Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
She’d had no idea how to take care of a toddler, but she’d had Sivya and Montgomery as backup . . . and she’d had Raphael. It turned out that an archangel who’d once stood guard in the angelic nursery knew exactly how to deal with a curious little girl who could toddle-run at startling speed—and who loved playing hide-and-seek with her hapless guardians.
The rest was sweet, funny, wonderful history.
As Montgomery had stiffly said, “Why should Zoe Elena stay with another when she is loved here?”
Their butler adored her goddaughter.
Zoe absolutely loved him in turn; when she visited, she could often be found trailing around behind him, helping him “butler”—with breaks to go steal fresh-baked treats from an indulgent Sivya.
Elena’s wasn’t the only heart that would break the day Zoe stepped through the veil most immortals would never pierce.
“Not today,” Elena reminded herself. “Today, Zoe is young and wild and dazzling.”
She reminded Elena of Belle.
Gasping, she pressed one palm against the wall and blinked hard and fast. It was the first time she’d allowed herself to think that, make that connection.
Dance with me, Ellie! Look at your feet go! Wow, what a move! Go! Go! Go!
She shoved a fist against her mouth, holding back the dry, hot sobs that wanted to escape.
18
Interlude
War
Raphael and Dmitri stopped mid-spar to look up at the noon sky that had gone a vivid and empty black on a thunderous boom of sound.
“One of them is dead,” Raphael said, shoving a frustrated hand through his hair. “The stupidity of it.”
Dmitri didn’t ask him to explain who he was talking about—his second knew. “By my count, that’s three archangel-to-archangel wars since your ascension, and you’ve only been on the Cadre for a hundred years.”
“I’m learning that my kind can’t seem to embrace peace for longer than a few decades.”
Dmitri rolled back and forth on the balls of his bare feet. “Don’t worry, my friend, I’ll pin you down and talk sense into you if you try to start a war for no reason but that you’re bored.”
Needing to work off his anger at the needless death, Raphael took a sparring position once more. The only reason he could even see Dmitri was because of the glow coming off his own wings—a glow born of his simmering rage at the avoidable.
“I’d be most grateful,” he said to the vampire who was his closest friend. “I would not want to go down in history as the archangel who ruled for a hundred years before he picked a fight and got himself dead by angelfire.”
Laughing, his friend came at him, a blur in the darkness.
* * *
* * *
It was only later, long after the sky cleared, that a courier landed on top of his Tower with the news.
The Cadre hadn’t lost one archangel in a pointless fight today.
It had lost two.
19
Despite the memories crushing her heart today, Elena had herself under control when she walked out of the suite dressed in jeans and an old T-shirt with the “Hunter Angel” logo on it. Her smartass friends had given it to her so long ago that the once glitter-filled logo was all but indistinguishable from the black of the tee, the material soft against her skin.
She found Illium with Vivek, the two of them ensconced in the private room that Vivek used to work on things so confidential they were unknown even to his senior team in the Tower’s tech command center.
“Guten morgen, Ellie,” he said when she walked in, and from the look on his handsome but too-thin face, he already knew about Jeffrey. No surprise. Information was Vivek’s job.
“Āyubōwan, Vivek,” she said, continuing the game they’d been playing forever. “You yearning for sauerkraut today?”
“As much as you are for a cup of tea from Sri Lanka’s green fields.” He bumped fists with her from where he sat in his wheelchair.
Despite all predictions to the contrary, her fellow hunter’s transition to vampirism had come with more than one hiccup. Initial estimates had said that it would take decades after his Making for vampirism to heal the childhood spinal damage that had left him a tetraplegic.
The healers had been wrong—and right. Vivek could walk already. Only it caused him excruciating pain due to factors unknown. To further the complications, his left leg hadn’t matched the recovery schedule set by the rest of his body. It was much weaker than the right and went numb on him at times, forcing him to drag it along behind him.
But the man was as stubborn as any hunter in the Guild, and he did walk often with the help of a cane—but when it came to serious work, he preferred to do it from his wheelchair.
“After a lifetime in this, Ellie,” he’d said to her just last month, patting the side of his chair with an affectionate hand, “it’s an extension of my body. My speed in the chair and with all the various accessible interfaces is miles ahead of what I can do with my hands and legs.”