Dmitri’s answer was a long time coming. “She appears to be in a stable relationship, but she is ... different. I may yet have to execute her.”
19
Dmitri’s chilling words continued to circle in Elena’s head as she dropped by the morgue to ensure the dead woman had indeed been the one who’d murdered the vampire in the park. All it took was a single deep breath—the sweet poison of oleander was embedded in the assassin’s skin. That done, Elena snuck into the Tower to take a quick shower. It felt wrong to meet Evelyn straight after having come from the house of the dead.
“Here we go,” she said twenty minutes later as she led her sister through the solid steel doors of Guild Academy, conscious of the tension in that small, sturdy body. “You’re too young to join as a full member, and no one expects you to live here, but you’ll be set a schedule of after-school classes to help you hone and control your abilities.”
Evelyn glanced over her shoulder, to where Amethyst walked stiff-backed beside Gwendolyn. “Amy can come with me?”
“Yes, if you want.” Unexpectedly, though it was Eve who was hunter-born, it was Amy with her fiercely nurtured anger and keen distrust who reminded Elena most of herself. Eve, she thought, was still young enough to see the world as she wanted to see it. Amy had had the rose-colored lenses ripped off long ago, likely understood the painful truth of the relationship that seemed to exist between Gwendolyn and Jeffrey.
The ghost of Marguerite haunted them both.
Shaking off that thought as they reached the glass door to the waiting area, Elena pushed through. To her surprise, the man who met them inside was in a high-tech wheelchair. That wasn’t the surprise, however. “Vivek!” Closing the distance between them, she cupped his face, kissed him on both cheeks, having not realized how much she’d missed him until this moment.
He blushed but didn’t shove back his wheelchair. “Wow, look at those wings. I thought everyone was pulling my leg even after I saw the news reports.” Moving his chair using a pressure control, he ignored Evelyn, Amethyst, and Gwendolyn as he peered at her feathers. “Would you be willing to let me—”
“Later,” she said, putting her hand gently between Eve’s shoulder blades, compelled by a sense of responsibility to get this right, to make sure her youngest sister would never ever think herself cursed rather than gifted. “I’ve brought the Guild a new student.”
Vivek’s attention shifted at once, his brown eyes hard, incisive. “Hunter-born,” he said with curt assurance. “Nowhere near as strong as you, but strong enough to get herself in trouble if she’s not careful.”
Evelyn shifted closer to Elena at that harsh, almost cold summation. Elena tugged on her ponytail. “Don’t mind him. Vivek talks to computers most of the time—humans are too much trouble as far as he’s concerned.” It was highly atypical to see him away from the subterranean tunnels that were his usual milieu.
Now, grumbling, the Guild’s resident computer genius nodded toward the busy office area beyond. “Go over there; they’ll do the paperwork.”
Elena went in with Evelyn, but when it became clear that Gwendolyn was capable and ready to shepherd her daughter through the process, she stepped out to talk to Vivek. “It’s good to see you, V.”
“Did you get that gun I sent with Sara?” he asked, eyes touched with a trace of envy when they landed on her wings.
She didn’t begrudge him that. He was hunter-born, too, but had been paralyzed in an accident as a child, losing all feeling below the shoulders. His wheelchair, built for wireless capability, was a cutting-edge piece of technology from which he ruled his domain—the Cellars.
She’d always understood why he preferred to stay in the secret hideaway and information clearinghouse beneath the Guild’s main building—it had to be a sensory nightmare for him to be up in the world when he had no outlet for his hunting instincts. That he had managed not only to retain his sanity in the face of that pressure, but to become an invaluable part of the Guild, was a testament to his incredible will.
“You mean this gun?” She retrieved it from an inner thigh holster, then put it back before she got told off for flashing a weapon.
Vivek smiled, and it turned his face striking. He was too thin, his bones too sharp against skin a shade darker than Venom’s, but he was a handsome man. Yet he never made anything of it—as long as she’d known him, he’d been asexual. Intentionally so, she thought. “So what do you want to do with my wings?”
Lines on his forehead. “I was going to ask you to come in for a scan so we could get a better idea of their internal structure, but . . . that might make you vulnerable.” Moving his wheelchair with a minute shift of his head, he rolled away from the office and out to the porch that ran the length of the front of the building.
Following, she leaned against the railing. “Yeah.” She folded her arms, thought about loyalties. “He holds my heart, V. I’d never do anything to betray him.”
Vivek stared at her for a long time. “I always wondered who’d break through that armor—figures it’d be a scary-ass archangel.” Crooked smile creasing his face, he angled his head toward the office. “So ...”
“Yep.” Vivek knew more about her tangled relationship with her family than anyone else aside from Sara. Having been rejected by his own family after his accident, perhaps he understood even better.
Now, he looked out over the paved drive and to the massive iron gates that guarded the entrance to Guild Academy. “I was watching the surveillance monitor before you landed. Your father drove your sisters here. He’s outside, sitting in his Mercedes.”
Elena felt her shoulders lock, and it was an instinctive response, one she couldn’t fight. She understood without being told that Gwendolyn was the reason Jeffrey had come. Somehow, the beautiful woman who had always seemed nothing but a decorative fixture had found the will to force her intractable husband into supporting her children.
“I’m not strong enough. Forgive me, my babies.”