Elena had always made sure to hug Beth after the day their family shattered, to ensure her younger sister didn’t ever feel the chil , but she’d never had anyone to hold her in turn, never had anyone to smash apart the block of ice that encased her organs for hours after a nightmare. So, the words took time to come, but he was an immortal. Patience was a lesson he’d learned long ago.
“It didn’t make sense,” she said at last, her voice raw—as if she’d been screaming. “None of it made sense.” Her mother hadn’t done what she had in the kitchen. No, Marguerite Deveraux had very careful y tied the rope to the strong railing that went around the mezzanine. Her pretty, shiny high heel had dropped onto the gleaming checkerboard tile of the hal way that was the grand entrance to the Big House.
A glossy cherry red, that shoe had made Elena’s heart fil with hope for a fractured second. She’d thought her mother had final y come back to them, final y stopped crying ... final y stopped screaming. Then she’d looked up. Seen something that could never be erased from the wal of her mind. “It was al just a big jumble.”
Raphael said nothing, but she had not a single doubt that she was the complete and total center of his attention.
“I thought,” she said, clenching her hands on his shoulders, “that the nightmares would stop after I kil ed Slater. He’l never again hurt anyone I love. Why won’t they stop?” It came out shaky, not with fear, but with a tight, helpless rage.
“Our memories make us, Elena,” Raphael answered, in an echo of something she’d once said to him. “Even the darkest of them al .”
Hand splayed out on his chest, she listened to the beat of his heart, strong, steady, always. “I won’t ever forget,” she whispered. “But I wish they’d stop haunting me.” It made her feel like a traitor to say those words, to dare to wish for such a thing when Ari and Bel e had lived the nightmare. When her mother had been unable to escape it.
“They wil .” Knowledge in his tone. “I promise you.”
And because he’d never broken a promise to her, she let him hold her through what remained of the night. Dawn was pushing its way into the room on slender fingers of gold and pink when the sweet nothingness of sleep took her under.
But the peace only lasted for what felt like a mere blink of time.
Elena. A wave crashing into her head, a fresh bite of storm.
Groggy with sleep, she blinked open her eyes to see that she was alone in the sun-kissed bed, the rain having cleared away to leave the sky beyond the windows a startling azure. “Raphael.” A glance at the bedside clock showed her it was midmorning. Rubbing at her eyes, she sat up. “What is it?”
Something has occurred that requires your skill.
Her senses stretched awake in anticipation, her mental muscles seeming to pop with the same pleasure-pain as her physical ones when she lifted her arms and arched her body. Where do you need me?
A school upstate. It is named the Eleanor Vand—
She dropped her arms, abdomen heavy with dread. I know
what it’s called. My sisters go there.
3
Ten-year-old Evelyn saw Elena first. Evelyn’s eyes went wide as Elena said good-bye to the angel who’d escorted her to the location via the quickest route, and flared out her wings to come to a steady landing in the front yard of the tony prep school, the velvet green perfection marred only by a number of errant leaves. Miniature twisters of spring green and crisp brown, smal dervishes ful of irritation, rose up in the wind created by her descent.
Folding away her wings, Elena gave her youngest half sister a nod of acknowledgment. Evelyn went to raise a hand in a tentative hel o, but Amethyst, three years older than her sister, grabbed that hand to pul Evelyn to her side. Her dark blue eyes, so like her mother, Gwendolyn’s, warned Elena to keep her distance.
Elena understood the reaction.
Jeffrey and Elena hadn’t spoken for a decade after he threw her out—until just before the violent events that had led to her waking with wings of midnight and dawn. And prior to being disowned, Elena had been banished to boarding school for some time. As a result, she’d had no real contact with either of her half siblings. She knew of them, as they knew of her, but beyond that, they might as wel have been strangers.
There wasn’t even a surface resemblance to compel the recognition of familial ties—unlike Elena’s pale, near-white hair and skin touched with the sunset of Morocco, not to mention her height, the girls had their mother’s exquisite raven hair and petite build, their skin a rich cream that wouldn’t have looked out of place on an English rose. Evelyn stil carried a layer of baby fat, but her bones were Gwendolyn’s, delicate and aristocratic.
Both of Jeffrey’s wives had left their marks on his children.
Looking away from the two smal faces that watched her with a combination of wariness and a tight, cool accusation, she took in the rest of the people on the porch. Several other girls clustered together just beyond Evelyn and Amethyst, al dressed in the maroon and white of the school, along with a number of adults who had to be teachers. Nowhere did Elena see any sign of Raphael, which meant he was either inside the heavy building of cream-colored brick or behind its ivy-covered wal s in the large inner courtyard where the girls ate lunch, sat on the grass, played games.
Elena knew that because she’d made it a point to find out. It didn’t matter that the three of them were only connected by the frigid ties of Jeffrey’s blood
—Evelyn and Amethyst were stil her sisters, stil hers to watch over. If they ever needed her, she would be there ... as she hadn’t been able to be there for Ari and Bel e.
Heart encircled by a thousand shards of metal, each a stabbing blade, she began to head for the entrance. That was when she saw Evelyn shake off her older sister’s hold and run down the front steps toward her. “You’re not a vampire.”
Rocking back on her heels at the chal enge in that smal , rebel ious face, in those bunched fists, Elena said, “No.”
An instant of searing eye contact, gray to gray, and Elena had the feeling she was being sized up. “Do you want to know what happened?” Evelyn asked at last.
Elena frowned, glanced at the porch—to see no one else making a move to come forward, the adults appearing as shel -shocked as the majority of the girls. Returning her attention to her sister, she fought the urge to touch her, hold her close. “Is there something you want to tel me?”
“It was awful.” A whisper, nothing but horror on that soft face that was of a child’s yet, not of the woman she would one day become. “I went into the dorm and there was blood everywhere and Celia wasn’t there even though we were supposed to meet. And I can’t find Bets—”
“You discovered this?” Feral protectiveness bared its teeth. No, she thought, no. The monsters wouldn’t steal another one of her sisters from her. “What did you see?” Her gut knotted, bile rising in her throat.
“Nothing after that,” Evelyn confessed, and the relief threatened to send Elena to her knees. “Mrs. Hil heard me scream, and she dragged me out the door almost straightaway. Then they made us al stand out here, and I heard wings ... but I didn’t see your archangel.”
At that instant, Elena glimpsed a shrewdness in those gray eyes that reminded her of Jeffrey’s. It caused a painful twisting in her chest—because she, too, was her father’s daughter, at least in some part of her soul. “I’l take care of things,” she promised. “But I need you to go back up and stay with Amethyst until I figure out what’s going on.” It could only be a vampire gone rogue if Raphael had cal ed for her.