Elena’s fingers clenched on the phone. “Do you think . . . ?”
“I don’t know.” Her best friend’s voice held the weight of what it meant to be director. “Losing his wife one year then his daughter the next messed him up—especially after he’d managed to get her into rehab, but he was upbeat the last time I saw him, said he had plans for the future. And the police confirmed skid marks on the road. It was just an accident on a rainy night.”
Elena nodded; better to believe that than to think strong, dangerous Archer had suicided by crashing his car into a closed gas station one dark, desolate night. The resulting fireball had lit up the entire surrounding town. “You need to fill his position,” she said, realizing it wasn’t only Archer’s death that haunted Sara but what it meant.
“Deacon stepped in on an interim basis,” her friend said. “But he can’t keep on carrying the load. There’s a reason he stopped being Slayer when we got together.”
“Yes.” Deacon wasn’t the kind of man who was threatened by female power; he and Sara would’ve never lasted had that been the case. But Sara desperately needed Deacon to be her husband and lover, never her subordinate. With him, she could lay down the mantle of Guild director and just be Sara as he was Deacon.
Deacon had also forged a new career path for himself; he was now a weapons-maker whose work was coveted by mortals and immortals both—to ask him to abandon that work would be to ask a gifted artist to lay down his tools. “Who are you thinking of?”
“That’s just it, Ellie.” Sara sounded as if she was moving, pacing. “Who do I ask to take this on? It’s a lonely, heartbreaking role. You saw how Archer was. The Guild is family to the rest of us, but the Slayer has to live in the shadows outside it.”
Elena thought of how Archer had never accepted an invitation that included other mortal hunters, how he’d only ever had a drink with her when it was just her and Ashwini or Honor. All hunters now associated with the Tower and thus beyond the Slayer’s purview. “The new Slayer will have me, Ash, Honor, and of course you and Deacon.”
“I just . . . I worry about him, too.” Sara lowered her voice. “He left that life behind years ago, but he’s stepped back into the darkness for me.”
Elena would never know all of Deacon’s demons, but she could imagine the toll being Slayer took on a man. “I could act as his backup once my wing heals,” she offered.
“Ellie. That’s not why I wanted to talk—I just need to vent, and Deacon’s already handling so much.” A sense of Sara pausing. “I’d never ask you to go after another hunter.”
History was a whisper of evil and a race against time between them.
“It’s all right, Sara. I did what was needed.” Or Bill James would’ve gone on killing young boys. “I’ve made my peace with it—and if you appoint me Slayer, the Guild will never have to worry about appointing another one.”
The idea of executing rogue hunters through time had her stomach twisting violently, but evil had to be stopped. Even when it came from your own family. “I’m stronger than anyone else in the Guild,” she pointed out. “Less liable to get wounded during the hunt.”
But Sara wasn’t open to accepting her offer. What she wanted was Elena’s input on creating a shortlist. Elena gave it without withdrawing her candidacy for the difficult position. She also forced herself to continue eating. Her pants were already loose—if she kept losing weight at this rate, one of these days she’d flash all of New York when her pants fell right off.
She’d just ended the conversation with Sara when a hint of movement made her glance toward the windows. Snow had begun to fall again, soft and light, Manhattan a shimmering mirage through it. A snow globe world sparkling with tiny stars. But that wasn’t what caught Elena’s attention.
Rising, she walked to the doors that led out onto their balcony, wonder unfurling inside her. Raphael, do we have white owls in New York?
What do you see?
Owls gliding through the falling snow. She opened the doors, walking out to stand in the freezing cold just so she could watch the exquisite, unearthly creatures move silently through the air. A hundred of them, maybe more. They’re like living ghosts.
Graceful beyond compare, their feathers sleek and perfect, and their eyes huge orbs that burned a luminous gold. Her fingers curled into her palms, but she felt no fear, only endless wonder that such beauty could exist in the world. Their eyes are glowing golden. She reached out a hand to touch one that seemed a bare hairsbreadth away, but her fingers met only the snow.
And the cold, it was searing her bones.
The sea crashed violently against her senses. ELENA.
Shuddering, she stepped back from the snow, from the night, from the fucking voice in her head that had held her captive with musical words about the owls, and slammed shut the balcony doors. There are no owls, Raphael. She stared at the falling snow from behind the glass, her heart thunder inside her chest. Someone is messing with my mind.
That was when she noticed the owl sitting quietly on her vanity, watching her with eyes so haunting in their clarity and beauty that her soul ached.
6
Raphael scythed through the snow-laden blackness of the skies above his territory, his jaw a grim line and his mind only on getting to his hunter. When he neared their home, however, he was drawn not to the house but to the greenhouse that sat a short distance from it.
It glowed from within, a beacon through the falling strokes of white.
Landing outside the glass structure, he saw her silhouette within, his dangerous warrior mate who was so gentle with the plants she nurtured. When he walked in, he brought with him a breath of winter air, but it was soon overwhelmed by the warmth that held sway here.
“Archangel.” There was a tightness around her eyes as his consort walked, tall and strong, toward him. She’d taken off her jacket and her larger weapons as well as her forearm sheaths but was otherwise dressed as she’d been earlier, her garments sleek and black. Sliding one hand around the back of his neck, her other on his chest, she kissed him in welcome, her warm lips thawing his cold ones and her fingers on his face a caress. “Am I glad to see you.”
Raphael curved his wings around her. “Any other incursions into your mind?”
A shake of her head. “Not after the owl on the vanity flew through the balcony doors.” She paused before adding, “I keep telling myself there was nothing scary or threatening about the experience—the owls were astonishingly beautiful, and I actually felt privileged to have seen them.” The rim of silver around her eyes glittered. “And aside from the whole predicting-my-death thing, the voice hasn’t harmed me.”
“Do not joke about your death.” He cupped the side of her face, felt the life of her burn him with its fire. “I have spoken to the Legion.” The last time the birds had begun to act strangely, the voices had been in Raphael’s head; it had turned out the birds had been acting as the Legion’s eyes and ears.
“I don’t suppose they sent the owls?”
“No.” The Primary says they remember white owls with golden eyes from long ago, but they do not know why they remember.
Elena ran her fingers through his hair, dusting off stubborn particles of snow. “No point wasting our time obsessing about it.” Words that held a resolute decisiveness. “We’ll find out when the Cascade is ready to let us know.”