She’d just finished shooting her best friend a reply when a new e-mail popped into her in-box. It was from Aodhan, the subject line making Elena’s fingers clench convulsively around the phone and her mind hurtle two months into the past.
• • •
Elena swallowed, the paper crinkling in her hand the only sound as she stood in front of the elevator that would drop her down into the Cellars, the protected area under Guild HQ. She’d taken advantage of the underground safe house when she’d slit Dmitri’s throat during the hunt that had forever altered the course of her life—though, in her defense, he had provoked the action.
It was Vivek, the hunter who ran the Cellars, who’d given her a gun meant to injure an angel long enough to give a mortal a chance to run, to escape. That gun had done far more, Raphael’s blood pooling on the broken sheet of glass that had been the outer wall of her apartment.
“Do it, Ellie,” she ordered, knowing the trip through memory lane was nothing but procrastination at its finest.
Reaching out, she stabbed the button to summon the elevator and, when the doors opened, input the special code on the hidden auxiliary touchpad so the cage would move downward, rather than up into Guild HQ. That code changed on a daily basis and since she’d contacted Vivek directly to get it, he was expecting her.
“I am so whupping your ass today,” he’d predicted, in reference to their continuing Scrabble battle.
They’d always played a game or two anytime Elena was in town for more than twenty-four hours. Now that she was based in New York, she made it a point to come by at least once a week—because Vivek wouldn’t come to her. He was capable of it, his wheelchair state-of-the-art, but hunter-born like her, Vivek found it difficult to be outside when he couldn’t exercise his hunting abilities. The constant bombardment of vampiric scents scraped his senses raw, left him bleeding on the inside.
Exiting the elevator into the pitch-black area under the building, she navigated it without turning on the small flashlight she had in one of the pockets of her cargo pants. It had taken her some time to find a workable pathway after she’d returned to the city with wings, but she now moved through the darkness with confidence, easily avoiding the heavy pillars that were the foundations of the building.
Reaching the scarred and graffitied metal door meant to discourage any intruder who got this far, she coded herself in using another concealed keypad, then put her eye to the retinal scanner. The door slid open seconds later, inviting her into a solid metal cubicle where she was scanned three ways to Sunday in a new layer of security, her weapons noted.
“That way,” Vivek had told her, the first time she’d visited after the upgrade, “if you turn out to be a bad guy, I can gas you, and bye-bye, Evil Elena.”
“Funny,” she’d said at the time, thinking about just how much trust they put in Vivek down here—all of them dead certain that trust would never be broken. He might be occasionally petty, but Vivek was nothing if not loyal to the Guild.
When the doors opened to release her from the steel cubicle, she knew it hadn’t been an automatic action; Vivek personally cleared all incoming and outgoing traffic.
“Ohayoˉ, Vivek,” she said to the air.
“Gozaimasu, Elena.” A pause. “Seriously? That one was so easy even Ransom would’ve got it.”
“I’m going to tell him you said that.” She waited patiently as she was scanned a second time, wondering what other tricks he had up his sleeve; she wouldn’t put it past him to have had automatic gun ports built into the walls.
“Hey, I think I might have to double-check your identity.” Vivek’s voice came out strong and resonant through the speakers. “You usually start bitching about how long the scan takes the second after you walk in.”
Fingers tightening on the piece of paper she’d crushed beyond any hope of repair, she rolled her eyes. “Next time you complain about the bitching, I’m going to remind you of this little conversation.”
A chest-deep laugh, an unexpected sound when it came to the often moody hunter, before the final doors opened in front of her. She headed straight to the reinforced core from where Vivek held court, his steel hand controlling all aspects of the Cellars. That, however, was only a sideline—his true job was keeping watch on anything and everything that might affect the Guild or its hunters.
Today, he buzzed her into his inner sanctum without making her jump through any further hoops. “You’re in a good mood,” she said, when she entered to see him grinning from ear to ear.
“I just had dirty, dirty cybersex with a smoking-hot brunette from Italy. Let’s hear it for intimate international relations.”
“Too much information.” Grabbing a chair, she swiveled it around to sit with her arms braced along the back. In front of her was the large wall-mounted screen where they most often played Scrabble, below it a sleek bank of computers, merely one set of the many that filled the core.
“I go to the trouble of getting a chair constructed to support wings,” Vivek complained, “and you always do that.”
“If you ever get rid of that chair, I’ll never forgive you.”
Pretending to think about it, he brought up a game. “I hope you have tissues—because I plan to make you cry like a widdle baby.”
He was in such a good mood, she thought again. Vivek was often sarcastic, sometimes sulky, more than a few times curt, but truly happy? It was an uncommon thing. She didn’t want to change the tone of this conversation, wanted to leave him as happy as she’d found him.