Archangel's Shadows (Guild Hunter series Book 7)

by Singh, Nalini

  “No doubt, it’s a match,” she said.

  The DNA would put the final stamp on the identification, but there was no longer any question in Ashwini’s mind that Felicity Johnson was their victim.

  Taking the rest of Felicity’s belongings, she turned to Janvier. “Let’s go to a pretty place to look at this.” It seemed an insult to Felicity’s hopes to do it in such hard, clinical surroundings.

  “I know a spot,” Janvier said, and they headed back to his car.

  Watching the city pass by, the snow ground into ice and dirt in places, pristine in others, she kept her silence. There was no need to speak. She’d seen the same grim sorrow that lived in her heart on Janvier’s face. When he pulled into a parking garage near Chelsea Market, she thought he meant for them to go into a tea shop inside, but he led her through to the High Line.

  Originally elevated railway tracks used by freight trains, the area had been converted into a living green space. Summer days and nights saw it filled with New Yorkers out to grab a little sun, take a stroll, or just hang out. And it wasn’t popular only with mortals and vampires. Angels liked to drop by, often sitting on the specially reinforced railings, their wings hanging over the sides. Ashwini had once seen two of them eating ice cream and watching the stream of yellow taxis below while a curious boy of about seven leaned on the railing beside them and asked a million questions.

  Long grasses and wildflowers, trailing vines set up on trellises, innovative pieces of sculpture in among the greenery, the mood of the High Line changed at the whim of the gardeners and curators, making it a place that was new again and again and again. Then there were the birds and the butterflies, their song and color filling the air on sunlit summer days.

  The sunshine today couldn’t banish the cold snow on the deep wooden seats where people liked to lounge in warmer weather, but it remained a pretty place surrounded by the pulsing heart of the city. The gardeners allowed the plants and trees to grow freely in winter, so that instead of the barren lines of a manicured park, here there were waving grasses that had beaten the snow with grit and resilience, bare tree limbs stark against the sky.

  Janvier placed the box of Felicity’s belongings on a small wooden block that he brushed free of snow, then walked toward a winter-barren tree in the center of the garden. “Come here, cher. Look at this.”

  Joining Janvier under it, she sucked in a gasped breath. A delicate and secretive new sculpture had been added to the tree. Tiny bronze fairies sat on the branches, peeked out of a small hole in the trunk, tiptoed along in readiness to pounce on friends who sat gossiping. Each was exquisite in its detail, its features unique.

  “Did you know it was here?” she asked, heart aching at the ephemeral beauty of the piece—because visitors who glimpsed the secret wouldn’t be able to resist; they’d take a fairy or two home as a treasure.

  “It’s one of Aodhan’s,” Janvier told her. “He put it here three nights past with Illium’s help. He says they are for taking—tiny sparks of laughter caught in bronze, meant to travel where wonder will bear them.” Picking up a fairy who sat with her chin in her hands, her face expressive with delight at the world before her, he gave it to Ashwini. “For when Felicity is put to rest. I think it suits a woman who was never sad.”

  Ashwini pressed a kiss to his cheek on a wave of raw emotion and tucked the tiny creature carefully into her pocket, making sure the fairy’s face popped out so she could continue to drink in the world. Then, brushing aside the snow from a couple of the seats, they sat opposite one another, the wooden block between them.

  Though tall buildings looked down on them, Ashwini didn’t feel enclosed. The rush of traffic, the car horns, and the fragmented conversations that drifted up from the street, added to the bite in the air, the shadow of angel wings on the snow as a squadron passed overhead, it all spoke of freedom. This was a good place to step into Felicity’s past, to see who she’d been before a monster decided to treat her as disposable.

  Ashwini lifted the lid off the box.

  30

  Felicity’s box held an impossibly small amount for an entire life.

  A pretty gold chain with a heart-shaped locket sat inside a decorative wooden box with a blue velvet lining. Opening the locket, Ashwini saw pictures of a man and woman who looked to be in their fifties or early sixties. “Probably her grandparents.”

  There were three more photos. The one of Seth with Felicity, both of them laughing and waving foam fingers in the air with one hand, the other closed around hot dogs bursting with all the fixings. Felicity was beaming at the camera, Seth at her. “She knew,” Ashwini said, running a thumb over the red of the frame to brush away a fleck of dust. “She couldn’t look at this photograph and not know how he felt about her.”

  Janvier picked up the second-to-last photograph, its frame sparkly pink. “This one, too, holds those who loved her.” He turned it to show her an image of Felicity with Carys, Sina, and Aaliyah, the four women laughingly holding up pretty-colored drinks at a bar. Felicity was wearing a body-hugging white dress and had a silky-looking scarf of sunny yellow around her neck, purple butterflies on the fabric. She looked young and pretty and happy.

  The last photograph was of the older couple in the locket again. Ashwini traced the tractor in the background, took in the endless turned earth, caught the glint of a shovel in the corner of the frame, the sun lines that marked the faces of the two smiling people who looked out of the image. “She was a country girl.”

  Janvier’s eyes became chips of malachite, hard and icy. “One who came to the city to make a better life for herself, find a man who’d offer her the security she craved.”

  “Except she found a predator instead.” It was too common a story, the predators as often human as immortal, but that didn’t mean each and every victim didn’t deserve justice.

  Her resolve firm, Ashwini returned to the contents of the box. A small figurine of a cat chasing a ball, chipped in one corner, a white teapot with pretty blue flowers, and a pen from a chain hotel sat on top of a shoe box filled with stubs and papers. Setting the shoe box aside for the moment, Ashwini and Janvier went through the rest.

  It wasn’t much. More inexpensive ornaments that had meant something to Felicity, but that she’d been too embarrassed to bring into her new “home.” Given what Ashwini knew of Felicity’s nature by now, she was certain the shame and embarrassment had been fostered in her by another.

  The woman who’d been cheerful and hopeful and bouncy as a bunny, the woman who’d had every intention of inviting her working-girl friends to tea in her Vampire Quarter house, wouldn’t have felt it herself without outside pressure.

  “That’s it,” Janvier said after removing two books from the box.

  There were no notations on the dog-eared pages, no scraps of paper hidden within.

  “Shoe box,” she said, hoping against hope that Felicity had left them a thread to tug, a trail to follow.

  “She didn’t keep a proper grocery list.” Ashwini showed Janvier how Felicity had scribbled herself a reminder to buy milk around a recipe she’d ripped out of a magazine. “But she was compulsive about her finances.” Those documents were neatly bound by a rubber band.

  “When you are poor,” Janvier said, “you never forget the value of money, non?”

  Ashwini ran her finger under the rubber band. “I was never poor, except for the time I was on my own.” She’d always remember the day she ran from Banli House, racing from the terror of it in flimsy slippers not meant for gravel and tarmac. The soles of her feet had been bloodied lumps of meat afterward, tiny stones embedded into her flesh.

  The pain hadn’t mattered. She’d found the lonely dark of the road, waved a truck to a stop, and taken her life in her hands when she’d jumped into the cab. Better, she’d thought in her panicked and angry state, to die in freedom at the hands of a maniac truck driver than end up insane i
n the prison of Banli.

  As it was, the driver hadn’t been a maniac. He’d just been a lonely man who wanted some conversation on the road and who hadn’t seen any reason not to give her a ride to her grandma’s home out of state. Of course, Ashwini didn’t have a grandparent out of state, but it had been as good a story as any.

  “On your own at fifteen, cher,” Janvier said gently. “I think you understand the meaning of poor.”

  Ashwini thought of how she’d begged her way into a dishwashing job at the diner where the trucker had dropped her off, her wages paid in meals. She’d slept rough in the woods nearby, moved on after a bare three days, afraid she hadn’t run far enough. By then, she’d scoped out the drivers who patronized the diner, deliberately using her ability for the first time in her life to separate the good from the bad. And the good ones took her far enough away that she’d finally felt safe.

  “The funny thing is,” she said, her eyes on the shoe box, “I ran in the opposite direction to Felicity.”

  “A rural area?”

  Ashwini nodded. “I’d seen a documentary, knew the big fruit orchards always needed fruit pickers.” She’d timed her escape for summer, conscious she’d never make it in winter without the right gear. “I turned up and worked hard and lived in a barn or two to save money for winter. I snuck in after everyone else went home, snuck out before the farmers woke up.”

  “Will you tell me how you came to the Guild?” Janvier asked, his voice dark music that seduced and coaxed and made her feel alive.

  Ashwini let the music sink into her bones as she opened the door into the past. “I was three months into my new life and out of work when Saki found me asleep in her parents’ barn. She was the toughest woman I’d ever met”—all honed strength and patience—“but instead of kicking me out, she sat down on a hay bale and asked me why I thought this existence was better than home.”

  Janvier watched her with a quiet intensity. “You told her the truth.”

  “Yes.” To this day she didn’t know why, but that conversation had changed the course of her life. “She told me about the Guild, said my independence and resilience would stand me in good stead.”

  The choice had been easy; it was the first time in her life anyone had said she might succeed at something without having to alter her very nature. “It sounded too good to be true, and I was sure they’d reject me, but they didn’t.” Her defiant facade had cracked at the acceptance, left her exposed to Saki’s keen eyes. That was when the other woman had taught her the first rule of the Guild: Your fellow hunters will always have your back. We will never use what we know about you against you.

  “I was scared to return to New York to attend the Academy, afraid Arvi would put me back in Banli House. But . . . I missed my brother, too.” Love was never uncomplicated; she could hate Arvi and love him at the same time. Once, she’d tried to tell herself that she felt nothing, but the lie had been too big to carry. “The Guild psychologist was the one who made sure I wouldn’t be committed again. So I came home, did everything in my power to be a normal teenager.”

  “And your brother?” Janvier asked softly. “Did you see him on your return?”

  Ashwini’s mind flashed back to that instant so many years ago when Arvi slammed into the conference room at Guild HQ. She’d never forget the wild look in his eyes, his hair a tumble and his jaw shadowed with a coarse beard.

  He’d stopped halfway to her, his chest heaving. “You’re safe. Alive.”

  The agonizing relief in those words would live with Ashwini forever. “Yes,” she’d whispered, her hand clenching on the back of a chair as she stared across the gulf between them. She’d wanted to run into his arms and she’d wanted to punch and scream at him, the equally powerful urges crashing up against each other to lock her feet to the floor. “I would’ve died in that place.”

  Arvi had flinched. “I was trying to save you.”

  “I know.” Thanks to Saki, she also knew he’d filed a missing persons report on her, had hired countless private investigators in an effort to find her. Not only that, but he’d been personally talking to every bus driver and train conductor he could find, in the hope that someone might remember her. “Thank you for searching for me.” It had been her fear, and yet to know that he had, that he hadn’t simply written her off . . . it made her want to cry despite the confusion and anger inside her.

  Arvi’s expression had been stark. “There was never any question.”

  That was the only time the two of them had ever spoken of what he’d done by putting her in Banli House. “Yes,” she told Janvier now. “I saw Arvi.” Throat thick, she swallowed. “He’d looked for me,” she said simply, unable to face the tangled knot of emotions incited by the memory. “But he didn’t stand in my way when it came to the Guild, didn’t try to reassert guardianship.”

  Safe from the threat of committal, Ashwini had narrowed her focus to her Guild studies, determined to forget the other part of her existed. Having learned the truth about Tanu and her mother by then—after confronting Arvi a month after her return—she’d seen her “gift” as a curse that had destroyed her family and she’d wanted no part of it. “I was nineteen before I accepted who I was, what I had inside me.” It was seeing Tanu behind a locked door one day that had done it; she’d vowed she’d never be so trapped . . . and realized she’d imprisoned herself.

  Janvier’s smile was faint, his eyes dark. “So many years in so short a story. One day, you will tell me the rest of it.”

  Ashwini shrugged. “I was luckier than a million others.”

  “And the predators?” Janvier asked, tone quiet but shoulders tense. “You must’ve been a beautiful girl, tall and long limbed.”

  “More like skinny and dirty.” Not that such things stopped the monsters. “I had a couple of close calls—ironically not from the strangers I was so vigilant about, but from two of the farm laborers I’d gotten to know over the summer.”

  One man had cornered her in a disused drying shed she’d thought to use for sleep, while another had grabbed her in the fields when she’d made a mistake and been the last one to leave. “But I’d been a cornered animal once before,” she said to the vampire who had death in his eyes right now. “I still had that feral strength in me, along with the knives I’d bought with my first bits of money.”

  Janvier’s expression didn’t soften. “These men didn’t wish to make trouble for you after you hurt them?”

  “They may have, but I hopped a freight train to another farm state the same night in both cases. I knew I couldn’t win against them.” The helplessness had grated at her, but her survival instincts had won out over pride.

  “I feel a compulsion to visit these areas.”

  “No need. I went back when I was a fully trained hunter. Neither will bother another girl ever again.” At Janvier’s raised eyebrow, she said, “They’re not dead, just . . . out of commission in certain bodily functions.”

  “Good.” A slow, dangerous smile, before Janvier bent his head to the papers again. “The spreadsheets stop seven months ago, so she didn’t do one for the last month Seth saw her alive.”

  “She may finally have become totally dependent on the bastard who killed her.”

  Eyes narrowing, Janvier passed her a ticket stub that had become stuck inside the financial documents. “Opera. Nothing Felicity could afford and the performance was in that final month.”

  Ashwini took it, eyes on the bar code. “Good chance we can track this.”

  Nodding, Janvier went back to the financial documents while she combed through the other pieces of paper.

  “Her income goes down over the last five weeks of record keeping,” he said a few minutes later. “Far as I can see, that’s when she stopped doing her cleaning jobs.”

  Ashwini turned over the stub for an art house movie. No bar code. No way to chase down a single patron from six an
d a half months ago. Setting it aside, she said, “The sugar daddy convinced her to quit, but was generous on his terms.” Paying for things but giving her no financial independence. “Seems like something an abuser would do.”

  “Controlling her under a veneer of devotion.” Janvier’s jaw muscles moved. “He has done this before. It was too smooth an operation.”

  “Yes.” The realization that Felicity hadn’t been the first, the other victims lost and forgotten, infuriated her. “Opera, art house flick, receipt for a designer dress—” She frowned, looked at the total. “Five grand, paid in cash.” It must’ve been a prop, meant to draw Felicity deeper into the spider’s web. Five thousand was loose change for an old, rich vampire.

  “Either an old vampire uneasy with other methods of payment,” Janvier said, “or a young one showing off.”

  “I’d go for old with how well orchestrated this was, how patient, but why limit it to vampires?” She raised an eyebrow. “Angels can be even more twisted.” Nazarach had taught her that. “Could be an angel is behind this and the vampire who bit her is simply the one who did the dirty work.”

  “I’ll do some discreet digging, see if any angel is known for tastes that might have morphed into this kind of ugliness.” Opening a bank statement still in its envelope, as if it had come after Felicity last visited her apartment, he stopped. “She bought something at a store that’s unusually high end for a woman with as little income as Felicity. Maxed out her credit card . . . and that card was paid off in full a few weeks later.”

  Ashwini glanced at the charge, saw the reference, and looked up at the billboard plastered on the wall of a building a block down. “A man’s watch,” she said, blood a roar in her ears. “She bought the bastard a gift.”

  Janvier followed her gaze. “He’s cold, calculated. Banks can be worse than cops, so he made sure they wouldn’t come looking.”