The Beautiful and the Cursed: Marco's Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

here and there.
    Grace hadn’t been afraid of him. The care with which she’d drawn his gargoyle form showed that.
    Marco turned the page and ran his finger along the roughened edge near the book’s seam. She’d torn out the last page.
    He closed the sketchbook, his jaw clenching as he tried to imagine what she had taken for herself. Another image of him? Human or gargoyle? Perhaps both. Perhaps neither.
    Marco reopened the book and flipped to Grace’s self-portrait. Graphite-gray lines, not the vivid red and green Marco remembered. He took the corner of the page and carefully ripped the sheet free.
    Marco folded the paper and tucked it into his coat pocket, knowing he was a fool. It didn’t matter.
    So long as he was the only one who knew it.

About the Author
    Page Morgan has been fascinated with
les grotesques
ever since she came across a black-and-white photograph of a Notre Dame gargoyle keeping watch over the city of Paris. Her subsequent research fed her imagination, and she was inspired to piece together her own mythology for these remarkably complex stone figures. Page lives in New Hampshire with her husband and their three children.
    Look for the first full-length book in the Novels of the Dispossessed,
The Beautiful and the Cursed
, available from Delacorte Press.

Turn the page for a look at the first book in the Dispossessed series!

    Excerpt copyright © 2013 by Angie Frazier. Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

PARIS
FAUBOURG SAINT-GERMAIN
LATE NOVEMBER 1899
    T he boy was late.
    Brigitte crossed the folds of her sable cape to shut out the creeping frost. It was still and quiet within the walled garden, the hollow sort of quiet that arrives just past midnight. Swaths of snowy burlap covered the rose shrubs, making them look ghostly under the bright moon, and wisps of clouds scudded through the sky.
    She felt like a fool. She’d actually believed he would come.
    He had to have been trifling with her in the markets the day before, when they’d met. Brigitte usually sent servants there, but she was bored with the shopping arcades, and her friend Jacqueline had suggested they go. When Jacqui had wandered off to look at some inexpensive paste rings, Brigitte had noticed the boy standing behind his barrow of parsnips and potatoes.
    She had willfully overlooked his work-roughened hands, his threadbare tweed coat and trousers. Instead, she focused on everything north of his shoulders. He was glorious, his eyes and hair a golden shade of brown that put the finest tiger oak to shame. She knew the boy was unsuitable—he hawked vegetables!—and unworthy of her attention. Perhaps that was exactly why she so eagerly wished to bestow it. Before she knew it, she’d given him her address and a time to meet.
    And here she was.
    But where was he?
    Brigitte stared at the garden gate, the arched planks overrun by withered grapevines. She suddenly wanted nothing more than to be indoors, out of the cold, and safe. She started a slow retreat toward the house. If only the barrow boy had been of her class, they could have met during daylight. Even the garden of Brigitte’s family estate wasn’t completely safe, not now.
    The girls who had gone missing over the last two weeks had all disappeared from their own homes. The Blanche girl was the latest to have vanished. Brigitte had known of her, had seen her at parties once or twice. No one knew where the girls had gone, but the police were starting to suspect foul play. Perhaps it was better that the barrow boy had not come to take her from the walled garden.
    That was when she heard it: the sorrowful call of an owl. She stopped, her heart along with her feet, it seemed. The barrow boy had said he’d give an owl’s hoot three times. After the third cry rang out, the owl fell silent. Uncertain but hopeful, Brigitte went back to the gate. She lifted the hinge, the iron latch cold through her