Chapter 6
You know what I’ve learned from my baby girl? To enjoy the now. It’ll be gone soon enough, and no one knows what the next hour, much less tomorrow, will bring.
—Sara Haziz to Elena Deveraux (Once, on a New York roof)
A week after Nisia confirmed her pregnancy, Elena sat on the Tower roof, her legs hanging over the edge high above the clouds, and said, “Sara, you have no idea how much I miss you.” She’d made other friends through time, had so many people she trusted, knew she was beyond lucky when it came to the people in her life, but her friendship with Sara… it had defined her, made her.
They’d been young together, had matured together, had never been beyond each other even after Elena’s body stopped aging while Sara’s took on the touch of time. In mind and heart—the places where it counted—they’d still been on the same timeline. Friends who had counseled each other in turn.
As Sara had counseled her a mere week before her passing.
Her best friend hadn’t been fatalistic, but she’d known her time was coming, all the more so after she lost Deacon.
Husband, father, hunter, weapons-maker, Deacon’s loss was still mourned by immortals centuries after he chose a mortal existence.
“Promise me you won’t memorialize an ideal version of me,” Sara had said with the directness that was her hallmark, “turn me into some kind of saint to which no one else can compare. Make a new best friend, Ellie, and tell them about how I was a hard-ass—but a hard-ass you loved all the same.”
“I did make a close friend—not a best friend, not yet, but we’re getting there,” Elena said to Sara’s memory, her throat thick.
“But I couldn’t make a mortal one, not after I lost you.
” The idea of going through that agonizing pain again had been too much.
“I don’t know how Illium did it all those years, making mortal friend after mortal friend. ”
But even knowing that Sara would be annoyed with her for it, Elena hadn’t put any effort into new friendships for centuries after losing her best friend and sister of the heart. It wasn’t as if she’d been alone—she’d had Eve, Illium, Ashwini, Vivek, Honor, Jessamy, so many others.
It had been enough, her grief over losing Sara too profound for anything else.
“There you are.” A crisp, curt voice. “I’ve told you this spot is ridiculous, and still you insist on perching here like a damn insect.
” Long legs clad in black, the feet encased in dark green ankle boots, came down beside her own, Greta taking a seat on the edge with a very disgruntled “old-person” harrumph.
“This is terrible for my reputation,” added the Tower’s chief admin and the woman who still happened to terrify Aodhan, even if he was consort and second to an archangel these days.
Elena’s melancholy morphed into a sharp grin as she glanced at the woman who had become her most unexpected friend literal centuries after they’d first met—the only person who had come even close to settling in that space in her heart that was for a friend like Sara.
Greta wasn’t a woman of family as Sara had been.
Elena couldn’t imagine her rocking a baby; Greta would probably hold it at arm’s length, head turned away, as if the baby were some alien object.
Said baby shouldn’t be insulted, however—Greta didn’t like people in general the vast majority of the time.
But Greta and Sara shared two traits: a core of unbending steel and a relentless loyalty when they chose to offer that loyalty.
It hadn’t surprised her in the least when Greta had told her that she and Sara had had a “cordial” relationship. That was high praise from Greta. “Your friend got things done,” she’d said.
“No dancing around touchy subjects, either. When you went missing after you fell in Raphael’s arms, she sent me the Guild’s strike notice to pass up the chain—no hunts until the Tower revealed your location and status and proved it by taking Sara to you.
I told her she’d die going up against an archangel.
She sent me back a Guild dagger in answer. ”
A shake of the head. “I admire very few people, Elena, but I admired Sara Haziz. I kept the dagger, you know, and the strike notice. Appropriated both from Dmitri’s office after Sara won that battle. Do you want to see?”
It had healed a small part of Elena’s broken heart to know that other immortals carried pieces of Sara in their memories, too.
Because she and Greta, they’d only had that conversation some five hundred years after Sara’s passing.
Greta made it a point to hold on to both the physical objects and the memories.
Today, Elena said, “You seriously have eyes in the back of your head and also on top of your head. Not to mention psychic radar.”
Greta, piercing green eyes behind half-glasses and a precisely cut red bob against translucent skin no mortal would ever possess, pursed her lips. “I need none of that when you’ve been sitting here staring off into the clouds every morning this week. I should tell the sire.”
Elena scowled. “Hey, no narcing.” Not that Raphael didn’t already know of her continuing shock…and fear.
Such hard, brutal fear that it choked her.
The only reason he wasn’t with her right then was that he’d had to fly out to handle a situation in Nimra’s territory.
Nothing catastrophic, but it was educational for certain vampire kisses to feel the wrath of their archangel once in a while.
Especially young kisses led by charismatic vampires who believed they could take blood from the unwilling because “It is our right as near-immortals. Humans are cattle to be slaughtered.”
Nimra could have executed the leader without problem, but his poisonous “teachings” had reached too many pliable ears before he came to her attention.
“I believe, sire,” the Louisiana angel had said to Raphael, “it may be time for a punishment that causes enough terror to eliminate that line of thinking before it takes further root.”
It sounded vicious, but Elena was a hunter.
She understood that vampires like Greta and Dmitri, their deadly urges under iron control, had counterparts far less disciplined.
She’d seen firsthand what vampires on a rampage could do, borne witness to the torn-out throats and ripped-off limbs, heard the desperate wetness of sound as a woman tried to stanch her severed femoral artery while the life leached out of her and into a vampire’s mouth.
Elena had put a crossbow bolt through the vampire’s heart—but she’d been too late to save his victim.
Far better to stop the carnage before it ever got that far.
Greta nudged Elena’s shoulder with her own. “Greta is a timeless name. Though I suppose you could use Gretan if you have a male progeny, or Grentany for a gender-neutral choice. Gretana. Gretalika. Gretam. The choices are endless.”
Jolted out of her dark thoughts by the absurdity delivered in Greta’s deadpan tone, Elena snorted out a laugh.
No laughter from her friend. Pushing down those glasses she most definitely didn’t need, she said, “I’m insulted.”
Elena’s laughter intensified, until even Greta’s lips twitched.
“If only Aodhan could see and hear you now,” Elena managed to get out. Very few people ever experienced the other woman’s dazzlingly dry sense of humor—which Aodhan also possessed, ironically enough.
The first time Elena had really truly talked to the admin, she’d understood one thing.
“You’re bored,” she’d said to the woman who sat aloof and remote in her isolated Tower office—so much so that Elena hadn’t even known of her existence for an entire year after returning to the city post-coma.
She’d been mortified—only to realize it was by design.
Greta’s deepest nightmare was to have to socialize.
But she’d been polite to Elena that day as Elena said, “Not bored in your work. You like that.” That was why Greta was still with the Tower—because Dmitri and Venom treated her as an extra limb, which meant she dealt with complex issues as a matter of course. “But the rest of existence bores you.”
A flat look. “I’m older than the Tower many times over.
There’s not much I haven’t seen and done.
I only stick around because Dmitri and that far-too-slick-for-his-own-good Venom make sure to keep my brain busy—the idea of immuring myself in solitude and silence like some of my kind do when they are old and tired seems a horror to me.
“I’d rather find a friendly warrior and get decapitated when I’ve had enough. Dmitri would probably do it if I gave him appropriate notice.” She’d capped her fountain pen with a decisive snick of sound. “The end. Nice and clean.”
To this day, Elena wasn’t sure why she hadn’t taken the not-so-subtle hint and ended the conversation there. Crouching down to scritch Greta’s new black kitten behind her pointed ears, she’d instead said, “Come with me tonight. I promise you a new experience.”
A raised eyebrow. “Orgies, raves, drugs, I’ve tried them all, Consort. But thank you for the offer.” A genuine enough statement. “Truly, please don’t worry about me. I am as content as is possible given my age.”
Elena would’ve left it alone any other day, hesitant to overstep—but then the kitten had headbutted her palm and she’d decided to take it as encouragement.
“Humor me,” she’d said. “It’s not an order, to be clear.
I just think you might enjoy this. Why not come along—you can retreat back into your lair—I mean office—the minute you find it boring. ”
Greta had looked about as excited as if she were about to get her teeth removed. With pliers. Without anesthetic. “Of course. You are mostly not annoying, so I will give you an hour.”
“You have no fear, do you, Greta?”
“Older than dirt,” had been the response. “What are you going to do? Smite me? Go ahead. It’ll be something new, at least.”
So it was that Elena and Greta had gone out that night.
To a three a.m. party at Guild HQ.