“Ray, do something!” Magda demanded. “Posses don’t just stand around watching!”
“Er . . .” Ray pulled his camera out of his pocket and took a picture.
“Oh, for the love of all that is right and holy . . .” Magda snatched his camera away.
“He didn’t tell you how he killed my Beloved? How he watched her die slowly, her flesh melting off her body? He didn’t tell you how I almost died that night, too?” Alec called.
My eyes widened as I looked at Kristoff. You killed Alec’s Beloved?
No.
Then why-
My wife did. I told you she killed the mate of a Dark One.
You didn’t tell me she was Alec’s Beloved!
I didn’t know until you showed me that damned reaper journal.
“I thought you said vamps couldn’t live without their Beloveds,” Magda said as Raymond pestered her for his camera back.
“They can’t,” Alec yelled, leaping aside as Kristoff lunged forward, simultaneously throwing a metal bench at him. Alec jumped back, then immediately started an attack on the other side.
I realized at that moment what Kristoff was doing. He was keeping himself between Alec and me. My heart warmed with love for him. He wasn’t just keeping me alive for his own sake, but because he truly did have gentler emotions for me. They wouldn’t ever be what he had for his late girlfriend, but I had at last resigned myself to being happy with what he could give me.
“How did you survive, then?” I asked, sending Kristoff wave after wave of love.
He glanced back at me for a split second, startled. I blew him a kiss. Mattias, next to me, blew him one as well.
“We weren’t yet Joined. I had just met Eleanor when she ran into the Zorya.”
The word echoed with a horrible reverberation in my head.
Kristoff stumbled.
“A Zorya?” Magda asked, just as astounded as I was. “Uh-oh.”
“No!” I screamed, throwing myself forward as Alec, taking advantage of the misstep, kicked Kristoff’s other leg out and was instantly upon him, the sword held at Kristoff’s heart. “Nooo!”
Alec looked up from Kristoff, his green eyes like those of a cat, relish evident in them as he panted, his face and hands blistered. “Why shouldn’t I kill him, Pia?”
“Because I love him,” I said simply.
He hesitated, his eyes searching my face. Tears spilled over my eyelashes as I looked at Kristoff, his skin blistering as well, his gaze steadfast on mine.
Alec shook his head, his fingers tightening around the hilt of the sword. “Not good enough.”
“Then . . . because I can do this.” I pulled as hard as I could on the power of the moon, pulling from it the silvery cool light that filled me with a calm sense of rightness, slamming it into Alec’s chest.
He flew backward into a storage bench, knocking it over, his arms and legs tangling up in the chair cushions that spilled out from inside it.
Kristoff reached for the sword Alec had knocked out of his grip, stalking over to where the man who had once been his friend lay inert in a small stream of blood seeping from a cut on his head.
I joined Kristoff. We both stood and watched Alec for a moment.
“You didn’t kill him,” Kristoff said.
“No. There was only enough power in that ball of light to knock him backward and maybe singe off a little chest hair. Your wife was a Zorya?”
Pain washed through him. Pain and guilt and something that, for a moment, reminded me of fear. “Yes.”
“Which means, unless things have changed over the centuries, that you were a sacristan.”
Kristoff turned to me, his eyes robin’s-egg blue. “I did not know the woman was his Beloved.”
I touched his mind with mine. He was reluctant to allow the intimacy, but I was insistent, and he finally let me in. The dark, stained part of his mind that I thought was due to his plans with the vampires was now lit brightly.
You thought I would hate you if I knew you were once a reaper, too?
You did not wish to be Zorya anymore.
So?
You have to be married to a sacristan to be Zorya. I could not risk giving you up. And I knew that once you were aware of what I had been, how it was my wife who had started the reapers on their path of murder, you would not wish to remain with me.
I stared at him in growing disbelief. Do you seriously believe that I would dump you because of something you were a couple of hundred years ago?
Other women have when they found out.
Other women like Angelica?