Elena could’ve never predicted that the two women would hit it off so well. Holly was as tough as Beth was soft . . . but Holly did love fashion as much as Beth, and Holly, too, had once been a far softer creature.
However, when Elena walked into the infirmary, it was to find Beth alone. She sat beside Harrison’s bed with a steaming mug in her hands and a fashion magazine on her lap. A small plate of cakes lay on the side table, the plate itself decorated with gold foil and hand-painted feathers.
“I see we’re looking after you.” Elena leaned down to press a kiss to her sister’s hair, her chest squeezing; some part of her would always see in Beth the lost little girl who’d clung to Elena’s hand beside far too many fresh graves.
“The magazine’s Holly’s,” Beth confided. “And she just raided a kitchen somewhere and brought me the tea and cake. She had to leave to do her shift at the sinkhole, but I knew you were in the Tower.”
“You two spent a lot of time talking.”
“I like her. We’re going to go shopping at that new mall after Harrison is better.” Smile fading, Beth put down the tea. Her fingers trembled as she brushed her husband’s hair off his forehead.
Harrison’s face remained too pale, his throat swathed in bandages. Elena knew Laric had stitched up the wound to hold it together. It wasn’t the standard procedure with vampires, but with Harrison being so young and his throat so badly cut, Nisia had made the unusual call and supervised Laric in its implementation. There was zero risk of Harrison healing around the stitches.
He was recovering too slowly for that.
“The senior healer was here a few minutes ago.” Beth tugged the finely woven blanket higher up Harrison’s body. “She said it’s going to take time, but that Harrison will wake up. I just have to be patient.” She leaned her head against Elena’s thigh. “I can be patient, Ellie. I waited all that time while Harrison was being Made. I trusted that he’d come back to me.”
Elena ran her fingers through the rough silk of her sister’s hair. “I know you can be patient, Beth. I see how you are with Maggie.” Beth never yelled at her daughter, always spoke with a sweet gentleness. It was at those moments that Elena most saw pieces of their mother in Beth. Marguerite had never yelled at her children, either, and yet even rebellious Belle had listened when she’d spoken.
Maggie minded Beth the same way, a piercing echo of memory and family.
Beth looked up with a smile before putting her head back against Elena. “I’ll have to work out certain times when I can come see Harrison. I can’t sit with him twenty-four hours a day, no matter how much it hurts to leave him here. I have to look after Maggie’s heart.”
“Harrison would agree with you. You’re the two most important people in his life.” That, too, was true; regret was an emotion with which Harrison Ling had plenty of familiarity.
As if she’d read Elena’s thoughts, Beth said, “I know you think he was selfish in being Made, Ellie. So did I for a while, but then . . . it gives me such comfort to know that he’ll be around to look after Maggie after I’m gone.” A quiet pause filled only with the subtle sounds of the machines that monitored Harrison. “I never considered that he might go first one day.”
Elena squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, her jaw clenched.
She’d had nearly the same conversation with Sara. And she’d thought more than once that she’d have to watch her baby sister grow older and older while she stayed ageless. But her body was running backward, and she had wounds she couldn’t explain that wouldn’t heal. Beth might outlive both her and Harrison.
If that happened, Elena knew her sister would deal. She might be heartbroken beyond repair, but she’d deal. Because no matter her pain, she would not abandon her child as Marguerite had abandoned them.
“We have to live in today,” she said, speaking to herself as much as to Beth. “Worrying about the future just steals the now from us.”
“So does living in the past, doesn’t it, Ellie?”
Swallowing hard, Elena put her hand on Beth’s shoulder. “Yes. I’m glad you never did that.”
“Father’s still back there, with Mama and Ari and Belle.” Such terrible sadness in Beth’s voice, so much compassion for a man who’d died when Marguerite chose to leave him behind rather than trust him to help her navigate the darkness. That old Jeffrey was buried with his wife in a cold grave she’d never wanted to inhabit.
Elena would always be angry with her father for that, for burying Marguerite in the unforgiving earth when her mother had wanted to be cremated and scattered to the winds, so she could be part of the wind itself.
That had been her mother, brilliant and light and always in motion.
Yet even in her anger, she remembered the empty bottle of whiskey and a man who’d cried heartbroken sobs in the dark of the night. “I don’t think we can pull him back to the present,” she said, her voice rough. “He has to make that choice himself.”
“I feel sad for Gwendolyn, too.” Sitting up properly, Beth took a sip of her tea, then held up the mug in a silent offer.
Elena wasn’t much of a tea drinker, but she took the mug from her sister and had a drink before handing it back. The heat ran through her in a sweet rush. “Yes, Gwendolyn’s got no fault here.” If she’d made a mistake, it was to fall in love with a man who’d left the best part of himself in the past, but as Elena knew, love wasn’t a thing to plan or control. It just was.
“I’m trying to figure out who’d want to hurt Harrison,” she said a while later.
“Do you want to ask me questions?”
“If you think you’re ready to answer them.”
“If it’ll help protect our baby, I can manage,” Beth said softly.
“Has anything been worrying him, or has he been afraid of someone?”
Picking up a cake, Beth handed it to Elena. “You should eat this. Holly said the chef would be insulted if we didn’t eat his cakes.”
“The chef” happened to be Venom, a little secret to which not many people in the Tower were privy. They just knew that, over the past couple of years, extraordinary creations occasionally appeared in the communal areas utilized by those who called the Tower home.
Elena knew the truth only because Illium had let it slip—then sworn her to blood-oath secrecy. “Usually,” she told Beth, “I’d be lucky to get a crumb. The cakes and pastries disappear at the speed of light—then everyone sulks when the chef goes quiet for weeks or months at a time.”
Smile a faded copy of its luminous reality, Beth took a bite of her own cake and chewed, swallowed, before saying, “Harrison hasn’t really said anything, but I know my husband. Something’s been on his mind the past couple of days.” She paused and took a drink before continuing. “I used to never ask him things, but that changed after Maggie.
“I want to know how to look after her if anything happens to Harrison. I want to know how to access our money—and I want to know if there’s a danger that could hurt her.” Anger in those last words, though the look she sent her wounded husband’s way still held more love and worry than anything else.