Chapter 8

8

GAbrIEL

I caught Evangeline before she could hit the floor. I wasn't naturally given to panic, but my body decided to give it a try on my behalf. I scooped her limp form into my arms and carried her over to the sofa, scanning her face frantically. She was breathing, and I could see the faint jump of her pulse in her neck—something my darker instincts were all too eager to focus on.

I shook myself out of it. What did witches need? Should I get her some water? Did she need food?

Before I could spiral any deeper, Evangeline stirred. She blinked, then let out a quiet groan, pushing herself into a sitting position. The apartment moved a few cushions around to better support her.

"Are you all right?" I asked, crouching in front of her so that I could see her face, even though she'd rested her head in her hands. "Are you hurt? Do you need anything?"

"I'm fine," Evangeline mumbled. "I just feel… weird."

"Weird?" I repeated. Weird didn't sound reassuring.

"Like when you're getting a massage and they finally manage to get a knot to release," she said. "Except, it's in my brain."

I looked at her for a long moment. "Okay," I said gently. "Can you tell me how many fingers I'm holding up?"

"I'm not concussed," she said. I held my hand up pointedly, and she sighed. "Three. Your turn. How many fingers am I holding up?"

"Just one," I said with a shake of my head. "Good to see you're still capable of being rude."

"Always," Evangeline said, but she stopped flipping me off. She sat up straighter, looking down at her hands. "Seriously, though, I feel… good. Really good. Strong. It's like there's this little glow in my chest."

My worry faded, and I suddenly knew exactly what she was talking about. "Right here?" I said, pressing a hand over my sternum.

She looked at me, brow wrinkling. "Yeah, exactly. How'd you know? Have you read about this or something?"

I shook my head. "I can feel it, too."

"Did you see anything?" Evangeline asked, her voice suddenly urgent. "Visions?"

"All I saw was you passing out," I told her. "You had a vision?"

"Right. Okay. Shit." She rubbed a hand through her hair and stood.

I shot to my feet as well, ready to catch her if needed. She ducked back into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of scotch and two mugs.

"I'm not dealing with this sober," Evangeline said, flopping back down on the sofa. I sat at the far end of it, watching as she poured a hefty measure of liquor into one of the mugs. She hesitated. "Do you drink booze?"

"I do."

She nodded and poured me some as well, then waved a hand at the mugs, offering me first pick. I picked up the one that said THIS GRANDPA LOVES FISHING with a cartoon fish contorting its fin into a thumbs-up. Evangeline took the other one. On it was a photo printed of a woman with extremely large, dark hair, and an amazingly low-cut dress. Beneath the photo was bright red text that read MISTRESS OF THE DARK ROAST.

"Thank you," I said, although it came out sounding more like a question. Scotch wasn't usually to my taste, but I took a sip, anyway. On the other end of the sofa, Evangeline downed her drink in one long chug. The pale line of her throat was very long, and she had a freckle just under the hinge of her jaw. I took another sip.

Evangeline poured more scotch into her mug. A drop ran down the side of it, and she wiped it away with her thumb. I watched, hypnotized, as she licked the scotch off the pad of her thumb. It made me feel like I was about to burst into flame.

"I think I saw my parents," she said quietly, leaning back against the cushions.

"You're not sure?"

Evangeline shrugged. "I don't remember them—my birth parents. I was adopted when I was five, and everything before then is just kind of a blur. But…" She sighed. "I don't know. It just feels like it was them."

"But you didn't see anything about the ascendancy array?"

"Maybe?" Evangeline said. "There was something, but I only got a quick glimpse of it." She sighed and started to take her hair out of its bun, sending chestnut curls cascading down her shoulders and chest. "Hey, you're not one of those vampires who'll get offended if you see an ankle or something, right? Because it's been a really fucking long day, and I need to not be wearing jeans anymore. You mind if I throw on pajamas?"

"I…" I began, then cleared my throat. "No. By all means. Ankles are fine."

"Cool," she said. "Be right back."

As soon as she left the room, I realized my mistake. So far, I'd only seen Evangeline prepared for work, wearing clothes that, while flattering, were almost certainly bought because they were sturdy and easy to clean. I saw the version of her that went out, ready to face the world. Now, I was on her sofa, in her apartment, and she was changing into pajamas. Soft, comfortable clothing.

I tried to pick up a throw pillow just to have something to do with my hands, but when I reached for a round, fuzzy green one on the floor, it bit me.

"You don't seem to be a pillow," I said to it.

"Mrrrah," said the thing that wasn't a pillow. It stood up and revealed itself to be a handsome little cat. The beast stretched into an arch like a Halloween decoration, doing it with such intensity, its legs quivered with it. Then it hopped up onto the sofa next to me.

"Hello," I murmured, holding my finger out for the cat—I was sure it was a cat—to sniff. It leaned in curiously, sniffed, and immediately decided to ignore me.

"Nice to meet you, too," I said ruefully. I gave the cat a gentle stroke down its spine but yelped and pulled my hand away. The cat's back had suddenly begun to bristle with thorns. It gave me a smug look, and I couldn't shake the feeling I was being laughed at.

"Pothos!" Evangeline said sternly, coming back into the room. She wore a faded T-shirt, the neckline so stretched out it slipped off one of her shoulders, and a pair of soft-looking shorts. "What have I told you? No thorns! Bad boy! Bad!" She scooped the cat off the sofa and held him up at eye-level. He looked completely unrepentant. I was trying so hard not to stare at the pale, smooth skin of Evangeline's thighs, I was completely blindsided by her saying ‘bad boy' in any context whatsoever. I bit the inside of my cheek hard.

"Did he poke you?" she asked, dropping the cat onto a window seat.

"Just a little," I told her, studiously maintaining eye contact. "My own fault. I shouldn't have petted him unless he seemed interested."

"He might've poked you anyway," she said, sitting back down. She folded one leg up on the sofa and let the other stretch out to the floor. There was a small, pale scar on her inner thigh. I wanted to throw myself into the sun. "You sure he didn't get you? You look a little off." She poured herself more scotch.

"Yes, well," I said. "You warned me there might be ankles, but by God, woman, parading around with your knees out for everyone to see? How scandalous."

She snorted into her mug. "Sorry. I know it must be a horrible shock to you. Good thing you don't actually need your heart to work, or you could've died of a heart attack."

"Ha ha," I said weakly. "Yes. Lucky me. That would've been a very embarrassing way to go. Would you say witches have human-like metabolisms?"

"They're a little quicker, but pretty close," Evangeline said, refilling her mug. "Why?"

"You might want to slow down," I suggested.

"I really don't want to, actually." She slumped into the corner of the sofa, halfway on the arm of it. The green cat made a creaking sound from the floor, and she patted her chest absently. He hopped up, curled into a tight ball, and began purring loudly.

"I don't remember exactly what hangovers felt like, but I'm quite certain I didn't enjoy them," I told her. She rolled her eyes when I stood. I grabbed another mug—HEXY WITCH it read in curly gold lettering—and filled it with water, then pressed it into her hand. "Drink this."

She gave me a look that I was shocked to realize was softly amused. "Worried about me, huh?"

I didn't make eye contact. "Worried about delaying our investigation if I have to hold your hair back while you vomit."

"Oh, you're no fun," she teased, but she drank the water anyway. "One piece stolen by evil's might…"

It took me a moment to recognize the words from the prophecy. "If the pieces of the array can be used individually, then someone could already be using that piece as a weapon. The prophecy called that piece ‘a drain of life'. I can't say I like the sound of that."

"Do you think maybe it has something to do with your missing vampires?" Evangeline asked. She wasn't quite slurring, but her words had gotten a little soft around the edges. She scratched her cat's cheek, and he leaned into her touch. I absolutely refused to be jealous of a cat.

"It could," I said. "If someone's trying to take living energy, immortals would be the most useful source. We would take longer to run dry," I added grimly, shuddering a little at the thought.

"That's fucking nightmarish," Evangeline said. "If the person who has it is capable of doing something like that, I don't wanna think about what they'd do with the whole… whole…" She waved a hand in the air. "Thing."

"We have to find it first," I said.

"And we don't even know how much of a head start they have," she said, nestling her head against the back of the sofa. "Or who they are. Or what they want. And my team is me, my cat, and a spooky pretty-boy who acts like he's constantly auditioning for Hamlet."

"I beg your pardon," I said.

"And Isabella. She's pretty good at this stuff. And Marcus, but he's sort of only useful when he feels like it. Wizards, you know?"

I stared at her, then got up and refilled her water mug. Pretty-boy? I was distracted enough that I didn't even realize I'd stopped tamping down my natural grace until I was already back on the sofa and Evangeline pointed at me.

"You don't have to do that around me," she said. "Hold yourself back like that, trying to act more like a human. Not when it's just us. No need to waste those brain cells, okay? You can be as spooky as you want."

Evangeline had gotten looser and more relaxed with the liquor in her system, but her green eyes were still incredibly sharp. I suddenly felt excruciatingly vulnerable.

"I think I'm starting to figure you out," she told me. "I think you're stuck. At first, I thought you were a prissy little prince, but you aren't, are you? You came to the library by yourself. You didn't bring an entor—ant—entourage or anything. You didn't send someone to go get what you needed. I think you're going rogue. You're not some stuffy, brooding dweeb." She frowned, stared at the ceiling for a moment, then corrected herself. "You're not just some stuffy brooding dweeb."

"I don't think I'm stuffy," I said, trying to grab onto something in the flood of words.

"But you're all right with being a brooding dweeb?" she asked, cracking a grin that made me feel like I was staring directly into the sunrise.

"I know myself well enough to admit that I have a tendency to brood," I said. "And I'm not entirely sure what a dweeb is."

Evangeline laughed loudly enough that Pothos woke up and gave her a disapproving look.

"I was going somewhere with that," she said once she'd caught her breath. "Where was I going with that? Oh, right. The happiest I've seen you so far is when you were getting the hulls off of those nuts. I think you're fed up. You've spent too long being stuck in a little prince-shaped box, and now you're starting to bust out."

"You're drunk," I told her.

"That doesn't mean I'm wrong," she pointed out, looking immensely pleased with herself.

I huffed out a quiet laugh and grabbed her now-empty water mug. By the time I came back from refilling it, she was dozing against the cushions. I let myself look at her peaceful expression for a moment, then shook my head and went to try to find her a blanket.

All I wanted to do when I got home was collapse into bed and possibly spend some personal time with my hand. Unfortunately, the universe seemed to have other plans. When I approached my front door, a shape detached itself from the shadows nearby and came toward me.

The woman had a pale, round face, and blue-black hair that fell in loose waves over her shoulders, blending into the collar of her fur coat. She was disarmingly beautiful, and extremely aware of it.

"Gabriel," she said. "It's been too long."

I bit back a sigh. "Gwendoline. What do you want?"

"Why would you assume I want something?" she asked innocently, raising a hand to her chest. When I gave her an unimpressed look, she dropped the act. "You missed the meeting today."

I wracked my brain, trying to remember what on earth she was talking about. "The council wasn't scheduled to meet today," I said, puzzled.

"Not the council," Gwendoline said, a touch impatiently. "The heads of clans De Montclair and Ash, and their respective heirs."

This time I was unable to stop the sigh. "Right. That."

"That," Gwendoline said. "You left me to deal with both our families on my own."

I winced. "Something came up."

"Yes, well, perhaps if we'd both been there, it would have been easier to direct them away from their favorite topic," she said.

I bravely resisted the urge to slam my head into the front door. Our clans were both old and powerful, with strong bloodlines. Because of that, I'd been in a perpetual state of being nearly engaged to Gwendoline for at least three hundred years. It could have been worse. Gwendoline wasn't a friend, exactly, but she was an excellent ally to have. She was far better at managing clan politics than me. When we inevitably were forced to get married, it would probably be a good match. We'd slept together a handful of times over the centuries, and it was always fun and impressively athletic.

It could have been so much worse, but that didn't mean I had to be happy about it. A small, foolish part of me kept insisting that I could have something different, and I always did my best to ignore it. I was an heir, and that meant there were certain expectations. A political marriage was one of them. Producing my own heirs was another.

In a magically-enforced vault deep in my parents' portion of the citadel, there was a neatly labeled row of small glass bottles. They had been strongly enchanted, at great expense, hundreds of years ago to preserve their contents. They contained… well, samples.

One of the peculiarities of the spell that had first created vampires was that, for the first twenty-two years of our lives, we were entirely human. Then, on the first new moon after we passed that fateful threshold, we began to change. We became stronger, faster, with heightened senses and a thirst for blood. We also became infertile.

Because of this, the more powerful families—the families that could afford top-of-the-line medical magic—made sure to preserve sperm and eggs from their heirs so that they could be used to create a child who would be incubated in a magically-controlled device that was somewhere between a womb and a cocoon. Vampires tended to view having children long after being turned as something of a status symbol, and often treated those children as either a treasured trophy or a small, irritating dog who'd gotten too big to be carried around in a purse.

"What did you tell them?" I asked Gwendoline.

She shrugged one shoulder and inspected her flawless nails. "The usual. That it would be more advantageous to wait until we can use the marriage to either distract from something or truly consolidate power. They then spent an hour and a half arguing which clan would get to keep us, and what sort of dowry the other would get. It should keep them distracted for at least six months."

"You're a marvel," I told her.

"Yes, I know. So kind of you to notice." Gwendoline gave me a carefully curated look of beautiful, elegant nobility, then dropped the mask and sighed. She suddenly looked very tired. "I could use something to take my mind off it," she said. "Feel like inviting me in?"

I thought about it for a moment. Thought about the cleverness of Gwendoline's mouth, the sweet, tight clench of her around me, the pleasure of losing myself in making someone else feel good. Then I thought of the way Evangeline's hands moved through the air when she was frustrated, and the soft look she'd given me as I'd made her drink a glass of water, and the horrible tacky mugs that seemed to be the only drinking vessels she owned. I closed my eyes for a long moment.

"I can't," I said, a little regretfully. "Not tonight. I'm just?—"

Gwendoline held up a hand to stop me. "No need to explain," she said. "I just thought we might both need a bit of stress relief. I'll find someone else. And you should probably get some rest, anyway. You look atrocious."

"Always a pleasure, Gwendoline," I drawled. She gave me a genuine, impish little smile, then went up on her toes to kiss the air next to my cheeks.

Gwendoline slunk away into the dark, and I didn't watch her go.