by Nalini Singh
“I heard the back door slam as we came in, like someone had left in a rush,” Eve added, her voice mingling with that of a sunlit childhood that had lasted only a few short years. “I pulled my blade out before we walked into the living room.”
“Clearly,” Jeffrey said, his voice as calm as if they were talking about a business deal, “we interrupted an intruder in the act of violently assaulting Harrison.”
Elena looked over at Laric, who was swathing her brother-in-law’s throat with bandages. “I’m pretty sure he’d be dead if you hadn’t arrived when you did.” A little deeper on the cut and Jason’s blood would’ve come too late.
“Beth can’t walk into this.” Jeffrey held her eyes.
“No.” Beth hadn’t been there the day Slater Patalis turned their family home into an abattoir. Neither had she seen their mother’s body swinging from the ceiling, a painful shadow that lived forever on the wall of Elena’s mind. Elena had been able to grab Beth and get her out of the house before her baby sister came far enough inside to see the end of their fractured family.
Beth had the terrible sorrow of having lost her mother and two of her sisters, but no horror stained her memories of them. Elena wanted to keep it that way. It was enough that Elena carried the blood and the death and the nightmares. It was enough that Jeffrey carried the same. That was their dark bond, the viciousness and the pain that connected the two of them and that would probably always hold them apart.
“It’s okay, Ellie.” Jeffrey’s big hand stroked her hair as they stood in the morgue beside Ariel and Mirabelle’s bodies, tears thick in his voice. “There’s no more pain where they are now.”
The memory broke her with its glimpse of who Jeffrey had once been. A father who’d fought to give her the closure she needed—to show her that Slater Patalis hadn’t turned her sisters into monsters like him. Jeffrey had held her hand and kept her safe, a tall, strong bulwark against the darkness.
“We should go to Maggie’s great-grandparents’,” he said now. “Break the news before Beth hears it in some other way.”
Maggie’s great-grandparents.
Never my parents-in-law.
Never, ever Marguerite’s parents.
Elena wondered if he’d even spoken to Majda and Jean-Baptiste Etienne. They’d been in the city two and a half years, but Jeffrey was very good at drawing a line in the sand and holding to it.
Tap. Tap.
Eve jerked at the quiet knock on the front door.
Putting one hand on her sister’s shoulder, and aware of their father’s eyes going hyperalert, Elena opened the door after a glance through the peephole. “Tower vampires,” she told Eve and Jeffrey.
The more senior of the two, his black hair tightly curled to his skull and his night-dark skin a stark contrast to the snowy background against which he stood, said, “Dmitri sent us,” in a voice that held the formal intonation of many of the old vampires.
Relieved she could go to Beth without leaving Laric unprotected, Elena pointed to the living room. “Help Laric transfer Harrison wherever he needs to go.”
“We brought a van.” The other member of the team, shorter and freckled, with floppy hair of pale brown paired with a broad Midwestern accent, jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Big enough for wings. Dmitri figured the healer would want to accompany his patient to the infirmary.”
It would also, Elena realized, excuse Laric from having to fly again.
Every so often, Dmitri acted human and she almost liked him. Then he’d play his scent games with her, trapping her in a seduction of fur and champagne and decadent chocolate, and she’d remember why the two of them would never braid each other’s hair while singing camp songs around a bonfire.
After speaking to Laric to ensure he was happy supervising the transfer, Elena nodded at Jeffrey and Eve. “Let’s go see Beth.”
Jeffrey put his spectacles back on. “Shouldn’t we call the authorities?”
“The Tower will deal with that. It has forensic teams that’ll come in and sweep for clues. Given that Harrison is my brother-in-law, we have to treat this as an immortal crime until we have evidence otherwise.”
No barbed response from Jeffrey about how she’d put Harrison in danger.
The three of them walked out of the house in silence. It was only then that she noticed the gleaming black sedan that sat at the curb in front of the equally dark van with opaque windows belonging to the Tower team. “You want to drive?” she asked her father.
“No, it’s close enough to walk. Let me get my coat.” A glance at Eve, his gaze penetrating behind the lenses of his spectacles. “I’ll get yours, too, Evelyn.”
Elena put a gentle hand on her sister’s upper back once Jeffrey was out of earshot—Eve was much shorter than her. “Sheathe the long blade, Evie.” She couldn’t walk around the city flashing the weapon.
Cheeks coloring, Eve whispered, “You won’t tell my team leader, will you?”
“Your secret’s safe with me.” She watched to make sure her sister’s hand was steady as she slid the blade home in the sheath she wore down the side of her leather pants. Those pants weren’t an affectation but a necessity for new hunters. Sewn with a protective inner layer, they were harder to cut through.
Elena had once almost stabbed herself in the arm while putting away her own blade. Ransom had laughed at her—then promptly speared a hole through his pants. There was a reason baby hunters were issued weapons with only fifty percent sharpness.
Her blade safely stored, Eve took the jacket that Jeffrey had retrieved for her. It was a puffy thing, dark green in color and with fake brown fur around the hood that suited Eve’s face with its soft layer of baby fat that was already being honed to adult sharpness by age and the strenuous training regime at Guild Academy.
Jeffrey’s coat couldn’t have been more different; tailored black, it reached halfway down his calves.
He held out something to Elena.
Startled, she took it, unraveling the soft gray fabric to realize he’d handed her a scarf. She knew it was his the instant she put it around her neck. The scent of his aftershave lingered in the woven strands, bringing with it a thousand childhood memories.
Of being held against his chest when she got too tired to walk.
Of laughing wildly with him as they played a game of tag.
Of watching him dance with Belle and Marguerite in the living room while Ari took photographs with her new camera and Beth played with her dolls.
Of walking in on a kiss in the kitchen between Jeffrey and Marguerite and feeling her heart squeeze so hard in happiness.
Shattered pieces of a mirror with jagged edges, memories of a life forever destroyed.
Part of her wanted to tear off the scarf, tear off this resonance of yesterday, but she didn’t reject the offer. With her and Jeffrey, it was a tightrope, a fragile balance that could be upended with a single word.
They began to walk the five blocks to Majda and Jean-Baptiste’s home.
It was three minutes later that Eve said, “Ellie, psst.”
Following her sister’s gaze, Elena saw that Eve was pointing to where Elena’s left wing dragged through the snow. A chill filled Elena’s blood, and it had nothing to do with the winter white that blanketed the world and made her breath create small, icy clouds as it left her mouth.
She hadn’t felt the slack in her wing muscles.
Neither had she felt the wet cold of the snow.
“Thanks.” Winking conspiratorially, she lifted both wings to the correct position . . . while keeping a surreptitious eye on the one that had dropped.
The muscles responded to her commands, but she couldn’t feel them. And though her right wing appeared fine, it wasn’t. It might not have weakened far enough to drag, but there was too much slack in it.
Rocks in her abdomen, hard black weights t
hat crushed and scraped.
But Beth came first; she’d deal with this later.
It took tight and conscious control to keep her wings from dragging as they walked the rest of the short distance. Her grandparents had chosen their house because it was close to Beth and Maggie.
They loved Elena and Beth for being “children of their child,” but it was Marguerite “Maggie” Aribelle Deveraux-Ling who’d so totally stolen their hearts. Beth’s chubby, pretty baby had turned into an energetic and sweet little girl who laughed as often as not.
Cherished and protected and loved, Maggie would have a far different life than either Elena or Beth. She’d probably end up a little spoiled, but far better that than the bone-deep sorrow that had led an adult Beth to sob in Elena’s arms.
Beth, the baby of their original family, had wanted Marguerite when she fell pregnant herself, wanted to learn how to be a mother from her own. But Marguerite had left them long ago, so broken inside that she’d forgotten it was one of her surviving daughters who might find her body.
“Mama?”
A single high-heeled shoe lying on the tile.
A burst of hope that Marguerite was getting better.
The gently swinging shadow.
Eve’s gloved hand wove through Elena’s right then, tugging her from a past too full of pain to bear. Another baby of the family. The youngest of the six daughters Jeffrey had fathered. Holding on to her big sister even though she was fifteen now and far too sophisticated to act like a child.
Elena curled her fingers tight around Eve’s.
“Will Harrison be all right?” her sister asked solemnly.
As solidly practical as Maggie was carefree, Eve reminded Elena fiercely of Ari at times. Jeffrey’s second-eldest daughter had been pragmatic and solid, too, a point of calm in the madness—and the most like their father. Elena remembered how the two of them would escape the chaos together at times, fishing rod and camera, respectively, in hand.
Today, Jeffrey walked silently on Eve’s other side, but Elena could tell he was listening.
“Harrison has Jason’s blood in his system now,” she said after a cough to clear her throat—the memories were haunting her today. “It gives him a far higher chance of survival.”
Eve shivered. “I’ve met lots of angels because of you, but he made all the hairs on my arms stand up—like he carries a storm with him.”
Pragmatic and perceptive, that was Eve. “Jason’s one of Raphael’s Seven.” And an angel who could create black lightning that broke the sky, his power a dark storm.
Her wing dropped again.
14
Having caught the motion out of the corner of her eye, she managed to pull it up before her sister or father noticed.
“What do we tell Beth?” Jeffrey’s tone held no wrenching emotion, but that was the thing with her father—he hadn’t cried when they’d discovered Marguerite, and he’d stood stone-faced at her funeral. Two days later, Elena had woken from a nightmare and walked down the hall to see Jeffrey crumpled on the floor of his study, sobs wracking his frame. An empty whiskey bottle had lain on its side beside him.
Elena had gone in even though the two of them were already broken by then, and she’d hugged him and they’d cried together.
That was their terrible history. Pain and love entwined in equal measures.
“We tell her the truth,” she said as a prickling sensation ran over the back of her hand, “but we lead with Harrison being alive and in excellent hands. She needs to know what’s happening to take precautions to protect herself and Maggie.”
“I don’t think we should tell her about all the blood in her lounge, though,” Eve suggested. “Father—”
“I’ll organize a cleaner,” Jeffrey said. “In the interim, and for her and Maggie’s safety, she needs to stay with either myself and Gwendolyn or Maggie’s great-grandparents.”
“Jean-Baptiste is a trained fighter,” Elena said. “It’s probably better if they stay with him and Majda until we figure out what’s going on. Majda can also look after Maggie when Beth visits Harrison at the Tower.”
Jeffrey didn’t point out that he had the capacity to hire round-the-clock bodyguards, and that Gwendolyn didn’t work outside the home and could also babysit Maggie. He knew as well as she did that Beth had bonded far deeper with her mother’s parents than she had to Jeffrey’s second wife.
There was no enmity between Gwendolyn and Beth, but Beth saw her mother in Majda’s face. She saw the same fine bones and small stature, the same darkly golden skin, the hair that could’ve been Marguerite’s under a waterfall of sunshine. And in Majda and Jean-Baptiste’s piercing love for one another, a love that had survived decades of torture and isolation, she saw an echo of Marguerite and Jeffrey.
Those were the very reasons Jeffrey couldn’t stand to look at Majda and Jean-Baptiste. Majda most of all. Elena knew that her grandmother and grandfather had reached out to Jeffrey many times. As far as she was aware, he’d rebuffed each and every approach, politely but firmly.
She wondered what he’d do today, but that he was coming with her was a good sign. Beth might’ve bonded to her grandparents, but she was still a daddy’s girl. Jeffrey’s presence would help her weather the shock.
Two little boys playing in the snow up ahead stared at Elena with huge eyes, their impressive snowballs forgotten in their hands. “Whoa,” one of them said as she passed. “Those real?”
Taking the chance to confirm everything was functional, Elena flared out her wings—and heard excited chatter behind them as the boys ran off to tell their parents they’d spotted an angel walking around the neighborhood. Poor kids probably wouldn’t be believed unless someone else snapped a pic and uploaded it online.
She closed her wings, using the excuse of avoiding a broken piece of fencing to glance back and check everything was where it should be. No drag. No obvious sign of weakness. She remained unable to feel her wing muscles.
Her stomach gnawed at her spine.
Shit.
Elena couldn’t have felt less like eating, but she took out two energy bars and methodically finished them one by one. Eve didn’t pay much attention, her face set in a determined frown and her eyes looking straight ahead, but Jeffrey said, “You’re still transitioning?”
No one would ever call her father anything but sharply intelligent.
“Long process.” Which appeared to be going backward.
Bars eaten, she tucked the wrappers into a pocket then rubbed her fingertips gently over the worry lines on Eve’s brow. “She won’t believe us if you look so gloomy.”
Sniffing out a breath, Eve leaned a little into Elena.
And Jeffrey ran his hand over the raven black of his youngest daughter’s hair.
Then there it was, the pretty town house Elena’s grandparents had made their own, complete with a low-slung black sports car in the drive. Jean-Baptiste had taken to technology like the proverbial duck to water—not only had he quickly learned how to use phones, he loved driving. He especially loved driving the fast car he’d been assigned by the Tower after Dmitri caught him admiring the red Ferrari that was Dmitri’s pride and joy.
At first, Jean-Baptiste had been given the courtesy because he was Elena’s grandfather. Not that Elena couldn’t have bought him the car herself, as she could’ve bought her grandparents this home—the hunt that had ended her mortal existence had also left her a wealthy woman, and then she’d fallen into the blood-café business.
Money wasn’t a problem.
But the Tower had insisted on providing for the couple—and she’d realized Majda and Jean-Baptiste would be more likely to accept the help from their archangel than their child’s child. Especially as Jean-Baptiste, experienced and valued for his skill, was now a commander in charge of an infantry unit.
Even had Jean-Baptiste decided against s
uch service, he and Majda would’ve been treated with the same courtesy.
“They are your grandparents,” Raphael had said as he and Elena lay tangled in bed one night, “and so they are mine, too.” A pause before he’d added, “I also do not feel the desire to murder them as I so often do your father.”
The door Jean-Baptiste had painted a bright pink at Majda’s request opened before she reached it. As with Beth’s home, this door was wide enough to allow Elena entry. And it was Beth whose smiling face filled the doorway. Jean-Baptiste must’ve spotted them coming and not stopped Beth. From the joy of her, he also hadn’t alarmed her with a warning about nebulous danger. Good.
Before Beth could say anything, a smaller body wriggled out from around her side and pelted down the walk. “Auntie Ellie! Grampa! Auntie Eve!”
Bending, Elena scooped Maggie’s body into her arms and snuggled her close. Her niece was dressed in pink jeans with pink snow boots and a white furry jacket that was open over a white top that had a sparkly design on it. Her head was bare, the shoulder-length strands of her silky black hair awry, but she’d no doubt be wearing her pink sparkly hat when she ventured out into the snow again.
Her eyes were a sweet brown, tilted up at the edges, and her light olive-toned skin held a brush of gold. In the cheekbones hidden beneath the little-girl softness, Elena saw the promise of dramatic beauty. Most of all, in Maggie’s tiny body, she saw myriad threads of their family—strands of Morocco, of France, of New York, of her other great-grandparents’ history in Hong Kong and India.
But Maggie’s smile was a reflection of the pretty woman with strawberry-blonde hair who stood in the doorway, clad in skinny blue jeans and a fuzzy green sweater with threads of silver.
Beth’s face had lit up at seeing the three of them, but her smile began to fade at the edges almost before Maggie finished digging in Elena’s top jacket pocket for a treat. As Maggie knew her aunt often had a small sweet for her, Beth knew that Elena and Jeffrey didn’t go out for companionable walks in the snow. Her eyes zigzagged between them to finally land on Elena. “Ellie?” A shaky question.