“Her people are in the grip of a stunned kind of shock,” the vampire said, “but there is no despair, not at the level there should be. They are waiting, and erecting shrines—where they kneel and pray for Lijuan’s swift recovery.”
“Damn.” Dmitri had been hoping Raphael had managed to kill her off despite Raphael’s own belief otherwise.
Killing an archangel, Raphael had said, has always been a difficult task. Killing an Ancient might be an impossible one—and while Lijuan isn’t an Ancient, she’s close enough to it that I believe it’ll take an extraordinary event to eliminate her.
“I’ve thought of multiple methods to kill her,” Naasir said. “Unfortunately, she keeps regenerating, even in my imagination.”
That was the crux of it. If nothing could eradicate the threat of Lijuan, hell would erupt on earth. “Share your ideas with the sire.” Naasir didn’t think like the rest of them, had come up with surprising maneuvers before.
“Do I need to take a gift for Elena? Is that the thing to do?”
Dmitri fought the urge to tell him yes. Naasir’s idea of a gift tended to be interesting at best. “Do what feels natural. Neither the sire nor the consort expect us to be anything other than who and what we are.” That fact was at the core of why he served Raphael; there was no need for pretense.
“I’ll take a gift,” Naasir said after a minute. “It’s what Jessamy taught me to do when invited to a special dinner at someone’s home.”
Dmitri wondered if Honor would mind if he changed their plans and invited them both to dinner at the Enclave.
• • •
“It lives!”
Ashwini pointed her finger at Demarco. “I haven’t shot anyone this week.”
The streaky blond-brown of his hair more on the brown side right now, given the winter sunlight, the irrepressible hunter jumped over a table in the Academy dining hall to grab her shoulders and squeeze. It was his form of giving her a hug—most of the hunters who were her close friends knew she had trouble with too much physical contact.
Leaning forward, she hugged him. He was part of her family and she understood the value of such loyalty and affection in a way no one who hadn’t lost a family could. It had all gone wrong so long ago, and now there was no way to fix the family into which she’d been born. But she could do this; she could hold on to the family she’d created.
“You teaching today?” she asked when she drew back.
Demarco flicked his finger at one of her earrings, the fall of bronze circles making a tiny metallic ping of sound. “Just finished doing a one-on-one strategy lesson with an older student.” He led her back to where he’d been seated with a cup of coffee and a half-demolished banana chocolate chip muffin, the two of them detouring to the counter so she could pick up a muffin and a chocolate milk for herself.
They’d just sat down when Honor walked in.
“I thought I saw your name on the board,” Demarco said. “Aren’t you meant to be in class?”
“I postponed it for fifteen minutes to give the students time to change and catch a breath after a combat session that ran overtime.” She slid into the chair next to Ashwini, nudging at Ash’s shoulder with hers in hello before sneaking a piece of chocolate off Demarco’s plate. “Mmm.” She sighed, eyes closing. “I don’t care how old I get, I’m never going to lose the taste for chocolate.”
“I thought Dmitri gave good blood?” Demarco smirked.
“I’m going to murder Ellie,” Honor said, her cheeks hot.
“Don’t blame Ellie.” Ashwini gave her friend a chunk of chocolate from her own muffin. “You start to stutter every time one of us asks about the blood drinking.” Honor was the first hunter they all knew who’d become a vampire, and, family being family, they were nosy as hell about the experience.
“Then,” Demarco added, “you go this amazing shade of red and seem to lose the ability to form words.”
“Shuddup.”
Laughing, Ashwini took a sip of her milk. She was happy to see her friend so alive and vibrant. Dmitri might be a bit of a bastard, but he’d brought Honor back from the bleak world in which she’d existed after the hell of her captivity, and for that, the vampire had a friend in Ashwini.
“Did Dmitri mention the case I’m working?” she asked her friend, feeling her way before she mentioned the details. The last thing she wanted to do was drag Honor back into the horror she’d survived.
“Yes.” Honor’s skin pulled taut over her bones, her voice vibrating with withheld emotion when she said, “I hope Raphael fries the evil bastard after you catch him.”
Demarco leaned forward, lowered his voice. “What’s the case?”
Reassured by Honor’s anger that her friend wasn’t in a bad headspace, Ashwini told him. She knew he wouldn’t speak to anyone else about it unless she gave him the go-ahead. “Have either one of you heard anything that might help?”
“I wish I had,” Honor said, her fury a thrum beneath her skin. “But I haven’t really been on the streets since I got back, mostly teaching and at the Tower, helping Dmitri deal with the Legion. Now and then, the Primary will talk to me in an ancient language I’ve studied but never expected to hear. It’s fascinating.”
Ashwini shivered at the thought of the winged army that had appeared out of nowhere. Most people assumed the fighters had arisen from a secret compound that belonged to Raphael. Ash knew that was wrong, very, very wrong. Even from a distance, they gave off such a sense of age that it was a crushing pressure against her senses.