“He’s a good dad.” For the first time, she saw a glimmer of what Beth must see in her husband. Saw the gentleness with which he swung Maggie up in his arms, the tenderness with which he stole a kiss from Beth while she tried to shoo husband and daughter out of the snow.
“Andreas likes him better these days,” Illium told her.
Had Elena not hauled Harrison back to his angel when she had, Andreas would’ve signed an execution order with Harrison’s name on it—a fact that Harrison hadn’t understood when he attempted to escape, or even in the aftermath of his punishment.
Angels didn’t play when it came to rogue young vampires.
After taking a drink of cola to swallow down another bite of sandwich, Illium said, “Last time I spoke to Andreas, he said your brother-in-law’s knuckled under and put his nose to the grindstone.”
“I think some of that has to do with Maggie.” She rubbed the back of her neck to ease the stiffness without taking her eyes off the endless snow-draped white of the footage. “I know motherhood’s changed Beth.”
“Your niece might be the making of her father,” Illium agreed. “Andreas can be harsh, but he doesn’t ruin the vampires who work under him.”
Elena thought of the punishments she knew the angel in question had meted out over the years: the precisely flayed skin and vicious whippings, the enclosure in coffin-sized boxes, the removal of a fucking eye with a rusty blade. “Are you sure about that?”
“Vampires can be blood-hungry monsters, Ellie. Normal punishments mean nothing to them.”
In Elena’s mind ran the images from one particular hunt: she’d found her target with his face burrowed in the torn open body of a young woman, her viscera—slick and gleaming—clutched in his greedy fingers. He’d been so glutted on his victim’s blood that Elena’d had no trouble removing his head from his body.
His angel had sighed when she reported the circumstances and her decision to execute the vampire rather than bring him in. “I suppose I should be angry,” Nazarach had said, his piercing amber eyes lit from within and his power bruising her skin. “But Richard was eighty years old. If he could not maintain a hold on his blood hunger at such an age . . .”
Wings of burnished amber in her vision and the ebony of his skin taut over fluid muscle as he turned to walk to a large arched window that offered a view of his gracious and lush estate full of magnolia and cypress trees. “It is a shame to lose one of mine, but Richard chose to run rather than come to me with his unacceptable urges. He dug his own grave.” Age and death lived in Nazarach’s voice, ancient and cold as the darkness of a crypt.
To this day, Elena found Nazarach as disturbing as fuck. But Andreas wasn’t far behind Nazarach in the disturbing stakes. “What else have you heard about Harrison?” she asked Illium.
His shoulder brushing hers, he said, “Turns out he has a gift for administration. Andreas is training him to run a household.”
“Like Montgomery does ours?” The Enclave home would be a shambles without him; Elena certainly would have no idea what to do.
“No one will ever be a Montgomery,” Illium said, “but Harrison could deal with a more standard household. Trained that way and with Andreas as a reference once he finishes his Contract, he’ll never have to fear being out of work and unable to support his own household.”
But Beth would be gone by then, perhaps Maggie, too.
Her heart twisted.
“So if he hasn’t pissed off Andreas,” she said through the screaming wrench of it, “and he’s walking the straight and narrow, what could he have done that got him targeted for murder?”
“Andreas mentioned Harrison broke away from his previous friend group a while ago.”
Pausing the recording, Elena turned to face Illium. “Since when are you and Andreas such good buddies?” she asked suspiciously. “He’s not taking advantage of you while Aodhan is gone, is he?”
Illium’s shoulders shook before he threw back his head and laughed. If Nazarach’s voice was death and age and pain, Illium’s was golden light and a playful joie de vivre that had the others in the room looking up with smiles. No one liked it when he wasn’t himself. Once he finally calmed down—and after wiping tears from his eyes—he picked up one of her hands and brought it to his mouth for a kiss.
“I love you, Ellie.” Solemn words, but his eyes were dancing.
“I have a crossbow, Bluebell, and I won’t hesitate to use it.”
An unrepentant grin. “Andreas and I have known each other for centuries. In battle, he leads one of the other elite squadrons.” He pointed to the recording and she started it up again, both their eyes on the unmoving scene as they spoke. “We’ve had more contact recently because the squadrons are in the process of evaluating our total fighting capacity and ability to work with one another.”
She’d known Andreas led a squadron but hadn’t realized it was one of the elite ones that held their deadliest angelic fighters. “Tell me what your buddy Andreas had to say about Harrison’s old friends.” In spite of Illium’s perfectly rational explanation, she remained leery of this relationship she’d never known had existed. “Why were you talking about Harry in the first place?”
Illium reached over to tug at her braid. “Because he’s your sister’s husband, of course. I know you’d want to know if there was a problem.” Still playing with her braid, he told her the rest of what he’d discovered. “In short, Harrison is on an upward trajectory, but the others—all post-Contract—were heading in the opposite direction last Andreas heard. Drugs, lack of ambition, the usual.”
Elena’s instincts prickled. Eric Acosta had been a junkie. So were hundreds of other vamps in Manhattan. But deadbeat former friends were a better lead than anything else she had right now. “You know the names of the post-Contract vamps?”
A shake of his head she caught out of the corner of her eye. “Andreas will, but he’s out of the city tonight. He should be back tomorrow.” A pause. “We show each other our diaries—then make playdates.”
“Ha-ha.” She poked him in the side while continuing to watch the footage.
She’d been staring at the whiteness of Beth’s snow-draped home and yard for so long that when the movement came and the video slowed to normal speed, she stared disbelieving at it.
20
The same long coat Elena had seen in the footage when the intruder fled through the back door, the same hat, the same scarf wrapped around the face. Her heart pounded. “Can you skip through until you find the initial entry?” she said to Illium. “I want to watch this in the right order, from arrival to exit.”
It only took Illium a minute to cue up the recording to the intruder’s first appearance in the yard.
The unknown individual walked with quiet purpose, scoping out the house with intense attention to detail.
It was nighttime in the video, the resolution grainy, but . . .
“He moves like a man.” She didn’t know how else to explain it, but the gait, the way he held his body, the breadth of his shoulders, it all said male to her mind.