Raphael knew the angel was right. “The task is yours,” he said, and spent the next hour drilling a specialized night-maneuvers squadron before heading home.
His consort was in her solar, cleaning her weapons with a single-minded focus that told him she wasn’t seeing the lethal items at all. Taking a seat across from her, he picked up a cut-glass tumbler and poured himself a drink from the decanter she kept for him, a silent invitation into her inner sanctum. “Illium tells me you charmed the vampire leaders.” Whatever she’d done, the effect had been immediate, the city calmer, vampires on their best behavior.
She snorted. “Illium did the charming. I talked business—vamp leaders are all about that—and rampaging vampires are bad for it. We came to an understanding.” Lashes flicking up, humor in the gray. “I may have channeled you at your politest and scariest, to drive home the point that you’d be very, very disappointed should they fail in their task.”
Lips curving, he took another sip. “You are proving to be a most efficient consort, Guild Hunter.”
“Don’t you forget it.” A dagger pointed at him to underscore her command, before she went back to her cleaning.
“Is it your father’s revelation that occupies your mind?”
A nod. “I had a bit of time before you got home, so I logged into the Tower’s information network from here.”
“Did you find her?”
“Yes—the facts weren’t hidden. I just didn’t know to look for them before.” Fingers clenching on the dagger, Elena met eyes of pitiless blue that watched her with an intense patience that told her she mattered. “Her name was Elizabeth Parker.” Her heart pounded in sympathetic memory of the stunned shock she’d felt at the discovery. “Belle and Ari were his firstborn, but he didn’t give them her names, just me and Beth.”
Elieanora Parker Deveraux and Elizabeth Marguerite Deveraux.
Releasing and setting the dagger aside when her fingers began going numb, she dropped her head in her hands. “It’s almost as if it took him that long to trust in the happiness he’d found, have enough faith to open the door a fraction to his past.” Only for the horror to be repeated. “God, Raphael, no wonder he’s so damn fucked up.”
“Tell me about her.”
It was exactly the question she needed to hear. Somehow, she had to find a way to come to terms with a fundamental change in the fabric of her history, her vision of her father altered in a way she was having difficulty comprehending. And even though she knew Raphael had no sympathy for Jeffrey after what her father had done to her, he listened as she released the torrent of words and questions and confusion.
Hours later, when she’d emptied it all from inside her head and could think again, he took her to bed and held her safe from the nightmares, his wing spread over her body in a heaviness of silken warmth that made her feel safer than any weapon.
• • •
Raphael decided to rest in truth this night, his hunter’s skin warm against his own. She’d talked herself out and, in so doing, come to a kind of peace with the ghost of a woman she’d never met, but who’d thrown a shadow across her entire existence.
“Elizabeth Parker,” she’d said quietly at the end. “She’s a part of me and I’m glad I know that.”
Now, she lay tucked trustingly against him, her wings tangled around his body in the way of angelic lovers, his own acting as her blanket. Only when he was certain she’d fallen into a deep, nightmare-free sleep did he press a kiss to the warm curve of her neck and close his eyes.
He dreamed again of that forgotten field, and of a woman’s bare feet as light as air on the ruby-flecked grass, his mother walking away from him after he fell to the earth, his body bloodied and bones broken.
Except . . .
He stood able-bodied on that field—and it was the same field, on the same day. He’d never forget the breathtaking clarity of the sky; the way the dew sparkled as if a careless hand had spilled a thousand translucent gemstones on the lush green blades; the distinctive patterns of light and shadow formed by the blossoming tree to the right; the tiny insect that crawled painstakingly across the grass, food held in its pincers.
He’d watched that insect for what felt like hours as it made its way across the field. When the food slipped out of its pincers, it would stop, pick it up again, and restart its journey. Lying broken on the grass Raphael had thought of himself as an insect, too, an insignificant, discarded piece of angelic flotsam beneath an endless sky.
Today, he could step on that insect without thought, ending its existence and struggle, but he took care to walk around it, the clear morning sunlight a cool brightness on his face, the slight wind adding to the sense that dawn had just broken. Tilting back his head, he saw nothing in the sheet of blue above . . . no, there was his mother. Though he stood in the wrong place, his view was the same as on that fateful day—when he’d watched her from a hidden vantage point, needing to see her free and beautiful just once more before he sought to bring her down, end her life.