Page 43 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 1

Marcus clapped me on the shoulder. “Good lad,” he said. “I was hoping that was all. There’s a great deal of paperwork and politics in the aftermath of the death of a vampire heir, you know. I’m glad I could avoid all the fuss.” He turned away and searched through a cabinet, pulling out a dusty bottle and a plastic squeeze bottle of honey in the shape of a bear. He set a mug in front of me that had a bright purple cartoon spider on it, giving four thumbs up. Below the spider, it said, in a jaunty green font: browsing the web! He poured a measure of liquid from the dusty bottle into it.

I drank the contents of the mug in three long gulps. It was a surprisingly good ruby port. Marcus began humming to himself as he squeezed honey onto his sandwich.

“What do you think?” he asked conversationally. “Should I add in some walnuts?”

I looked at the gloopy mess he’d built. “They might help with the structural integrity?” I offered weakly.

Marcus nodded sagely and began rummaging through a drawer. I heard the shower turn off, and shortly after, Evangeline came out of the bathroom in a cloud of sweet-smelling steam. She had changed into a soft-looking dress made of moss-green fabric, cut to leave her toned, freckled arms bare. Her hair was twisted up in a towel, but a few damp curls were attempting to make an escape, plastering themselves to the long pale line of her neck.

“You two having fun?” she asked.

“We had a wonderful talk,” Marcus said cheerfully. “Didn’t we, Gabriel?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was quite a talk.”

“Great,” Evangeline said. “Shower’s all yours if you want to go get cleaned up. There are towels in the hutch.”

The idea of being even more vulnerable around Marcus wasn’t appealing, but the idea of escaping the room definitely was. I stood with as much dignity as I could muster, pulled a change of clothes from the bottomless tote, and headed to the bathroom.

I am falling in love with Evangeline, I thought, stripping off my stained and torn clothes. I am falling in love with her, I thought, as the hot water sprayed down over me, washing away the grime of travel and combat. I am falling in love with her.

How could I have let this happen? I had duties to fulfill, responsibilities to my clan, and to my people as a whole. I would have to marry a vampire, produce vampire heirs, continue my lineage. Plenty of high-ranking vampires pursued relationships outside of the bonds of marriage, often with the knowledge of their spouses, but even then they slept with other vampires, or perhaps a nymph or werewolf. Sleeping with a witch would have been bad enough, but falling for one?

Witches created vampires and had immediately considered them a failed experiment before they tried to destroy them. Vampires had been created then betrayed by their creators. The ones who escaped the initial massacre had stayed on the run for years, fleeing witches who were intent on experimenting on them, draining them, and using their life force for experiments. Only a few of the vampires who remembered those brutal, paranoid times survived. One of them was my father.

My father wasn’t the sort of man capable of acknowledging his own fear, so instead, he twisted it, converting it into frigid anger. Given his willingness to make problems disappear, I didn’t want to imagine what he might do if he learned how I felt about Evangeline.

I could only avoid Evangeline by hiding in the shower for so long, so I dried off, using a towel that the apartment had thoughtfully warmed up for me, and dressed in clean clothes. Luckily, I’d had the forethought to pack something comfortable, although even I had to admit that the merino trousers probably wouldn’t have been ideal for hiking. As I shrugged on my shirt, the top two buttons popped off and clattered to the floor in a way that I might have assumed was spontaneous if I wasn’t aware of Chanel’s inclinations.

“Not your most subtle work,” I told the apartment. The apartment seemed unrepentant, which was fairly standard, given that it was a building. I rolled my sleeves neatly up to the elbows, did my best to finger-comb my damp hair into some rough semblance of order, and went back out into the main space of the apartment.

Evangeline was curled up on the sofa with a thunderously purring Pothos in her lap. She perked up when she saw me, and the cat cracked open an eye to glare at me.

“Feeling better?” she asked, running a hand down the cat’s grassy back.

“Much,” I said. It was true. I was still actively tamping down my panic, but at least now I was clean. “Where’s Marcus?”

“He headed out,” she told me. “He said he was going to make some calls and see if he could find a safer place to store the fragment of the ascendancy array.”

“I see,” I said, trying to hide my relief. “Well, once I retrieve my things from the enchanted bag, I’ll be out of your hair.”

Evangeline bit her lip. “Actually, um… Usually after big jobs it takes me a while to unwind. Usually, I invite Isabella over and we have a girls’ night or something, but would you…? I mean, you don’t have to, obviously—you’re probably pretty busy—but you could stay. If you wanted.” She took a deep breath and tried again. “I’d like it if you stayed.”

Nothing could have forced me to leave in that moment. “I suppose I could make some room in my schedule.”

15

EVANGELINE

“Ionly have a passing familiarity with the rituals that make up a standard girls’ night,” Gabriel said. There was a small furrow between his eyebrows, and he looked deadly serious, and a little perturbed, like he’d just realized there was a massive oversight in his research.

I did a really good job of not laughing. “The girls’ night thing was just an example. We don’t have to do any of that stuff.”

“What do you and Isabella usually do on those nights?” he asked, cocking his head to the side. His hair was drying into a chaotic curly mass, and he looked softer and less guarded than I was used to. I patted the sofa next to me, and he settled onto it lightly.

“Watch a movie, drink, gossip,” I said. “Sometimes I do her nails. She offers to do mine, but she’s awful at it. Stuff like that.”

Gabriel nodded, listening intently. “I don’t have objections to any of that. Except perhaps the gossip. Not out of any sort of disapproval of it, you understand, just because I doubt we have anyone in common to gossip about.”

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