Ashwini let the music sink into her bones as she opened the door into the past. “I was three months into my new life and out of work when Saki found me asleep in her parents’ barn. She was the toughest woman I’d ever met”—all honed strength and patience—“but instead of kicking me out, she sat down on a hay bale and asked me why I thought this existence was better than home.”
Janvier watched her with a quiet intensity. “You told her the truth.”
“Yes.” To this day she didn’t know why, but that conversation had changed the course of her life. “She told me about the Guild, said my independence and resilience would stand me in good stead.”
The choice had been easy; it was the first time in her life anyone had said she might succeed at something without having to alter her very nature. “It sounded too good to be true, and I was sure they’d reject me, but they didn’t.” Her defiant facade had cracked at the acceptance, left her exposed to Saki’s keen eyes. That was when the other woman had taught her the first rule of the Guild: Your fellow hunters will always have your back. We will never use what we know about you against you.
“I was scared to return to New York to attend the Academy, afraid Arvi would put me back in Banli House. But . . . I missed my brother, too.” Love was never uncomplicated; she could hate Arvi and love him at the same time. Once, she’d tried to tell herself that she felt nothing, but the lie had been too big to carry. “The Guild psychologist was the one who made sure I wouldn’t be committed again. So I came home, did everything in my power to be a normal teenager.”
“And your brother?” Janvier asked softly. “Did you see him on your return?”
Ashwini’s mind flashed back to that instant so many years ago when Arvi slammed into the conference room at Guild HQ. She’d never forget the wild look in his eyes, his hair a tumble and his jaw shadowed with a coarse beard.
He’d stopped halfway to her, his chest heaving. “You’re safe. Alive.”
The agonizing relief in those words would live with Ashwini forever. “Yes,” she’d whispered, her hand clenching on the back of a chair as she stared across the gulf between them. She’d wanted to run into his arms and she’d wanted to punch and scream at him, the equally powerful urges crashing up against each other to lock her feet to the floor. “I would’ve died in that place.”
Arvi had flinched. “I was trying to save you.”
“I know.” Thanks to Saki, she also knew he’d filed a missing persons report on her, had hired countless private investigators in an effort to find her. Not only that, but he’d been personally talking to every bus driver and train conductor he could find, in the hope that someone might remember her. “Thank you for searching for me.” It had been her fear, and yet to know that he had, that he hadn’t simply written her off . . . it made her want to cry despite the confusion and anger inside her.
Arvi’s expression had been stark. “There was never any question.”
That was the only time the two of them had ever spoken of what he’d done by putting her in Banli House. “Yes,” she told Janvier now. “I saw Arvi.” Throat thick, she swallowed. “He’d looked for me,” she said simply, unable to face the tangled knot of emotions incited by the memory. “But he didn’t stand in my way when it came to the Guild, didn’t try to reassert guardianship.”
Safe from the threat of committal, Ashwini had narrowed her focus to her Guild studies, determined to forget the other part of her existed. Having learned the truth about Tanu and her mother by then—after confronting Arvi a month after her return—she’d seen her “gift” as a curse that had destroyed her family and she’d wanted no part of it. “I was nineteen before I accepted who I was, what I had inside me.” It was seeing Tanu behind a locked door one day that had done it; she’d vowed she’d never be so trapped . . . and realized she’d imprisoned herself.
Janvier’s smile was faint, his eyes dark. “So many years in so short a story. One day, you will tell me the rest of it.”
Ashwini shrugged. “I was luckier than a million others.”
“And the predators?” Janvier asked, tone quiet but shoulders tense. “You must’ve been a beautiful girl, tall and long limbed.”
“More like skinny and dirty.” Not that such things stopped the monsters. “I had a couple of close calls—ironically not from the strangers I was so vigilant about, but from two of the farm laborers I’d gotten to know over the summer.”
One man had cornered her in a disused drying shed she’d thought to use for sleep, while another had grabbed her in the fields when she’d made a mistake and been the last one to leave. “But I’d been a cornered animal once before,” she said to the vampire who had death in his eyes right now. “I still had that feral strength in me, along with the knives I’d bought with my first bits of money.”
Janvier’s expression didn’t soften. “These men didn’t wish to make trouble for you after you hurt them?”
“They may have, but I hopped a freight train to another farm state the same night in both cases. I knew I couldn’t win against them.” The helplessness had grated at her, but her survival instincts had won out over pride.
“I feel a compulsion to visit these areas.”
“No need. I went back when I was a fully trained hunter. Neither will bother another girl ever again.” At Janvier’s raised eyebrow, she said, “They’re not dead, just . . . out of commission in certain bodily functions.”