Gwendolyn’s lips pursed tight, her hands fisted at her sides as she stared at her husband. When Jeffrey didn’t speak, the black-haired woman turned to Elena. “Hunter-born,” she said. “My baby is hunter-born.”
If Elena hadn’t been braced against the doorjamb, she’d have col apsed—her body felt as if it had taken a tremendous blow. Disbelief had her saying,
“That’s not possible.” Hunter-born were rare, very rare, being birthed with the ability to scent-track vampires. However, it did run in families—Elena had always believed her ability came from her mother’s unknown bloodline.
“We’ve run tests,” Jeffrey snapped out. “Using Harrison and some of his friends. She can track them.”
Harrison was a vampire, and Elena’s brother-in-law, married to Marguerite’s only other surviving daughter—Beth. The fact that Evelyn could track him ...
“You,” Elena whispered, staring at Jeffrey. “It comes from you.” He’d known, she thought, glimpsing the flash of some unnamable emotion in his eyes. Al this time, when he’d been rejecting her for her “base, inhuman” occupation, he’d known it was his blood that had given it to her.
A muscle pulsed along Jeffrey’s temple, his skin pul ed taut over that aristocratic bone structure. “That has no place in this conversation.”
Elena laughed. Harsh, jagged. She couldn’t help it. “You hypocrite.”
His head snapped toward her. “Be quiet, Elieanora. I’m stil your father.”
The hel of it was that part of her was stil the little girl who’d once adored him, and that part wanted to obey. Fighting the urge, she was about to retort when she glimpsed Gwendolyn’s face. The other woman looked shattered, and al at once, Elena’s anger with her father, his fury at her, wasn’t the most important thing. It would keep. It had kept for over a decade.
“She’l need training,” she said, speaking to Gwendolyn. “Without it, she’l find it difficult to focus and concentrate.” The cacophony of scents in the air, especial y in a city as ful of vampires as New York, could severely impact one of the hunter-born. Elena had taught herself to filter out the endless “noise”
in the years before she grew old enough to join the Guild without parental permission, but it had been a painful, lonely road. One Evelyn didn’t have to take. “You need to register her at Guild Academ—”
“No!” Jeffrey’s voice was rigid with withheld rage. “I wil not have another daughter of mine tainted by that place.”
“It’s a school,” Elena said, keeping a white-knuckled grip on a temper that pul ed aggressively at the reins. “It has specialized teachers.”
“She will not be a hunter.”
“She already is, you bastard!” Elena yel ed, the reasoned adult fal ing apart under the echoes of childhood. “If you’re not careful, you’l lose her the same way you lost me!”
The blow hit. She saw it.
For herself, she wouldn’t have fought. But for Evelyn, she pushed forward, using the advantage. “Being hunter-born isn’t a choice. It’s part of our very makeup. If you ask her to make a choice, she’l probably choose you.” Before Jeffrey could pounce on that, she added, “And she’l go mad if not in the next few years, then in the next decade.” The urge to hunt was a pulse in the blood, a hunger that could consume if caged.
Gwendolyn gave a short, choked cry. “Jeffrey, I won’t lose my daughter. You might be able to walk away from your child, but I won’t.” Turning to Elena, she said, “Can you send me the information about the Academy? Perhaps ... would you speak to Eve?”
Shaken by the maternal love that had turned cool, composed Gwendolyn into a lioness, Elena nodded. “I’l be out in the garden if you want to bring her down.” Suiting action to words, she stepped out into the smal backyard and breathed in deep lungfuls of the open air. This close to Central Park, it held hints of fir and water and horses, but below that was the constant hum of the city, a touch of smoke and metal, the active press of humanity.
Rubbing at her eyes with one of her hands, she froze when she felt Jeffrey in the doorway at her back. “Is it possible the vampire who murdered the girls at the school was drawn to Evelyn?”
The question threw ice water across her senses. Because it meant he knew. Jeffrey knew Slater Patalis had been drawn to their smal family home because of Elena. Part of her, the part that held the lost, hurt girl she’d once been, had hoped he didn’t, that there might yet be hope for a relationship between them, but if he knew ... “No,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “We caught the vampire who murdered Celia and Betsy. He wasn’t like Slater.”