Lucy’s time on the streets to guess who he might go after next—and Beth and Maggie remained in his crosshairs. All a man of his training needed was a single slip in their protection, a single opportunity.
She, Sara, and Santiago hung up after deciding to activate their separate intelligence networks to be on alert for Archer’s name and face. Elena told Jean-Baptiste and Beth who to watch for, and she warned Jenessa. In the grip of a fever of revenge, Archer might decide that she’d led his daughter into life as a prostitute. The young woman was in a hairdressing salon with her mentor, and Elena got that mentor to lock the door and close the salon by promising to cover her lost profits for the day.
Thankfully for Jenessa’s dreams, her mentor appeared more excited at the intrigue than put out. Especially when she heard that her student lived with a senior Tower vampire and that he’d be by to pick her up.
Flaring out her increasingly heavy wings afterward, Elena decided to take flight. She didn’t know where she was going, Archer a phantom who’d left no trail that Vivek could find, but she ached to fly. According to a message Dmitri had sent her during the call with Sara and Santiago, Raphael was on his way back. Maybe she’d fly toward him as far as she could, and then she’d wait.
For one last flight with her archangel before her wings failed.
It wasn’t to be.
The phone rang in her pocket. “Ellie?” Ashwini said on the other end. “We’ve got two more bodies.”
So many owls surrounded her that Elena had to push through them to get to the dead, the birds’ bodies soft and warm against her. She wondered if Cassandra was trying to help her cheat destiny. Is this it? The broken blade? The mourner?
No answer, but the owls didn’t move. Elena continued on, her skin flushing hot then cold. Should she back off? Would that throw a spanner into the mechanics of destiny? Or would it alter the future in the worst way, leading to Beth’s and Maggie’s murders at Archer’s hand?
No, she had to finish this, eliminate the threat. And it wasn’t as if she was alone. Her three Legion shadows were waiting on the roof—even Archer couldn’t take on four trained fighters at once. And while her wing muscles might be sluggish in responding to her commands, warning of imminent failure, she had plenty of feathers left. Nowhere close to losing her last one.
She reached the first of the dead.
The small, pudgy vampire had been killed in his combined convenience/pawn shop in a seedy corner of the Quarter and his body found behind the counter by a regular customer. It was a miracle the customer hadn’t decided to rob the place. The corpse was so fresh that the blood was tacky rather than dry and encrusted.
“Spine bisected at the neck, hands cut off.” Janvier rose from his crouch beside the dead vampire. “And we’ve got a connection to Lucy.”
“How?”
“She pawned her jewelry here,” Ashwini explained. “Was easy to check the records after you gave us her legal name.” She pointed at a small laptop that sat open behind the grill that should’ve protected the shopkeeper from harm. “He demanded official IDs and recorded every transaction. Gave a fair price, far as I can tell.”
The same records had probably led Archer to his door. “When did she pawn her things?”
“Roughly two weeks after she first met Kumar and crew.”
A time when Lucy would’ve had access to other funds—she couldn’t have drained her bank account dry that quickly. A memory flared at the thought of Jenessa saying Lucy had no bank account. It hadn’t struck Elena as odd at the time because Lucy had been on the streets working in a cash profession—and unlike Jenessa, she’d been an addict.
“She always gave me the rent money,” Jenessa had said. “But anything else, she kept in a jar until she wanted to spend it. She didn’t trust banks.”
However, now that Elena knew Lucy’s true identity, her cash existence took on another cast. As the daughter of the Slayer, she must’ve known her father might be able to track her if she accessed her accounts. “She made a choice to pawn her jewelry rather than go home or ask Archer for money.”
Anger or wild grief, they would never know Lucy’s motivations. “But it’s a choice Archer will never accept.” To do so would be to accept that Lucy had made conscious decisions