For one last flight with her archangel before her wings failed.
It wasn’t to be.
The phone rang in her pocket. “Ellie?” Ashwini said on the other end. “We’ve got two more bodies.”
So many owls surrounded her that Elena had to push through them to get to the dead, the birds’ bodies soft and warm against her. She wondered if Cassandra was trying to help her cheat destiny. Is this it? The broken blade? The mourner?
No answer, but the owls didn’t move. Elena continued on, her skin flushing hot then cold. Should she back off? Would that throw a spanner into the mechanics of destiny? Or would it alter the future in the worst way, leading to Beth’s and Maggie’s murders at Archer’s hand?
No, she had to finish this, eliminate the threat. And it wasn’t as if she was alone. Her three Legion shadows were waiting on the roof—even Archer couldn’t take on four trained fighters at once. And while her wing muscles might be sluggish in responding to her commands, warning of imminent failure, she had plenty of feathers left. Nowhere close to losing her last one.
She reached the first of the dead.
The small, pudgy vampire had been killed in his combined convenience/pawn shop in a seedy corner of the Quarter and his body found behind the counter by a regular customer. It was a miracle the customer hadn’t decided to rob the place. The corpse was so fresh that the blood was tacky rather than dry and encrusted.
“Spine bisected at the neck, hands cut off.” Janvier rose from his crouch beside the dead vampire. “And we’ve got a connection to Lucy.”
“How?”
“She pawned her jewelry here,” Ashwini explained. “Was easy to check the records after you gave us her legal name.” She pointed at a small laptop that sat open behind the grill that should’ve protected the shopkeeper from harm. “He demanded official IDs and recorded every transaction. Gave a fair price, far as I can tell.”
The same records had probably led Archer to his door. “When did she pawn her things?”
“Roughly two weeks after she first met Kumar and crew.”
A time when Lucy would’ve had access to other funds—she couldn’t have drained her bank account dry that quickly. A memory flared at the thought of Jenessa saying Lucy had no bank account. It hadn’t struck Elena as odd at the time because Lucy had been on the streets working in a cash profession—and unlike Jenessa, she’d been an addict.
“She always gave me the rent money,” Jenessa had said. “But anything else, she kept in a jar until she wanted to spend it. She didn’t trust banks.”
However, now that Elena knew Lucy’s true identity, her cash existence took on another cast. As the daughter of the Slayer, she must’ve known her father might be able to track her if she accessed her accounts. “She made a choice to pawn her jewelry rather than go home or ask Archer for money.”
Anger or wild grief, they would never know Lucy’s motivations. “But it’s a choice Archer will never accept.” To do so would be to accept that Lucy had made conscious decisions along the way to her descent into darkness.
That didn’t nullify her suffering or in any way excuse the abuse she’d endured—what Kumar and the others had done to her was unforgivable—but it also didn’t mean that her every action had been coerced. Kumar and Lee’d had money. They’d had no reason to force Lucy to pawn her jewelry.
Also, she hadn’t been a prisoner under the vampires’ control—it had been very early on in her life in the Quarter, probably while Kumar and Lee were still grooming her. She’d shared an apartment with Jenessa at the time, been free to come and go as she pleased. Logic said she must’ve made the decision to come to this pawn shop on her own. “Who’s the second victim?”
Ashwini’s eyes flashed. “Owner’s wife, I think. In the storeroom.”
Elena followed Ash to the small doorway just as Santiago arrived. A woman’s body lay crumpled inches from the door, her head separated from her neck. A gold wedding band twinkled on her left ring finger. “I don’t have a scent. She’s human.”
Ashwini swore. “Why the hell would Archer kill her?”
“Probably ’cause she saw his face.” Santiago pointed to a security mirror that would’ve given the woman a view out front even while she was in the storeroom. “He’s got no reason to think he’s already been made.”
Simon Blakely, Eric Acosta, Nishant Kumar, Terence Lee, even Harrison, Elena could’ve allowed that Archer’s vengeance had been justified. He’d skirted the line with Harrison, but in his grieving mind, Harrison could’ve been the reason behind all the others.
But these victims, especially the woman . . . they’d just been going about their lives, running a small business. Lucy had come to them, not the other way around. The owner hadn’t even cheated her. Archer’s lines had shifted, his justifications no longer explicable or excusable.
“Your boy’s a loose cannon,” Santiago rumbled in an unknowing echo of Elena’s thoughts. “He’s so angry he’ll find reasons to keep killing.”
“Yes.” Drawing in a deep breath, Elena ignored the noxious scents that wanted to slide into her nostrils and focused on the iron richness of blood.
Sugared doughnuts and cold winter rain.
Vampires could have peculiar scents to her hunter-born nose, but this took the cake—or the doughnut, she thought with black humor. Returning to the body of the shopkeeper, she knelt, closed her eyes, then inhaled the scent directly from the gaping wound at the dead vampire’s throat. His head was only attached to his body by a flap of skin at his nape.
Yes, he was the sugar and the doughnuts and the icy stab of rain against the skin.
Opening her eyes, she took in the violence around them. The sprays and smears of blood on the walls and on the floor. The footprints in blood that led to the back door. Archer hadn’t run this time. No, his stride had been confident but unhurried.
Child of mortals. The broken blade is close. Your destiny nears.
Heart jerking at the distress in the old voice, Elena stared directly into the eyes of an owl as she said, “I can track him.” Ashwini was a gifted tracker, but she couldn’t pursue by scent; what she did took time and patience. They needed to move fast, follow the scent before it dissipated—and once and for all eliminate the threat to Beth and Maggie.
Archer was smart, had probably already thrown his bloody clothing in the trash. But given the recent nature of the kill, he was unlikely to have had enough time to shower. And it was hard to strip away every tiny speck of blood. Droplets got in hair, or in the inside shell of the ear, and his weapon would need careful cleaning to remove all traces.
No hunter would abandon a perfectly good weapon.
She began to move, the sword she’d grabbed from her and Raphael’s Tower suite heavy in the sheath she wore down the center of her spine. She also had her crossbow as well as spare crossbow bolts in a flat sheath strapped to her thigh—plus a smaller number of bolts in a combined bolt-and-knife sheath worn on her left forearm. Those weren’t her only weapons; going up against a Slayer would require everything she had.
Santiago and Janvier stayed with the body, while Ashwini ran with her, keeping watch and acting as her backup. The owls danced right in front of her face, their wings buffeting her, but she put her head down and kept running.