Archangel's Shadows (Guild Hunter #7)(64)

“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.

As it was, they passed only two other vehicles over the next twenty minutes.

“Turn where you can see that small signboard on the left.”

The car’s headlights reflecting off the discreet black-on-cream of the board, he found himself going down what appeared to be an endless private drive, winter-bare oaks lining it on either side. “Cher,” he said, hating the pain in her silence. “I can see large gates.”

“I have the access code.” She told him the code when they reached the gates, and he punched it in on the driver’s side.

Lights appeared in the distance over five minutes later, a sprawling brick house that reminded him of a Georgian mansion taking shape against a backdrop of trees that were black silhouettes in the night. The drive appeared to end in a circular sweep, with what might have been a fountain in the center, though it was difficult to tell from this distance.

“Pull over here.”

Not arguing with Ash’s request, he brought the car to a stop some distance from the house and turned off both the headlights and the engine. “What is that place?”

Ash got out. Following, he met her at the front of the car . . . where she reached for his hand and held on tight. “It’s called Banli House,” she whispered. “They don’t have a website or any other online presence. It’s one of those places that’s so exclusive, you have to know someone to get in.”

Janvier’s tendons went taut, jawbones grinding against one another.

“My brother was a younger doctor then,” she said, “but our family was wealthy, established. One of my parents’ friends must’ve recommended this place when . . . when things went wrong.” Her breath fogged the air, her inhales shallow. “The rich usually send their drug-addicted sons and daughters here to sober them up, but Banli House is a fully accredited medical and psychiatric facility capable of handling far worse embarrassments.”