fairground clowns whose paint had washed off. We do not keep books.
Finding a laugh inside her, Elena said, “If you remember anything about this”—she tapped the internal bruise left behind by the attack—“let me know, okay?”
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Hidden in the echo of their final yes was another voice, old and heavy with sleep: Child of mortals. Vessel unawakened. You step closer to your destiny. For one must die for one to live.
Who are you? Elena said inside her mind.
No answer. No sense of a presence. Just a promise of death.
Fuck it, she thought. If death was coming for her, she’d face it with teeth bared and weapons unsheathed.
The pain down to a dull throb, she said her good-byes then left the Legion to transfer the potted plants across the river. At least she didn’t have to climb down the slippery ropes of vine. Flaring out her wings, she floated easily to the ground, but she’d only taken five steps when her phone began to buzz with an incoming call.
Retrieving it, she stared at the name that flashed on the screen. Great, this was exactly what she didn’t need. “Father.”
“Elieanora, I need you at Beth and Harrison’s home,” Jeffrey Deveraux said in a curt tone. “Harrison is badly injured. Do I give him blood?”
Elena was already running toward the Tower. “No, it’s too dangerous.” If Harrison was so badly hurt that Jeffrey was calling Elena, he could fall into a blood fog and drink Jeffrey dry. Elena’s father was strong and in good shape, but Harrison was both younger and a vampire—in a physical fight, he was the one who’d reign supreme. “I’ll bring a healer.” Her bruised lungs fought to keep up with her pace. “Beth and Maggie—”
“Eve has messaged Beth,” Jeffrey interrupted. “Both are safe.”
“Stanch the blood loss as well as you can. I’m on my way.”
Shoving the phone into a pocket, Elena ran full-tilt. Every second that passed felt like an eternity.
After reaching the infirmary floor, she found only Laric in attendance. No one had expected the badly scarred and emotionally wounded young healer to accept Raphael’s invitation to visit his Tower, but eight months after they’d first met, Laric had surprised everyone by coming to New York to visit Aodhan.
And somehow, he’d stayed.
He never ventured to the ground and kept his scarred face hooded even among friends. However he seemed to find fascination in sitting on the Tower balconies and watching the colorful life of the city, and he flew in the skies above New York. The violent archangelic energy that had burned him down to the bone had done catastrophic damage to his wings—but a long-overdue examination had found that enough of the crucial substructure remained to offer hope.
It turned out that Keir had, in his records, designs for pair upon pair of prosthetic wings that he’d worked on as a young man in an effort to find something to help his friend Jessamy take flight. None had proved suitable for the historian’s congenital malformation . . . but one pair, when modified, extended and supported Laric’s devastated wings enough to give him back the sky.
He couldn’t fly for long, but he could fly.
And from afar, his wings looked like any other angel’s.
“Can you make it to my sister’s home?” Elena asked, telling him the distance. “You’ll be dealing with a severely wounded vampire.” Laric was in training under Keir, with Nisia his tutor while he was in New York.
His hands flowed rapidly in the silent tongue he used nearly all the time and that Elena had learned after he came to the Tower. Most of the other senior staff already knew it, and the ones who didn’t had learned alongside Elena; Laric would not be isolated here as he’d been in the place where he’d spent more than a thousand years.
I have this knowledge, he was saying. Flight possible. A short pause before his hands formed another word. Witnesses?
“Only my father and sister will see you, and they know never to speak immortal secrets.” As with Jessamy, Laric was careful never to be really seen by mortals; humanity needed to believe angelkind too powerful to be hurt. It kept the balance of the world and stopped mortals from trying to pick fights with immortals they could never hope to win.
Nodding, Laric took a moment to grab his kit, then the two of them stepped off the closest balcony. Today, Elena didn’t see the glittering winter-draped beauty of her city, and she barely felt the ache