She took a ragged breath. “Ten years before I left for the Refuge, I walked into a room in my parents’ home and saw him torturing a mortal boy who was barely of age.” It had shattered Andromeda, left her heart in pieces on the floor, the hope inside her snuffed out. “He meant for me to know,” she whispered. “He could see the stars in my eyes and he wanted to erase them, to show me his true colors.” To teach her that though he wasn’t lost in a compulsive search for sensation like her parents, he was as pitilessly jaded.
Andromeda had begged him to let the mortal go. The man who was her father in blood had simply raised an eyebrow and flicked the whip once more on the boy’s back, making him whimper as blood trickled down his ravaged skin.
A soft heart can be a fatal weakness in the immortal world, a lure for the predators. If you want to survive, you’d do well to learn from my example.
Andromeda had thrown up instead.
“Dahariel is a bastard,” Naasir agreed. “But he is also Astaad’s second and can request sanctuary for you. No one will interfere as you are his child.”
Andromeda knew he was right; the archangels and old angels would deem it a private family matter since Dahariel—and thus Astaad—had as much right to her as Charisemnon. “I asked him,” she admitted in a small voice. “Fifty years ago.” She’d been desperate enough to chance the humiliation, knowing that though Dahariel was cruel, Astaad’s court was nothing like Charisemnon’s.
Naasir’s expression hardened. “He said no to his own cub? Angels love their children.”
“I think he does love me in his own twisted way.” That was what made his abandonment hurt all the more. “He told me he’d given me what he was capable of giving and that he’d continue to train me, but in every other way, I was on my own.”
“A lot has changed in fifty years.”
“Yet he’s never made the offer, though I have seen him many times for our combat sessions.” She stroked back Naasir’s hair. “I don’t think the bond ever formed deep enough for him to claim me as his own—he didn’t realize I was his until almost fifty years after my birth, when my wings settled into their final adult pattern. By then . . . it was too late for him to see me as a babe.” To feel the protective instincts of a parent.
“So you want me to wait five hundred years?”
Yes. “I can’t demand that,” she said aloud even as her soul tore in two.
He growled at her, so loud and angry that she startled. “Are you going to rut with others in Charisemnon’s court?”
“No!” She pushed at his shoulders but he refused to move. “Why would you say such a horrible thing?”
“Why would you say I shouldn’t wait for you?” It was a snarl. “If you’re mine, you’re mine. And I’m yours. Today, tomorrow, always.”
Andromeda began to cry. Hard, gulping sobs that held all her pain, all her love, all her dreams. Rolling over onto his back, Naasir crushed her close and made purring sounds in his chest as he stroked her hair and her back. “I’m sorry I growled at you,” he said, nuzzling at her. “I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“I know,” she got out through her tears.
Sniffing away the last of the tears several minutes later, she just lay against him. “I wasn’t crying because of that. I was crying because you’re wonderful and I can’t bear to think of leaving you.”
“There must be a way.”
“It’s a blood vow.”
“I’m a chimera who was made of a small, fierce boy and an equally small, equally fierce cat. I can think of a way out.” He wasn’t going to let his mate end up in the court of the Archangel of Plague and Disease.
49
A day later, however, he had to watch her leave for that very court.
“Five hundred years,” she said, one hand on his chest, over the heart that beat for her. “Will you truly wait?”
“If I have to,” he said, taking her mouth in a ravenous kiss. “But I won’t. Watch for me. I’ll be coming to get you.” He fisted both hands in her hair. “Stay alive.” He knew the ugly rules of Charisemnon’s court, knew the horrors she’d face.
“I will,” she promised, but in her eyes, he saw the knowledge that it might not be enough.
Death had many forms. Not all were of the body.
50
A week after that parting, Andromeda couldn’t help looking out through the balcony doors of her bedroom and out over the landscape. She knew it was impossible for her wild chimera to find an answer to a blood vow owed an archangel, but she waited nonetheless. He’d sneak in to see her as soon as he could, that she knew beyond all doubt, though they’d had zero communication since they parted.
Andromeda didn’t dare carry a phone. It could be taken from her, and once taken, Charisemnon would know Naasir was her heart, not a simple sexual dalliance. Her grandfather would find a way to use that, to twist the pure into the ugly.
Five hundred years.
She would fight to survive . . . but she might not come out the same on the other side.
Today, her grandfather had summoned her for a special task. She’d seen the vampire staked out in the courtyard, seen the implements of torture, knew she would not pick up those implements. So they would be turned against her.
Because she was a princess of the court, her naked body would be staked out in a dungeon, not in public. And her torture wouldn’t be at inexpert hands, but at the hands of Charisemnon’s Master Torturer. The tall, thin angel’s aim would be to break her piece by piece. Until she became like Cato, like Lailah.
Daughter and fosterling raised side by side.
Empty shells repainted in Charisemnon’s image.
For the first time, she understood that perhaps her parents were together because no one else could understand what they’d survived. A broken kind of love, but love nonetheless.
Gut churning and skin going hot, then cold, she put on her uniform: dark brown pants and a lighter brown tunic with the pattern of a tree printed in black down the front left side—the same kind of tree under which she’d loved with Naasir. The memory a secret held inside her, she pulled her hair back into a tight braid and strapped on her sword.
No more time.
Naasir. Fight for Naasir. Don’t allow them to steal him from you.
She stepped out, striding down the hallways into Charisemnon’s inner court. The smell of alcohol, as well as of strong narcotic substances that had an effect on immortal physiology, lingered in the air, a number of courtiers still slumped over the tables where they’d been last night.
Wings trailed limply on the sticky floor, and a glutted vampire slept on a chaise longue with his arm possessively around a slender mortal boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Hearing a grunt, she looked up and saw one of her grandfather’s angelic generals copulating with a female vampire who already bore bruises from his meaty grip, but who seemed to be enjoying being fucked on a dining table.
Carrying on through the court without stopping, skirting sleeping and fallen bodies and ignoring slurred propositions, she walked to the great doors beyond. Carved with exquisite care and inlaid with gold and precious stones, the doors were as striking as her grandfather’s heart was rotten. The guards—sharp eyed and alert—opened them for her at once, and she continued on to the inner sanctum.
She swallowed her revulsion before pushing through the unguarded door at the end, having to fight her way through hanging silk curtains to the bedroom. Charisemnon lay in bed, his previously healthy and muscled body shriveled and marked with scars. The disease he’d spread had turned on him like a vicious dog. The fact he was regaining his health, regardless, was no surprise.