Archangel's Heart(134)

The angel convulsed, his hand falling to his side as the green-gold energy fizzled.

Gian, however, wasn’t the only threat. If the vampire was insane after his trauma, there wasn’t much anyone could do. He’d have to be executed, no matter how unfair that was.

Maddened vampires rarely came back from their murderous urges.

Those thoughts tumbled rapid fire through her brain as she turned to the other captive in the room, her mind trying to catch up with what her eyes were seeing: a woman with hair of moonlight who stared at Elena as if she’d seen a ghost.

Majda had Ari’s eyes, Beth’s eyes, she found herself thinking. Stunning turquoise, so clear and so painfully familiar.

“Marguerite.” The raw whisper was shaped by full lips set in a face that was wrinkled and haggard, those stunning eyes smudged with tears, but it was undoubtedly of the woman in the miniature.

Elena’s breath caught.

“Elena,” she corrected gently as she broke through her shock to examine the chains that held Majda’s wrists and ankles pinned to the wall. “Marguerite was my mother. My maman.” She didn’t know if Majda spoke English, but the word “maman” should be understandable to a woman who’d lived in France.

The chains were heavy iron.

“I’ll take care of it, Guild Hunter.”

Stepping back, Elena let Raphael pulverize the irons and caught Majda in her arms.

Her grandmother’s legs were shaky, her arms, too, but those arms came around her with unexpected fierceness. “Marguerite’s baby?” Tears in every word. “My granddaughter.”

Going down to the floor with Majda in her arms, Elena fought her own tears. “You need blood,” she said, recognizing the cinnamon spice and wild raspberry scent of this woman as that of a vampire.

Her grandmother pushed away Elena’s wrist when she offered it.

Elena tried again. “You need to drink.” Majda wasn’t emaciated or starving like the other vampire, but she was weak, as if she hadn’t fed for at least a week or longer.

Majda shook her head. “Not from my bébé, from my Marguerite.”

Realizing her grandmother was still disoriented, Elena went to make a small slit in her forearm, but Raphael was there before her. “Let me, hbeebti. I am far stronger and she’ll heal faster.”

Her grandmother’s eyes flicked from Elena to Raphael at the word hbeebti, her pupils dilating. When Raphael’s wing pressed over Elena’s as he crouched down to offer Majda his forearm, she scuttled back . . . and then her gaze seemed to focus on Elena’s own wings. Her breath began to come faster.

“I’ll explain,” Elena said, desperate to help her. “But please drink, Grandmother.”

Elena didn’t know if it was the “please” or the “Grandmother” that did it, but Majda made her way cautiously closer and, lowering her head, sank her fangs into Raphael’s wrist. She jerked back after a single long pull at most, and when her lashes lifted, there was a glow to her eyes that reminded Elena of Raphael’s wings.

“Not an angel,” Majda said even as her skin smoothed out to flawless beauty, her hair turning glossy and shiny.

In a matter of heartbeats, she looked no older than Elena.

“No.” Elena just stared. “He’s an archangel.”

And her grandmother was astonishingly beautiful.

Her eyes were also no longer locked on Elena. “Jean-Baptiste!” Scrambling to her feet, she ran to the other vampire, the one Gian had been torturing.

He was still feeding—and Gian was the one who was shrinking and shriveling, the vampire growing healthier in a slow motion contrast. His eye had healed first, the crusted blood and ocular fluid around it falling away in flecks when he blinked. His hair was no longer straw but becoming softer blond, his body filling out in a way that told her he was a tall, solidly built man when not starved.

Still, the transformation was nothing close to that with Majda.

Then Raphael got up, pulled Gian away to drop his wasted but still alive form to the floor, and pressed his wrist to the vampire’s bloody mouth. The vampire fed, jerking the same way as Majda had done at the punch of power, but he didn’t wrench away, his starvation too great. He drank for at least a minute before he lifted his head.

By then, he had starkly handsome features that looked oddly familiar to Elena.

“You have her hair, her skin,” Raphael murmured. “But much of the rest, it comes from him.”

And it really hit her; she was staring at her grandfather. And Raphael was right—much as she superficially resembled her grandmother, it was her grandfather whose genes had held sway over both Marguerite and Elena, though if anyone had asked her to explain exactly how, she’d have been stumped.