by Nalini Singh
Eyes of rich brown intermingled with an unusual acidic green sparkling, Holly reached back to tighten her ponytail. Her hair was currently a vivid purple accented with a streak of gold that began at her right temple and carried all the way down. Dmitri had termed the look “grape jelly with a radioactive rash.” But it had been said with an affectionate smile and a shake of the head.
Dmitri’s treatment of Holly was like that of a father with a cherished daughter—a daughter who occasionally drove him crazy. A week earlier, Elena had walked into his office to find Holly curled up in a chair in the corner, her nose buried in a college textbook while Dmitri did his work as Raphael’s second.
“Venom didn’t want to join the race?” she asked.
“He’s out at the sinkhole.” Holly put her hands on her hips, her nails painted a vivid orange with pink accents. “I’m heading there later this afternoon—after I help Trace pack his fancy duds.” A grin at her friend. “You come to visit the Legion?”
Elena nodded. “They inside?” Every so often, the entire seven hundred and seventy-seven strong cohort would rise up and fly off somewhere. Once in a while, it would be to Central Park. The first time they’d pulled that trick, the media had been besieged by calls reporting the abrupt appearance of hundreds of gargoyles in the park.
Agog residents had wondered if it was all an avant-garde art show.
It wasn’t only the Legion’s way of sitting inhumanly motionless that had people mistaking them for stone. Though they’d gained color since their arrival in New York, their eyes and skin and features no longer palest gray, that color wasn’t yet solid. As if it hadn’t sunk into their skin and was washed off by the elements.
“I think they’re hibernating,” Holly said. “I can’t blame them—it’s so cold. I’m pretty sure my eyelashes are going to freeze and fall off at any moment.” Her breath fogged the air, her cheeks pink.
On the surface, nothing remained of the naked and mute mortal coated in dried blood whom Elena had found hiding in an abandoned guard station. Elena knew the truth wasn’t so simple. Holly would carry her scars forever, but she’d fought back with feral determination to ensure those scars didn’t steal her future, and in so doing, she’d raised her middle finger to the being who’d brutalized her.
Elena approved.
“In case I don’t see you tomorrow,” she said to Trace, “have a good journey, and say hi to Aodhan.”
The vampire who had eyes of the deepest green she’d ever seen, a forest under the veil of night, crossed one arm across his chest with old-world grace and bowed. “I will look forward to my return to the city.”
The two headed off to the Tower, while Elena strode to the vines.
The Legion had been alive for eons. Maybe they had an answer for her.
About the heart attack that wasn’t.
About the voice in her head.
About the cut on her forearm that she’d covered with a flesh-colored Band-Aid when it began bleeding again at the end of her morning session.
11
Pulling on her gloves, she realized she hadn’t brought the ones with grips. But when she checked the vine Trace had used, she saw the vampire’s claws—never visible in company—and boots had scratched the coating of ice just enough that Elena should be able to get to the top without slipping.
It remained a bitch of an ascent. It didn’t help that her wings caused heavy drag on her entire body. “Ellie, you obviously left your brain on pause this morning,” she puffed out a quarter of the way up, and spread her wings.
The drag became more manageable.
Reaching the top with a grunt of satisfaction—though her muscles felt disconcertingly quivery for such a short exertion—she stripped off the gloves, stuffing them into a side pocket of her slimline cargo pants. She gave her heart and her breath time to even out before she made her way to the thick strips of plastic that hung at the entrance to the Legion’s home. She’d used to call out before she entered, but the Primary had made it clear this place was as much hers as it was theirs, and they didn’t understand why she asked for entrance.
Elena walked in.
To be immediately assailed by hundreds of whispering voices in her skull.
Elena. Aeclari. Elena. Aeclari. You come. We are glad.
Having been braced for the avalanche, she managed to push the voices away without being harsh. “Use your mouths!” she called out into the cavernous space with a massive internal core. “Remember what we talked about.”
Every one of the gargoyles in her vision—clinging to the walls or crouching on the parts of the building that jutted out to the center—tilted their heads to the side, looking at her with eyes pale and strange.
“One at a time,” she said, in case the entire Legion decided to speak at once.
What is one?
Elena rubbed her forehead with two fingers. Every time she thought the Legion had begun to understand the concept of individuality, they’d regress and she’d be explaining it to them all over again. It had gotten to the point where she wondered if they were meant to be a unit always, no matter if they slept in the deep or lived in the world. Yet a few of them had indicated a desire to explore the idea of “oneness,” so she kept on trying.
Today, however, she decided to let it go. Taking a deep breath of the humid green air, she jumped into the hollow heart of the building. The distance down was just enough that she got air under her wings and could beat her way up to perch on one of the midpoint outcroppings—the remnant of what had once been the forty-fifth floor, if she had her bearings right.
The outcropping had been planted with exotic blooms since her last visit. “Where did you get this?” She pointed at a bright blue flower she’d been trying to source forever. “Can I have a cutting?”
One of the Legion landed near her. Not the Primary, who most often spoke for them. This one was nearly fully gray, except for an unexpected brush of color on the backs of his hands. A deep mahogany shade quite unlike the rest of his skin or clothing. That clothing formed with the members of the Legion when they fell in battle to rise again, and it was an identical gray to their bodies.
Reaching out to touch the discrete patches of the darker shade with gentle fingers, Elena said, “What’s this?”
“We are becoming,” the member of the Legion said before pausing and adding, “I am becoming. I like this color.”
Startled at the individualistic statement, Elena looked at him with more care. “Do you have a name?” None of the Legion had chosen names that she was aware.
“I am Legion,” he said, the pinprick points of his pupils black against irises so pale they all but merged into the whites. “We made you a plant.” Getting up from his crouch, he moved to one side of the garden and returned with a pot in which grew a smaller version of the plant she’d wanted. “We were waiting for you to come.”
A small sun in her heart, Elena ran her fingers over the frond-like leaves. “I’ll put it by the entrance so I don’t forget to take it with me when I go.”
“I will carry it down for you.” His bat-like wings flared out in readiness. “We have much to show you.”
Elena. Aeclari. Elena. Aeclari. See.
They used that word with such ease, but they still hadn’t explained its meaning.
You are aeclari, and the Legion may only serve aeclari.
Aeclari is you.
That was all she ever got.
At this point, she’d stopped asking for an explanation. The Legion, millennia of information in their collective brain, believed they were being straightforward in their answers. It was simply that they skipped, oh, about six hundred and ninety-seven steps between one statement and the next.
The whispers rose again in the back of Elena’s mind.
Dream. Dream. Blood. Sad.
Shifting to sit with her legs hanging off the ed
ge of this outcropping, Elena looked down at the plants that thrived in this massive and multilevel internal garden. The member of the Legion who’d given her the plant flew back from his errand to crouch next to her while several of his brethren came to crouch on the outcropping facing her. Others flew to cling to the vines that crawled down the walls.
“How do you know my dreams?” she said, somehow not creeped out by the idea.
We are Legion. We are yours.
Actually, technically, they were Raphael’s, the power capable of calling the Legion from the deep archangelic in nature—but the strange and truly immortal beings tended to treat her and Raphael as one.
As aeclari.
“My mama,” she said, her hands curling over the edge on which she sat. “I dream of her. She’s gone.” It hurt to say that, to admit she’d never again feel Marguerite’s soft arms around her except in her dreams. “Dead.”
Dead.
An echo, not a question.
“Do you understand the concept of death?” Cut down in battle, the Legion had arisen over and over again, an army that could not be vanquished.
We know. We die. Eons we die. Then we wake.
How could Elena argue with that? Surely, an endless sleep at the bottom of the ocean would feel like death. “But you hear the world passing by?”
“Not all,” several voices said aloud. “Only the ones who listen. Then we know.”
Working that through, she realized that during their times in the deep, only groups of the Legion were “awake” at a time, but as they shared all knowledge gained, it made no difference long-term. “Why seven hundred and seventy-seven?” Another question she often asked.
It is the number.
And that was the answer she always received.
Laughter bubbling inside her, she said, “Have you grown any new fruit?”
Come. Come. Come. See. See. See.
Following the sweep of a pair of silent gray wings, she rose higher after dropping down to gain momentum and found herself on an outcropping situated near the apex of the skyscraper, underneath a glass cover, which was closed against winter’s frigid kiss. In the summer months and in spring, the Legion often left it open. Sunshine drenched the building then, and the rain fell in, helped quench the thirst of their gardens.
Today, beneath the anemic winter sunlight and the yellow glow of heat lamps attached to the walls, she saw a perfect patch of strawberries. When one of the Legion plucked out a strawberry the size of a small plum and handed it to her, she bit into it with relish. The juices flowed onto her tongue and down her palm to her wrist, the trail as thick and darkly crimson as blood. She jerked but didn’t drop the strawberry . . . And when she looked again, the trail was a pale, watery pink as it should be.
“Did you do that?” she demanded of the Legion, a hot ball of lead in her stomach.
You did. You did. You did.
“Stop.” The voices had been rising in volume, mirroring one another and threatening to drive her to madness.
Quiet, broken only by the sound of her own breathing. The Legion could be quieter than death, quieter than stone. “I did it?” She stared at the thin stream of juice. “A bad dream brought to life?”
The Primary’s voice reached her from inside the silence. “Yes.”
She wasn’t the least surprised to turn and discover him crouched beside her—with his gray eyes that had a ring as blue as Raphael’s irises, and his hair of black, the Primary was the most individual of all the Legion. But she saw now that the gray had begun to creep through his hair once again.
Backward, he was going backward.
Like Elena.
“What’s happening?” She indicated his hair. “Have you stopped becoming?”
He tilted his head to the side, his bat-like wings folded tight to his back and his body otherwise static. “No, this is the second becoming.”
Her heart was a bass drum. “What will be the end result?”
“We do not know. But we feel the spiral of energies, the cataclysm of change.”
The tiny hairs on her arms rising, Elena held out the strawberry. “Why do I see blood? Why won’t my cut heal?”
“Because you are becoming, too.”
The Legion lifted off together without warning, a flock of silence. They’d scattered across the skyscraper in a matter of minutes, and she knew that if she asked more questions on the topic, their answers would be exactly the same.
She finished eating the strawberry with slow, deliberate focus on its ripe sweetness then flew down to look at the other new plantings. By the time she reached the exit again, it held a collection of ten potted plants.
Affection bloomed inside her, a strange thing to feel for these ageless creatures who were so clearly not human. “Thank you,” she said aloud. “I’d appreciate it if you could fly these gifts to my greenhouse.”
We will. We will. We will.
Elena was about to walk out when she remembered another question she’d meant to ask. But agony burst inside her chest before she could speak, red-hot iron pokers searing her organs and perforating her lungs.
She screamed without a voice, would’ve fallen to her knees except that two of the Legion caught her, one on either side. They lowered her gently to a seated position on the ground, her wings spread out behind her on the lush green grass they’d somehow coaxed to grow inside their haven.
The Legion crouched all around her, watching, waiting, eerie but unthreatening.
Hand still clutched to her chest, she clenched her jaw and rode the pain. Scarlet waves, black nothingness, crushing stone in every breath, this attack went on and on.
It was instinct to reach for Raphael, but she held off with grim will. There was no reason to remind him again of the mortality that lingered in her bones. Even now, the pain was fading, the edges softening until she could breathe again without the air slicing her lungs.
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
She shook her head at the rising swell of echoes. “It’s all right. It wasn’t you.”
The becoming, the Legion said. The becoming.
Elena rubbed at her chest again. Finding the Primary in the sea of faces, she said, “Have you been through a second becoming before?”
“The Cascade does not always surge.”
Instead of tearing out her hair at the cryptic answer that intimated the “second becoming” only came into play when the Cascade cycled from active to dormant, she asked another question. “Am I in danger of dying from this pain?”
A long pause during which she could hear a million whispers at the back of her head but couldn’t make out the words. The Legion consulting among themselves.
“The pain will not kill you,” the Primary said at last. “We have not seen this in our past wakings, but we have felt the energies. The pain energy will not kill you.”
It was, she realized, a highly specific answer. “What about the reason behind the pain? The root cause? Is that energy dangerous?”
Another wave of background whispers, cresting and falling.
It is not known to us, was the ominous final response.
Gut tight, Elena hooked her arms around her raised knees and stared. The Legion had been around since before vampires; for them to so bluntly say they had no knowledge of what was happening to her, it hit a solid ten on the terror meter. “I guess this Cascade will be one for the books.”
They tilted their heads to the side all at once, a comical row of fairground clowns whose paint had washed off. We do not keep books.
Finding a laugh inside her, Elena said, “If you remember anything about this”—she tapped the internal bruise left behind by the attack—“let me know, okay?”
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Hidden in the echo of their final yes was another voice, old and heavy with sleep: Child of mortals. Vessel unawakened. You
step closer to your destiny. For one must die for one to live.
Who are you? Elena said inside her mind.
No answer. No sense of a presence. Just a promise of death.
Fuck it, she thought. If death was coming for her, she’d face it with teeth bared and weapons unsheathed.
The pain down to a dull throb, she said her good-byes then left the Legion to transfer the potted plants across the river. At least she didn’t have to climb down the slippery ropes of vine. Flaring out her wings, she floated easily to the ground, but she’d only taken five steps when her phone began to buzz with an incoming call.
Retrieving it, she stared at the name that flashed on the screen. Great, this was exactly what she didn’t need. “Father.”
“Elieanora, I need you at Beth and Harrison’s home,” Jeffrey Deveraux said in a curt tone. “Harrison is badly injured. Do I give him blood?”
Elena was already running toward the Tower. “No, it’s too dangerous.” If Harrison was so badly hurt that Jeffrey was calling Elena, he could fall into a blood fog and drink Jeffrey dry. Elena’s father was strong and in good shape, but Harrison was both younger and a vampire—in a physical fight, he was the one who’d reign supreme. “I’ll bring a healer.” Her bruised lungs fought to keep up with her pace. “Beth and Maggie—”
“Eve has messaged Beth,” Jeffrey interrupted. “Both are safe.”
“Stanch the blood loss as well as you can. I’m on my way.”
Shoving the phone into a pocket, Elena ran full tilt. Every second that passed felt like an eternity.
After reaching the infirmary floor, she found only Laric in attendance. No one had expected the badly scarred and emotionally wounded young healer to accept Raphael’s invitation to visit his Tower, but eight months after they’d first met, Laric had surprised everyone by coming to New York to visit Aodhan.
And somehow, he’d stayed.
He never ventured to the ground and kept his scarred face hooded even among friends. However, he seemed to find fascination in sitting on the Tower balconies and watching the colorful life of the city, and he flew in the skies above New York. The violent archangelic energy that had burned him down to the bone had done catastrophic damage to his wings—but a long-overdue examination had found that enough of the crucial substructure remained to offer hope.