But my relief was short-lived.
The air left my lungs as I watched a man appear out of nowhere behind them; short, bald, wearing glasses and a light grey suit. In one hand was a briefcase I recognised. In the other, a long Samurai-style curved sword.
I opened my mouth to scream at Clive and Annette to turn around.
I was too late.
The sword moved fast and sure, impaling them both as its long blade was pushed through both their bodies from behind, piercing their hearts.
I saw Annette’s look of shock before her eyes glazed over, and though I could not see Clive’s face I saw his hand as he grabbed hold of Annette’s in his last living act, and they crumpled to the ground.
Suddenly his calculated eyes met mine. Like he’d known I was there. Like he’d known all along I was watching.
Like … the entire display had been for me.
The corner of his mouth twitched and he bowed his head before stepping back into the shadows.
‘What the hell was that?’ Gray asked, still beside me.
‘Throw me up!’ I yelled.
He didn’t hesitate, just cupped his hands and held them out. When I leaped into the hand-hold he used all his strength to catapult me high into the air. I landed on the balcony above, and ran towards Clive and Annette.
When I reached their motionless bodies, I looked around frantically, but he was nowhere to be seen. I dropped to my knees beside them, checking for their pulses. They were gone. No matter how much healing power I had, I couldn’t bring back the dead.
Carter, who’d stayed on the upper level, was the first to reach me.
‘Aw, hell, purple,’ he said, crouching beside me. ‘Are you hurt?’
I shook my head. ‘He killed them before they even knew he was behind them.’
‘You sure you’re not hurt? You look white as a ghost,’ he said. ‘These two friends of yours, or something?’
I shook my head again. But Carter was right. I had seen something that had me shaking for the first time in two years. Something a part of me had been waiting for every day since that night.
The exile who took my blood is back.
And he wanted me to know.
CHaPteR tHRee
‘To live is not merely to breathe; it is to act …’
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
When I’d packed up and left the city with Mum and Dad two years ago, I’d really had no idea what lay ahead. Other than the eternal war. Although I had thought we would make it work all together, it didn’t take long to realise that too much had happened.
I wasn’t the only one who’d changed.
We moved a lot, bouncing between half a dozen of Mum’s safe houses around Europe. Sometimes we travelled simply to go somewhere new, other times it was because I could feel that he was getting close.
Mum was no longer Grigori, and that meant a few things for us. First, while her experience and training methods offered me a lot of insight, she didn’t have the strength or durability she once had. Second, and most frustratingly for her, it seemed that, like angels who exiled, when she became purely human she gave up many of her memories. She was still able to recall the important things, like her partnership with Jonathan and many of the battles they’d encountered, but every now and then I would ask her a specific question and she would just go blank.
Every choice has a consequence and this was one of hers.
As for Dad, as great as it was for me to see him so full of life, he constantly struggled knowing what I faced and had to fight against when I went out at night.
And then there was the love thing.
I was so happy for them. I barely recognised Dad without the haunted, sad eyes that I’d only ever known. With Evelyn by his side, he relished each day. I was proud of them; that they had moved beyond all the obstacles and found their own private bubble filled with love and passion and I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the needle that burst it.
So I left, telling them it was to do my job.
Mum agreed that it was probably for the best, that I needed to take the fight to the exiles. She believed that the battles ahead would come to me whether or not I sought them and it would be better to be ready. But really, it was Dad who understood the most. I knew he recognised the look in my eyes as something similar to what he, too, had once displayed.
After I left Mum and Dad in Switzerland, I spent six months drifting from city to city, picking up odd jobs and failing miserably to pay my way. So, when Josephine tracked down my unlisted number and texted me with an offer of a paid-on-the-side job – fighting two exiles in Prague – I took it.