Chapter One
The child stood behind the bar, no more than five years of age, still and gray as a stone. Blood had long ago soiled her dress, and her hair hung in limp locks to her waist, hopelessly matted.
She smelled of the old forests of home, damp and heavy with decay.
Gabriel hadn’t seen her in nearly forty years—not since the night he’d marked ten years in Sin City. Ten years since his brother Dorian had nearly decapitated him and he’d walked out of Ravenswood without a backward glance.
That night, her dark eyes seemed to hold a particularly urgent warning, though he couldn’t have said what it was. Any number of his choices deserved judgment. Scorn. His first decade out west had passed in a blur of gambling, booze, drugs, women, blood slaves—all part of the epic building of his empire and the search for that elusivesomethingthat’d left his eldest brother unrecognizable.
Obsession.
If Gabriel could find it, he’d reasoned back then—if he could lose himself so completely in the madness of some insatiable desire—perhaps he’d also find confirmation that he wasn’t so cold and broken after all. That a heart could still beat passionately in a chest that’d long ago been excavated, even if it beat for something destructive.
But all Las Vegas had offered Gabriel was a constant ache for home, a fathomless hunger that made him dizzy on the best of days, and a mountain of sin he could never hope to scale—only to profit from. Immensely.
And, of course, there was the child.
He’d been alone in one of his clubs that night too, the last he’d seen her. And drunk. And no closer to un-fucking his life than he was now—more than two thousand miles, four decades, and hundreds of terrible decisions later.
Why the hell she’d chosen today to reappear, Gabriel knew not. Cared not.
“I can’t help you,” he told her, as he always did.
And she lingered, saying nothing, asshealways did.
Never speaking. Never moving. Never aging. Merely watching him with haunted, empty eyes as bottomless as they’d been the morning she’d knelt beside her mother’s corpse in the woods and shook the woman as if the force of her tiny fists had the power to awaken the dead.
Gabriel downed another shot of bourbon. Dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. “Take your revenge, girl, or leave me to plotting mine.”
No response but the eyes, unblinking and ever watchful. Ever judging.
“I said leave me!” He whipped his glass in her direction. It passed right through her, taking out a bottle of rum on the shelf behind her in an explosion of amber and glass.
The girl flickered in his vision but didn’t vanish, existing as she did in the space between all things. In his mind. In his memories. In the hell that surely awaited him on the day—sooner than he’d hoped, perhaps—a witch figured out how to end his immortal life.
“Bloody damned witches. Ghosts.Demons.” His lip curled back on the last word, thinking again of the woman who’d betrayed him. The monster he’d bound in the back of the club, still bleeding. “The whole lot of you canburn.”
Another shot, straight from the bottle this time, and a slice of mid-day sun spilled suddenly into the darkness, chasing off Gabriel’s pitiful thoughts and the child both. He winced at the intrusion, the daylight a sharper pain than it was even a week ago.
The scents of his brothers flooded his awareness, irritating and impossible to miss.
“We’re closed,” he grumbled.
“For fuck’s sake, Gabriel.” Dorian approached with heavy, determined footsteps. Aiden followed behind, four newly appointed royal guards left outside. “Whose blood are you wearing now?”
Gabriel finally glanced up from his seat at the bar, where he’d been thoroughly floating his liver for at least an hour, and grimaced. Until Dorian had mentioned it, he hadn’t even felt the cold, sticky wetness of the demon blood soaking his shirt.
“One who no longer needs it,” Gabriel replied. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to be alone.”
“Actually, I do mind. I’ve been trying to reach you all morning.” Dorian clamped a hand over Gabriel’s shoulder, concern and exasperation warring in his gaze. “What the hell happened to you? Where’s Jacinda?”
Jacinda. A tremor rippled through Gabriel’s muscles. He hissed, forcing his attention to the bottle, lest he inadvertently choke his brother in the witch’s absence. He scraped at the label with his thumbnail, watching the paper bits curl and peel away. “Don’t ask.”
“Lovers’ quarrel?” Aiden took the adjacent barstool, looking over the smashed glass and spilled booze. Leaning close to Gabriel, he sniffed and said, “Doesn’t smell like witch’s blood.”
“That’s because it’sdemonblood, detective,” Gabriel corrected. “A crucial difference all of us would be wise to learn.”
Dorian narrowed his eyes. “Whichdemon? And if you tell me it’s another of Chernikov’s, we’re—”
