Archangel's Legion (Guild Hunter #6)(87)

“I’ve lost two daughters already! I won’t lose another!”

Stunned by the raw declaration, her mother’s words still fresh in her mind, she squeezed the doorjamb in an effort to find her lost sense of reason. “You’re doing this to protect her?”

Ripping off his glasses, Jeffrey dropped them on the desk, meeting her gaze with unshielded eyes of the same distinctive gray that marked her and Eve as blood. “Do you know what happened when you were sixteen?” he asked, his hands fisted to bloodlessness. “You went to the Academy in the holidays and returned to your boarding school with broken ribs. Three months later, it was a dislocated collarbone, six months after that a black eye and a fractured jaw.”

Elena hadn’t realized the boarding school had reported the injuries, much less that her father had kept track of them, he’d done such a good job of freezing out anything to do with the fact his daughter was hunter-born. “It was necessary,” she said through her shock.

The only reason she’d even been able to attend those intensive holiday classes was that the Guild had gone to bat for her, getting a judge to sign an order that did away with the need for Jeffrey’s consent. Like Eve, Elena would’ve gone mad without the outlet of those practice sessions where she could give her ability free rein; a hunter-born had to hunt, the need a compulsion.

But when she’d communicated with her father, it had been with her hunter skin locked away; a child hungry for his approval, she’d pretended to be the nice, normal, obedient daughter he wanted her to be. The fraught peace created by her silence, and his, had lasted until she turned eighteen and enrolled at the Academy full-time over his objections. Their bitter fight that night had left her emotionally bloodied, the resulting estrangement lasting a decade. “I had to become more skilled than the va—”

“Yes, because the monsters are so strong, they could tear off your head with their bare hands!” Stalking around the desk, he grabbed her by the upper arms and shook so hard that her teeth clattered. “Do you know what it’s like to watch a woman get her head torn off? The blood spurts hot and dark and it gets in your mouth, in your eyes, in your nose, until it’s the only thing you can see, all you can smell!”





32





Elena couldn’t move, even to break the bruising tightness of Jeffrey’s hold. She didn’t understand what he was saying, the words making no sense in the context of who he was: Jeffrey Parker Deveraux, his blood so blue, it was created from the foundations of the city. History, family, tradition, that was the Deveraux way. The blood and the death had come with Elena, Jeffrey’s “abomination” of a daughter.

“I was four,” he said, his breath hot on her face. “Playing under the covered bench where she cleaned her tools. She was agreeing how I’d make a great policeman, while I played with my trucks and she sharpened her blades”—eyes falling to the blades on her forearms, his fingers digging deeper into her flesh—“and that’s when they came for her. Three vampires who wanted vengeance for having been returned to their masters to face punishment.”

Elena started to tremble, her heart stuttering in her chest. As far as she knew, Jeffrey’s mother was alive and well and active on the boards of several major charitable organizations. Cecilia Deveraux was also not, and had never been, a hunter.

“When I tried to help her,” Jeffrey said, “they laughed and tossed me aside as if I weighed nothing.” Jagged words. “The fall broke my legs, one of my arms. I tried but couldn’t get to her. Instead I had to watch while they kicked my mother, beat her, breaking every bone in her body before they ripped off her head.”

“Papa.” It was the first time she’d called him that in an eon. “Papa, I’m sorry.” Sliding her arms around his chest, she held him, his body an icy rock. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Her father’s arms came around her, crushing her so tightly, she could barely draw breath. One hand cupping her head, the other around her upper back over her wings, he held her close to his heart, his breath choppy. When his body shuddered against her own, she thought he might be crying, but it was a thought her mind couldn’t accept.

Her father didn’t cry. The child in her confused and shaky, she just held on until his breathing evened out, his hand stroking over her hair with a gentleness she’d never again expected to experience from her father.

“I will always be your father . . . and I wish to God I wasn’t.”

The hateful words no longer hurt, not when she heard the fear she’d been too angry to hear the first time. Her father, this man who held her with such fierce tenderness, was afraid to watch his daughter die the same horrific death as his mother. It altered the bedrock of their relationship, left her without a mooring.

Dead certain the brittle moment would end the instant she stepped back, the wall of pain and loss that divided them once more in place, she held on for just a little while longer. So did he. In silence, their words locked down where they couldn’t hurt and cut and make the other bleed.

The world, however, continued to spin, the sound of a chopper passing overhead breaking the fragment out of time in two. They drew apart without a word, her father turning to walk to his desk, pick up his spectacles, while Elena backed out of the doorway. Heading around the side of the house, she gritted her teeth and made a vertical takeoff into the cold air, bringing herself to a hover in front of Eve’s window.