19

Elena’s heart raced as Nisia walked over and put her hands on Elena’s abdomen. “Not a flicker of power,” she announced, “and considering the other genetic donor, it’d be a conflagration.”

“What?” Elena demanded again.

Raising an eyebrow, Nisia said, “If you were pregnant.”

“Christ, Nisia, you can’t just say things like that!”

Back at her chair now, Nisia waved off Elena’s shock. “You’re not with child, so stop panicking.”

“I’m not panicking,” she squeaked out; she was so not ready for a baby.

“Yes, of course not.” Dry words. “You’re far too young anyway. But with the Cascade”—Nisia shrugged—“I thought better to check.”

“Right.” Elena’s head spun madly at even the idea of it. “Wait a minute. Did you call the possible baby a parasite?”

“The basic definition of a parasite is an organism that lives on or inside a host and feeds off that host. Therefore all fetuses are technically parasites. A fetus with DNA from an archangel will be a super-parasite,” she added cheerfully. “It’ll suck you dry of energy, so you’d better be really old and strong before you start thinking about the flitter-flutter of tiny wings.”

Elena slitted her eyes and pointed. “You’re having fun making my future offspring”—and jeez, she was never going to be ready for those—“sound like energy-draining horrors.”

Nisia smiled beatifically. “Strange how that happens when you question a four-thousand-year-old healer about immortal worms.”

“It was just a question!” Elena protested but decided to haul ass before Nisia got in the mood to put more nightmare images in her head. “Parasites,” she muttered under her breath. “No wonder she’s not in angelic obstetrics.” Keir was the expert in that, and she bet he didn’t take pleasure in terrifying poor hunters who had perfectly legitimate questions about ringworms.

And why was it called ringworm when there were no worms involved? That wasn’t playing fair.

Also, maybe she should talk to Keir about contraception. He’d said it was unnecessary because she could not fall pregnant. She wasn’t immortal enough yet, quite literally a different and biologically incompatible species from Raphael. But with the Cascade going on . . .

Then again, she appeared to be becoming even more mortal these days.

Chastened and ringworm-less, Elena made her way to Vivek’s domain. “Where’s V?” she asked a passing vamp when she couldn’t spot the other hunter.

“Being tortured by a physiotherapist. Sadists even check to make sure he’s not wearing an earpiece. Man’s totally cut off from comms.” A shudder at the idea.

“I guess he finally got on their last nerve.” Vivek had a way of interrupting sessions to follow up on incoming pieces of information.

“Whatever.” The vampire wasn’t buying it. “Anyway, he’s out for an hour. You need help?”

“No, I think I can handle it.” With that, she made her way to the area at the back that was set aside for Tower residents who needed computers but didn’t have an office. Elena could’ve had an office, but she preferred working here or in Raphael’s office. Today, bones heavy with missing her archangel, she wanted to be around the buzz of life in the tech center.

She’d just sat down when she sensed a current of power in the air. Turning, she scowled at Illium. “Are you following me?” She wouldn’t put it past Bluebell—he was very protective of his people.

“You wound me, Ellie.” A hand pressed to his chest, golden eyes wide in innocence. “I was visiting my friends.” He indicated a couple of angels hunched over the computers, their wings flowing gracefully to the carpet.

That sight always took her a moment or two to process even though she knew full well that part of the reason Raphael’s Tower ran so well was that he’d changed with the times—and he had Illium. The blue-winged angel handled a phone with the same ease he did the sword he wore in a spine sheath.

“What are you doing?” He leaned over the back of her chair, his scent familiar and as welcome as the heat coming off his body.

Elena was so cold deep inside.

Shrugging off the odd sensation and telling herself she’d be fine once she could wrap her arms around Raphael for a long embrace, she logged onto the computer. “Looking at security footage from near Beth’s place.”

Illium stayed where he was, watching along with her. “I heard about Harrison.”

First, she replayed the section she’d watched at Al and Anita’s house. But no matter how many times she ran the footage, the camera just hadn’t caught enough of the assailant.

“Now comes the boring part,” she murmured. “We have no idea how long Harrison’s attacker was lying in wait, so I’m going to cue it up to the time of the incident and go backward at speed from there. Even then, it’ll take time.” She dug out an energy bar to eat while they watched.

Illium’s stomach rumbled.

Elena blinked and paused the footage to look up at him. “Seriously? You haven’t eaten for so long that your stomach is actually rumbling?” Angels didn’t need to eat as often as mortals, which meant Illium had skipped a serious number of meals.

“I’ve been busy.” He rubbed his stomach, the blue-tipped black of his eyelashes lowered.

Rising from the chair, Elena thrust half the energy bar at him. “Proper food for both of us, I think.” Her body had already digested the sandwiches, and that wasn’t scary at all. “We can eat as we watch.”

Illium went with her to the suite, where the two of them got busy preparing more sandwiches, as well as rolls. “You’re missing Aodhan, aren’t you?”

“I have to set him free.” Illium’s answer was quiet. “I finally figured that out. He’s doing what he didn’t do for two hundred years.” Eyes of aged gold held Elena’s. “Those years when he buried himself in the Refuge, I had a chance to grow and become who I am today. Now it’s his time.”

Elena ran her hand over his wing with the intimacy of long friendship; though the silver filaments glittered, the texture of his feathers was incredibly soft and silken. “That doesn’t mean you can’t miss him—especially after you waited two hundred years for him to emerge from the shadows.”

“I’m scared all the time,” he admitted, bracing his hands on the counter. “I know he’s powerful, I’ve seen him in battle, and yet the fear crushes me.”

“Of course it does.” Elena let her wing overlap his. “That’s what it means to love someone.” She gave him a lopsided smile. “I worry about Raphael and he’s an archangel. I’ve been known to warn him that if he gets hurt, I’d kill him dead.”

Illium’s laugh pierced the darkness around him to reveal her Bluebell who had so much light in his soul. “Let’s go watch your boring footage. I know how to program it to stop on movement, so we don’t have to keep it to a speed the eye can track.”

As it was, Illium had gone through half his sandwiches and she’d finished off her filled rolls and all they had was a big fat nothing. The only movement so far had come from a couple of prowling cats, two snowfalls, and a flying plastic bag. No indication of an intruder in Beth and Harrison’s yard.

“Assailant could’ve been hiding in a section the camera doesn’t cover.” Elena threw back more of Nisia’s mixture as the footage continued to run backward.

“He’d still have to enter the house,” Illium pointed out. “Only two options left if he didn’t use the back door. Either he was in the house for hours—and that doesn’t seem reasonable with how you’ve described the layout of your sister’s home—or he went in another way.”

Tapping her fingers on the table, Elena said, “They do have a large window on the other side of the house.” She rang the forensic team and asked if they’d picked up anything unusual near that window.

She groaned inwardly at the answer. “We could’ve saved ourselves the mind-numbing boredom,” she told Illium after she’d hung up. “The techs found shoe prints on the windowsill. Nothing in the snow outside, but depending on when it snowed, any footprints could’ve been buried.”

Illium dropped his wings in a dramatic slump. “Does this mean we can stop the visual torture?”

Elena went to nod then thought better of it. “No, let’s watch it through.” She scratched absently at the older cut on her forearm through the fabric of her long thermal tee; she’d long ago stripped off the jacket. “Harrison’s attacker must’ve scoped out the property at some point, and we’ve got two days of data.”

“I must really like you to subject myself to such punishment,” Illium said as they settled in to watch more of the same endless scene. Even at the speed they had it going, it seemed a static image.

The only break came when a giggling Maggie ran outside dressed up like a little polar bear—complete with bear ears on the hood of her snow jacket. Harrison stepped out after her, the two of them playing in the snow until Beth came to the doorway to call them back in. It was odd watching the entire scene in reverse, but one thing was clear.

“He’s a good dad.” For the first time, she saw a glimmer of what Beth must see in her husband. Saw the gentleness with which he swung Maggie up in his arms, the tenderness with which he stole a kiss from Beth while she tried to shoo husband and daughter out of the snow.

“Andreas likes him better these days,” Illium told her.

Had Elena not hauled Harrison back to his angel when she had, Andreas would’ve signed an execution order with Harrison’s name on it—a fact that Harrison hadn’t understood when he attempted to escape, or even in the aftermath of his punishment.

Angels didn’t play when it came to rogue young vampires.

After taking a drink of cola to swallow down another bite of sandwich, Illium said, “Last time I spoke to Andreas, he said your brother-in-law’s knuckled under and put his nose to the grindstone.”

“I think some of that has to do with Maggie.” She rubbed the back of her neck to ease the stiffness without taking her eyes off the endless snow-draped white of the footage. “I know motherhood’s changed Beth.”

“Your niece might be the making of her father,” Illium agreed. “Andreas can be harsh, but he doesn’t ruin the vampires who work under him.”

Elena thought of the punishments she knew the angel in question had meted out over the years: the precisely flayed skin and vicious whippings, the enclosure in coffin-sized boxes, the removal of a fucking eye with a rusty blade. “Are you sure about that?”

“Vampires can be blood-hungry monsters, Ellie. Normal punishments mean nothing to them.”

In Elena’s mind ran the images from one particular hunt: she’d found her target with his face burrowed in the torn open body of a young woman, her viscera—slick and gleaming—clutched in his greedy fingers. He’d been so glutted on his victim’s blood that Elena’d had no trouble removing his head from his body.

His angel had sighed when she reported the circumstances and her decision to execute the vampire rather than bring him in. “I suppose I should be angry,” Nazarach had said, his piercing amber eyes lit from within and his power bruising her skin. “But Richard was eighty years old. If he could not maintain a hold on his blood hunger at such an age . . .”

Wings of burnished amber in her vision and the ebony of his skin taut over fluid muscle as he turned to walk to a large arched window that offered a view of his gracious and lush estate full of magnolia and cypress trees. “It is a shame to lose one of mine, but Richard chose to run rather than come to me with his unacceptable urges. He dug his own grave.” Age and death lived in Nazarach’s voice, ancient and cold as the darkness of a crypt.

To this day, Elena found Nazarach as disturbing as fuck. But Andreas wasn’t far behind Nazarach in the disturbing stakes. “What else have you heard about Harrison?” she asked Illium.

His shoulder brushing hers, he said, “Turns out he has a gift for administration. Andreas is training him to run a household.”

“Like Montgomery does ours?” The Enclave home would be a shambles without him; Elena certainly would have no idea what to do.

“No one will ever be a Montgomery,” Illium said, “but Harrison could deal with a more standard household. Trained that way and with Andreas as a reference once he finishes his Contract, he’ll never have to fear being out of work and unable to support his own household.”

But Beth would be gone by then, perhaps Maggie, too.

Her heart twisted.

“So if he hasn’t pissed off Andreas,” she said through the screaming wrench of it, “and he’s walking the straight and narrow, what could he have done that got him targeted for murder?”

“Andreas mentioned Harrison broke away from his previous friend group a while ago.”

Pausing the recording, Elena turned to face Illium. “Since when are you and Andreas such good buddies?” she asked suspiciously. “He’s not taking advantage of you while Aodhan is gone, is he?”

Illium’s shoulders shook before he threw back his head and laughed. If Nazarach’s voice was death and age and pain, Illium’s was golden light and a playful joie de vivre that had the others in the room looking up with smiles. No one liked it when he wasn’t himself. Once he finally calmed down—and after wiping tears from his eyes—he picked up one of her hands and brought it to his mouth for a kiss.

“I love you, Ellie.” Solemn words, but his eyes were dancing.

“I have a crossbow, Bluebell, and I won’t hesitate to use it.”

An unrepentant grin. “Andreas and I have known each other for centuries. In battle, he leads one of the other elite squadrons.” He pointed to the recording and she started it up again, both their eyes on the unmoving scene as they spoke. “We’ve had more contact recently because the squadrons are in the process of evaluating our total fighting capacity and ability to work with one another.”

She’d known Andreas led a squadron but hadn’t realized it was one of the elite ones that held their deadliest angelic fighters. “Tell me what your buddy Andreas had to say about Harrison’s old friends.” In spite of Illium’s perfectly rational explanation, she remained leery of this relationship she’d never known had existed. “Why were you talking about Harry in the first place?”

Illium reached over to tug at her braid. “Because he’s your sister’s husband, of course. I know you’d want to know if there was a problem.” Still playing with her braid, he told her the rest of what he’d discovered. “In short, Harrison is on an upward trajectory, but the others—all post-Contract—were heading in the opposite direction last Andreas heard. Drugs, lack of ambition, the usual.”

Elena’s instincts prickled. Eric Acosta had been a junkie. So were hundreds of other vamps in Manhattan. But deadbeat former friends were a better lead than anything else she had right now. “You know the names of the post-Contract vamps?”

A shake of his head she caught out of the corner of her eye. “Andreas will, but he’s out of the city tonight. He should be back tomorrow.” A pause. “We show each other our diaries—then make playdates.”

“Ha-ha.” She poked him in the side while continuing to watch the footage.

She’d been staring at the whiteness of Beth’s snow-draped home and yard for so long that when the movement came and the video slowed to normal speed, she stared disbelieving at it.