13

It was Eve who spoke first.

“I wanted to drop off my gift for Beth’s birthday,” she said, her hand clenched to bone-white tightness around the hilt of the long blade. “I’m going away tomorrow for two weeks for that out-of-town Guild training session. I won’t be here for her actual birthday.”

Elena broke contact with the gray of Jeffrey’s eyes, eyes he’d bequeathed her and Eve both. “Yes, I remember.” The two-week camp would teach her sister tactics she couldn’t learn in the city.

It would also be a time of friendship and freedom.

She half expected Jeffrey to comment on Eve’s plans—their father could barely deal with having one hunter for a daughter, and in a few short years he’d have two. But all he said was, “I have a key to this home.” He pulled the key out of the right pocket of his suit pants then slid it back in. “When Evelyn received no response to her knock, I decided we should leave the gift inside. That way, even if we were unable to track Beth down, she’d have the gift and card.”

That sounded like her father: decisive and coolly rational. He’d always been that way, except when it came to the butterfly of a woman who’d been his first wife—and the four daughters she’d given him.

Only Elena truly remembered Marguerite’s Jeffrey. Beth had been so young when they buried Belle and Ari. What they hadn’t known until it was too late was that they were also burying Marguerite. Jeffrey’s butterfly and Elena’s beloved mama, the lovely, soft-spoken woman who’d kissed Beth’s chubby cheeks until she giggled and giggled, had never come back from the hell of so horrifically losing two of her babies.

“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 home 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 before pulling it open.

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 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 on 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 that 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 onto 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.