Archangel's Prophecy (Guild Hunter #11)(97)

My baby girl was smart and funny and loved doughnuts so much she once ate six in a row. She shouldn’t be gone. I’ll miss you always.

Below that was a note asking people to donate to a scholarship set up in her name: The Samaria Candace Archer Scholarship. No way to get Lucy from that, so maybe she was wrong and none of this had anything to do with the murders. Or maybe it was like China and Jenessa. One woman. Two names.

With more questions than answers, she called Ashwini the instant Hiraz left to return to his duties. “You manage to dig up anything about Lucy?” The other couple hadn’t had much time since her briefing, but Elena had just lost three more feathers, two of them primaries. She was on a strict deadline.

“Lucy’s dead.”

Elena’s heart was ice, filled with thoughts of a young woman who’d passed away a year and a half after her mother. “When?”

“Exactly eight months and twenty-three days ago,” Ashwini replied, and Elena felt the confirmation like a kick to the chest.

Picking up another feather she’d just shed, she stared at the fine filaments of inky black. “Where did you get your information?” There could be no crossed wires about this, no mistakes.

“Where I get all my weird information.”

“I thought you glimpsed the future?”

“I see . . . someone standing at Lucy’s grave—I got the date of death from the gravestone. What I see, the person—possibly people—at the grave, that hasn’t happened yet.”

Elena’s fingers clenched on the feather. “What was the name on the headstone?”

“This isn’t like high-resolution photography, Ellie. All I got was the date and the knowledge it was our girl in the ground.” Ashwini carried on. “Janvier managed to dig up that she appeared on the streets maybe three months before her father found her. She was new, so our informants noticed—fresh meat.”

The echo of Jeni’s description of herself made the hairs prickle on the back of Elena’s neck. Nothing unusual about that in a conversation with Ashwini—the other hunter had a way of existing just out of time.

“She was already experimenting with drugs by then, and word on the street is that Nishant Kumar supplied her to get her on-camera.” Edgy words. “One of our informants kept a clip from one of the recordings on his phone. He pirated it off a porn site. ‘Degrading’ is the word I’d use. Wasn’t about the sex but about humiliation. Real hard-core, brutal humiliation. Janvier had to stop me from beheading our informant. Then he turned around and nearly tore off the fucker’s head. Lost that informant for sure. Oh, well.”

“Harrison was friends with these assholes.” Elena kicked at the snow on the balcony, careful to do it away from the owls. “I have him in a photo with them and Lucy before she began to look like a junkie.”

“I’ve got bubkes on your brother-in-law so far. Call you back if we unearth more.”

Elena put away her phone and bent to pick up the three feathers she’d lost earlier. Walking through the phalanx of owls, she dropped those feathers plus the poor black one she’d crushed, over the edge of the balcony in her own personal good-bye. Two more lost primaries wouldn’t ground her, but at the rate they were shedding, she’d lose her ability to fly by the end of the day.

Tiredness was already beginning to infiltrate her bones, her back aching. Mind strangely clear, she decided that if this was to be her last day with wings, she’d fly her heart out. She’d be careful, not fly alone and land the instant it became dangerous, but she’d wring every last drop of wonder out of her dream of flight.

Streamers of white over the back of her hand, her bones shoving up in jagged peaks against her skin. Elena pushed off the visible filaments and rubbed at her face to ensure nothing was sticking there. Her palms came away with fine white strands. “Great.” She scowled at the owls. “Now I’m going to grow a beard?”

Spreading their wings, they flew off into the heavy gray-blue sky, fading into nothingness in front of her eyes as the spot on her chest, the dark mirror, began to pulse like a second heartbeat.

You could stop now, lower the chances of meeting the broken blade, the mourner.

Elena discarded that thought as soon as it arose. If she flinched and left Beth and Maggie in danger, she’d die inside anyway. Elena Deveraux was no coward; she’d face her reckoning head-on. “Archangel,” she murmured, searching the skies for him, though she’d sent him away herself.

A black fear crept insidiously through her veins.

“The last feather to fall,” she reminded herself, glancing back. “Yep, got plenty yet.” Spreading her wings, she prepared to take off.

Her phone rang.

It was Dmitri on the other end. “Harrison’s awake. Talk to him before he starts thinking about trying to cover his ass.”

“Have you heard from Raphael?”

“Geothermal field is unstable, but he’s close to achieving containment.”

“Casualties?”

“Ten dead, double that wounded. Without Raphael, it would’ve been in the hundreds.”

Saddened at the loss of life but relieved her archangel was safe, Elena ran to the infirmary, found Nisia with her brother-in-law. The healer was bent over him, her attention on his no-longer-bandaged neck wound. It appeared a macabre mouth, the flesh red and wet and the skin around it dark.