Ashwini would never regret him, either.
And she knew. No more secrets, no more stealing time.
She had to tell him, show him, everything.
Forcing her mind off the heavy weight of what was to come, she said, “I shot Ransom a note with Felicity’s name in case his street contacts know anything. I also fed her name to the computer tech on duty so he can troll the databases.”
Vivek had been a lone ranger for a long time in the position, available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He’d known everything, or so it seemed, but he was one of a kind. “How’s Vivek?” she asked Janvier. “Have you seen him?” The guild hunter had chosen vampirism not for eternal life but because it would—eventually—give him back the use of his paralyzed body.
“No.” Expression dark yet, Janvier said, “He asked for privacy during his transformation, and Elena has made sure of it. I don’t think she’s seen him, either.”
She could understand why Vivek didn’t want his friends to see him while he was weak and defenseless; paralyzed or not, he’d always been a force to be reckoned with. “I guess I just want to know someone has a careful eye on him. I don’t know any human who’s been Made after suffering such devastating long-term injuries.”
“Keir himself is monitoring his progress.”
Ashwini had met Keir in the aftermath of the battle. She’d been stitched up by human doctors, but the angelic healer had unexpectedly dropped by her apartment two days after she’d made Janvier leave. With uptilted eyes of warm brown set in a delicately beautiful face, his black hair sleek and his body slender as a boy’s, Keir had appeared unutterably young and yet there’d been a wisdom in his gaze that told her his was a soul old and noble in its peace.
“It is past time I came to see you,” he’d said with a small incline of his head.
Bemused, she’d invited him in, offered him a cup of herbal tea rather than coffee.
His response had been a smile and the words, “Yes, of course that is what I would like.”
The most unfathomable thing was that she hadn’t touched Keir even once, and yet she’d known he’d enjoy the tea, just as she knew he was exhausted from the work he’d been doing with the wounded at the Tower. So she’d offered him a place to rest and, to her surprise, he’d accepted, closing his eyes and dozing quietly in her favorite old armchair.
It had been strange to see angelic wings of golden brown draped over her furniture, to have someone of such age and power in her living space. “Keir,” she said to Janvier, the two of them having almost reached the car, “he’s so old.” The kind of age she’d always feared. “But he doesn’t make me uncomfortable. If anything, he makes everything seem peaceful, he’s so gentle and centered.”
She knew Keir had incredible depths to him, intricate layers of pain and living that made up any life, but there was no cruelty, none of the horror she associated with immortality.
Janvier blinked away a tiny snowflake that sought to cling stubbornly to his eyelashes. “The scholar who taught me to read,” he said after they’d entered the parking lot and were inside the car, “said she’d done the same for Keir when he was a boy. She told me he was the wisest child she’d ever known, an old, old soul reborn into a new body.”
“Yes. Lijuan boasted that she’d evolved to the next plane of existence, but I think Keir’s the one who’s done that.” The healer was something better than this world, with a luminous light at his core.
Janvier’s return gaze was hard. “I won’t argue with you—on that point.”