Archangel’s Shadows (Guild Hunter #7)(53)
Author: Nalini Singh

“Ashwini, I’m yours.” Utter disbelief intermingled with temper. “Hating you is an impossibility.”

Her already brittle heart threatened to shatter. “You don’t know what I’m keeping from you.”

“I don’t need to know—and neither one of us has ever been in control of the thing between us. It has its own stubborn, relentless will.” He thrust one hand into his hair, began walking again, his next words so angry the heat of them seemed to melt the snow. “The only way it would die would be if you repudiated me.”

Stopping again, the two of them now on the fringe of the Quarter, he faced her. “Is that what you want to do?” His tone was raw, his hands fisted. “To tell me that you don’t want me?”

“You’re an idiot.” Hauling him to her by gripping the open sides of his jacket, she kissed him in frustrated fury. “I’m trying to protect you.” She released him, strode off ahead.

He caught up to her, his eyes bright with temper and passion both. “Well, don’t. I’m a big vampire. I can handle any secret you have as long as you’re mine.”

“Damn you.” She slipped her left hand into his right. “You’ll regret this.”

He wrapped his fingers around hers, the hold blatantly proprietary. “I will never regret you!”

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.”

Gloves off and jacket unzipped in the warmth of the car, Ashwini looked out at the lightly snowy landscape as they left the Quarter. The city sparkled through the white and it felt as if they traveled inside a snow globe, like the one Arvi had given her when she was seven. She’d accidentally broken the treasured present the morning of the day he drove her to the place where they tried to “fix” her; and Arvi, he’d stared at the shards with the strangest expression on his face.

At the time, she’d thought he was angry. Now, she wondered if, just for an instant, he’d realized that what he was doing might as irretrievably shatter the sister who adored him.

“Ashwini?”

“Would you like to go for a drive?” she asked the vampire with the moss green eyes who’d branded her soul long ago and whose heart she was about to break as she’d once broken that snow globe. “I have to show you something.”

•   •   •

Following Ash’s instructions, Janvier left the city and the falling snow behind. The tires currently on his car were designed for winter conditions, so the journey was smooth despite the occasional patch of ice. He’d driven for approximately an hour on mostly empty night roads when she directed him down a side road, having not spoken much for the entirety of the drive.

The road was well maintained, though not particularly brightly lit. Janvier didn’t yet have the preternatural eyesight that came with centuries-long vampirism, so he lowered their speed around the corners, in case the person on the other side was an idiot who thought he or she could see in the dark.