Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Dmitri threw back his head at the reference to the shooting that had forever altered the pattern of feathers on Raphael’s left wing. “I can’t wait,” he said, before hauling Raphael into another back-slapping embrace. “I’ll order the baby gates—I’m pretty sure your kid is going to be as much trouble as the cubs.”
The idea of a small babe—his and Elena’s babe—toddling around the Tower…Raphael returned Dmitri’s embrace with a huge smile on his face.
11
Cher, I would be hunted down and fed to a gator should I miss a single family event.
—Janvier to his Ashblade (Once, on a dark New York night)
Saying goodbye to Eve a few days later wasn’t hard—not when Elena knew she’d be seeing her sister again in a few more months.
“My lips are zipped until you’re ready to spill the beans,” Eve said just before she got on her return flight. “Though I reserve the right to start secretly stockpiling tiny combat outfits. Might even dust off the knitting skills Beth taught me and make teeny-weeny socks. I think Bethie would like that, don’t you?”
Elena started crying. “Stupid hormones,” she said, as Eve hugged her.
Then her sister was boarding her flight—not supersonic as had once been floated due to the fact the inevitable sonic booms disrupted angelic flight—but far faster and cleaner than jets in Elena’s mortal life.
Elena watched the sleek triangular object vanish into the horizon, already missing her sister.
However, it seemed this was the week for family, because she arrived home to find an invitation from the descendants of Beth’s and Amy’s children and their children’s children.
It had been Janvier who’d told Elena to stay in touch with her family through time. “Oui, there will be pain at first,” the Cajun vampire had said as he sat beside her on a bench in Central Park some months after Beth’s funeral.
Laying her sister to rest had savaged Elena’s heart. She’d helped carry Beth to her place of rest, and all she could think of the entire time was how small Bethie had been when their lives changed forever. How her tiny hand had clutched at Elena’s at Ari and Belle’s joint funeral.
She’d been so scared and lost, not truly understanding what had happened to her big sisters. The next day, in an act of confused childish grief, she’d locked away her favorite dolls. “Suzy and Janey are being mean, Ellie.” A quivering lower lip, her strawberry blonde hair a halo around her face. “They’re saying Ari and Belle won’t come back ever.”
As Beth would now never come back.
“You will remember those you lost,” Janvier had continued that day in Central Park, the bayou green of his eyes potent with memory. “As I remember my Amelie and Jöelle and how they used to bring all their complaints to their big brother. They were so ’tite my sisters, so vibrant, and to my eyes, so young to the very end.”
“I never saw Beth as older than me.” Elena’s voice had been as ragged as her heart. “She was and will always be my baby sister.” Even though Beth had gained wrinkles over the years, her skin spotted by time, and was her family’s beloved matriarch, she’d still turned to Elena anytime she needed “grown-up” advice.
“That’s how it should be. Age, the way we look, that is only part of what makes us.” Arms braced on his thighs and the sun glinting off the burnished brown of his hair, the vampire had watched children play with kites in the distance, the colorful diamonds bright against the blue sky.
“But after the pain will come the happiness,” he’d said in his lazy drawl of a voice. “You will catch glimpses of your sister and others in those who come after them. There is a new bébé in my family who could be a copy of my sister, Jöelle.”
He’d put a fist on his heart. “When I’m with their descendants, when I dance with them at a fais-dodo, when I hear their memories, I remember that my family is not dead. It has simply changed and grown, and if I am not to be frozen in stone, so must I.
“Some of my vampiric brethren say it is foolish to hold on, that we should separate vampires from mortals, but why? My Ashblade and I do not go to feed on my family. We go to share their lives and to tell them of ours in turn. You see how it helped Majda and Jean-Baptiste to know you and to know Beth and her children. Such bonds are a gift, Elena.”
Janvier wasn’t like Illium, with whom she’d always had an affectionate friendship. Rather, theirs was the relationship of fellow warriors. He was part of her Guard, and their respect went both ways—but they didn’t do heart-to-heart conversations.
That day, however, he’d taken her hand and held it as he said, “Grieve, Ellie. Oui, you must. But after that is over, you must celebrate what brought Beth such happiness—the family she raised, the legacy she left behind. That is her spirit walking through time.”