Quiet, broken only by the sound of her own breathing. The Legion could be quieter than death, quieter than stone. “I did it?” She stared at the thin stream of juice. “A bad dream brought to life?”

The Primary’s voice reached her from inside the silence. “Yes.”

She wasn’t the least surprised to turn and discover him crouched beside her—with his gray eyes that had a ring as blue as Raphael’s irises, and his hair of black, the Primary was the most individual of all the Legion. But she saw now that the gray had begun to creep through his hair once again.

Backward, he was going backward.

Like Elena.

“What’s happening?” She indicated his hair. “Have you stopped becoming?”

He tilted his head to the side, his bat-like wings folded tight to his back and his body otherwise static. “No, this is the second becoming.”

Her heart was a bass drum. “What will be the end result?”

“We do not know. But we feel the spiral of energies, the cataclysm of change.”

The tiny hairs on her arms rising, Elena held out the strawberry. “Why do I see blood? Why won’t my cut heal?”

“Because you are becoming, too.”

The Legion lifted off together without warning, a flock of silence. They’d scattered across the skyscraper in a matter of minutes, and she knew that if she asked more questions on the topic, their answers would be exactly the same.

She finished eating the strawberry with slow, deliberate focus on its ripe sweetness then flew down to look at the other new plantings. By the time she reached the exit again, it held a collection of ten potted plants.

Affection bloomed inside her, a strange thing to feel for these ageless creatures who were so clearly not human. “Thank you,” she said aloud. “I’d appreciate it if you could fly these gifts to my greenhouse.”

We will. We will. We will.

Elena was about to walk out when she remembered another question she’d meant to ask. But agony burst inside her chest before she could speak, red-hot iron pokers searing her organs and perforating her lungs.

She screamed without a voice, would’ve fallen to her knees except that two of the Legion caught her, one on either side. They lowered her gently to a seated position on the ground, her wings spread out behind her on the lush green grass they’d somehow coaxed to grow inside their haven.

The Legion crouched all around her, watching, waiting, eerie but unthreatening.

Hand still clutched to her chest, she clenched her jaw and rode the pain. Scarlet waves, black nothingness, crushing stone in every breath, this attack went on and on.

It was instinct to reach for Raphael, but she held off with grim will. There was no reason to remind him again of the mortality that lingered in her bones. Even now, the pain was fading, the edges softening until she could breathe again without the air slicing her lungs.

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

She shook her head at the rising swell of echoes. “It’s all right. It wasn’t you.”

The becoming, the Legion said. The becoming.

Elena rubbed at her chest again. Finding the Primary in the sea of faces, she said, “Have you been through a second becoming before?”

“The Cascade does not always surge.”

Instead of tearing out her hair at the cryptic answer that intimated the “second becoming” only came into play when the Cascade cycled from active to dormant, she asked another question. “Am I in danger of dying from this pain?”

A long pause during which she could hear a million whispers at the back of her head but couldn’t make out the words. The Legion consulting among themselves.

“The pain will not kill you,” the Primary said at last. “We have not seen this in our past wakings, but we have felt the energies. The pain energy will not kill you.”

It was, she realized, a highly specific answer. “What about the reason behind the pain? The root cause? Is that energy dangerous?”

Another wave of background whispers, cresting and falling.

It is not known to us, was the ominous final response.

Gut tight, Elena hooked her arms around her raised knees and stared. The Legion had been around since before vampires; for them to so bluntly say they had no knowledge of what was happening to her, it hit a solid ten on the terror meter. “I guess this Cascade will be one for the books.”

They tilted their heads to the side all at once, a comical row of fairground clowns whose paint had washed off. We do not keep books.

Finding a laugh inside her, Elena said, “If you remember anything about this”—she tapped the internal bruise left behind by the attack—“let me know, okay?”

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Hidden in the echo of their final yes was another voice, old and heavy with sleep: Child of mortals. Vessel unawakened. You step closer to your destiny. For one must die for one to live.

Who are you? Elena said inside her mind.

No answer. No sense of a presence. Just a promise of death.

Fuck it, she thought. If death was coming for her, she’d face it with teeth bared and weapons unsheathed.

The pain down to a dull throb, she said her good-byes then left the Legion to transfer the potted plants across the river. At least she didn’t have to climb down the slippery ropes of vine. Flaring out her wings, she floated easily to the ground, but she’d only taken five steps when her phone began to buzz with an incoming call.

Retrieving it, she stared at the name that flashed on the screen. Great, this was exactly what she didn’t need. “Father.”

“Elieanora, I need you at Beth and Harrison’s home,” Jeffrey Deveraux said in a curt tone. “Harrison is badly injured. Do I give him blood?”

Elena was already running toward the Tower. “No, it’s too dangerous.” If Harrison was so badly hurt that Jeffrey was calling Elena, he could fall into a blood fog and drink Jeffrey dry. Elena’s father was strong and in good shape, but Harrison was both younger and a vampire—in a physical fight, he was the one who’d reign supreme. “I’ll bring a healer.” Her bruised lungs fought to keep up with her pace. “Beth and Maggie—”

“Eve has messaged Beth,” Jeffrey interrupted. “Both are safe.”

“Stanch the blood loss as well as you can. I’m on my way.”

Shoving the phone into a pocket, Elena ran full-tilt. Every second that passed felt like an eternity.

After reaching the infirmary floor, she found only Laric in attendance. No one had expected the badly scarred and emotionally wounded young healer to accept Raphael’s invitation to visit his Tower, but eight months after they’d first met, Laric had surprised everyone by coming to New York to visit Aodhan.

And somehow, he’d stayed.

He never ventured to the ground and kept his scarred face hooded even among friends. However he seemed to find fascination in sitting on the Tower balconies and watching the colorful life of the city, and he flew in the skies above New York. The violent archangelic energy that had burned him down to the bone had done catastrophic damage to his wings—but a long-overdue examination had found that enough of the crucial substructure remained to offer hope.

It turned out that Keir had, in his records, designs for pair upon pair of prosthetic wings that he’d worked on as a young man in an effort to find something to help his friend Jessamy take flight. None had proved suitable for the historian’s congenital malformation . . . but one pair, when modified, extended and supported Laric’s devastated wings enough to give him back the sky.

He couldn’t fly for long, but he could fly.

And from afar, his wings looked like any other angel’s.

“Can you make it to my sister’s home?” Elena asked, telling him the distance. “You’ll be dealing with a severely wounded vampire.” Laric was in training under Keir, with Nisia his tutor while he was in New York.

His hands flowed rapidly in the silent tongue he used nearly all the time and that Elena had learned after he came to the Tower. Most of the other senior staff already knew it, and the ones who didn’t had learned alongside Elena; Laric would not be isolated here as he’d been in the place where he’d spent more than a thousand years.

I have this knowledge, he was saying. Flight possible. A short pause before his hands formed another word. Witnesses?

“Only my father and sister will see you, and they know never to speak immortal secrets.” As with Jessamy, Laric was careful never to be really seen by mortals; humanity needed to believe angelkind too powerful to be hurt. It kept the balance of the world and stopped mortals from trying to pick fights with immortals they could never hope to win.

Nodding, Laric took a moment to grab his kit, then the two of them stepped off the closest balcony. Today, Elena didn’t see the glittering winter-draped beauty of her city, and she barely felt the ache in her left wing.

All she heard was that tone in her father’s voice.

Cold, controlled, clipped.

Harrison had to be critical.

12

Elena would never like her brother-in-law—he was a weak man, weak enough that he’d gotten himself Made into a vampire while Beth was still waiting to hear back if she’d been accepted. It turned out Elena’s younger sister was incompatible with the toxin that turned a mortal into a near-immortal. She couldn’t be Made. Harrison would have to watch his wife grow old and die. He might well have to bury his daughter, too.

But Beth loved him and that was what mattered.

“There!” She pointed out the house to Laric.

Landing on the pathway swept clear of snow, Elena dropped a knife into her palm before running into the house, Laric following . . . to be greeted by a scene of horror. A choking, gurgling sound filled the air, and on the sofa, Jeffrey had both hands clamped around Harrison’s neck. The wound was spurting blood, the dark red liquid flowing over her father’s hands, macabre ink that smelled of iron.

Red splattered Jeffrey’s wire-framed glasses.

More blood smeared the space on either side of Harrison’s mouth, and at first glance Elena thought his mouth was twisted into a rictus of a smile. But no—Christ—his assailant had slit open the sides of his mouth.