Archangel's Shadows (Guild Hunter #7)(69)

“Arvi moved Tanu temporarily to Banli after her suicide attempt.” Ash looked out over the water, but he could tell she didn’t see the skyline beyond. “He thought it’d be a better environment for her than a hospital ward, but the temporary stay kept being extended. Each time they thought she was better, she’d go into screaming fits for days or try to harm herself.”

“I don’t understand why the fact that she lived was kept from you. Your grief must’ve been devastating.” Broken or whole, Tanu was Ash’s sister, was clearly loved by his hunter.

“Tanu didn’t want me to see her that way,” Ash said, her voice rough. “Directly after her first psychotic break, she told Arvi that if she was ever institutionalized, I was to be told she was dead.” Breathing in harsh gulps, she gripped his thigh more tightly. “And with the car accident . . . Arvi just said she’d died from unexpected complications.”

A lie, Janvier saw, that a heartbroken child would have had no reason to disbelieve.

“Neither Tanu nor Arvi has ever said so,” Ash continued in that voice shredded with pain, “but I think they wanted to give me a clean slate, no preconceptions about my future . . . because Tanu’s ability was stronger than my mother’s had been, and my mother had also begun to exhibit signs of mental illness in the months before the crash.” Agony in her every word. “I was meant to be the one who made it . . . and I turned out the strongest of us all.”

Staggered, Janvier saw that he’d been wrong, that until this instant, he’d had no real idea of the root of Ash’s fear about immortality. “You believe the older you become, the greater your chance of becoming as she is.” And a vampire’s madness could last an eon.

“It’s a certainty with our history. Tanu’s initial psychotic break happened at twenty-eight and I’m only six months away from turning the same age.” A long exhale. “It’s why I’ve always encouraged the other hunters to see me as a little kooky, a bit crazy.” Her smile was faint. “Not that I’m not, but I figured it’d make it easier to hide the first signs of degeneration.”

Refusing to listen, Janvier tugged her against his chest, his jacket open. She came, swinging up her legs to lie along the cliff edge, her head on his shoulder and one arm around him as they faced the city skyline.

“Two women in a family doesn’t equal an inevitable pattern,” he said, his heart tearing at the idea of losing his Ashblade to the insidious illness that had consumed her sister. “You said yourself that your ability is stronger than your sister’s, and yet you’re not showing any symptoms despite being so close to the age she was when she suffered her first psychotic break.”

Ash pressed a kiss to his chest, searing him through the fabric of his tee. “I can feel the darkness licking at me, whispering ugly, vicious things just out of my hearing. It’s coming.”

“No. I won’t accept this.” More than two hundred years he’d waited for her, and now she was telling him he’d lose her in a heartbeat? No.

“I tracked down my maternal grandmother’s medical records.”

Janvier’s blood turned to ice.

“I never knew her,” Ash said. “My mother told me she died when my mother was twenty-one. What she didn’t tell me is that my grandmother spent fifteen years in a psychiatric facility.”

He shook his head in mute denial, but Ash wasn’t finished.

“It was much harder to track my great-grandmother, but I finally found one of her girlhood friends.” A ragged breath, her body rigid against him, and he knew she was fighting the same rage and pain and screaming sense of loss that had him in its grip. “She told me my great-grandmother hung herself when she was about forty, after ‘the ghosts would not leave her alone’—as they hadn’t her mother.”

He knew what she was trying to tell him, didn’t want to understand it.

“I’m so sorry, Janvier. I should’ve stopped us before—”

“Don’t you say that. Don’t you ever say that.” He crushed her to him. “You were always meant to be mine.” His eyes burned, his chest so painful that it felt as if his heart had burst. “Whether it’s for a year or a century, it doesn’t diminish who and what we are together.”

Ash didn’t fight his hold, the kiss she pressed to the pulse in his neck an agonizing tenderness. “I’m yours.” Her fingers trembled as she curved them around the side of his neck. “Only ever yours.”

He couldn’t speak for a long time, and when he did, he had to see her face. Releasing her so she could sit up, he said, “No more walls, no more distance.” He wanted to shake her for keeping this from him for so long, for protecting him at the cost of the life they could’ve had together. “And never any apologies. Not between us.”

His fierce, beautiful, wild storm of a lover cupped his face in her hands, her own face strong and proud and so damn vibrant it was impossible to imagine her fading into a nightmare twilight. “No walls, no distance.” Raw power in every word. “You’re in my soul, Janvier.”

He wanted to say the same in return but his throat was too thick, too filled with the anger inside him.

Ash wouldn’t let him look away, wouldn’t let him hide his fury. “I want a promise, too.”