Archangel's Legion

31

Jason’s report at noon the next day made it deadly clear what they would face when the hostilities did begin. “Lijuan is openly consolidating her troops,” Raphael told Elena after scanning the report.

“How bad?”

“Her numbers have always been greater than mine—a consequence of her age.”

Elena didn’t need Raphael to spell it out to realize that Lijuan had been kept in check previously only because every member of the Cadre was more or less equal in power, thus Lijuan risked death in a fight. That clearly no longer applied. “Is there any chance New York isn’t the target?”

“No.” He showed her a piece of heavy paper, the texture rough silk, as if it had been handmade. “A courier brought this in just before you came up from the infirmary.”

Elena couldn’t read the message, but recognized the language as an ancient angelic one she’d seen in one of Jessamy’s history books. “It’s a declaration of war,” she guessed.

“Lijuan is ‘civilized’ to the end.” Expression harsh, he glanced back down at his spymaster’s report. “Jason also confirms there is no indication whatsoever that she has gained the ability to cause disease, and the fact she wasn’t in the vicinity of Amanat at the time of Kahla’s infection bears out the theory she has a conspirator.”

“So we might be about to face not one but two enemy archangels.” Meanwhile, the Tower infirmary remained full, only three of the injured fighters having recovered enough to rejoin their squadrons. The good news, however, was that with the transfers from outside the main city, they weren’t as badly disadvantaged as Lijuan might believe.

“We’ll also have the benefit of fighting on home soil,” Raphael pointed out when she shared her thoughts, “while her fighters must arrive on the wing. I’ll speak to Elijah, test the strength of our alliance—the odds change dramatically if we and our people stand together.”

Leaving Raphael to speak to the other archangel, she flew out with the intention of sneaking a visit with Eve during her break at school. Her sister’s recent e-mails had held an undertone of anxiousness she didn’t like and she planned to get to the bottom of it—just because the world was going to hell didn’t mean Elena was about to abandon the little girl who needed her.

However, she’d barely flown a block when the dull throbbing at her temples suddenly increased in volume and duration. “Damn it.” The pulsing headache was her own fault; she hadn’t gone back to bed the night before and, regardless of Raphael’s healing, she’d given her body a shock with her unforgiving flight over the sea. It was now telling her she either rested or exhaustion would kick her in the ass without warning.

The throbbing turned into stabbing.

Wincing, she realized she’d be of no use to Eve if she was distracted by a migraine. And, if she timed it right, she could catch her sister after school and before Jeffrey returned home—Eve’s mother, Gwendolyn, knew Eve needed the guidance of a fellow hunter, wouldn’t block Elena from talking to her daughter.

Decision made, Elena detoured to the Enclave house and, waving off Montgomery’s offer of lunch, went upstairs. “Soon as I get up,” she reassured him, when the butler frowned and reminded her Keir had ordered she eat regular, high-protein meals to fuel her growing immortality.

Ten minutes later, stripped of her weapons and boots, but still in her combat leathers, she lay down on top of the comforter for a power nap that’d keep her going for the rest of the day.

She dreamed again, but this dream, it was different from the one that had nearly broken her in Amanat. There was no blood. No death. No screams.

“There you are.” Marguerite looked up from the cake she mixed at the counter, streaks of flour on her cheeks from where she’d no doubt pushed back recalcitrant tendrils of hair as pale as Elena’s.

Her father called it “captured sunlight.”

“Sit, chérie. Talk to your mama.”

“Mama?” Hope incandescent in her blood, she crossed the gleaming kitchen floor to take a seat on the counter across from the beautiful butterfly who was her mother. “What are you doing here?”

“My silly Elena.” Marguerite laughed, the long dangles at her ears tinkling with the faint, familiar music that was a part of so many of Elena’s memories of her mother. “You know it’s your sister’s birthday tomorrow. This cake must set overnight. Why don’t you chop the black cherries?”

Picking up the small knife that was the only one with which Marguerite would trust her, Elena began to cut up the cherries into smaller pieces, looking every so often to her mother for encouragement. She’d been here, in this instant before, her fingers smaller, her legs hanging off the stool on which she perched, and her sister Belle at the kitchen table behind her.

“Shush, short stuff,” Belle had said when Elena tried to talk to her about a television show. “I have to write a tome about Romeo and Juliet for English homework.”

“Can I dance with you later?”

“Only if you sneak me some cherries.”

Today, Marguerite and Elena were alone in the kitchen, though Belle’s writing pad and pen sat on the table, as if she’d stepped out for a second. “Mama, can I ask you a question?” she said, continuing to use the little knife, though she had longer, sharper blades in her arm sheaths.

“My pretty baby, you can ask your mama anything.” Her eyes sparkling, her smile radiant. “Not so big, Elena. Little pieces.”

“Yes, Mama.” Concentrating, she cut some more and showed her mother. “Like this?”

“Perfect.” A caress of loving fingertips on her cheek before Marguerite returned to her mixing. “What was your question?”

Elena kept her head down, unable to look at her mother as she asked the question that had haunted her for more than a decade. “Why?” It was a whisper. “Why did you leave me and Beth?” Her lower lip quivered, her eyes burned. “Papa was broken. You know he was broken.”

“Give me those cherries.” Accepting the glass bowl when Elena handed it over, her vision blurred, Marguerite tipped them into the mix. “You and your sister are living pieces of my heart, Elena, cut out of my chest at the moment of birth.”

“But you left.” Jerking up her head, she yelled the accusation. “You left us!”

“I loved your elder sisters, too, bébé. I couldn’t bear to think of my Ariel and my Mirabelle alone in the dark.”

Sobbing, Elena wiped the backs of her hands over her eyes, her chest hurting with the force of her childish sobs. “I miss Ari and Belle so much. I miss you. You left Beth and me all alone, too, and now there’s no one to teach Beth how to be a mom.”

“I know, oh, I know.” Walking around the counter, Marguerite took Elena’s tearstained face in her soft, flour-dusted hands. “But I have told you, Elena, you were always the strongest of my babies. Even my wild Belle, she had a heart that carried bruises always, but my Elena, my Elena is strong. Like my mama. Did you know her name was Elena?”

“Really?”

A smile that lit up her face to such beauty, she was the prettiest woman Elena had ever seen. “Yes, it was her, how you say?” One of those unexpected but familiar pauses in her otherwise fluent English. “Her home name. Only her best friends used it.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yes, you did. I told you stories about her during the time my little Beth used my womb as a football pitch.” Laughter that was melted honey against Elena’s skin, sweet and a little wild. “Tales of my strong mama to my strong baby.”

Elena jutted out her chin, her anger intermingled with a bleak happiness at being able to feel her mother’s touch again. “I thought you didn’t remember much about Grandmama.”

“I remember enough.” The scent of gardenias lush and fragrant in the air, her dark gold skin silken, her hands fine boned when Elena lifted her own to hold her mother’s to her cheeks.

“I left you the day that beast came into our house,” Marguerite whispered. “You know that.”

Elena thought of the bloody streaks on the carpet that told of her mother’s brutal fight to get to her daughters, the broken look in her eyes when she understood her two firstborn would be forever silent, and knew Marguerite told no lies. She’d died that day along with Ari and Belle, leaving behind an empty shell. “I still needed you,” Elena insisted, ignoring the truth because it hurt too much. “You would’ve been okay.”

“I wish that was so, azeeztee.” A word of gentle affection from a sun-drenched desert land Marguerite had never known. “I wasn’t strong, not like you, not like my mama.” Kissing Elena on both cheeks as she’d always done, her mother looked into her eyes. “Look after Beth. And look after my husband. A part of him died with me.”

Elena shook her head, gripping her mother’s wrists in a futile effort to hold her to the world. “He hates me.”

“No, Elena. He loves you too much.”

Elena woke with the echo of her mother’s words in her mind and the delicate notes of Marguerite’s favorite perfume in the air. Unwilling to lose the fragile link to the woman who had borne her, she lay prone on the bed, her wings painted by the early afternoon sunlight slanting in from the balcony and the idea of her father loving her as strange a thing as the Hudson turning to blood.

Oh, Jeffrey had once loved her as he’d loved all his daughters. She remembered the way he’d held her hand in the warm strength of his as he took her to see the bodies of her dead sisters, fighting against other family members in order to give Elena what she needed, the peace of knowing Ari and Belle were safe, that the monster hadn’t made them like him.

Jeffrey’s eyes had been wet when she looked up from saying good-bye, his strong face struggling against what she now knew must’ve been unbearable grief. It couldn’t have been easy for him to face the broken bodies of his two eldest girls, but he’d done it for a daughter who lived, paying the painful price and never making Elena feel wrong for her need.

“Don’t cry,” Elena had said, wiping away his tears when he bent down. “They’re not hurting anymore.”

That “Papa,” strong and loving and kind, had been lost to her long ago.

Touching her hands to her face, she imagined she could feel the imprint of her mother’s gentle kisses, a bittersweet ache inside. “I love you, Mama,” she whispered, and it was as true as her anger at the choice Marguerite had ultimately made.

It was hard to leave the moment and the final vestiges of memory, but a glance at the clock told her it was already past two. Staring into the mirror in the bathroom, she tried to see the shadow of her mother’s fingers, but the imprint was gone, faded into time. It hurt. Breath jagged, she washed off the tears she’d cried in sleep, dried off, then forced herself to keep her word to Montgomery.

The food choked down, she was strapping on her crossbow when her phone rang with a boy band ringtone her younger half sister had programmed in for herself. “Eve? I was just coming to see you.”

“It’s Amy,” was the surprising answer.

Elena’s fingers froze on the strap she’d been about to tug into place. Gwendolyn’s older daughter didn’t speak to Elena, likely out of loyalty to her mother—unlike Eve, Amy was old enough to understand that there was something wrong in her parents’ relationship, that her father didn’t love her mother as he should.

And yet, Amy loved her father, which left her with no one to blame. Elena didn’t mind giving the teenager a focus for her anger, not when she understood what it was to be that girl, confused and angry and sad at the same time. “What is it?” She knew it had to be bad for Amy to break her silence. “Has something happened to Eve?”

“We had a half day at school so we came home at lunch. After we ate, Father locked Eve in her room.” A rush of words, as if Amy had been holding them inside too long. “He says he’s shipping her off to boarding school in Europe in a few hours.”

“Where’s your mother?” Gwendolyn had fought for Eve’s right to stay in Manhattan and attend Guild Academy.

“Visiting Grandma.” Amy’s voice trembled. “I can’t get through—I’ve been trying and trying. Sometimes reception isn’t good where Grandma lives and it’s been raining there.”

Elena knew exactly what it was like to feel helpless to protect a sibling, and it enraged her that Jeffrey had put Amy in the same position. “I’ll take care of it.” She was already at the balcony doors, the snow below glinting under sunlight. “I’m on my way.”

“My windows aren’t big enough for you.”

“That’s okay.” Elena wasn’t planning to skulk into the Deveraux home; she was planning to slam headfirst through Jeffrey.

She shoved open the French doors to her father’s study less than ten minutes later, the glass vibrating as the doors slammed into the stops on either side. “You’re imprisoning children now?”

Jeffrey’s head jerked up from the papers on his desk. Pushing back his black leather executive chair, he rose to his feet, the sunlight glinting off his wire-framed spectacles. “Elieanora!”

“What? You want to lock me up, too?” So angry she could barely see straight, she braced herself with her hand on the right doorjamb. “What is wrong with you?” Fury and a plea combined. “Do you really want her to hate you like I do?”

“I want her to live!” he yelled, his voice stripped bare of the urbane sophistication he used so effectively as a weapon. “She came home with a black eye yesterday. Combat training. Combat training! For a child!”

“She needs that training!” Elena screamed back. “We’ve had this conversation! She’ll go mad without an outlet for her hunting abilities.”

“I’ve lost two daughters already! I won’t lose another!”

Stunned by the raw declaration, her mother’s words still fresh in her mind, she squeezed the doorjamb in an effort to find her lost sense of reason. “You’re doing this to protect her?”

Ripping off his glasses, Jeffrey dropped them on the desk, meeting her gaze with unshielded eyes of the same distinctive gray that marked her and Eve as blood. “Do you know what happened when you were sixteen?” he asked, his hands fisted to bloodlessness. “You went to the Academy in the holidays and returned to your boarding school with broken ribs. Three months later, it was a dislocated collarbone, six months after that a black eye and a fractured jaw.”

Elena hadn’t realized the boarding school had reported the injuries, much less that her father had kept track of them, he’d done such a good job of freezing out anything to do with the fact his daughter was hunter-born. “It was necessary,” she said through her shock.

The only reason she’d even been able to attend those intensive holiday classes was that the Guild had gone to bat for her, getting a judge to sign an order that did away with the need for Jeffrey’s consent. Like Eve, Elena would’ve gone mad without the outlet of those practice sessions where she could give her ability free rein; a hunter-born had to hunt, the need a compulsion.

But when she’d communicated with her father, it had been with her hunter skin locked away; a child hungry for his approval, she’d pretended to be the nice, normal, obedient daughter he wanted her to be. The fraught peace created by her silence, and his, had lasted until she turned eighteen and enrolled at the Academy full-time over his objections. Their bitter fight that night had left her emotionally bloodied, the resulting estrangement lasting a decade. “I had to become more skilled than the va—”

“Yes, because the monsters are so strong, they could tear off your head with their bare hands!” Stalking around the desk, he grabbed her by the upper arms and shook so hard that her teeth clattered. “Do you know what it’s like to watch a woman get her head torn off? The blood spurts hot and dark and it gets in your mouth, in your eyes, in your nose, until it’s the only thing you can see, all you can smell!”