A glossy cherry red, that shoe had made Elena’s heart fill with hope for a fractured second. She’d thought her mother had finally come back to them, finally stopped crying ... finally stopped screaming. Then she’d looked up. Seen something that could never be erased from the wall of her mind. “It was all 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 killed Slater. He’ll 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 all.”
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 Belle had lived the nightmare. When her mother had been unable to escape it.
“They will.” 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, small dervishes full 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 hello, but Amethyst, three years older than her sister, grabbed that hand to pull 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 well 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 still 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 small 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, all 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 walls 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 still her sisters, still 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 Belle.
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 challenge in that small, rebellious 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 shell-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 tell 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. Hill heard me scream, and she dragged me out the door almost straightaway. Then they made us all 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’ll 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 called for her.
Evelyn turned and ran back up to the porch, sidling up to her older sister’s stiff form.
Raphael.
For an instant, the only thing she heard was infinite silence. No deep voice laced with the arrogance of more than a thousand years of living. No rush of the wind, the rain in her head. Then it thundered, until she almost staggered under the unleashed power of it. Of him.
Fly over the first building and—
I can’t. I landed already. She wasn’t yet strong enough to achieve a vertical takeoff, something that required not only considerable muscle strength, but a great deal of skill.
Come in through the front door. You will find your way.
His certainty—knowing the only thing that could’ve caused it—made her stomach clench, her spine go stiff. It took conscious effort to sweep aside the sensations and narrow her focus to the upcoming hunt. Contracting her wings as close to her back as possible so they wouldn’t inadvertently brush against those huddled on the porch, she walked up the stairs and across aged but solid brick identical to that of the building itself.
Whispers surrounded her on every side.
“Thought she was dead—”
“—vampire—”
“I didn’t know they Made angels!”
Then came the secretive clicks that announced cell phone cameras in operation. Those pictures would hit the Web in minutes if not seconds, and the news media wouldn’t hesitate to pounce the instant after that. “Well,” she muttered under her breath, “at least that takes care of announcing my presence.” Now all she’d have to deal with was the media scrum that was sure to hit like a freaking tornado.
Whispers of iron in the air.
She jerked up her head, her senses honing in on that thread that spoke of blood and violence. Following it, she made her way down the deserted hallway carpeted in burgundy, its walls lined with class photographs spanning decades past, the students starched and pressed, and to a staircase that curved sinuously up from her left.
In spite of the fact that the building was old, its bones heavy, the corridor was filled with light. She saw the reason why when she stopped on the first step, glanced up—a magnificent glass skylight, domed and gilded with gold, and caressed by a few errant strands of ivy. The leaves looked like emeralds scattered against the glass. But that wasn’t what caught her attention.
Iron again, so rich and potent and thick that it sighed of only one thing.
Death.
“Upstairs.”
Startled, Elena turned to find herself facing a skeletal-thin woman garbed in an elegant suit that straddled the border between pale olive and deep gray. The color appeared almost harsh against skin of a pale, papery white. “I’m Adrienne Liscombe, the principal,” the stranger said at Elena’s questioning look. “I was checking to make sure all the girls got out.”
Having noticed the signs on the doors that opened off the right side of the corridor, Elena said, “This is the office building?”
“This floor,” Ms. Liscombe said, her words crisp, correct. “The second floor houses the library and work spaces for the girls. Above that are a number of dorm rooms, with further facilities on the fourth floor. We function as a home to many of our students—and the staff offices are set up as studies since a significant proportion of us also live in. A girl can come down from her room at any stage to talk to a member of the staff.”