Her mouth filled with the taste of bitter rage. "Slater Patalis." The most infamous killer vampire in recent history. "We were his last snack stop."
"The records say the hunters were able to capture him because you disabled him."
"I remember stabbing him through the eye, but that wouldn't have stopped him." Her fingers finally unclenched, dropping the knife. It would've sliced into her thigh had Raphael not caught it midfall.
Placing it on the small bedside table, he said, "Your memories are incomplete?"
"They're coming back more and more." She stared out at the wall, seeing nothing but blood. "I've always seen parts, but now I think they were jumbled up pieces of the whole.
What I saw tonight . . ." Her eyes burned, her hands fisting on her thighs. "The monster broke my mother's legs, her arms, pinned her to the bed, made her listen as he killed Belle and Ari."
Raphael opened his arms. "Come here, hunter."
She shook her head, unwilling to surrender to weakness.
"Even an immortal," Raphael said quietly, "has nightmares."
She knew he wasn't talking about her. Somehow, that made it easier. She fell into his embrace, burying her face in the warm curve of his neck, the clean, bright scent of him filling her lungs. "Later, I saw the streaks on the carpet, realized she'd tried to come to us even after he hurt her so badly. But he came back upstairs, put her in that bed again."
"Your mother fought for you."
"She lost consciousness soon after I found her. I was so scared then, so afraid to be all alone with him, but now, I think her lack of consciousness was a mercy." Her stomach twisted because in the most secret depths of her mind, she knew Slater had hurt her mother in other ways, made Elena watch. "I stayed awake because I knew Beth was coming home from her sleepover soon. I knew I couldn't let the monster get her. But he was gone before that."
"So your youngest sister was saved from the horror."
"I don't know," Elena said, remembering the lack of comprehension on Beth's small face at the funeral ceremony for Ari and Belle. "It was her first ever sleepover, and I don't think she's spent a night away from home ever again. Somewhere deep inside, she's afraid of what she'll come home to."
"You, too, hold a hidden fear," Raphael murmured. "What is it that you're so scared to speak of?"
"I think," she said through the haze of tears she refused to let fall, "he did something to me." Then he'd left both her and Marguerite alive, while Ari and Belle lay dead on the kitchen tiles.
"Tell me." Raphael's voice was an icy breeze.
She welcomed the ice, wrapping it around herself like a safety blanket. "I haven't reached that part of the day yet." Her heart squeezed off panicked beats at the idea but she held on to Raphael, his body strong beneath hers, and confronted the nightmare head-on. "Whatever it was, it was so bad, I blanked it from my mind all these years."
"It may have been the transition that resurrected the memories." His arms were granite around her, possessive, protective, immoveable. "Your coma may have unlocked the same part of your mind as that which opens in immortals duringanshara ."
He'd fallen into the deep healing sleep during the hunt for Uram, had returned to his childhood, to the heartbreaking beauty of his mother's face looking down into his while he bled across a meadow floor. "It opens memories that have faded over time, until we believe that they are long gone."
"Nothing's ever gone." A warm breath across his neck, fingers curling into his chest.
"We fool ourselves that things fade, but they never do."
Raphael brushed a hand over that brilliant near-white hair that had hung like a banner over his arm as they fell to earth in Manhattan. Some memories, he thought, were etched in stone.
"What do you dream of inanshara ?"
"It's not something spoken of. Each angel's journey is his own."
Elena's fingers spread over his heart. "I guess it's about confronting your demons."
"Yes." And then he made a decision he'd never thought he'd make - not since the day he watched Caliane move across the dew-sparkling grass, her feet so light, her voice so clear as she hummed an old lullaby. "I dream of my mother."
Elena stilled. "Not your father?"
"My father was the monster who was known." His mother had been the horror in the dark, unknown, unknowable. "Caliane kissed me good-bye as I lay bleeding and bloody after a fight I knew I'd never win." But he'd had to try, had to stop the madness that had spread a dark stain across his mother's eyes. "That was the last time I saw her."
"Was she killed by the Cadre?"
"No one knows what happened to my mother." It was a mystery that had haunted him for hundreds of years, would probably continue to do so for thousands more. "She simply vanished. No trace of her was ever found after the day I watched her walk away." He hadn't been discovered for . . . a long time. So young, so damaged, he hadn't been able to summon help, had lain there a broken bird, his wings crushed.
"Do you think she knew?" Elena asked, sorrow in her voice. "That she took her own life to spare you the task?"
"Some say that." Raphael ran his fingers down her wings, fascinated as always by the blend of colors that marked his hunter as unique even among angelkind.
"What about you?"
"When angels have lived millennia, they sometimes choose to Sleep until such time as they feel compelled to wake." Secret places, hidden places, that was where angels slept when eternity became a burden.