Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
They listened.
They waited.
6
You know what I’ve learned from my baby girl? To enjoy the now. It’ll be gone soon enough, and no one knows what the next hour, much less tomorrow, will bring.
—Sara Haziz to Elena Deveraux (Once, on a New York roof)
A week after Nisia confirmed her pregnancy, Elena sat on the Tower roof, her legs hanging over the edge high above the clouds, and said, “Sara, you have no idea how much I miss you.” She’d made other friends through time, had so many people she trusted, knew she was beyond lucky when it came to the people in her life, but her friendship with Sara…it had defined her, made her.
They’d been young together, had matured together, had never been beyond each other even after Elena’s body stopped aging while Sara’s took on the touch of time. In mind and heart—the places where it counted—they’d still been on the same timeline. Friends who had counseled each other in turn.
As Sara had counseled her a mere week before her passing. Her best friend hadn’t been fatalistic, but she’d known her time was coming, all the more so after she lost Deacon. Husband, father, hunter, weapons-maker, Deacon’s loss was still mourned by immortals centuries after he chose a mortal existence.
“Promise me you won’t memorialize an ideal version of me,” Sara had said with the directness that was her hallmark, “turn me into some kind of saint to which no one else can compare. Make a new best friend, Ellie, and tell them about how I was a hard-ass—but a hard-ass you loved all the same.”
“I did make a close friend—not a best friend, not yet, but we’re getting there,” Elena said to Sara’s memory, her throat thick. “But I couldn’t make a mortal one, not after I lost you.” The idea of going through that agonizing pain again had been too much. “I don’t know how Illium did it all those years, making mortal friend after mortal friend.”
But even knowing that Sara would be annoyed with her for it, Elena hadn’t put any effort into new friendships for centuries after losing her best friend and sister of the heart. It wasn’t as if she’d been alone—she’d had Eve, Illium, Ashwini, Vivek, Honor, Jessamy, so many others.
It had been enough, her grief over losing Sara too profound for anything else.
“There you are.” A crisp, curt voice. “I’ve told you this spot is ridiculous, and still you insist on perching here like a damn insect.” Long legs clad in black, the feet encased in dark green ankle boots, came down beside her own, Greta taking a seat on the edge with a very disgruntled “old-person” harrumph.
“This is terrible for my reputation,” added the Tower’s chief admin and the woman who still happened to terrify Aodhan, even if he was consort and second to an archangel these days.
Elena’s melancholy morphed into a sharp grin as she glanced at the woman who had become her most unexpected friend literal centuries after they’d first met—the only person who had come even close to settling in that space in her heart that was for a friend like Sara.
Greta wasn’t a woman of family as Sara had been. Elena couldn’t imagine her rocking a baby; Greta would probably hold it at arm’s length, head turned away, as if the baby were some alien object. Said baby shouldn’t be insulted, however—Greta didn’t like people in general the vast majority of the time. But Greta and Sara shared two traits: a core of unbending steel and a relentless loyalty when they chose to offer that loyalty.
It hadn’t surprised her in the least when Greta had told her that she and Sara had had a “cordial” relationship. That was high praise from Greta. “Your friend got things done,” she’d said.
“No dancing around touchy subjects, either. When you went missing after you fell in Raphael’s arms, she sent me the Guild’s strike notice to pass up the chain—no hunts until the Tower revealed your location and status and proved it by taking Sara to you. I told her she’d die going up against an archangel. She sent me back a Guild dagger in answer.”
A shake of the head. “I admire very few people, Elena, but I admired Sara Haziz. I kept the dagger, you know, and the strike notice. Appropriated both from Dmitri’s office after Sara won that battle. Do you want to see?”
It had healed a small part of Elena’s broken heart to know that other immortals carried pieces of Sara in their memories, too. Because she and Greta, they’d only had that conversation some five hundred years after Sara’s passing. Greta made it a point to hold on to both the physical objects and the memories.
Today, Elena said, “You seriously have eyes in the back of your head and also on top of your head. Not to mention psychic radar.”