Page 21 of Archangel’s Lineage

Elena sniffed. “Romeo.” A miniature gray schnauzer, he’d belonged to an older couple and had too much energy to burn. Their home, with four energetic children who loved to play with him, had been his idea of heaven, and he’d often jumped the low fence to join them.

“Marguerite was laughing because I was joking about Romeo trying to find his Juliet, except that he was chasing the wrong species,” Jeffrey said. “I think it was half a dream and half a memory. I didn’t want to wake up.”

Face haunted by his love for a woman long dead, he said, “Do you think the afterlife exists, Ellie? Now that you’re an immortal?”

“Yes,” she answered without hesitation. “Angels can die, too—you saw that in the war. It just takes a lot more to make it happen. And I refuse to believe that we just end. I refuse to believe that Belle and Ari and Maman aren’t having the time of their lives beyond the veil we can’t pierce in life.”

Jeffrey looked away, staring fixedly at the window now blurred by water.

Elena didn’t rush him, well aware he was fighting to control his emotions. That was the thing with her father—he’d always had a hard time with emotion, even before everything went wrong. Marguerite had balanced him then, teaching him how to be soft, how to show his intense and protective love for his daughters without crushing their wild spirits.

“I put her in the ground,” Jeffrey said, still staring at the window lashed by the cold morning rain, the world outside yet night-dark. “She always said she wanted to be cremated, her ashes scattered, but I put her in the ground because I couldn’t let her go.” He turned then, met her eyes full on. “You hate me for that.”

So I can fly, chérie.

Elena took a shuddering breath on the echo of her mother’s long-ago words. “Hate isn’t the right word. I’m so angry with you for breaking that promise. You know what she was like better than anyone—she was a butterfly, a will-o’-the-wisp. She was meant to fly and you buried her in the earth. It haunts me, the idea of her trapped there.”

Jeffrey’s hand spasmed on hers. “You’re the only one other than me who remembers Marguerite, Belle, and Ari.” Rasping voice, his grip increasing in strength. “Beth was too young, has only faded echoes. To their friends, they’re a tragedy long in the past. Do you ever think about that?”

“Yes.” It hurt her heart to realize that one day she alone in all the world would remember a laughing dancer named Mirabelle, a kindhearted budding photographer named Ariel, and a woman of air and delight named Marguerite.

“Even though only we remember,” she said, “we don’t talk about them. You refuse to talk about them.” Anger threaded her voice, and she couldn’t stop it even though he was sick and in a hospital bed.

Her father didn’t rebuke her. “I was the first person to hold my Mirabelle when she decided to arrive in this world on her own timetable, and I was the first person to give my Ariel a bath. I was their father. I was meant to protect them. But I wasn’t there when it counted. I don’t deserve to speak their names.”

“Papa.” Elena let the tears fall now, her head bent over their clasped hands.

Fingers brushing her hair as Jeffrey raised his free hand to caress her downbent head. “I’m sorry.” Rough words. “For so much, Ellie. But most of all, for making you believe you didn’t have a father when you’d already lost everything.”

Never, in all her adult life, had she believed that Jeffrey would apologize to her, much less with such heartfelt grief and sorrow. Maybe it was the medication. Maybe he’d return to being an asshole tomorrow, but at this moment, she felt something toxic that had been clawing at her heart for too long break away, setting her free.

“Slater was attracted to the house because of me,” she said, raising her tearstained face to look him in the eye. “I know you blamed me for it.”

“I blamed myself. Because your blood is mine.” He clenched his jaw. “My mother was hunter-born. That’s where you get it from. I always knew the fault was mine. I saw my mother be murdered and still I went ahead and married and had babies, creating more vulnerable people for the vampires to brutalize.”

When he met her gaze this time, it was with the face of the hard-eyed father she’d come to know. “I never blamed you, Ellie. Do you know what I see when I look at you? A living indictment of my failure. I’m the reason you exist in this world, I’m the reason you live a life surrounded by vampires and blood, and I’m the reason you had to watch your sisters die. It all comes from my bloodline.”

Elena was no longer so sure this was post-surgery meds talking. That had sounded very much like her father. “You know about Mama’s parentage now. One of her parents was a vampire. If your bloodline is to blame, then so is hers.” She shook her head when he would’ve parted his lips to reply. “I know you don’t blame Mama for any of it, but it doesn’t work that way. I’m made of both of you.”

“You’re wrong, Ellie.” Harsh words. “I do blame her. For leaving me. For leaving us. We could’ve made it but she never gave us the chance.” His jaw worked. “We could’ve made it.” The anger in his voice wasn’t the coldness she’d heard so often over the years—this was red-hot and raw and passionate.

He squeezed her hand with more power than he should’ve had. “I hate her a little bit for that. And I love her endlessly.” A moment of searing eye contact. “You’re like me that way, do you know that? You love with as much devotion, and that kind of love? It’ll destroy you if it’s in any way betrayed. She killed me when she killed herself. All that remained was a shell.”

“No,” Elena gritted out, their hands still linked.

Father and daughter.

Survivor to survivor.

Anger against anger.

“You don’t get to cop out like that.” She refused to break eye contact. “You made choices along the way, including the choice to let me think that there was something wrong with me, that my papa had stopped loving me.”

Jeffrey flinched, but his color stayed high, his eyes bright—as if his anger had brought him to life. “You’re right. It’s easier to be angry with Marguerite than to confront how badly I screwed up.”

His chest rose and fell in quick, fast breaths. “I’m so proud of you, Ellie. For always being your own person, for fighting for Eve when she was too small to fight me herself, and for standing up for what you believe in—even if that meant telling me I was an ass.”

Elena’s chest compressed and compressed, until she couldn’t breathe. “How medicated are you?” she managed to get out.

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