eyeing a large potted plant.
“Ray, do something!” Magda demanded. “Posses don’t just stand around watching!”
“Er . . .” Ray pulled his camera out of his pocket and took a picture.
“Oh, for the love of all that is right and holy . . .” Magda snatched his camera away.
“He didn’t tell you how he killed my Beloved? How he watched her die slowly, her flesh melting off her body? He didn’t tell you how I almost died that night, too?” Alec called.
My eyes widened as I looked at Kristoff. You killed Alec’s Beloved?
No.
Then why-
My wife did. I told you she killed the mate of a Dark One.
You didn’t tell me she was Alec’s Beloved!
I didn’t know until you showed me that damned reaper journal.
“I thought you said vamps couldn’t live without their Beloveds,” Magda said as Raymond pestered her for his camera back.
“They can’t,” Alec yelled, leaping aside as Kristoff lunged forward, simultaneously throwing a metal bench at him. Alec jumped back, then immediately started an attack on the other side.
I realized at that moment what Kristoff was doing. He was keeping himself between Alec and me. My heart warmed with love for him. He wasn’t just keeping me alive for his own sake, but because he truly did have gentler emotions for me. They wouldn’t ever be what he had for his late girlfriend, but I had at last resigned myself to being happy with what he could give me.
“How did you survive, then?” I asked, sending Kristoff wave after wave of love.
He glanced back at me for a split second, startled. I blew him a kiss. Mattias, next to me, blew him one as well.
“We weren’t yet Joined. I had just met Eleanor when she ran into the Zorya.”
The word echoed with a horrible reverberation in my head.
Kristoff stumbled.
“A Zorya?” Magda asked, just as astounded as I was. “Uh-oh.”
“No!” I screamed, throwing myself forward as Alec, taking advantage of the misstep, kicked Kristoff’s other leg out and was instantly upon him, the sword held at Kristoff’s heart. “Nooo!”
Alec looked up from Kristoff, his green eyes like those of a cat, relish evident in them as he panted, his face and hands blistered. “Why shouldn’t I kill him, Pia?”
“Because I love him,” I said simply.
He hesitated, his eyes searching my face. Tears spilled over my eyelashes as I looked at Kristoff, his skin blistering as well, his gaze steadfast on mine.
Alec shook his head, his fingers tightening around the hilt of the sword. “Not good enough.”
“Then . . . because I can do this.” I pulled as hard as I could on the power of the moon, pulling from it the silvery cool light that filled me with a calm sense of rightness, slamming it into Alec’s chest.
He flew backward into a storage bench, knocking it over, his arms and legs tangling up in the chair cushions that spilled out from inside it.
Kristoff reached for the sword Alec had knocked out of his grip, stalking over to where the man who had once been his friend lay inert in a small stream of blood seeping from a cut on his head.
I joined Kristoff. We both stood and watched Alec for a moment.
“You didn’t kill him,” Kristoff said.
“No. There was only enough power in that ball of light to knock him backward and maybe singe off a little chest hair. Your wife was a Zorya?”
Pain washed through him. Pain and guilt and something that, for a moment, reminded me of fear. “Yes.”
“Which means, unless things have changed over the centuries, that you were a sacristan.”
Kristoff turned to me, his eyes robin’s-egg blue. “I did not know the woman was his Beloved.”
I touched his mind with mine. He was reluctant to allow the intimacy, but I was insistent, and he finally let me in. The dark, stained part of his mind that I thought was due to his plans with the vampires was now lit brightly.
You thought I would hate you if I knew you were once a reaper, too?
You did not wish to be Zorya anymore.
So?
You have to be married to a sacristan to be Zorya. I could not risk giving you up. And I knew that once you were aware of what I had been, how it was my wife who had started the reapers on their path of murder, you would not wish to remain with me.
I stared at him in growing disbelief. Do you seriously believe that I would dump you because of something you were a couple of hundred years ago?
Other women have when they found out.
Other women like Angelica?
He turned away from me, prodding Alec with his shoe.
“Show’s over, I guess,” Magda said softly. “Why don’t we go inside and give them a bit of privacy?”
“Probably best,” Raymond said, fussing over the camera that Magda had handed back to him. “Oh, now look what you did. You had it set completely wrong for this amount of sun. . . .”
“Come on, Mattias. Mattias . Honey, we need to have a talk about Pia. Why don’t you come with Ray and me, and I’ll tell you how things stand.”
The others left. I grabbed Kristoff’s arm and made him turn around to me. “I know you don’t want to talk about her. And I promise I will never bring up her name after this, but please, Kristoff, answer me. Did the woman you loved above all others shun you because she found out about your origins?”
His eyes narrowed. “The woman I loved above all others?”
“Angelica. Your girlfriend. The one the reapers killed,” I said, in case I’d gotten her name wrong.
“I loved her, but I didn’t love her above all other women,” he said. “And yes, we were tracing some reapers when somehow she stumbled across information about my past. She was repulsed by what I had been, and ran away from me. It was then that the reapers caught her.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, waggling a finger at him. “You were mourning her when I first met you.”
“No, I wasn’t,” he said, stroking his chin.
“But . . . you had sworn eternal vengeance or something like that. Alec told me.”
He gave a little shrug. “I had sworn to avenge her death, yes. As well as find out who had given her the information about me that sent her fleeing to that death.”
“Still haven’t figured it out?”
We both looked down to the source of the question, Kristoff immediately putting the sword tip to Alec’s neck.
Alec waved it away, pulling himself up until he was propped up on a nearby bench. “You can drop the sword. I’m not going to kill Pia.”
I widened my eyes. “Were you going to try?” I squeaked.
“Yes. It seemed only fitting to take his Beloved as he took mine.” Alec winced as he felt along his head, his fingers coming away smeared with red. “And speaking of killing, why didn’t you end my suffering once and for all?”
“I couldn’t do that without a ceremony and a group of reapers,” I said, watching him carefully. “Not that I would. You really would have killed me?”
“Yes.” He looked up, his gaze meeting mine before a wry smile stole over his mouth. “No. I thought I could, but I guess I’m just too weak.”
“I don’t think it’s weakness,” I said, smiling slowly. “I think you realize that Kristoff did not kill your Beloved.”
Alec leaned back against the bench, his eyes closed. “Does it matter anymore?”
“Yes, it does,” Kristoff said, lowering the sword. “You told Angelica the truth.”
“Yes. As I did Mabel, and Augustine, and who was that dairymaid in Alsace whom you used to visit every Sunday? Marie? I told them, just as I told every woman who ever captured your heart.”
