “What I need is a demon hunter, not an apprenticing nuisance.”
The weight of Gabby’s sword was a comfort, even if Chelle’s words were not. She kept the blessed blade close to her whenever she could manage it, and not just because a few weeks before, Chelle, one of the last two Alliance members remaining to safeguard Paris, had reluctantly agreed to train Gabby in the art of demon slaying.
The sword reminded her of Nolan.
It had been his gift to her for her sixteenth birthday, and Nolan Quinn, another Alliance member in Paris, had promised to teach her how to use it when he returned from Euro-Alliance headquarters in Rome. But he’d been gone for more than six weeks, and Gabby had been champing at the bit to train. She’d needed something to obsess over, and she certainly hadn’t wanted it to be the set of ugly scars that marred the right side of her face.
Her encounter with a hellhound in December had left a three-pronged track of deep claw marks down her right cheek. Sitting around the rectory while she waited for the doctor’s judgment that the wounds had fully healed had been torture. The moment the bandages had come off, Gabby had gone to H?tel Bastian, Alliance headquarters in Paris.
“Give me one more week,” Gabby said as Chelle rewrapped a thin woolen scarf around her neck and tugged down the short brim of her cap against the gusting wind. She avoided Gabby’s pleading stare. “I almost had this one.”
And if Nolan knew, he’d be furious. Chelle didn’t have permission to train Gabby, even though the Paris Alliance was hurting for fighters. It had been thinned out months before when higher-ranking members had gone to Rome for some big summit. Gabby didn’t know much about it, but she did know that with Nolan gone and two treasonous members, Tomas and Marie, in Rome for their trials, Vander Burke and Chelle were the only two Alliance left in Paris.
They needed all the demon hunters they could get.
Secretly, Gabby imagined with pleasure how stunned Nolan would be when he returned and saw how well she fought. Impressing Nolan wasn’t her main desire, but it was one of them. Before he left, he’d assured her that the scars the hellhound’s claws had carved wouldn’t matter. He’d made Gabby that promise and she’d accepted it with a slow, heated kiss. But she still felt the need to make up for the puffy pink marks. If she couldn’t be beautiful anymore, she had to be skilled—and demon hunting was a skill she knew Nolan admired.
“As if I could rid myself of you anyway,” Chelle said, starting for the bridge’s Left Bank exit. Gabby wasn’t one of Chelle’s favorite people. Nolan had a lot to do with that. Chelle harbored old feelings for him.
“Thank you,” Gabby said, following Chelle’s brisk footsteps. The words wouldn’t make Chelle like her, but she was thankful.
Gabby nearly trod on Chelle’s heels a moment later when Chelle ground to a halt and held up an arm, her short, well-manicured nails poking through the open tips of her gloves.
“What—” Gabby sealed her lips when she saw a man emerge from behind a stack of steel beams. He brushed aside the frayed, flapping canvas cover.