Rhys of Glast, only son of Edmund of Glast and Angharad the Sage, Irin scribe and archivist of Istanbul, was not impressed by the biscuits and gravy at the diner on Kirby Drive. The biscuits were passably flaky, but the gravy tasted too much of flour and was thick enough to stand a fork in. Fortunately, the chocolate cream pie had redeemed the meal.

The waitress walked around the counter and down to Rhys’s booth with a steaming pot of coffee. “Warm-up?”

Rhys quickly put a hand over his mug, an edge of ash-black ink peeking from the long-sleeved linen shirt he wore. “Tea.”

Her brown eyes widened. “Pardon me, sugar?”

“Tea,” Rhys said again. “I’m drinking tea, not coffee.”

She smiled. “That’s right. Can I get you some more hot water?”

“Please. And another bag of tea.”

“You got it.” She walked away with a natural sway to her wide hips, dodging with practiced grace the server coming at her.

There were two waitresses working in the diner that night, the older black woman with greying hair and quick reflexes and a younger white woman Rhys suspected was just starting her job. She looked to the older woman almost constantly for cues and lingered at a table in the back corner near the toilets where a brown-haired young man smiled and flirted with her.

Rhys catalogued the diner in detail. Fading incandescent bulbs reflecting off dated gold-veined mirrors provided ample visibility of every angle in the restaurant. The red vinyl booths squeaked whenever patrons moved, and an old-fashioned bell over the door alerted him to any new entry.

In addition to the waitresses, there were seven other patrons. Three students who had taken over a round booth, a middle-aged couple who appeared to be quietly fighting, an older man lifting coffee to his mouth with shaking hands, and the Grigori flirting with the young waitress.

Rhys sipped his tea as he watched the Grigori. It was plain black tea, nothing like the symphony of teas he was accustomed to in Istanbul. There one could find tea blended with spices from all over the world in countless varieties and subtle variations. Love of tea had redeemed Istanbul for Rhys.

Pie was on its way to redeeming Houston.

The Grigori glanced at Rhys and opened his newspaper, pointedly ignoring the scribe who watched him. A newspaper meant the Grigori had to be over sixty, early middle age for one of the Fallen children. Though his face was young and attractive to the humans around him, he could pose a slight challenge if he chose to confront Rhys.

The air-conditioning blasted in the restaurant, even in the middle of the night, forcing the hot, wet air of the Bayou City to cold condensation that ran down the windows and scattered the light of the passing traffic on Kirby Drive.

The Grigori glanced up, then looked down again. Despite the air-conditioning, Rhys could see a gleam of perspiration at the man’s temples.

Rhys of Glast had spent his formative years in the cool, rolling hills of Somerset in southern England, but for some reason known only to the Creator, his entire adult career had been spent in various places that baked and steamed.

Spain. Morocco. Istanbul.

And now he was being sent to New Orleans, Louisiana, by way of Houston, Texas.

Hot and hotter.

The waitress returned with a battered metal pot with a red-and-yellow packet wedged on the side. “You want another piece of pie?” She motioned to the near-empty plate. “Sure didn’t seem like you liked the biscuits and gravy much.”

“I didn’t.”

The woman didn’t look offended; her pink-painted mouth turned up at the corner. “More pie, Mr. Bond?”

“I beg your pardon?”

The waitress glanced over her shoulder before she turned back to Rhys. “Fancy British guy eating pie and drinking tea at two in the morning on a Wednesday night? Sitting in the corner booth with one eye on the door and the other on that flirty fella in the booth by the bathroom?” She wrote something down on her order pad. “If I didn’t know you weren’t carrying, I’d be worried.”

Rhys sat up straighter. “Not that you’re wrong, but how do you know I’m not carrying a firearm?”

The tilted smile turned into a grin. “Sugar, I’ve been waiting tables in Texas for thirty-five years. I know when someone’s got a gun.”

“Fair enough.” He made a mental note not to discount the waitress.

Rhys hadn’t approached the Grigori by the toilets. He’d been drawn to the diner by the scent of sandalwood that followed the half-angelic creatures—sons of the Fallen always carried the distinctive scent—but so far the Grigori had done nothing but flirt, and that was built into its DNA. In the complicated times they lived in, that meant Rhys was forced to show restraint.

No longer could scribes hunt Grigori on sight. Though the Irin race was charged with protecting humanity from the offspring of fallen angels, recent revelations had turned black and white to countless shades of grey.

Some Grigori had wrested freedom from their Fallen fathers and conquered their predatory instincts. Many of those had turned those instincts to join the Irin in their quest to rid humanity of fallen angels. Some of their sisters, the kareshta, had mated with Irin scribes. Rhys’s own brother-in-arms was mated to the sister of a Grigori the Istanbul scribes had once hunted.

It was all so complicated now.

“Has he done anything to concern you?” Rhys asked the waitress quietly. “The man by the bathrooms?”

“No.” She lifted the empty pie plate. “Just sitting there reading his paper. He likes the blueberry and wears too much cologne. Not my type.”

Rhys forced his eyes away from the Grigori. “Another piece of chocolate for me.”

“Cook just put a black-bottomed pie in the case.”

His mouth watered. “That sounds perfect.”

“See?” She winked at him. “Knew you were my type.”

Rhys couldn’t help his smile.

“You be good,” she said, walking back to the counter.

Rhys sometimes longed for the days when the borders between enemy and friend were clear. Only a few years ago, he could have stalked the creature waiting in the restaurant with a clean conscience; run him to ground, pierced his neck with the silver blades he had hidden, and watched Grigori dust rise to the heavens to face judgment.

It is what they deserve, a vengeful voice whispered inside him. It was the Grigori who slew the Irina singers. It was the Grigori who tried to wipe out their race. It was the Grigori—

No.

That wasn’t their world anymore. Rhys dunked the teabag into the silver pot. That would never be their world again. Their world demanded forgiveness. It required reconciliation, both within their race between the Irin who hunted and the Irina who hid, and outside their race between the Irin and those Grigori who pursued a peaceful life.

So Rhys waited for his tea to steep.

And he watched.

* * *

At four in the morning, the air outside the diner was still muggy. Rhys toyed with the end of a cinnamon toothpick as he watched the entrance of the diner from the car he’d rented at the airport. His phone was on speaker, and his brother Maxim was speaking.

“The Houston scribe house and the New Orleans house are combined under one watcher. It’s a situation that’s persisted despite complaints from New Orleans, but the American Watchers’ Council is unconvinced that New Orleans needs a stronger presence.”

Rhys said, “It’s a large tourist destination.” Grigori liked to feed on tourists.

“True. But as far as anyone can tell, attacks are surprisingly low. Houston has more. Larger population, bigger house.”

Rhys pulled the toothpick from between his lips. “Fallen presence?”

“The closest known Fallen stronghold is in Saint Louis. There are always minor angels about, but Bozidar is the closest known archangel, and he resides in and around Saint Louis. Prior to his arrival around two hundred years ago, there hadn’t been a significant Fallen presence in North America for four hundred years because of the native Irin presence.”

And by Irin presence, Max meant what their people had once been. Not the fractured and suspicious people they were now. The Irin of North America were legend in Rhys’s world, vibrant and powerful societies of warrior scribes and singers descended from Uriel, the oldest and wisest of the Forgiven angels. Renowned for their long lives and prowess in battle, the largest group, the Uwachi Toma had routed the archangel Nalu and all his cadre eight hundred years before, leading to a golden age of Irin peace that lasted for roughly five hundred years.

But with European expansion into North America, new Fallen came, breaking the rule of the Uwachi Toma and their allies.

Rhys said, “North America didn’t escape the Rending.”

“Nowhere did,” Max said. “But they had already been weakened by the American Revolutionary War. By the time the Rending happened, many Irin communities were already scattered, more stories than actual presence.”

“So what you’re saying is it’s entirely possible this singer we’re looking for was already in hiding and lived.”

Maxim didn’t respond. Rhys frowned and tore his eyes away from the diner entrance to make sure they still had a connection.

“Max? Are you there?”

“I am. According to Sari’s contact, this Irina is definitely still living. And likely somewhere in Louisiana. If we can find her—”

“We might be one step closer to restoring Irina status.”

Max said, “The Irina need to relearn martial magic if they want a chance at regaining their rightful place in Vienna.”

The Rending, the massive global Grigori attack that had killed eighty percent of Irin women and children, hadn’t happened out of nowhere. The Irina had spent centuries focusing on creative, artistic, and scientific magic, letting their focus drift to peaceful pursuits while Irin scribes gained more and more battle prowess. Battle had become men’s work, far beneath more lofty Irina goals. It had left the singers vulnerable to attack.

Two hundred years after the Rending, most surviving Irina were still reluctant to leave the havens where they’d hidden. The Elder Council in Vienna was the governing body of the Irin people, financing the scribe houses and protecting the secrecy of the Irin race in the human world. Since the Rending, the council was made up of old men reluctant to part with their power.

The lack of Irina martial power was a constant and pressing concern for those working toward reform in their world. Though the Irina Council had reformed in Vienna, every day Irina still lived with the threat of Grigori attack looming over them and a lack of confidence from Irin scribes around the world.

Damien, his former watcher in Istanbul, and Sari, Damien’s mate, had taken over the martial training academy in the Czech Republic. They were only one example of reformers desperate to rediscover the once-potent battle spells Irina had sung. Songs that had destroyed angels had been lost to time and the Rending.

Unlike the scribes’ vast libraries and archives, Irina libraries existed only within singers. Librarians were knowledge in human form, walking encyclopedias of magic, able to recall complex spells from memories trained since birth. They did not write magic down, believing that the delivery and emotion behind oral preservation were as essential as the spells themselves.

It was a stubborn ideology that drove Rhys mad.

He was a scribe of Gabriel’s blood, trained to preserve knowledge and copy any manuscript with precision, gifted in tattooing intricate magic on his body. Rhys’s tattoos, his talesm, started on his left wrist, wrapped around his arm and up his shoulder, down his chest, torso, and right arm, covering his body from the tops of his thighs to his neck. Only the space over his heart was bare, waiting for the mating mark he was mostly convinced would never come.

His talesm were not only magical armor but personal history. Every scribe was trained to preserve knowledge for future Irin generations in the most efficient and sensible way: writing.

“So this woman”—Rhys adjusted his seat—“the singer we’re looking for. Is she a librarian?”

“She’s more valuable than a librarian.”

“Right.” Rhys rolled his eyes. At this point in their history, there was nothing more valuable than an Irina librarian.

“Rhys, Sari’s contact believes she’s found the Wolf.”

“What wolf?”

“The Wolf.”

Rhys blinked. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am.”

“The Wolf and the Serpent were both killed in battle.”

“No. Ulakabiche died in battle, but his sister didn’t. Atawakabiche lives. At least according to Sari’s contact.”

Rhys was skeptical. “And not once in nearly three hundred years has she revealed herself to her sisters?”

Max sighed. “Don’t ask me. You’re the archivist. That’s why Damien sent you on this job instead of me and Renata. Sort out truth from legend, talk to this woman in New Orleans, and find out if the Wolf is still living. She and her brother were the most feared Irin warriors in North America. Atawakabiche’s magic destroyed an archangel without the use of a heavenly blade. If she exists, she could change everything.”

“Who is Sari’s contact?” Rhys asked.

“An Irina named Meera.”

“Meera? Who is she?”

“I don’t know anything about her except that she’ll meet you in New Orleans in three days. Go to Jackson Square on Saturday morning, and she’ll find you.”

Rhys groaned. “She wants to meet me among the heaviest tourist traffic in New Orleans on Saturday morning? Is she serious?”

“I don’t make the decisions here, brother. I’m passing along information. Be there by nine.”

“In the morning?” Rhys curled his lip. He was a night owl.

“Nine in the morning, my friend.”

Rhys’s eyes locked on the dark-haired man walking out of the diner with a woman on his arm. It was the Grigori and the young waitress. He opened his car door and spit the toothpick on the ground. “Max, I have to go. I’ll call you when I get on the road.”

“What are you doing?”

Rhys slid his hand into his pocket, his fingers curling around the hilt of a silver dagger. “Just a little hunting. No need to be alarmed.”

“Be careful. The Houston house thinks you’re a mild-mannered scholar on vacation.”

“Of course I am,” Rhys muttered. “Goodbye, Max.”

He hung up before his brother could say another word. He tossed the phone in the passenger seat and closed the car door. The Grigori and the woman had disappeared to the back of the parking lot. Perhaps the Grigori had convinced the woman to give him a ride to a more secluded location where he could feed from her.

Grigori were soul hungry. Human mythology called them incubi or vampires. Even cannibals. They fed from the soul energy that all human beings possess, though most preferred women. Women they could lure with their looks and their scent. They were born predators, dark sons of heaven made to seduce and feed.

In a shadowed corner of the back parking lot, Rhys saw the Grigori pressing the woman against her car, kissing her neck as her head was thrown back. She was panting, her breasts heaving in a macabre imitation of pleasure. In reality, there could be no pleasure for her because the Grigori’s bare hands were pressed to her stomach and back, his touch robbing the waitress of her will. She was putty in the creature’s hands, willing to do anything he asked, his touch more effective than a drug.

Rhys approached quietly, but the Grigori sensed him. The creature spun, keeping one hand on the woman.

“You,” he hissed.

“If you were smart,” Rhys said, “you’d already be running.”

The Grigori’s eyes were cold and blank. No hint of conscience warmed them. “She wanted me. She said yes.”

“She doesn’t know what you are.” Rhys glanced at the woman. Her eyes were closed. She was still panting. Her moans of pleasure scraped against his ears like nails on slate. “Get away from her.”

The Grigori hesitated, his eyes narrowed in growing panic. Rhys noticed the second the man decided to run. He broke away from the woman and lunged to the left, dashing between cars as Rhys caught the human woman and laid her on the ground. Then he shot to his feet and ran after the man who was running toward Kirby Drive.

The older waitress walked out of the restaurant just as Rhys ran past.

“Your friend is in the back,” he yelled. “She’s hurt!”

Rhys left the humans and sprinted, waiting for the traffic to pass so he could follow the Grigori. Cars honked and drivers rolled down their windows to yell.

There.

Rhys caught a glimpse of the monster as he darted between two parked cars in a multistory parking garage. The Grigori might have been running to his own vehicle or simply trying to lose Rhys. Either way, it was going to die.

He paused when he entered the garage, brushing a thumb over the talesm prim on his left wrist and waiting for his senses to sharpen. In seconds, his eyes adjusted to the darkness, his heart rate steadied, and his ears picked up the footsteps running up the ramp and toward the roof. Rhys followed the sound, drawing the silver stiletto from its hidden sheath and gripping it tightly.

He reached the top of the garage and was barely breathing harder. The moon had disappeared behind a blue fog that drifted over the city, but yellow lights buzzed on the roof, casting strange overlapping shadows between the parked cars.

There were several rows, and Rhys walked among them deliberately, waiting for a sound, a scent, anything. He sorted through the acrid smells of burning sulfur, exhaust, and mold.

There.

A row of pickup trucks caught his eye, every one of them a potential hiding place for the Grigori.

“Who do you belong to?” Rhys asked. “Who commands you, Grigori?”

A creak near the blue truck.

Not the blue, the red.

“There are ways to live without killing,” Rhys said.

A shuffle and a break in the silence. The Grigori took a running leap from the top of the parking garage to the office building on the other side of the alley.

“Are you joking?” Rhys grumbled. He hated to jump, and he didn’t particularly like heights. “You fecking knob!” Rhys gritted his teeth and ran toward the edge, concentrating on the burst of magical energy as he leapt into the darkness.

A fall from four stories wouldn’t kill him, but it would hurt like hell.

He landed and rolled on the gravel roof of the office building just as the Grigori slipped over the side. Rhys needed to get to the ground fast. He spotted a drainpipe and ran toward it, shimmying down the dirty pipe until he was close enough to fall. He ran around the corner of the building and saw the man dangle from the fire escape before he dropped.

Rhys grabbed him by the neck while he was still catching his balance and shoved him face-first against the brick wall of the office building.

The man was smaller than he’d appeared on the run. Rhys was tall, over six foot, with a runner’s build and a long reach. The Grigori was far from bulky, but Rhys dwarfed him.

He gripped him by the neck. “Who do you belong to?”

The man’s shoulders slumped. “Bozidar.”

“The archangel?” Not likely. Bozidar’s sons would have more natural magic than this.

The Grigori began to laugh. “Our fathers are waking, scribe. The Fallen have only been sleeping, resting in their victory. Now you’ve roused them.”

“Have we?” Rhys leaned in. “I look forward to the fight.”

The man laughed harder. “You have no idea! How many of your women did we kill? How many of your men died of despair? The Irin are pathetically weak.”

Rhys curled his lip. “You call me weak? How many unsuspecting women have you fed from like that waitress?”

The man froze. “Not enough.” Then he turned and snapped his teeth at Rhys’s left wrist in a last-ditch effort to damage the scribe’s magic.

Without a second thought, Rhys plunged the silver stiletto into the base of the Grigori’s neck and waited. Within seconds, the body began to shimmer and disintegrate. Rhys stepped back and wiped the dust from his blade before he returned it to the sheath, watching silently as dust rose through the heavy night sky, disappearing into the darkness and mist.

Under his breath, Rhys said a prayer. He’d slain a son of the angels. Fallen angels, yes. But the same blood ran in his veins. The same magic fueled him. Grigori were the dark shadow of the Irin. Without knowledge and training, scribes could turn feral too.

The lone Grigori had been no challenge, and Rhys felt no satisfaction in the kill, no sense of righteous anger or vengeance.

Bozidar.

The archangel from Saint Louis. It hadn’t been the whole truth, but there had been a ring to it. Perhaps the young man had belonged to one of Bozidar’s lesser Fallen allies. He’d report the incident to his watcher and let Malachi decide if he wanted to pass the information along.

After all, Rhys was nothing more than a visiting scholar from Istanbul.

* * *

Rhys slept until noon the next day, waking only when the housekeeper tapped on his door. He’d checked in with a Spanish passport, so Rhys called out in Spanish, asking for a few minutes more. He threw off the sheet that covered him and took a moment to enjoy the cool breeze on his bare chest. He rubbed the unmarked skin over his heart, wondering for the thousandth time what it would feel like to put a needle into it.

His first marks had been made at the age of thirteen by his father, a stern man who impressed on Rhys the importance of history and legacy and tradition. Those talesm ran down his back, covering the magic his mother had spoken over him from the time of his birth.

“When you find your mate, then you will know true wisdom.”

His parents still lived, still tended the library in Glast as every scribe in his family had done since the beginning of time. Rhys was a direct descendant of Gabriel’s line in Glastonbury. His father had been the chief archivist as his grandfather had been. Rhys’s children—if he ever had any—would be expected to follow in that line.

In the early days, the scribes in his family only took trained Irina librarians as mates, so the Great Library at Glast had been one of the rare joined archives of their race. Rhys’s grandfather had met his reshon and broken that tradition, but no one had blamed him for it. A reshon was a rare and beautiful gift, the single perfect soul created by heaven to be your equal.

In his rare optimistic moments, Rhys hoped for a mate. A reshon was likely too much to ask. Of course, it wasn’t easy finding any mate when eighty percent of the women in your race had been killed.

He hadn’t given up hope. Not… entirely. After all, his brothers in Istanbul had found mates. Malachi, his new watcher, had mated with Ava, an American with unique Grigori blood. Leo had mated with Kyra, and Rhys was fairly sure Max and Renata were finally together, though the cagey Irina had led his brother on a fifteen-year chase.

There was hope. Possibly. If those bastards could find women to put up with them, there had to be someone who could keep his interest for more than a single conversation.

Rhys groaned and rolled out of bed. He could feel the onerous heat pressing against the windows and creeping under the door. He showered and threw on his spare change of clothes, unconcerned about covering his talesm that morning. Americans were easy about such things. Tattoos were so common now; he’d noticed professionals and grandmothers inked with them. The neat rows of intricate writing covering his arms were unlikely to raise more than casual interest.

He stood at the door of his motel room, enjoying the brief moment of being perspiration-free before he slid on his sunglasses and walked outside.

Ah yes. Covered in sweat again.

Walking quickly down the stairs, he found his compact blue rental car and threw his backpack in the passenger seat. Then he drove two blocks away and returned the car at the rental agency before he called for a taxi. He took that car to another hotel and walked from there to a national car rental.

If he was going to take a road trip, he wanted the right car, and it needed far better air-conditioning than the blue compact. He took off his sunglasses and scanned the lot.

A salesman walked up to him. “Can I help you, sir?”

Rhys spotted it, a silver Dodge Challenger with tan leather interior. “That one.” He walked over to look inside.

Legroom. Glorious, glorious legroom.

“The Challenger?” The man appeared to be excited. “An excellent choice. It has—”

“Would it be possible to return it in New Orleans?”

“Yes, sir. There would be an additional charge.”

“Not a problem.”

He slid his sunglasses back on. Yes, this one would do nicely.

Within minutes, he was driving on Interstate 10, “Way Down We Go” blaring from the speakers, crossing the channel and heading east to New Orleans and a legend lost for three hundred years.