Read Chapter 7: The Rooftop Hunt

The gargoyle landed on the parapet of the Hôtel de Ville with a scrape of stone on stone—not the grating sound Luc expected, but something softer, almost like a hand smoothing over sand. Aigle folded his wings against his flanks and tilted his head, the carved hollows of his eyes catching the city’s amber glow.

“You see him?” Luc whispered, crouched low behind a chimney pot.

Aigle did not speak the way men spoke. His voice came as a vibration in the stone beneath Luc’s palm, a low hum that shaped itself into words Luc’s chest understood more than his ears. *West. Across the Seine. Moving fast.*

Luc peered over the roofline. The sky above the Latin Quarter was a bruised purple, the last of the daylight bleeding away. And there—a flicker of movement, a shadow that didn’t belong to the chimneys or the water towers. A figure in a long coat, hunched and quick, darting from rooftop to rooftop with an agility that made Luc’s stomach clench.

He raised the compass. The needle spun once, then settled, pointing not north but toward the figure. East, toward the old slaughterhouse district. Still east.

“That’s no coincidence,” Luc muttered.

Aigle shifted, his talons gouging shallow furrows into the slate. *He wears a mask. Modern. It is not one of the guild.*

“Could be the Architecte’s man.”

*The Architecte walks without shadow. This one casts one—barely. But he casts one.*

Luc didn’t fully understand Aigle’s ways of seeing, but he’d learned to trust them. In the three nights since the catacombs, the gargoyle had become his shadow—appearing at his workshop window when dusk fell, leading him onto the roofs to track the marks the ravageur left behind. Not claw marks. Those were easy to find. The subtle ones: the chipped gargoyles, the cracked cornices, the fresh mortar that smelled wrong.

But this was the first live prey they’d spotted.

“Let’s go,” Luc said.

He didn’t need Aigle to carry him. Not yet. The rooftops of Paris were a world unto themselves—lead sheeting worn smooth by generations of chimney sweeps and cat burglars, gutters that ran like narrow canyons between the slopes of mansard roofs. Luc had spent fifteen years climbing scaffolds, reading the buildings like pages of a book written in stone. The handholds were all there if you knew how to look.

He ran, boots whispering on the zinc. Aigle launched himself off the parapet and swept wide, circling to cut off the figure’s path.

The masked man glanced back. Through the dusk, Luc caught the glint of something over his face—a plastic shell, white and featureless, like the masks you’d buy at a costume shop, except this one moved when the man breathed. Not a mask, Luc realized. A prosthetic. Or something worse.

The man turned and bolted.

Luc poured on speed. He vaulted a low chimney, landed on the far slope of the roof, and slid down the slick zinc to the next gutter, catching himself on a decorative finial that swayed alarmingly. Below him, the Rue de Rivoli hummed with traffic, oblivious. Above, Aigle’s wings beat a soft rhythm as he drove the figure north.

The chase moved fast. They crossed a bridge of rooftops over the Seine—Luc leaping a four-foot gap between buildings, his heart hammering in his throat—and then the masked man dropped.

Not fell. Dropped, deliberately, through a ragged hole in a roof that sagged like a wounded animal.

Luc pulled up short at the edge. The hole gaped black, ringed with broken slate. The building below was a bell tower—old, crumbling, its bell long gone. The stonework was Gothic, probably fifteenth century, abandoned sometime in the nineteenth when the church attached to it was demolished.

He checked the compass. The needle spun wildly now, unable to settle. The area was heavy with masonry memory, thick with the sweat of long-dead craftsmen. It was like standing inside a shout.

Behind him, Aigle landed with a thud.

*This tower is not in the guild’s records.*

“The Architecte’s not the only one who keeps secrets.” Luc lowered himself through the hole, gripping the edge of a broken beam. His feet found purchase on a cross-brace, then a ladder that creaked but held. Aigle followed, folding his wings tight to squeeze through the opening.

The interior of the tower was a cylinder of shadow, pierced by narrow lancet windows that let in sickly slivers of streetlight. Dust hung in the air, thick enough to taste. Luc pulled the chalk from his coat pocket—the chalk the Architecte had given him, still warm, still humming with a faint energy he couldn’t name—and drew a small X on the wall beside the ladder. A mark. A breadcrumb.

The sound came from above. A scuffle, a scrape, a muffled curse.

Luc climbed. The ladder ended at a rough-hewn platform where the bell used to hang. Ropes hung slack, decaying. And there, pressed into the far corner, knelt the masked figure.

He wasn’t hiding. He was hunched over something on the floor, working at it with frantic, fumbling hands.

“Don’t move,” Luc said.

The figure stiffened but didn’t turn. The white mask tilted, as if listening.

Luc stepped closer. Aigle landed on the platform beside him, his weight making the timbers groan. The figure’s shoulders shook—not with fear, Luc realized. With effort. The mask made a wet sound against the man’s face each time he breathed.

“Who are you?” Luc demanded.

The mask turned. And Luc saw it clearly for the first time—a smooth oval of white resin, featureless except for two dark eyeholes, and beneath those, a seam that ran from the temple down to the jaw. The seam pulsed.

Not a mask. A mesh. A graft.

The man laughed—a thin, reedy sound—and stood. In his hands, he held something Luc would have recognized anywhere.

François’s hammer. The one Luc had given him last Christmas—a hand-forged claw hammer with a handle of ash, the head engraved with a single small lily.

Luc’s chest tightened. “Where is he?”

“Safe,” the man said. His voice was distorted by the thing over his face, like words pushed through gravel. “Safer than you.”

“Give me the hammer.”

“It stays. It matters to her.”

“Her?” Luc’s mind raced. “Who’s her?”

The man laughed again, but this time it caught in his throat. He clutched the hammer to his chest as if it were a talisman. His gaze flicked to Aigle, then to the lancet window behind Luc. Calculating an exit.

“The harvest moon is full,” the man said. “Do you know what that means for the craftsmen of Paris, restorer?”

Luc didn’t answer.

“It means the tide is highest tonight,” the man continued. “Not the tide of the sea—the tide below. The deep water that runs under the city.” He tapped his own chest where his heart should be. “The ravageur will feed well tonight. And François has been waiting for a long, long time.”

“François is dead,” Luc said, testing.

The man’s head tilted again, bird-like. “Is he? You’ve seen his note. You’ve held my compass. But have you seen his body?”

Luc had not.

The man lunged—not at Luc, but at the window. He moved with a speed that didn’t match his hunched frame, and Aigle barely caught him in time, one stone forelimb slamming down across the sill. The man recoiled, landing hard on the platform, and the hammer skittered from his grip, clattering across the timbers.

Luc dove for it.

His fingers closed around the ash handle just as the man leapt again—not for the window this time, but for a hole in the floor, a black gap where a stair had rotted away. He vanished like water down a drain. Aigle lunged after him, but the gap was too small, and the gargoyle’s bulk jammed against the beams.

Luc scrambled to his feet, hammer in hand, and peered into the darkness. Nothing. No sound of a landing. No scuffle below. The man was gone.

Aigle pulled back, his talons scraping deep furrows in the wood. *He knows the tower’s secrets. The hidden ways.*

Luc ran his thumb over the engraved lily on the hammer’s head. It was warm—warmer than the air around them. Warmer than it should be.

He looked at the window the man had intended to take. Through it, he could see the roofline of Île Saint-Louis rising across the Seine. The Bouchard family’s house stood there, dark and shuttered, like a sleeping eye.

“He was going west,” Luc said slowly. “Not east. Not toward the slaughterhouse.”

Aigle tilted his head. *The compass points east.*

“The compass points where it wants to.” Luc set the hammer down on the platform and pulled out the compass again. The needle spun, then settled east—toward the slaughterhouse, toward the ravageur’s lair.

But the masked man had run west. Toward the Bouchard records. Toward the traitor.

Luc’s jaw tightened. François’s hammer was warm. His chalk was warm. The compass pointed east, but everything in this city pointed west.

“He lied,” Luc said. “The Architecte said François was dead. He said the compass would lead me to him.”

*Do you trust him?*

“No.” Luc pocketed the compass and picked up the hammer, weighing it in his hand. “But I trust this. François still uses his tools. He’s alive, Aigle. Somewhere in this city, he’s still alive—and someone doesn’t want me to find him.”

Aigle’s stone gaze met his, unblinking. *Then where do we go?*

Luc looked back out the window, past the rooftops, toward the dark mass of the old slaughterhouse district—and beyond it, to the river, to the island where the Bouchard family kept their secrets.

“East,” Luc said. “For now. But we’re going to need to move faster than he expects.”

The hammer in his hand pulsed once, like a heartbeat.

François had never been a patient man. He would have left more than a trail of chalk.