Chapter 12
He’s so afraid, Ellie. Of the day I go. Of the day our children go.
—Elizabeth “Beth” Marguerite Deveraux-Ling to her big sister, Elena (One warm afternoon before Tea and Cake)
It had been over a century since Elena had seen her sister’s once-husband.
He looked…bad.
Hollows under his eyes and his body thin and hunched in, his normally olive-toned skin sallow enough to appear jaundiced and his lips pale.
As if he hadn’t fed in weeks.
He hadn’t looked good a century ago, either, but this was much, much worse.
No trace remained of the slender, handsome man with a sharp chin and bright eyes who’d charmed Beth.
“Hey,” she said, able to be kind to him because no matter if he was far from Elena’s favorite person, Harrison Ling had loved Beth to the very end. “Where have you been?”
He’d long ago fulfilled any contracts he’d signed with angelic courts, or with the teams of more powerful vampires.
Jason had reported that he’d seen her brother-in-law in Titus’s territory seven decades earlier, but it had been a passing comment, Jason just having glimpsed Harrison while on other business.
Because Elena had asked the spymaster to take Harrison off his watch list centuries earlier, give her brother-in-law his privacy.
The thread that had tied them together had broken long ago, Harrison’s life his own.
“Here and there.” Harrison shrugged, his dark eyes on the gathering in the distance. “It’s gotten bigger since the last time I saw the family.”
A family that contained many people of his bloodline.
His and Beth’s daughter, Maggie, had ended up with four kids, their son Laurent with three.
Seven grandchildren for a delighted Beth to spoil, and later, two great-grandchildren born at just the right time that Beth had been able to hold them, too.
“Yeah.” She shifted to stand next to him while keeping enough distance that her wings didn’t touch him.
They’d never had that kind of relationship, she and Harrison.
When he didn’t say anything further, she said, “You don’t look good.” She kept her voice gentle in memory of her sister’s love for this flawed man. “Do you need help?”
“I’ve tried, Ellie.” A shallow breath. “I’ve tried for so long to move on, even to do what you’re doing and become part of the family Beth and I began.
” His voice was faded, his pain a dull throb.
“But I want to see her face when I wake. I want to hear her laugh as she teases me. I don’t want to be in this world without Beth, without our children. ”
Once, Elena would’ve said, Tough shit, then you shouldn’t have rushed to become a vampire before you knew that Beth wasn’t compatible with the process, couldn’t be Made. But that was before she’d watched him stand steadfast in his love, be a wonderful husband and an amazing father.
Yes, he’d been stupid. But a lot of people did stupid things when they were young.
Most didn’t pay for that stupidity for an immortal lifetime.
“She wouldn’t want this for you.” Elena knew that for a certainty. “Beth loved you as much as you loved her.” Sweet and affectionate, her heart growing apace with her age, Beth’s eyes had still lit up when Harrison walked into a room. She’d always been a young girl in love with him.
“That’s my girl,” he’d say even when Beth was eighty, their hands linked and smiles delighted.
Beth in turn would giggle and snuggle into him. “That’s my handsome guy.”
Still later, when Beth became so very frail, Harrison would carry her out to their porch swing, hold her against him as he rocked them both. Once, after Elena dropped by unannounced, she’d found him just smiling at Beth while Beth slept in his arms.
It was a memory aglow in warmth, in tenderness, in love that had endured. “She told you to find someone after she was gone. She loved you enough to not want endless loneliness for you.”
“You’re a better woman than me, Bethie,” Elena had joked at the time. “I’d come back from the dead and banshee-haunt Raphael if he moved on.”
Oh, how Beth had cackled, two sisters having a laugh together.
“I know what Beth told me.” He took a long inhale.
“But I…I can’t go on, Ellie. I also can’t kill myself in one of the ways that can take out vampires—I promised Beth I wouldn’t die by suicide.
She was so worried about me, so I promised—but I didn’t understand what that would mean, how long I’d have to live without her. ”
His dull eyes met hers. “Will you do it? Or will you ask someone to do it? Clean and fast. So I can be with her?”
Of all the things he could’ve asked of her, this she’d never expected. “That’s not the answer.” She shifted to face him. “You—”
“It is!” He fisted one hand to the side, tendons tight at his neck. “I thought immortality would be fun, that I’d travel and see the world and taste life. But I have only ashes on my tongue.
“At first, I could bear it, because I had Maggie and Laurent, and their children. But with each generation that passed…I saw less and less of my Beth and our babies. And I lost more and more of myself. Because she was the best part of me. We both know that.”
Wracking sobs. “Please, Ellie. Please let me end, let me go home to her.”
Undone by his anguish, Elena knew he needed help of a kind she wasn’t equipped to provide. “Come to the Tower with me,” she said. “We’ll sort it out there.” As a first step, she’d take him to Nisia, and to the counseling the healer could provide.
Because Beth had asked Elena for a promise, too.
“I know you and Harrison have never been friends,” her sister had said one day in what would prove to be her last year of life, “but will you keep an eye on him? Not forever, just for the first ten or so years after I’m gone. I think he’ll have trouble for a while before he adapts.”
Elena had kept that promise—and she’d kept it for a lot longer than ten years. But given how well he’d seemed to be doing at around the two-hundred-year mark, she’d let it go—because Beth had asked that of her, too.
“Once he’s settled into his new existence, then please make sure he knows he’s free, that he doesn’t need to forever mourn me.” Her sister had leaned her head on Elena’s shoulder while Elena spread her wings around them in an embrace from a big sister to a younger one.
“I used to be so angry with him for getting Made when I couldn’t follow him into vampirism,” Beth had confessed, “but now I worry the guilt and grief will strangle him. It’ll be better for him to get away to another place—so when he’s ready for that, will you make sure he feels like he can leave without being tied down by the weight of memory? ”
“Yes, Bethie,” Elena had promised. “I’ll most definitely let good old Harry know he can head off for parts unknown. I’ll even set him up with job offers he can’t turn down. Oh, but how will I bear his absence?”
Beth’s laughter echoed through time in Elena’s mind as she looked at the broken shell of the man her brother-in-law had become. “Come on,” she said, afraid to leave him alone, “we’ll walk to the nearest road and I’ll call you a transport to the Tower.”
He walked silent and withdrawn beside her.
“You were content for a while at least,” she murmured. “Stellar reports from multiple territories.”
She hadn’t actually had to use her connections to get him work. Turned out her brother-in-law was really fucking good at being an administrator when he wasn’t wasting his energy attempting to climb the social ladder.
“I found purpose in work for a while, but I never found hope or happiness. It just kept me busy, so I kept on doing it.” A smile that was a grim facsimile of the real thing.
“Funny isn’t it, Ellie? I always wanted to be in the inner circle of an archangel’s court, but I’ve walked away from the offer twice now—once from Titus’s steward, once from Suyin’s. ”
His expression was distant. “They’re both good archangels, deserve people who have their heart in their work. I haven’t had my heart in anything since I laid our children to rest.
“Laurie—our strong, funny boy—was bad enough. He was like my Beth, had no choice. But our beautiful, talented Maggie…she was compatible, could’ve been Made.
But when I spoke to her about it, when I told her I’d ask you to fast-track the process for her, that I knew you’d make sure her transition was a happy one, she said, ‘No, Daddy, I want a mortal life with a beginning, a middle, and an end.’
“She was so gentle with me, our girl. She held my hand as I cried and she told me she couldn’t bear to outlive her baby brother, or any children she might have.
And she was as content with her choice as Beth was with the life she lived.
Maggie never wavered, not even when I held her hand at the end.
‘I’ve had a wonderful life, Daddy,’ she said. ‘Don’t be sad for me.’ ”
His chest shuddered as he sobbed. “I could’ve had that, too. A mortal life with all its love and pain and a final ending. Instead, I’m a ghost in the lives of others.”
Wiping at his eyes with the back of his forearm, he looked at her. “Do you miss her?”
“Every day. I still hope she’ll send me a random message full of those holographic emojis she started using as soon as they became a thing.”
“My phone used to turn into a disco from the old days whenever she messaged me. All these hearts and kisses floating about.” Harrison stared dully at the verdant green road just across the way.
“I used to get embarrassed when I opened them in public, but I never asked her to stop. I saved all of them, still have them in a protected and secure cloud.”
Another look at Elena, out of eyes bleak with pain—but they weren’t rimmed red, and she saw no broken blood vessels in the sclera of his eyes. She looked at his throat. No pulse, no bluish outline of veins even though his skin was thin and parchment pale.
This was worse than bad. Harrison was starving and seemed unaware of it. “Harrison,” she began.
But he spoke over her. “At least I can talk to you about her. You remember her. You loved her.”
Deciding to focus on getting him to the infirmary, she said, “So does Eve.”
“I haven’t run into her in at least three centuries,” Harrison murmured. “You can tell her what happened to me after it’s done. She might wonder one day, I suppose.”
Elena didn’t say anything to that, but she shadowed the transport in which she put him—and she personally walked him into the infirmary.
“I’m not sick, Ellie,” he said, but didn’t resist when Nisia admitted him. “I guess you have to be sure so you don’t feel bad about it. That’s okay. I’ve waited so long—a little longer won’t matter. Beth would be mad at me if I made you feel guilty.”
“Keep him away from the balconies,” Elena told Nisia once they were alone. “He’s beyond suicidal at this point. He promised Beth he wouldn’t do it, but the state he’s in…”
“Don’t worry.” Nisia’s eyes held none of her customary snark. “I’ve already programmed the balconies to throw up a shield if they sense his presence. He won’t be jumping on my watch.”
The healer tucked back a strand of silky dark hair that had escaped the bun at the base of her neck. “He shouldn’t try it if he has any sense—at his age and level of power, he won’t die. He’ll just shatter himself to smithereens and spend a lot of time in agony.”
Elena gestured to her own neck area. “No spinal separation?”
Nisia shook her head. “You probably haven’t noticed because he’s so depressed, and it’s suppressing his energy, but your brother-in-law’s grown in strength to a point that most vampires never do—and one, quite frankly, I never expected him to reach the few times I met him while he was still under Contract.
He’s no Dmitri or Venom, but give him another thousand years, and he’ll get there. My instincts say he hasn’t plateaued.”
“Huh.” Elena folded her arms. “I saw him as a fuckup back when he first got Made—and he was a fuckup then—but I guess even fuckups grow up.” She glanced in the direction of the infirmary bright and full of light.
“His grieving like this? I didn’t think he was ever in danger of that.
I always thought that no matter how deep his love for Beth, he was the kind to eventually forget. ”
“I’ve seen it before.” Nisia’s wings rustled as she resettled them.
“Some vampires, despite all they’ve done to prepare themselves, never get over the loss of their mortal loved ones.
A percentage go into seclusion as soon as they’re out of Contract, while the rest find a way to do what Harrison wants to do.
“Some losses are too much.” Nisia exhaled slowly. “Which is why even healers will permit the ending of a near-immortal or immortal life if the patient asks for it with a clear mind.”
Elena jerked her attention back to the other woman. “Even if he’s healthy and could live for millennia?”
“He’s in pain, Ellie.” A soft rebuke. “The kind of pain that never ends. To him, death could be the greatest mercy. As it is mercy for mortals who fall victim to accidents or illnesses where their lives become constant agony. They have the right to petition for a final ending. So do vampires.”
Elena saw what Nisia was telling her, but—“Please try to get through to him. My sister…she loved him so much. She wouldn’t want him to end himself if there was any other option.”
“He’s my patient—I’ll do my very best for him.” The healer slipped her hands into the pockets of her ankle-length day gown; the style had been her preferred infirmary wear as long as Elena had known her. This one was a sedate navy cut in flattering lines but otherwise unadorned.
The set of three small hair ornaments that fluttered near her left ear had been a gift from Naasir’s triplets, and they were the only embellishments she wore fairly regularly.
A constellation of moving stars, a tiger that unfolded from crouch to jump, and an intricate puzzle that solved and unsolved itself, all in Nisia’s favored silver.
Together symbolizing the rowdy little boys who Nisia had patched up many a time over their childhood.
“Any decision Harrison makes,” she said now, “he will do so with a sound mind, not mired so deep in the fog of the heavy shadow mortals call depression that his thinking is altered. If, after that, he is still firm on his choice, I will ensure a painless final rest for him.”
Nisia met her eyes. “What if Raphael had died and you had no child to hold you to this world? Would you wish to stay for an endless eon when your heart would break anew with each dawn?”
There was nothing Elena could say to that.