Page 30 of Archangel’s Lineage

“Mom, I’m not seven anymore,” Zoe said with a laugh, hugging Sara again.

“Listen to your mother,” Elena ordered. “You hate cold pancakes, so if you come back too late, we’ll have to listen to you moan the entire time.”

Grinning, Zoe shot them both a salute before running off to call her father—who also happened to be a craftsman Zoe respected beyond all others.

“My God, Sara,” Elena said when they were alone, “she’s better than most people I know who’ve set themselves up as full-time professionals. That includes immortals.”

“She’s brilliant.” Sara’s pride was a fire in her eyes. “I’ve known since she was about five that she was going to become a weapons-maker like her father.”

Elena understood why Sara and Deacon had pushed Zoe to attend college despite that, when Zoe would’ve preferred to go straight into a full-time apprenticeship with Deacon. They’d worried what Deacon’s solitary way of working, which perfectly suited his nature, would do to their social butterfly of a daughter.

So they’d offered Zoe a deal—try college for a year, and if she hated it, they wouldn’t ask her to go back. “She still friends with the same group?” Elena asked Sara today.

Sara nodded. “She chose her major well—a lot of these kids are going to work in fields adjacent to hers.” Elena’s best friend sighed. “Not that any of them are kids anymore. When did my baby start not being a baby, Ellie?”

Elena patted her shoulder. “She’ll always be your baby.”

Her mind flared, rippled, rolled backward.

***

“You’ll always be my bébé, Ellie.” A kiss pressed to her temple, a laughing smile at a toddling Beth. “And you, too, chérie.”

Her accent was familiar and missed, the scent of her a heaven of gardenias. “Now, where are my big babies? Belle! Ari!” she called out. “Come, help your maman set the table.”

A crash of feet, two more girls tumbling into the room—who were immediately snatched up into a hug by Marguerite, while Ellie and Beth laughed and ran to attack their sisters’ legs.

“Mama!” Belle protested, but she was laughing.

“Something’s biting my leg!” Ari looked down, her oval-shaped face warm with delight. “Oh, it’s a Beth crab! I’m gonna catch you, Beth crab!”

As a squealing Beth ran off, Ellie pretended to pounce on Belle.

***

“Ellie.” Sara’s hand on her arm.

Shaking off the ghostly laughter of her mother and sisters, Elena turned to her best friend. “Sorry. Got lost in my own head.”

“I know that look.” Sara’s voice was quiet, potent. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but I remember. Did you have a flash of memory?”

“A moment I’ve never before remembered,” Elena admitted. “I was younger than I usually am in the dreams, maybe seven or eight. It was a good one,” she told her friend. “Happy.”

What she didn’t say was that it had nonetheless cut her until she bled from a thousand stinging wounds.

***

Elena walked Zoe to the subway stop where she was meeting up with some friends from college who were also in the city for the week. “We plan to shop and eat,” Zoe told her, a glint in her eye. “I might find the perfect belly button decoration.”

“Stop messing with your mother.” Elena chuckled. “You serious about the piercing?”

“I think so. But I’m also considering doing my left eyebrow—I gotta look tough as a weapons-maker.”

“I hear and know nothing.”

Zoe snorted, a mischievous child. One who morphed into a nonchalant and sophisticated young woman in front of her friends outside the entrance to the subway. “Oh, this is just my Aunt Ellie,” she said to her bug-eyed friends. “Remember, I told you she and my mom have been best friends since forever? Murder enemies and disappear the bodies for each other kind of friends.”

Biting the inside of her cheek at that not inaccurate representation of her friendship with Sara, Elena posed for selfies with the excited group before waving them off on their day’s adventures.

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