17

Ashwini and Janvier left first, off to prowl the Vampire Quarter for new leads.

Desperate inside in a way she couldn’t explain, Elena was about to drag her archangel out for a kiss before she went to Beth, when Dmitri got a call from Naasir.

“Ice?” Dmitri wasn’t a vampire who often betrayed surprise, but that one word was spiky with it. “How bad?”

The answer had his skin going tight over the bones of his face. “I will inform the sire.” A short pause. “If he requests it. Otherwise, head back to the Refuge.” Hanging up, Dmitri looked to Raphael. “Naasir and Andromeda decided to make a short trip to Alexander’s territory.”

That territory was Persia. Elena had no details of how Naasir, a wild and unique member of Raphael’s Seven, was tied to Alexander, but she was aware that Naasir had an open welcome to the Ancient’s territory—and, technically, Naasir’s mate, Andromeda, belonged to Alexander’s court.

“Ice in Alexander’s sun-filled lands?” The Legion mark burned almost too bright on Raphael’s temple.

“Not only ice. An ice storm in Qatar.”

Elena sucked in a breath. “Those poor people won’t have the clothes, the heating . . .” She knew parts of Alexander’s territory could get frigid, but Qatar was warm even in the winter months. “Are Naasir and Andi safe?”

“Yes. I’ve told Naasir to assist if asked but to return to the Refuge otherwise.” Dmitri’s features were grim. “There is little we can do quickly.”

“I will speak to Alexander.” Eyes of deep Prussian blue held Elena’s. Go to your sister, hbeebti, I will tell you the outcome.

Filled with a raw need for him at this moment when life drew them in different directions, she blew him a mental kiss, but his eyes didn’t lighten, his features set in lines so perfect they were brutal.

Drink, Elena. A hard order. You must not get any weaker.

Elena stopped in the corridor to rub her fingers over the spot under her heart, her wings slumping for a moment. I’m a fighter, Raphael. A reminder to herself as much as him. Even if the weapon involved is some weird healer mixture that tastes like chocolate blueberries and ripe apples.

Raphael’s response was a sea storm inside her mind, the lightning flashes within it incandescent. Letting the searing power of him sweep through her, she finished the drink she had in the bottle then detoured to refill it. That done, she ate three energy bars . . . while considering the new cut on her left arm.

She’d absently shoved up her sleeve while mixing up more of the drink and there it was. Higher up than the first, the cut was a fine line she could’ve gotten anywhere.

The problem was that it was paper-cut thin but an angry red. She checked both arms then pushed down her sleeves. She’d examine it again in a couple of hours. Right now, her priority was Beth. Elena had sat with her after Nisia finished the tests on Elena’s wings, only leaving her to attend the meeting. Holly had arrived at the same time to return a book she’d borrowed from Laric and somehow ended up chatting to Beth.

Elena’s sister had immediately warmed up to her. Maybe because Holly looked so very young and human, with her playful hair and bright clothes. Beth could have no idea of the murderous alien power that had once run through Holly’s veins.

Holly would never be an ordinary vampire. Her reaction times were dangerously fast, as fast as Venom’s—and he was hundreds of years older. She also had the ability to turn liquid in a way that was difficult to describe, but that meant she could avoid broken bones even if thrown against a wall at great force.

Elena could’ve never predicted that the two women would hit it off so well. Holly was as tough as Beth was soft . . . but Holly did love fashion as much as Beth, and Holly, too, had once been a far softer creature.

However, when Elena walked into the infirmary, it was to find Beth alone. She sat beside Harrison’s bed with a steaming mug in her hands and a fashion magazine on her lap. A small plate of cakes lay on the side table, the plate itself decorated with gold foil and hand-painted feathers.

“I see we’re looking after you.” Elena leaned down to press a kiss to her sister’s hair, her chest squeezing; some part of her would always see in Beth the lost little girl who’d clung to Elena’s hand beside far too many fresh graves.

“The magazine’s Holly’s,” Beth confided. “And she just raided a kitchen somewhere and brought me the tea and cake. She had to leave to do her shift at the sinkhole, but I knew you were in the Tower.”

“You two spent a lot of time talking.”

“I like her. We’re going to go shopping at that new mall after Harrison is better.” Smile fading, Beth put down the tea. Her fingers trembled as she brushed her husband’s hair off his forehead.

Harrison’s face remained too pale, his throat swathed in bandages. Elena knew Laric had stitched up the wound to hold it together. It wasn’t the standard procedure with vampires, but with Harrison being so young and his throat so badly cut, Nisia had made the unusual call and supervised Laric in its implementation. There was zero risk of Harrison healing around the stitches.

He was recovering too slowly for that.

“The senior healer was here a few minutes ago.” Beth tugged the finely woven blanket higher up Harrison’s body. “She said it’s going to take time, but that Harrison will wake up. I just have to be patient.” She leaned her head against Elena’s thigh. “I can be patient, Ellie. I waited all that time while Harrison was being Made. I trusted that he’d come back to me.”

Elena ran her fingers through the rough silk of her sister’s hair. “I know you can be patient, Beth. I see how you are with Maggie.” Beth never yelled at her daughter, always spoke with a sweet gentleness. It was at those moments that Elena most saw pieces of their mother in Beth. Marguerite had never yelled at her children, either, and yet even rebellious Belle had listened when she’d spoken.

Maggie minded Beth the same way, a piercing echo of memory and family.

Beth looked up with a smile before putting her head back against Elena. “I’ll have to work out certain times when I can come see Harrison. I can’t sit with him twenty-four hours a day, no matter how much it hurts to leave him here. I have to look after Maggie’s heart.”

“Harrison would agree with you. You’re the two most important people in his life.” That, too, was true; regret was an emotion with which Harrison Ling had plenty of familiarity.

As if she’d read Elena’s thoughts, Beth said, “I know you think he was selfish in being Made, Ellie. So did I for a while, but then . . . it gives me such comfort to know that he’ll be around to look after Maggie after I’m gone.” A quiet pause filled only with the subtle sounds of the machines that monitored Harrison. “I never considered that he might go first one day.”

Elena squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, her jaw clenched.

She’d had nearly the same conversation with Sara. And she’d thought more than once that she’d have to watch her baby sister grow older and older while she stayed ageless. But her body was running backward, and she had wounds she couldn’t explain that wouldn’t heal. Beth might outlive both her and Harrison.

If that happened, Elena knew her sister would deal. She might be heartbroken beyond repair, but she’d deal. Because no matter her pain, she would not abandon her child as Marguerite had abandoned them.

“We have to live in today,” she said, speaking to herself as much as to Beth. “Worrying about the future just steals the now from us.”

“So does living in the past, doesn’t it, Ellie?”

Swallowing hard, Elena put her hand on Beth’s shoulder. “Yes. I’m glad you never did that.”

“Father’s still back there, with Mama and Ari and Belle.” Such terrible sadness in Beth’s voice, so much compassion for a man who’d died when Marguerite chose to leave him behind rather than trust him to help her navigate the darkness. That old Jeffrey was buried with his wife in a cold grave she’d never wanted to inhabit.

Elena would always be angry with her father for that, for burying Marguerite in the unforgiving earth when her mother had wanted to be cremated and scattered to the winds, so she could be part of the wind itself.

That had been her mother, brilliant and light and always in motion.

Yet even in her anger, she remembered the empty bottle of whiskey and a man who’d cried heartbroken sobs in the dark of the night. “I don’t think we can pull him back to the present,” she said, her voice rough. “He has to make that choice himself.”

“I feel sad for Gwendolyn, too.” Sitting up properly, Beth took a sip of her tea, then held up the mug in a silent offer.

Elena wasn’t much of a tea drinker, but she took the mug from her sister and had a drink before handing it back. The heat ran through her in a sweet rush. “Yes, Gwendolyn’s got no fault here.” If she’d made a mistake, it was to fall in love with a man who’d left the best part of himself in the past, but as Elena knew, love wasn’t a thing to plan or control. It just was.

“I’m trying to figure out who’d want to hurt Harrison,” she said a while later.

“Do you want to ask me questions?”

“If you think you’re ready to answer them.”

“If it’ll help protect our baby, I can manage,” Beth said softly.

“Has anything been worrying him, or has he been afraid of someone?”

Picking up a cake, Beth handed it to Elena. “You should eat this. Holly said the chef would be insulted if we didn’t eat his cakes.”

“The chef” happened to be Venom, a little secret to which not many people in the Tower were privy. They just knew that, over the past couple of years, extraordinary creations occasionally appeared in the communal areas utilized by those who called the Tower home.

Elena knew the truth only because Illium had let it slip—then sworn her to blood-oath secrecy. “Usually,” she told Beth, “I’d be lucky to get a crumb. The cakes and pastries disappear at the speed of light—then everyone sulks when the chef goes quiet for weeks or months at a time.”

Smile a faded copy of its luminous reality, Beth took a bite of her own cake and chewed, swallowed, before saying, “Harrison hasn’t really said anything, but I know my husband. Something’s been on his mind the past couple of days.” She paused and took a drink before continuing. “I used to never ask him things, but that changed after Maggie.

“I want to know how to look after her if anything happens to Harrison. I want to know how to access our money—and I want to know if there’s a danger that could hurt her.” Anger in those last words, though the look she sent her wounded husband’s way still held more love and worry than anything else.

Elena looked down at the top of Beth’s head; she’d been foolish to think Beth would be in the dark about Harrison’s secrets. She should’ve remembered her own thoughts about how motherhood had changed her sister. “What did he say when you asked him what was bothering him?”

“I never got the chance with his work shifts and my volunteer work with the suicide hotline.” White grooves bracketed her mouth. “I planned to do it today, after I got back with Maggie and she was snuggled up for naptime.” Putting down her half-eaten cake, she said, “But this morning, before Maggie ran in for breakfast, he said, ‘Baby, what if I did an innocent thing once and it ended up hurting someone? Would it be my fault?’”

Elena’s gaze lingered on the brutal slashes on either side of Harrison’s mouth, the mutilation that further linked this assault to the murders in the Quarter. “What did you say?”

“Maggie ‘attacked’ him before I could answer. She was pretending to be a lion, and he growled back and started playing with her.” She sighed, sorrow in her touch as she smoothed back Harrison’s hair once more. “He had to leave for his angel’s home ten minutes later, but he was only on for half a shift today. Just a few hours, I thought. We could talk after.” Her voice broke.

It was six by the time Beth left the infirmary. Jeffrey picked her up. Gwendolyn was in the passenger seat of the dark sedan and got out to hug Beth. Raven haired, with eyes of dark blue and rich cream skin over bone structure that shouted her high-society lineage, she was an elegant beauty two decades Jeffrey’s junior.

“Let’s get you home,” she murmured to Beth, and settled her in the car, then smiled at Elena. “Thank you for being so good with Eve. She felt so much better because you told her she did the right thing.”

“I have tough little sisters.”

Another smile before Gwendolyn got into the car. Shutting her door, Jeffrey nodded at Elena and went to get into the driver’s seat . . . only to turn without warning and come wrap her in a furiously tight embrace. Elena’s arms went around him almost by instinct, buried childhood memories rising to the fore as the smell of his aftershave mingled with the wool of his coat.

Neither one of them spoke.

It was over seconds later, and he was gone.

Elena.

She glanced up at the sound of Raphael’s voice to see him looking down at her from a high Tower balcony. Heart in a vise, she said, He’s afraid. It came out a whisper, the rapid beat of her father’s heart yet imprinted on her skin. He only has two of Marguerite’s daughters left now, and he can’t bear losing us, too. It was the very force of her father’s need to keep her safe that made Jeffrey so angry with her . . . With the daughter whose profession and life put her in danger on a regular basis.

Wings glinting white-gold against the night, Raphael soared down to land beside her. His eyes were flames of a blue so pure, it pierced her to the core. “Raphael.” She brushed her fingers over his cheek. “You can’t put me in a steel box as Jeffrey can’t wrap me up in cotton wool.”

Her archangel, his face harsh and beautiful, ran his fingers firmly over the arch of her wing. “How is your strength?”

“Good.” She’d had a full pre-dinner meal with Beth, astonishing her sister with how much she could put away. “Nisia’s cleared me for flight. No further degeneration since the first round of tests, so her magic drink must be helping.”

Putting his hands on her waist, Raphael said, “I have to return to the sinkhole.” No smile, no hint of softness. “Then I must fly deep into the territory.”

The fear of losing him to his power, it bit at her. Focusing on how he held her, how he felt like her Raphael no matter what, she said, “Has something happened?”

“The sentries have reported changes in the movement of the lava, and I’m receiving reports of geothermal activity in a slightly distant region not known for it.”

“Ashwini’s volcano?”

“Let us hope not.”

“Be careful.” She watched the wind riffle through the midnight strands of his hair. “Did Alexander want help?”

“This storm has passed for the time being, but we will be shipping over winter supplies to be used should another one hit.” He gripped her jaw. “You will not come with me?”

Haunted by memories of three cold graves and a small hand clutching tightly at her own, she fought her gnawing need to cling to him. As he couldn’t box her up and put her in a safe place, she couldn’t stop his development. All she could do was love him and hope he’d remember her no matter how the Cascade changed him. “I need to get to the bottom of the attack on Harrison, neutralize the threat to Beth and Maggie.”

Tightening his grip on her waist, Raphael lifted off. You will land the instant you sense trouble with your wings.

“I will,” she promised.

A hard kiss that burned with archangelic strength and had her wrapping her arms around his neck as she fought to assuage both her desperate need and his. They spun against the starlit sky, and when they parted it was with heaving chests and dilated eyes. “I love you, Raphael.”

“Knhebek, hbeebti,” he said in return . . . and then he let her go, this being of excruciating power who understood that her mortal heart would wither and die in a cage.

She turned to watch him fly away from her and saw wings of white fire. Of an archangel who was becoming . . . more.