10

The strange, haunting dream was still on Elena’s mind when she ran into Ashwini in the Tower lobby midmorning the next day. Tall, with long dark hair pulled back into a loose braid, and skin of dark honey, the hunter turned vampire wore a form-fitted chocolate-colored jacket zipped up to her throat, faded blue jeans, and scuffed hunting boots.

Gloves stuck out from her back pocket, and she had knives in one thigh sheath, a gun in the other. Her throwing stars weren’t visible, but that meant nothing. Ashwini always had several of the lethal spinning stars on her person. “Where you heading?” Elena asked.

“Quarter. Got two dead vamps.” Large gold hoops swung in Ash’s ears, multihued jewels dangling from the gold.

Marguerite had often worn long dangles in her ears, their tinkling music the background score to Elena’s childhood. “Fight?” she managed to say through the ache in her heart for a woman who’d never again slip on pretty earrings or wear her favorite white dress with the yellow flowers on it.

“Nah,” Ashwini said. “Not an ordinary fight, anyway—someone really lost their shit.” The other hunter turned the screen of her phone toward Elena. “Swipe through for the full effect.”

Elena whistled as she did so. The two vampires in the crime scene photos had been butchered. That their heads had been hacked off was fairly standard—most vampires could be killed by whacking off the head, and so that was the default when someone went after one of the Made. It was the rest of what had been done to the victims that was unusual.

The two looked to have been stabbed hundreds of times, until their flesh resembled ground meat. Not just that but other parts of their bodies had also been hacked off. A hand in one case and the genitals in the other. Nothing surgical about the amputations, either; it looked as if the perpetrator had done the genitals with a serrated hunting knife. As for the hand, the wrist bones were badly shattered. Broadsword, maybe.

“Slight case of overkill.”

“You’d be surprised.” Ashwini slid the phone into a zippered pocket of her jacket. “Janvier and I see a ton of weird-ass shit working the Quarter. But this one might be more standard—I’m hearing rumors the two vics might’ve been either angling to horn in on another vampire’s cattle, or poking their noses in a vampire gang’s drug turf.”

“Vics post-Contract?”

“Yep.”

Elena shook her head. “You’d think after over a hundred years of existence, people would get to be a bit smarter.” Poaching from another vampire’s harem of permanent blood donors was considered a mortal crime; and as for the drug gangs, their tendency to eviscerate anyone who encroached on their turf wasn’t exactly a state secret.

“Why do you live in hope, Ellie?”

“It’s a flaw.”

Laughter that faded quickly into a frown. “Don’t be afraid of the owls.”

Elena froze in place, her breath shards in her lungs. “No?”

“No, they’re only messengers of a messenger.” A motorcycle purred to a stop in front of the lobby doors, snagging Ashwini’s attention. “That’s my ride. Off we go to look at blood and gore—Janvier takes me on the best dates.”

Skin yet chilled, Elena watched Ashwini stride out to get onto the bike behind her husband. Janvier passed back her motorcycle helmet. A couple of seconds later and the two were gone, racing off toward the sin, sex, and darkness of the Quarter.

Leaving Elena with that unsettling piece of advice about the owls. The last time Ashwini had given Elena something, it had been a blade star, and it had turned out to be the perfect weapon to take down the monstrous angel who’d brutalized Elena’s grandparents. Ignoring Ash when she came out with one of her random statements was an intensely stupid thing to do.

“So,” Elena muttered to herself, “don’t get freaked out by the owls.” That in itself wasn’t an issue; the owls had been lovely and graceful and unthreatening. No, the problem was that Ash’s words implied Elena would be seeing more of the ghost birds with the enormous golden eyes and white feathers.

Fuck.

It was the last thing she wanted to hear when she already felt out of sorts, odd. She’d woken in Raphael’s arms, a lump of sadness sitting on her chest. He’d known. He always knew.

“Did you dream?” A masculine face piercingly familiar yet beautiful enough to stun, looking down at her, strands of hair purer than midnight falling over his forehead.

“I told my mother I wasn’t afraid.” A ragged whisper. “I wasn’t, not even when the entire room filled with blood. I was just so, so sad.”

Enclosing her in his arms, her archangel had shut out the world in which her mother and two eldest sisters no longer existed, and, after a while, she’d permitted herself to cry.

For Marguerite, who would never grow any older than she’d been when she hanged herself.

For talented, mercurial, loving Belle, who’d taught Elena to play baseball and whose legs had been savagely broken.

For smart, kind, bossy Ari, who’d tried to protect Elena with her last breath.

For their small, happy family that had disintegrated into splinters.

Even for her fundamentally damaged father, who’d married a strong, intelligent woman who loved him, and yet who’d once kept a mistress who was a pale facsimile of Marguerite.

Haunted by the memories, the scent of gardenias a sensory echo that clung, Elena had spent the early-morning hours on the snowy lawn above the Hudson, pushing her body through a training routine Galen had designed to teach her to fight with wings. Raphael’s barbarian of a weapons-master could be a pitiless bastard, but he was also brilliant.

She’d taken care not to jolt her hurt wing, but she hadn’t held back otherwise.

Raphael had watched her until it was time for him to leave to join Illium’s elite squadron; they were training over the ocean again today. After all that had happened and the certainty that Lijuan would be a nightmare brimming with power when she rose again, Raphael was taking no chances with his people’s readiness.

Despite being based in the Refuge, Galen was in charge of the training schedule. He kept an eye on the reports sent in by squadron and ground-force leaders, and mixed things up so every fighter had periods of rest and recuperation—an exhausted force was a useless one—but no one on the Tower team was ever rusty in their skills. Today, Raphael would act the aggressor so Illium’s squadron could practice combat maneuvers.

Elena had intended to go up to Dmitri’s office and ask him to put her to use. She’d spoken to Sara again this morning, their conversation focused on another name Sara had added to the Slayer shortlist. “No outstanding hunts,” her friend had said at the end, when Elena asked about work. “Keiko, Hilda, and Tyrese just came back from injury leave. Have the day off, Ellie. It’s not like your life isn’t busy.”

But Elena didn’t want free time; it gave her too much room to think and worry.

At that instant, however, she decided against speaking to Raphael’s second. Dmitri would aggravate her, and in her current mood, she might attempt to kill him dead. Since Dmitri was more than a thousand years old and as deadly as a rabid cougar, he’d probably avoid her attempts and laugh. At which point, her eyeballs would explode and she’d give in to the compulsion to pincushion him with her throwing knives.

No, better she kept her distance from the strongest vampire in the city.

Turning on her heel, she left the Tower to walk over to the Legion building. It rose up toward the heavy gray of the winter sky, its greenery dormant under the frost, but that wasn’t what cut through her grim mood to make her chuckle.

Holly was scrambling up the side of the building, one of the ice-encrusted dormant vines her rope ladder. Elena figured the palms of her gloves must have a rough surface to provide an effective grip. As she watched, the lithe young woman vaulted onto the entrance platform and glanced at her watch. Then she did a victory dance, the bright pink of her sweater a blaze against the grayness overhanging the world, and her actions aimed at someone out of view of Elena.

It wasn’t Holly’s lover, Venom, who stepped forward to bow at Holly in graceful defeat. No, it was Trace. Elegant and assured and with a fondness for exquisite poetry. Also a vampire several hundred years older than Holly. But up on the platform, the two of them grinned at each other like children before scrambling back down to the ground.

Holly’s daisy-patterned boots hit the snowy earth at the same time as Trace’s more prosaic black.

“Were you two having a race?” Elena was highly amused that Holly had managed to talk suave Trace into it, especially today. He needed to prep for his upcoming journey to the Refuge.

“Our Hollyberry is faster than a cheetah,” Trace said in his evocative voice, the angular lines of his face put together in a way that created a sharp handsomeness rather than refined vampiric prettiness. “I should know better than to accept her challenges.”

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 late 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.