A woman stepped from the shadows as Ava moved forward. She felt Malachi’s hand on the small of her back; he stood steady and protective behind her.
She was tall and dark-haired; her long brunette mane was streaked with ebony. She turned her gaze, and Ava met eyes a mirror of her own. Glowing gold behind thick black lashes. She heard Malachi suck in a breath. The woman was beautiful. Incandescently beautiful.
Inhumanly beautiful.
Like the Grigori she stood beside.
“Ava.” Kostas took the woman’s hand. “I’d like you to meet my sister. Kyra.”
Of course.
Of course.
Sister.
The memory of a dark angel’s voice in her mind.
“Soon. You will know soon.”
It was a startling, beautiful clarity, fresh as the sky after rain.
Kyra smiled at Ava. Her gold eyes were shining. “Did you think the angels only had sons?”
II.
JARON STOOD ON THE ROOF of a warehouse near Barak’s son, watching Ava in his mind’s eye.
Of course.
“Did you think the angels only had sons?”
No.
There had always been others.
Barak appeared a second later. Vasu followed.
“She knows,” they said together.
“Soon she will go to their city,” he said. “And I will remove my protection.”
“Volund will be drawn out?” Vasu asked.
“He will come,” Barak said. “He has his own interest in the woman.”
Vasu curled his lip slightly. “I still do not understand your fascination.”
“Not fascination,” Jaron said. “She will draw him as nothing else can.”
Jaron opened his eyes to them as they watched the scene play out among the sons and daughters of angels below them.
The Irin. Children of the Forgiven, their power glowing not with the wild raw fury of Fallen children but the low, controlled burn of a well-tended fire. Their magic had been honed. Trained. Tested. Their blood farther from the angels, they had used the knowledge the Forgiven had given them to become more powerful than those they fought. Male and female. They were a balanced race.
The Grigori. Raw fury and terrible hunger. Slaves to the Fallen. Abandoned to ignorance, their children raged against the human world with the fury of a child denied. Their sons, predators. Their daughters, a secret.
Born in fear. Terrible with untrained power. Forgotten. Disposed of. They called themselves kareshta. The silent ones.
Their fathers called them nothing. Those who allowed their daughters to live usually abandoned them to the madness of the human world. After all, female offspring were rare.
He’d never turned his mind to them, because for Jaron, there had only ever been sons.
Until there hadn’t been.
“I sing sometimes when you’re not here.”
Broken.
His only daughter was so terribly broken.
“Your son, Barak,” Vasu said with dark amusement in his eyes. “Kostas would remake the world we have built. There is power in that one. Are you sure he thinks you are dead?”
“Yes.” Barak cocked his head. “He won’t hear me. Whatever magic Jaron has laid over the woman protects me as much as it does her.”
“Kostas is perceptive,” Jaron said, “But he is not more powerful than me.”
“Why do you shield her?” Vasu asked.
“I have my reasons.”
Reasons only Barak knew. And his oldest friend only knew because he’d found Jaron in a killing rage sixty years before. A rage that would have swallowed the world unless Barak intervened.
Jaron had not taken a human lover since, and his line was dying.
He wanted it to.
Vasu, the most terrestrial of them, crouched down, clearly intrigued by the scene that Jaron showed them.
“I have never understood the fear of them.”
“That is because you have never raised your daughters,” Barak said.
Vasu shrugged. “If they run to the humans, the humans may have them.”
“The humans consider them mad.”
“What is madness but a form of wisdom?” Vasu murmured, his eyes still locked on the warehouse. “Once they were called seers. Holy women. They were revered in my territory. But Volund fears them. Hates them. Galal butchers them in the name of progress. Why?”
“They are of us,” Jaron said, “but unlike us.”
Barak said, “When the first Fallen daughters were born, they were killed immediately. Considered defective human offspring.”
“Many still view them as such,” Jaron said.
He remembered when Barak had stopped killing his female children. It was when the first pair of twins had been born. The two children grew to be some of his most powerful, though the daughter was always kept hidden from any he did not trust absolutely. Jaron was the only angel who knew Barak no longer killed or abandoned his daughters. Not that many didn’t escape his control. Those, he left to the human world. Or he had, before betrayal had rent their world. Barak had also ceased siring children sixty years ago, for many of the same reasons Jaron had.
Yet Vasu knew nothing. He still stared at the warehouse, watching the scene as if it were performed on a human stage.
“Vasu,” Jaron said.
Gold eyes looked up. Vasu’s dark skin was colorless in the night, but his gold and black hair whipped in the wind. The gold reflecting the starlight, the black swallowing the darkness.
“What do you want of me?” he asked. “I do not want the same thing you do. I have decided.”
“You will remain here?”
“Yes.”
Barak stepped forward. “Are you certain?”
“Are you?”
Barak’s eyes narrowed. “I am. If you remain, you will be alone.”
“If we succeed, I will not be. There will be no more reason to hide, and my people will return to me.”
Jaron said, “Killing Volund will not erase all your enemies, brother.”
“It will erase enough of them,” Vasu said. “Galal will be nothing without Volund’s support. You have your vengeance, and I have mine.”
“Enough,” Jaron said quietly. “We are decided.”
“We are decided,” the three Fallen said, turning their eyes back to the cold warehouse on the edge of the mountains where the earthly realm had changed in the space of a single word.
Chapter Nine
SISTER.
Malachi’s mind rebelled.
No.
It wasn’t possible.
They would have known.
They had to have known.
How could they not have known?
He reached for Ava’s hand, but she was already walking toward the woman called Kyra. Renata was at her side.
“Ava, don’t!”
The Grigori around them had been calm, almost eerily so. But at his protest, they turned furious eyes toward Malachi, as if they were enraged at the interference. Max put a hand on his arm and he calmed.
“Renata is with her. She’ll be fine. Kostas would never attack Ava, especially not in front of his sister.”
Sister.
A sister.
“How—”
“They are Barak’s children. Twins. Both their sire and mother are dead.” Max lowered his voice. “Malachi, surely you can see.”