Chapter 17

17

EVANGELINE

E verything was fuzzy and sort of distant as our cab wended through the streets of Eldoria. I wasn't sure how much was the curse spreading through me, and how much was my body suddenly deciding to remind me just how late at night it was. Pothos was a comforting weight on my shoulders, and he dug his sharp little rose-thorn claws into the meat of my good arm whenever my eyes started to drift closed.

I was barely aware of the car coming to a stop. My whole back throbbed, the pain radiating out from the wound on my shoulder. I felt sluggish and dazed, like I was trying to fight off anesthetic.

Gabriel said something to the driver. The part of my brain that never stopped working helpfully told me that our driver was a werewolf male, late forties, with wavy, graying hair, and a tattoo of wolfsbane on his forearm. The details floated around in my head vaguely, not connecting in any way. Gabriel passed the guy a wad of cash and ushered me out of the car, steering me gently by the arm.

The cool air outside the car was a relief, but as soon as I stood, my head began to swim. My vision grayed out for a moment, and when I came to, Gabriel was holding me up. He looked grim and pale in the harsh glow of the streetlights.

Without saying a word, he scooped me into his arms. I was too out of it to even yelp in surprise. The most I could manage was a disapproving grumble. Pothos didn't seem to mind, since now he was being carried by two people.

I got a vague impression of looming dark buildings and dew-slicked greenery, and then I was inside. The hallways blurred past—Gabriel was running as fast as he could. He set me down on a hard surface with a jolt, then he was muttering to himself, bolting around the room with vampiric speed that would've been almost impossible for me to follow even if I could make my eyes focus properly.

I slipped in and out of consciousness, brought back into awareness by strange smells and sensations before fading out again. A sudden shock of cold. A rough texture pressed against my back. A pungent, herbal scent.

I tried to focus on my breathing. Having dealt with enough desperate situations like this, I knew staying conscious was important. Pothos was helping, letting out gravelly little purrs and sticking his cold nose into my ear whenever I started to slip away.

Gabriel's wonderfully cool hands were pressed against the fever-hot skin of my shoulder. His voice was a quiet rumble behind me. The pain got worse and worse, so bad that I was letting out pained, animal noises through clenched teeth. Then, suddenly, it disappeared, like a balloon that had been inflated until it burst.

I let out a ragged gasp of relief, sagging back against Gabriel's touch. I was distantly aware of cool, gentle fingers brushing the hair off my sweaty forehead.

"Curse is gone?" I managed.

"Yes," Gabriel told me. I was leaning half against him, and I could feel the rumble of his voice where my good shoulder was pressed to his chest. "Now you just need to rest, Evangeline."

I held out a wobbly thumbs-up. "Okey-dokey," I said. Before I could reflect on the fact that that was probably the first time I'd said okey-dokey in my adult life—maybe ever—I was asleep.

I woke in an incredibly soft bed, with crisp white sheets. Hospital? No, that wasn't right. The bed was too comfortable, and there was no telltale scent of hand sanitizer, or the background noise of medical equipment, and nurse shoes squeaking on linoleum.

I squinted at the room around me. The furniture was all dark wood and aged leather. Dark wallpaper made the place feel cozy, but in a way that verged on claustrophobic. Gold-framed paintings of dark forests and stormy seas hung on the walls. On one wall, purple velvet curtains had been pulled mostly closed, leaving just a strip of daylight peeking through.

A dark head was pillowed on the bed next to me, face-down against the brocade bedspread. Gabriel had pulled a chair over to the bedside and apparently fallen asleep, tilting forward onto the edge of the bed. One of his hands was resting on the bedspread, close to where mine had been. Even though his hands were bigger and broader than mine, it looked oddly delicate splayed out on the bedspread, as though he'd fallen asleep in the middle of reaching out.

Sitting on the curve of Gabriel's bent back was Pothos, looking deeply pleased with himself.

"Good job, buddy," I muttered to him, scratching one of his fuzzy green cheeks. "You've got him pinned. He'll probably never figure out how to escape."

Pothos purred, kneading the soft pale skin on the back of Gabriel's neck. Gabriel let out a low mutter, but if there were any actual words involved, they were completely muffled by the thick bedspread.

I slid out of the bed, stretching and popping my back in three places. I stretched my shoulder gingerly a few times, but it wasn't painful. It felt better than it had before I was stabbed.

The thick rug muffled my steps as I walked to the window and slid the curtains open. The sun was high in the sky, and I guessed it was early afternoon. The view outside was of a small garden hemmed in by tall hedges. What the garden lacked in space, it more than made up for in complexity. The flower beds were bursting with color, and it looked like someone had laid down a labyrinth out of pebbles in one of the few patches of empty ground. The glass of the window had a telltale greenish reflection, meaning it had been enchanted to only allow people to see out, not in.

There was a rustle of fabric in the room behind me, and I turned to see Gabriel blinking owlishly at me. Pothos had abandoned his perch on the vampire's back and was now curled up on my abandoned pillow, enthusiastically licking his own butt.

"How do you feel?" Gabriel asked. His voice was still rough with sleep, his hair falling over his forehead in loose curls. I thought about how his hand had looked lying on the bedspread next to mine, and I swallowed hard.

"Better," I said. "Great, actually."

"And you can…?" he asked delicately, wiggling his fingers.

I summoned a ball of magic to my fingers; just a simple light spell that cast off a faint golden glow. I flicked it up into the air and caught it, twisting it over my hand and sending it twining between my fingers like I was doing a coin trick. It was a silly little thing Marcus had taught me back when we first started our training, but I found it weirdly comforting to do something so simple without any struggle. Being cut off from my magic had been awful, and feeling the comfortable thrum of it flowing through me again was a massive relief.

Gabriel was watching the little trick with a soft expression. "I'm glad you're okay," he said quietly. A few weeks ago, I would've thought that his tone was brusque, but now I could hear just how genuine it was. I couldn't help but wonder how differently our first few interactions would have gone if I'd been able to read him as well as I could now. How much of what I'd thought was standoffishness had just been nerves and awkwardness?

"Thank you for helping me," I said. "I don't know what I would've done if you hadn't been there. I probably could've handled the fight, but… the curse really rattled me, honestly."

"Understandable," Gabriel said.

"How long was I asleep?" I asked, glancing out the window. The sun was shining down brightly, glittering off the water in a small fountain tucked into a corner of the garden.

"Around twelve hours," Gabriel told me.

I let out a low whistle. "You shouldn't have let me take the bed. I could've slept on a sofa or something."

Gabriel's brow furrowed, and he tilted his head to the side. "This is the guest suite," he said slowly. "I have my own bed. Not in the guest suite, obviously."

"Oh." I flushed a little, feeling silly. Of course, the fancy vampire house had a guest room. "I just figured, you know, since you were asleep when I woke up…"

"I didn't intend to drift off." He seemed sheepish about it. "I had planned to keep watch, just in case some remnant of the curse remained." I froze, but he shook his head quickly. "There doesn't seem to be," he reassured me. "If there was, it would have shown itself by now, so you're in the clear."

"Thank fuck," I muttered.

"It seems as though we both needed the sleep. Especially since the recuperative properties of girls' night were so rudely brought to an abrupt close."

I squinted at him. "You're actually pretty funny, you know that? Just deadpan. Nobody seriously says things like ‘recuperative properties of girls' night.'"

The corner of Gabriel's mouth ticked up into a tiny smile. One of his cheeks had creases from where it had been mashed against the bedspread.

"You must be hungry," he said.

I was suddenly extremely aware that I was completely ravenous. "I could eat."

Gabriel led me through the twisting hallways of the manor to a sleek, modern kitchen that looked about as lived-in as an Ikea showroom. The countertops were gleaming black marble. A few of the appliances still had the protective blue plastic covering their glass.

"We don't cook much," Gabriel said, fidgeting with the cuff of his sleeve. While I'd been asleep, he'd changed into clean, non-bloody clothes—a cloudy blue-gray button-down and black slacks. I was jealous. My clothes were starting to feel crusty.

"We?" I asked.

"Me and my chosen family," he said. "Lissa, Vic, and Theo. They're away on a hunt right now."

"A hunt?" I tensed. "Not, like… I mean, it seems like you just do animal and bagged blood. Are they…?"

Gabriel huffed out a quiet chuckle, shaking his head. "They mostly call them hunts as a joke," he said, pulling open the door of a mostly empty cabinet. "They go into the woods, get some animal blood, then find teenagers partying out there to lecture them about fire safety and camping responsibly."

"Like if park rangers did Scared Straight? " I asked.

"Pretty much."

I tried to imagine just how freaked out a group of stoned teens would be if a pack of vampires appeared out of nowhere and started lecturing them like a team of goth Smokey Bears. That would go on the pile of mental images I went back to when I was having a rough day and needed a pick-me-up.

There was clattering from the other side of the kitchen, and the burbling of an electric kettle. Gabriel placed a steaming bowl in front of me. It was full of something alarmingly liquid and beige. When I looked up at him, he shrugged.

"One of Theo's exes left behind a box of instant oatmeal," he said. "We don't tend to have a lot of food around the place for, ah, reasons that are probably obvious." He placed a few small containers on the kitchen island next to my oatmeal. Dried fruit, mostly, and one plastic tub of slivered almonds.

I was hungry enough that I probably would've eaten anything. Right now, worrying about oatmeal was the least of my problems. I loaded it up with dried fruit and the almonds, then went to town. It was way better than I'd expected, but then I'd always had a soft spot for that slightly chemical, fake-maple-syrup taste.

As I ate, Gabriel pulled a packet of blood from the fridge and loaded it into the only appliance in the kitchen that actually looked like it had gotten some use. I probably wouldn't have recognized it, but I'd dealt with a changeling case a few months ago, and there had been one of those in the family's kitchen.

"Is that a milk warmer?" I asked. "Like, the kind they make for baby bottles?"

"No," Gabriel said, just a beat too quickly for it to be believable.

I snorted into my empty bowl. "Well, I guess it's meant for getting liquids to body temp," I said. "Innovative use for it. Probably voided the warranty, though."

Gabriel decanted his warmed blood into a cup—one of the Eastern European style mugs, with a glass inside a metal holder that had a handle. "There are some perks to modern technology," he said mildly. "Being able to warm blood with the touch of a button is one of them."

"Yeah, that's probably the most important one," I teased. Gabriel's eyes crinkled at me over the top of his cup as he took a sip. "All right, I've gotta get cleaned up. I'm starting to feel super gross."

"I left your go-bag in the guest suite," Gabriel said. "I assume you have a change of clothes in there?"

"Yeah, I—Shit." I groaned. "Last time I had to use it, I forgot to put in a clean shirt. Can I borrow something to change into?"

Gabriel froze for a split second, then nodded jerkily. "Of course. I'll leave something on the bed for you if that's acceptable."

"Perfect."

The shower in the guest suite was about the size of my apartment's entire bathroom, stocked with the fancy, vaguely generic bath stuff that rich people tended to put in their guest bathrooms. When I emerged, feeling worlds better and smelling like an expensive forest, I pulled on my clean clothes. I'd never been so happy to wear jeans.

Gabriel, true to his word, had left a sweater on the bed for me. It was a dark, rich purple, and insanely soft. Pothos was curled up into a small ball squarely on top of it. He grumped a little when I scooted him off his new bed, then wandered off, probably to commit some sort of crime.

The sweater was big on my body. Gabriel was almost a head taller than me, after all, and even though he was pretty trim, his shoulders were broad. I rolled the sleeves up to my elbows and tucked the sweater in, messing with it until my reflection looked more like a cool girl making an intentional fashion choice, and less like someone who'd been sent the wrong size after buying something online. The neck of the sweater gaped a bit to one side, showing off some of my collarbone in a way that was actually pretty cute.

Gabriel was waiting for me in an alcove at the top of the stairs. The place had an honest-to-God foyer, with giant carpeted staircase and all. He was staring into space in the general direction of the front door and jumped a little when I tapped him on the shoulder.

"Lost in thought?" I teased.

"What?" he said. "I… Yes. I was. Yes." His eyes were flicking across me, as if he was trying to stop himself from looking at any one spot for too long. I was really glad I'd taken the time to primp in the mirror, especially when his gaze landed on my collarbone for just a moment too long, and his eyes widened a fraction.

Pothos trotted down the hall toward us, his tail held high in a way that spelled danger for any fragile curios he could get his grubby little paws on. I watched Gabriel's eyes, still moving restlessly, and was struck by a sudden, not terribly kind impulse.

"Hey, buddy," I cooed at the cat, bending down to scratch his grassy back. The sweater draped forward, giving Gabriel a clear view down the front. When I straightened up, he was staring up at the ceiling like a renaissance painting of a monk praying for strength in the face of temptation. I mentally high-fived Past Evangeline for putting a cute bra in the go-bag.

My phone buzzed frantically in my pocket, and I winced when I checked it. Three missed calls from Isabella, and another one coming in..

"Heyyy," I answered, grimacing. Gabriel shot me a questioning look, and I moved the phone away from my cheek enough to show him the screen. He nodded.

"Don't you fuckin' heyyy me," Isabella said. "I've been trying to call you for a fucking hour. Where are you? Are you okay? I'm at your place and it looks like a goddamn bomb went off in here."

"I'm fine," I told her. "I sort of got attacked by some vampires, but I'm okay."

"Sort of?" Isabella repeated, sounding strangled.

"I'm not hurt, I swear. There was a curse on me, but that's happened before. I'm at Gabriel's."

"Fuck. Okay. Jesus, you scared the shit out of me," Isabella said. "Tell me about the curse. What do you need?"

"I'm set," I told her. "Gabriel broke the curse for me. Actually, you know what, let me…" I pressed the phone to my chest for a second. "Is it cool if I invite her over?" I asked Gabriel. He nodded. "All right, I'll send you the address, you can come over and take a look for yourself."

"I'm gonna," Isabella said. "Because you love to bullshit about not being hurt that badly, and I hate that. So, I'm going to come over and make sure you're not dying, and if I find out that you forgot to let me know you were okay because you were making goo-goo eyes at your hot vampire, I will actually kill you."

"Uh…"

"Wait, wait," Isabella said. "I'm not on speaker, am I?"

"No," I said. "No, but, you know. Vampire super-hearing." I didn't think there was any point in trying to hide what I was talking about, given the stare Gabriel was leveling at my phone.

" Oh no," Isabella said. "Okay, well, I'll see you in ten—fifteen tops. Have fun dealing with that." She hung up on me.

I blew out a slow sigh and pinched the bridge of my nose.

"Goo-goo eyes?" Gabriel repeated delicately, with an expression that was way too innocent to be genuine.

I pointed a finger at him. "Do not. No. Absolutely not."

Gabriel's eyes crinkled.

I smiled back, despite myself.

When Isabella arrived, Gabriel went to let her in, then ushered us into the library. It was a massive two-story room, complete with balconies wrapping around the upper level, and those wheeled library ladders I'd always wanted to try while always assuming I'd find a way to injure myself with. Plush, patterned rugs, and dark, comfortable-looking furniture from throughout the past century or two filled the room. In one corner, a mid-century modern chair had an art nouveau end table next to it, and a fiddly Victorian-looking ottoman in front of it. In a different spot, a Tiffany lamp sat on a brutalist desk with a baroque chair tucked against it. Calling the place eclectic was an understatement.

"Oh, my God," I said under my breath. "This place is crazy."

"Yes, it's rather started to get away from us," Gabriel said. "After a few centuries, it's easy to start hoarding a bit."

"No, I mean good kind of crazy," I said. "Like, I kind of wish I could live here."

"Yeah, no kidding," Isabella said. "It's a little weird to see a crystal chandelier and string lights shaped like cartoon bats in the same room, but I'm kind of into it."

Isabella settled onto a brocade sofa and stared around the room. She'd stepped out of her combat boots at the front door but had kept her bulky jacket on. It made her look out of place, even in a room where basically everything was out of place.

"All right, pretty-boy," she said, pointing at Gabriel. "Give us a minute. Gonna need some doctor-patient confidentiality here."

"You're not a doctor," he pointed out, sounding a little confused.

She rolled her eyes. "Uh, yeah, which is why I also don't have to worry about the ‘do no harm' stuff. Give us the room, will you?"

Gabriel looked at me, and I shrugged, nodding.

"I'll see if we have any snacks," he said before he left.

As soon as the door closed behind him, Isabella twisted her hands through the air, putting up a muffling spell around the two of us. She bounced back up to her feet, shedding the casual toughness she'd come in with to reveal something urgent and tense.

"Are you okay?"

"Honestly, the curse is totally fine now," I said, pulling the sweater down so she could see the spot where the mark had healed to a flat, pale scar.

She blew out a breath and nodded, inspecting the skin with practiced brushes of magic. "I'm not just asking about the curse," she said softly. "I'm asking about all this shit. Your place gets attacked by vampires, and then all of a sudden you're staying in the vampire prince's place? I wanted to make sure that you're… you know. That you actually want to be here."

Isabella had experienced some shit in her past. She didn't talk about it much, and I didn't ask, figuring she'd tell me what she wanted me to know when she wanted me to know it. But I knew that whenever she helped me with a job that involved a hostage situation, she always had a hangover the next morning. When a job uncovered details about a bad marriage, she started breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth, nice and slow, like she was focusing on it. The time I'd taken on a client who, as it turned out, had a piece-of-shit boyfriend using her blood for spells without her knowledge, I'd taken a nice long walk with the girl. Isabella, though, had stayed behind. When the client and I got back, the boyfriend was gone, and Isabella's knuckles were bloody.

I took Isabella's hand now. "Hey," I murmured. "It's all right, I promise. I'm not just saying that, okay? Gabriel's a good guy. He wasn't, like, keeping my phone away from me or anything. I was just asleep."

Isabella's breath shuddered out of her, and she nodded.

"Seriously, he's got me set up in the guest suite, and when I low-key flashed my tits at him earlier, he looked away. It's honestly sort of cute how much of a gentleman he's being." I squeezed Isabella's hand. She squeezed back, then pulled away.

"I'm really glad you're okay," she said. "And seriously, if you ever need me to have a word with him…"

"I know. You're honestly so good at scaring guys, it's one of my favorite things about you."

She laughed a little at that. We stood in silence for a moment, leaning against each other.

"So, are you going to lie low for a bit?" Isabella asked. "Stay out of trouble until whatever you've gotten yourself into dies down?"

"I don't think that's an option. This could be… really fucking terrible. End-of-the-world-as-we-know-it shit. I can't stop the investigation now, and even if I could, I think these guys would keep coming after me."

"Shit," Isabella said, sitting on the sofa.

"Yeah," I said, sitting next to her. "Shit."

"So, what's your next move?"

"You're not gonna like it," I warned her.

"I figured," she grumbled. "Quit stalling."

"Nanny Murk. She's got the next piece of the array."

Isabella went very still. "Evangeline, last time you went up against her, she nearly killed you."

"This won't be like last time," I said firmly. "I'm stronger now, and I'll have backup."

"Do you want me with you?" She didn't even hesitate to offer. How had I managed to find myself such a wonderful best friend?

"No," I said. "Thank you, seriously, but no. Stealth will be the most important thing here, and you're not really the quietest spell caster. It'll just be Gabriel and me, in and out if we're lucky."

"And if you're not lucky?" she asked.

"Then we'll improvise."

Isabella and I talked shop for a while, going over spells to use and precautions to take. We were eventually interrupted when the library doors slammed open, and a short, curvy woman with a flawless blonde bob burst in.

"You must be our guests!" she exclaimed, clapping her hands together in delight. "I'm Lissa. Evangeline, Gabriel's told me so much about you."

"Has he now?" Isabella said dryly, elbowing me in the ribs.

I elbowed her back.

"And you, of course, must be Isabella," Lissa went on. "I've heard a lot less about you, but so far, all of it's been good."

"Then, it must all be lies and slander," Isabella said with a smile.

"I've instructed the boys to order dinner for the two of you because it seems rude to leave our guests hungry," Lissa said. "And if you're interested, I'd love to give you a proper tour of the place. Knowing Gabriel, he probably just stomped straight to his study and left you to fend for yourselves."

"I mean, he didn't stomp," I said. "But aside from that, you're not far off."

Lissa laughed and waved a hand at us, signaling for us to follow after her. Isabella shrugged and set off after the vampire, and I fell into step alongside her.