“It’s called a necropsy when it’s an animal—and sure. If someone’s going to pay for it.” Her gaze went from Ashwini to Janvier and back. “As you can see”—a wave around the shabby examination room, the paint peeling off the walls and the linoleum worn—“I don’t exactly charge my clients a lot, so I need the money from those who can afford it.”

“Guild will cover it. Look for anything strange—beyond the obvious.”

“It’ll have to be tomorrow. I promised my daughter I’d be home for dinner tonight.” The vet took off her glasses to pinch the bridge of her nose between forefinger and thumb. “With the battle and all, she needs her mom.”

Ashwini’s throat grew thick; she knew all about needing her mom. Coughing slightly in an effort to clear the obstruction, she said, “Call me when you’re done.” She didn’t really expect the vet to find anything significant, but better to check and make certain than miss a crucial fact. “You understand this is confidential?”

“I’m not about to mess with the Tower or the Guild by blabbing.”

Exiting the clinic a few minutes later, Ashwini glanced at Janvier. “Has an animal ever become infected with vampirism?”

“It’s not a disease, cher.”

“You know what I mean.”

“As far as I know,” he said, passing her a helmet, “no animal has ever become a vampire, but I’m comparatively young in immortal terms. Do you want me to check with Dmitri?”

“Yeah, I guess if anyone would know, it’d be him.”

His thighs defined against the denim of his jeans as he straddled the bike, Janvier picked up his own helmet. “The body,” he said, holding her gaze, “it reminds me of the atrocity we witnessed during the battle.”

A shudder rippled through her. “Me, too.”

Ashwini, Janvier, and Naasir had watched Lijuan bury her face in the neck of one of her soldiers, her mouth open and teeth glinting. When she lifted her face back up, the lower half was a macabre mask of red, and she was bloated with power, her wounds healed, while the soldier lay a dead husk at her feet, a willing sacrifice.

“But,” Ashwini pointed out, “even if Lijuan has somehow resurrected herself since the battle”—though she couldn’t imagine how, when Raphael had blown the crazy bitch to smithereens—“I can’t see an archangel who believes herself a goddess feeding off animals. I think she’d rather starve.”

Janvier slipped on his helmet. “The dog was also not desiccated enough for this to be Lijuan.”

“You’re right.” The empty husks that evidenced Lijuan’s feeds had been so fragile, Naasir had crumbled one into countless fragments when he tried to carry it off as proof. In the end, they’d had to leave the husks where they’d fallen—after Ashwini took multiple photographs using her phone.

When Janvier and Naasir returned to the site after Lijuan’s defeat, it was to discover the reborn had stampeded through it, crushing the remains to dust. “What’s the chance that Lijuan is fully dead?” Putting on her helmet, she got on the bike behind Janvier.

“Low,” he said over the throaty rumble of the bike’s engine. “Archangels don’t die easily, and Lijuan is the oldest of the Cadre, if we don’t include Raphael’s mother.”

It wasn’t the news Ashwini wanted to hear. Because who the fuck knew what a half-dead archangel could do even after her body had been annihilated?

5

Elena stretched her shoulders as she sat on the rooftop of the building given over to the Legion, her legs hanging over the side and her wings resting against the rough concrete surface. Her position gave her a direct view of the Tower, its windows blazing with the reflected glory of what promised to be a dazzling sunset.

Beside her crouched the Primary, in the Legion’s distinctive gargoyle-like resting pose. Wings arched high and one arm braced on his knee, he was dressed in what had been unrelieved black, but was now dusty, the dark of his hair the same. He still wasn’t “human” in any sense, but he no longer made the hairs rise on the back of her neck.

Most of the time.

“You are tired.”

Elena reached up to fix her ponytail, her hair damp from the quick shower she’d grabbed, else she’d be as covered in dust and grit as the Primary. “Busy day.” She’d spent it ferrying materials to facilitate the repair of one of the outlying high-rises that had been damaged during the battle. “How are the modifications to this building going?”

“It was not built for winged residents.”

The eerie, risen-from-the-depths male was getting verbose on her, she thought dryly. “Yes, there’s a lot of work to be done.” Railingless balconies had to be added, internal walls knocked down, windows turned into doors—what was safe and comfortable for mortals and vampires was annoying and stifling for winged beings.

The overhaul would take time, but a technical assessment by a specialist team had shown it would still be faster and more efficient to modify an existing building to the Legion’s requirements than to build a new one from the ground up.

“Are your people handling it all right for now?” One thing the Primary had told them was that while the Legion did not need sleep, his men didn’t do well cut off from one another so soon after their rising.

“Yes. We gather on the roof.”

Elena knew that. The first night she’d looked across from the Tower at midnight and seen their crouched forms, those hairs on the back of her neck had stood straight up. She wondered if the Legion had any idea how seriously other they could sometimes be. “If the snow’s too cold, we can organize—”