Chapter 20

20

EVANGELINE

A s soon as I was out of sight, I leaned against the wall and tipped my head back against it. That was the first time a man ever told me he loved me. That'd always be the first time. Great. Just my goddamn luck . At least he'd done it before I'd told him about the magic sickness. If he'd done it right after I finally opened up and asked him for help, the humiliation might've killed me.

There was a gentle touch on my shoulder, and I jumped. Lissa, who had managed to sneak up on me, smiled apologetically.

"Sorry," she said. "I forgot how much worse human hearing is. I didn't mean to startle you."

"It's fine."

"He's done something stupid, hasn't he?" she asked with the resignation of an older sister.

I huffed out an exhausted sound that fell woefully short of being a laugh. "He dumped me."

Lissa grimaced. "That does sound like Gabriel. He's not… the best with feelings."

"Yeah, believe it or not, I already picked up on that," I muttered.

"Under different circumstances, I would offer you a listening ear and a cocktail that's been outlawed in several countries since the twenties," Lissa said.

I managed a small smile even as I shook my head. "If you wanna help, could you gather everybody up in the workshop? His Royal Highness wants to have a meeting before he fucks off."

Lissa squeezed my shoulder again before she slipped away. It didn't change anything, but it was nice to know that one of Gabriel's dearest friends was on my side. I knew he was just panicking, but knowing why someone did something shitty didn't make it less shitty. I was glad I wasn't the only one who realized how shitty it was.

Taking a steadying breath, I headed for the workshop on the first floor where Gabriel, Lissa, Theo, Marcus, and Xarek were already gathered. Isabella and Vic were with the wounded We stood around the table with the ley line map like officers in a war movie looking at battle plans. I guess, in a way, we sort of were. Gabriel stood at the head of the table, extremely straight-backed, but with a dazed look in his eyes that didn't reach the rest of his expression.

"Should we wait for Isabella and Vic?" I asked, glancing around like I thought they might pop up from behind the furniture.

"No, they've got their hands full at the moment," Marcus said. "They have contacts within the local community of medical practitioners. They're taking the people you rescued into town and making sure they get proper care. Floyd managed to fit everyone inside, although it did become a sort of double-decker bus situation."

"You let them drive your car?" I asked, stunned. I'd never been allowed to drive Floyd.

"Vic was an ambulance driver in several wars," Lissa said. "He's very good at it."

Gabriel cleared his throat, and everyone else gave him their attention. Personally, I stared down at the wire map spread out across the table.

"As you all know, my father had planned to betray Morgana for quite some time," he began. "And now I know exactly what that plan was. He has—" He visibly gathered himself. "He had a weapon he believed could destroy her. Having now seen his memories of the experiments he did with it, I think he was correct. Even if it cannot kill her, it will weaken her significantly and give you enough of an opening to finish things. It's hidden, but I saw glimpses of where he was keeping it." He leaned over and tapped a spot on the table, a little clearing between the cotton bud trees. There was a tiny wire building there, the metal outline of a small cottage. "The weapon is a wand made of blind man's birch. It's vitally important that it not be used until the right moment. It should be retrieved with caution."

"I'll go," I said, surprising myself, but getting away from here would do me some good. The closest ley line crossing was a pretty distance away from the hut, and I could use a hike to clear my head. I had to keep moving, otherwise I would grind to a complete stop and not be able to start back up again when I had to. I needed momentum, like a shark.

"I don't know what sort of defenses the place has. It may be dangerous," Gabriel said. His face was still carefully neutral, but the look in his eyes was getting worse.

How nice. He's worried. How sweet . He can go to hell.

"I said I'll go," I said icily.

"But—" Gabriel started. I knew he was hurting, but I was really fucking ready to start a fight if he wanted one.

"You'll have backup," a deep voice said. Damien. "If you want it, that is."

He was still looking rough, but he'd cleaned up, and someone had found him a change of clothes. Probably Xarek's, I thought, based on the build. Well, that and the fact that I didn't think anyone else here would have dad jeans.

"Sure," I said. "Buddy system's probably not a bad idea right now, and everyone else is already paired up."

That put a crack in Gabriel's expression. Not much, just a twitch, but it still gave me a zing of satisfaction.

So, that was it. Gabriel was leaving. He'd told us what he knew, and now he was leaving. Damien was upstairs preparing odds and ends for our mission when I saw Gabriel slinking toward the door without so much as a goodbye. After a short but brutal struggle with myself, I stepped into his way. I was exhausted, scared, and extremely pissed off, but I didn't want Gabriel throwing himself into his stupid noble plan with a disadvantage.

"One thing before you go," I said. "You should eat."

He froze. "I'm sure I can manage without," he said after a tense moment.

I sighed. "You just gave me a whole fucking speech about how you're gonna be dead on your feet and working horrible hours. I know you. You're not gonna take the time to eat, and you're also still mostly doing human blood, right?"

"I just don't know if it's a good idea," he said, laying out each word as carefully as if he was defusing a bomb.

"If you're hungry, will you find a human to drink from? Do you have anything even approaching a plan for that? Are you gonna hunt someone down? Send a lackey to go find someone? Ask for a volunteer when you know damn well there'll be a power imbalance? None of those sound like you, Gabriel."

He refused to meet my eyes. What a stupid, noble man. I wanted to shake him.

"Let me do this," I said quietly. "I know you won't let me help with the rest, so just… One last time, okay?"

He relented. "Okay."

I turned my head to the side and brushed my hair out of the way, exposing my neck. Gabriel stepped forward slowly, like he was counting out the time to keep himself from rushing.

He hesitated with his lips almost touching my neck, then leaned forward and bit down carefully. I braced myself for the rush of molten pleasure that came with the bite, holding my breath, but it didn't come. There was that floaty painlessness of good painkillers, yes, but the crazy swoop of euphoria and warmth wasn't there. Instead, grief flooded through me.

It was everywhere all at once, overwhelming. Crushing layers of sadness and anger and regret and fear built up on top of each other like layers of rock, buckling and twisting where the tectonic plates met. That was when I understood for the first time.

The heady cocktail of pleasure, lust, and bliss I'd felt when Gabriel drank from me before wasn't from the chemicals in the bite itself. It was from Gabriel. When he bit me, his mind opened up to mine enough to let feelings slip through, and before it had been absolutely intoxicating.

He loves me , I thought as Gabriel lapped the blood from my neck. He loves me, and I think I love him.

Gabriel pulled away, licking my blood from his lips. He hesitated, then leaned forward, pressing his forehead against mine. I screwed my eyes shut to keep myself from crying.

"Thank you," he whispered into the air between us, and then he pulled away. By the time I opened my eyes, he was gone.

The woods near the ley line crossing closest to the hut were almost aggressively bright. It was late enough in the year now that most of the leaves had fallen, with a few yellow-brown stragglers still clinging stubbornly, and the cold autumn sunlight bore straight down to the forest floor. Damien and I stood in the center of a circle of weathered white stones, oblong and smooth-edged like river rock, all standing upright from the ground. The back of my neck prickled. Circles like these made me think of the stories about mushroom rings, and I didn't like being in the middle of one. The stones only came up to about waist height, though, which lessened the air of menace pretty significantly.

I took the lead, and Damien followed behind me silently. It wasn't hard to find a path. With the leaves down, you could see landmarks far in the distance, so we found our course pretty easily. We walked quietly for a while, and because Damien didn't make any noise, I was hyperaware of it when I started breathing heavier. He noticed, too, much to my embarrassment, because he dug a water bottle out of his pack and handed it to me.

"Let's take a break," he said. If he'd asked if I wanted to take a break, I would've lied and said no, pushed on until I needed a rest instead of just wanting one. But he hadn't asked.

There was a boulder nearby carpeted with moss, and I sat on it. The moss had begun to dry out, but it was still soft. I absently ran my fingers over. Damien leaned against a barren tree, keeping an eye on the forest around us. He looked more like himself now that he was in proper clothes, but Xarek had provided him with a denim jacket the exact same shade as the jeans, and Damien wasn't the sort of man who could make a Canadian tuxedo look like an intentional fashion statement.

"You're used to being around humans," I said. His gaze flicked to me, and I held the water bottle up, shaking it enough to make the water slosh. "Not many vampires can tell when a human needs a break."

Damien scanned the forest, looking for a distraction, then sighed when he came up empty-handed.

"If you'd rather talk about something else, you can tell me what you were doing in that cell," I offered.

He huffed out a rueful laugh. "I do owe you an explanation, don't I?"

I waited.

"I was in that cell because I was found out," Damien said. "When you rescued Gabriel, I was at the citadel, too. I wanted to make sure I was ready if something went wrong, and…" He shook his head. "When you bungled your first jump out, alarms were raised. I rushed in, and I wasn't as careful as I should've been.

"I have wings," he continued. "That's my vampire party trick. It's pretty rare, and pretty useful. Morgana decided she wanted wings, too, so…" He waved a hand. "She locked me up and took them. She needs to keep people alive to steal their power. That's the only reason she didn't kill me."

"Shit," I said sympathetically.

"Yeah. Shit." He dug in the pack and pulled out a protein bar, which he tossed to me. I caught it and turned it over to scan the ingredients list.

"It doesn't have cashews in it," Damien said. "I already checked."

I paused, staring down at the shiny wrapper. "How the fuck," I said slowly, "do you know I hate cashews?"

Damien stared out into the trees. I climbed to my feet.

"And how do you know so much about humans? Why did you call me Evie?" Now that I'd started, I couldn't stop. "And why do you keep looking at me like you can't believe I'm real?"

Damien fidgeted, brushing his thumb over the base of one of his fingers. It was the spot where his signet ring used to be—the one he'd used to seal the letter that had sent me head-first into this mess.

"Answer me!"

"I don't remember my birth parents," he said. His voice had gone distant and level, like he was reciting a poem he knew by heart without bothering to put inflection into it. "Obviously, they were vampires, but that's all I know about them. By the time I was ten, I was living in the woods, trying to find enough food to survive. I was too slow to catch rabbits, but I tried. I ate a lot of berries. Ate leaves. My fangs hadn't come in yet, since we don't turn until adulthood, which meant the abilities hadn't come in either. One night, I found a pair of campers. I waited until they were asleep, then went to steal their food.

"It turned out that they were light sleepers. They heard me, and they ran out to save their food, and they saw this, this… grubby little kid trying to gather everything up and run. They calmed me down, heated up some food for me. They asked if I had anywhere to go. Someone else would've chased me off, but they were good people." He looked at me, eyes blazing. "Miranda and Ewan were good people. It's important that you know that."

Miranda and Ewan. I stared at him, stunned. Miranda and Ewan, the couple who had crafted the ascendancy array to protect their daughter. To protect me.

"My birth parents," I said numbly.

"And my adoptive ones," Damien said. "They took me in, gave me a home. Gave me enough lessons to catch me up on the schooling I should've had, and then some. They didn't care that I was a vampire, they just cared that I was a kid."

"I had a vision of them when I put together the ascendancy array," I said, more to myself than to him. "Miranda said ‘Find D—', and then she got cut off. That was you?"

Damien gave a painful sort of smile and nodded. "When they told me they were going to have a baby, I had a meltdown. I figured they were going to kick me out. I packed up a bunch of stuff in a napkin on a stick, because I thought that's what you were supposed to do when you were running away from home. It took them a while to convince me that they wanted both of us. That they wanted me to be an older brother."

I was pretty sure I'd stopped breathing.

"I took that job very seriously," he said with a rough little laugh. "I did so much babyproofing. Cutting up pool noodles to put on table legs, crawling around to see what you'd be able to grab, the whole nine yards. I was so determined to look out for you." His face fell. "I didn't know about the Morgana situation. They didn't tell me about the plan to send you away if she attacked. I mean, I was just a teenager, but I would've—" He turned away, bracing himself against a tree with one arm. I looked away, wanting to give him some shred of privacy.

"They told me to run," he said after a moment. "I hadn't turned yet, wouldn't have been able to help in a fight. Morgana didn't know about me. She didn't see my face. After she… After, I went to Eldoria, I started asking around. I heard rumors that one of the high-ranking vampires was working with Morgana. As soon as my fangs came in, I went to the citadel to get myself a job, and I got damn good at it. Good enough that I kept getting promoted, making my way up until I was working for Roland directly."

"You're in it for revenge," I said.

"You're goddamn right," he snarled, wheeling around to face me. "I need to make sure she gets what's coming to her. She killed my family!"

The moment had switched into something slow and crystalline, with my options branching out before me. I took a deep breath and chose one.

"Not all of your family," I said.

Damien's face crumpled, and he lurched over to me, slumping down onto the forest floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

"I'm so sorry for everything I had to do to you. I hated myself for it, but I'd already come so far. I couldn't?—"

"You couldn't blow your cover," I said for him, and he nodded miserably. Sometimes it was easy to forget not all vampires had been around for centuries. Damien was good at putting up the smoothly confident front of the older vampires, but right now, it was painfully clear he was just some guy in his thirties stuck in a horrible situation. I patted him awkwardly on the shoulder.

"I don't… Um," I started hesitantly. "I don't remember anything from back then, but… We could start over, maybe? If you want."

"I'd like that."

The clinical part of my mind worked overtime, and then it connected the dots.

"Your ring," I said slowly. "The signet ring with the crescent moon on it. It's the alchemical symbol for silver. They were—we were—the Argents."

"It was our dad's," Damien said. "I had to keep something of them. You understand, don't you? I… I couldn't risk keeping the surname, but renaming myself Sterling seemed safe enough."

I didn't know if I did understand. Just like Damien, I had always considered my adoptive parents to be my family. I loved them in a familiar, distant way. I called them every few weeks to tell them largely made-up stories about my life. Until recently, I hadn't put all that much thought into my birth family.

"Can we keep walking?" Damien asked. "I think it'd help right now."

I nodded, stashing the protein bar for later, and we set off again.

Our next break was quieter. I ate the protein bar, then a slightly squished sandwich from the bag. Damien sipped on a synth blood pouch, keeping an ever-watchful eye on the woods. We'd swapped stories as we'd walked—he told me about our childhood, and I told him about jobs I'd done. Together, we helped each other fill in the blanks; now I knew more about the years I couldn't remember, and he knew what I'd been up to. Things were definitely more relaxed between us.

"So," Damien drawled between sips of blood. He drew the syllable out in a way that aroused my suspicions. "You and Gabriel."

I groaned. I both did and didn't want to talk about it. It felt like prodding at an injury, but I was in the mood to make myself feel worse. I understood Gabriel's reasoning, sure, but that didn't make the whole shitshow hurt any less.

"I said we could try hanging out. I didn't say you could start doing big brother shit right off the bat," I muttered, kicking at the fallen leaves petulantly. They sent up a waft of mold smell.

"Humor me. I've got a lot of lost time to make up for." That landed too close to something raw within him, I could tell.

I sighed. "I like him a lot, but we're kind of dealing with a lot right now, you know? We were already trying to save magic as we know it, and now he's dealing with killing his dad and getting saddled with a day job on top of that. Part of me gets why he dumped me."

Damien grunted.

"I'm not saying I'm cool with it," I reassured him, managing to talk around a stubborn lump in my throat. I absolutely refused to cry. "It's just… We're both kind of coming into our own, I guess. Figuring out who you are as yourself is hard enough without figuring out who you are with someone else on top of that." I sounded like such a reasonable, mature adult. God, I wanted to scream.

"So, you'd rather be a lone wolf, handling things on your own?" Damien asked dryly. "Not dragging anyone else into your problems, keeping everyone around you safe by not letting them in?"

"I mean…" I shrugged. "I wouldn't put it like that, but yeah. Kinda."

"Well." He thought for a moment, toying with the straw of his synth blood packet. "That seems pretty stupid."

I let out an outraged squawk. I wanted to wallow, not be lectured.

"Do you want Gabriel to deal with all of his stuff alone? Do you want him to keep everything to himself?"

"Of course not, but that's different!" I sputtered.

"Oh, so he deserves compassion and help, but you don't?" he asked innocently.

I glared at him. "Don't think I don't see what you're doing here," I grumbled.

"I wasn't really trying to hide it. Look, I've watched Gabriel for years. He's quick to retreat from the battle, but he's real stubborn when it comes to the war. He'll be back once he's had time to lick his wounds."

"Mixing your metaphors a little," I muttered under my breath, nowhere near quiet enough to get past vampiric hearing.

He rolled his eyes.

"What do you even know about all this?" I said snippily. "Do revenge quests leave you with a lot of time to date?"

Damien looked me squarely in the eye. "No, and it's been miserable. You deserve better."

"I hate it when people deflect my quips with emotional sincerity," I mumbled. "And yes, I know that was another quip. Let me have it. It's been a shitty da?—"

Without warning, the world went burning gold and agonizing. I was cooking inside my own skin. I was outside myself, being dipped into lava, waterboarded by the flow of magic all around the shred of matter that made up my fragile body. I couldn't see, couldn't think. Pain radiated through my chest as I came back to consciousness. My throat felt raw from screaming, and I was panting hard.

Damien hovered over me. "What the fuck was that?"

"Magic buildup," I gasped out. "Got too much in me. It's getting worse." I threw up four of the most complicated, power-draining wards I knew in quick succession, and the pain started to fade until I could catch my breath.

"Why isn't your familiar balancing this out?" Damien asked sharply.

"Pothos isn't actually my familiar," I said. "Every time I've tried to do the ceremony, he's wandered off. I took the hint after the third time."

"Pothos wouldn't be enough to help with this if it's that severe," Damien said. I was about to ask who died and made him the expert, and then remembered exactly who had and shut my mouth. He'd been raised by two of the most powerful magic users in the world, after all. "You need a much stronger creature."

"I don't really have time to go out and find a helpful monster," I said.

"You don't need to," Damien told me. "You know that isn't the only way."

I glared at him until he raised his hands in surrender. "I'm done talking about this," I told him.

"I mean there are ways aside from… that. Morgana had a ton of familiars. Basically anyone particularly powerful got press-ganged."

"I said I'm done talking about this."

"Right, of course. Now, are you good to keep going, or do we need to go back?"

"I'm not going back," I said firmly. "Let's go get that weapon."