“You are. You blame them for leaving. Or, at least, a part of you does.”
Leo stared at him, stared at his profile so hard that Malachi could feel his eyes. Finally, he said, “They left us alone. Irin and Irina were never meant to be separate. We were always meant to fight together.”
“So many had been lost, Leo. It must have been a huge shock. They were frightened.”
“We’re all frightened sometimes.” Leo’s voice was barely over a whisper. “But you don’t run away. You never run away.”
They drove for another three hours. Rhys snored in the backseat, and Leo and Malachi had turned to more pleasant topics of conversation.
“You must remember some of this,” Leo said with a laugh. “She was so angry with you.”
Malachi grinned. “I don’t. She really stood up, drunk in a bar full of Grigori, and told them you were a catch?”
“And criticized their grooming. Don’t forget that part.”
Both men burst out laughing.
“And there was some comment about makeup, too.”
“Was I laughing this hard then?” His sides ached with the vision of the tiny human woman he’d seen in pictures telling off six Grigori while Leo looked on, helplessly wondering what to do.
“Are you joking?” Leo wiped tears from the corner of his eye. “You were furious. Ava was ready to call the police when you threatened to stab one.”
“It sounds like she didn’t like me very much.”
“Well, she didn’t know the truth then. She still thought you were an out-of-control bodyguard. Trust me, she liked you very much.” Leo couldn’t contain his smile.
“What did she do after that? She didn’t call the police?”
“No, she took you out to an isolated monastery on the Prince Islands and pulled a gun on you.”
His eyebrows shot up. “What?”
“Then she kissed you. Or you kissed her. You were vague relating that part of the story.”
He couldn’t laugh anymore, but he did smile. “I should think so.”
“When you brought her back to the scribe house, Damien was livid. But you stood up to him. You were certain of her identity. Even though it took some convincing, you were certain. And you were right. You and Ava belonged together. I knew it.”
“I loved her, didn’t I? Even when I thought she was human, I loved her.”
Leo opened his mouth, but no sound came out at first. Then he said quietly, “I believe you did. Even when you thought she was out of reach.”
“Come back to me.”
Malachi nodded, ignoring the tight clutch in his throat. “I, uh… I dream about her, you know?”
“About Ava?”
He just nodded.
Leo angled his shoulders toward him. “What do you dream?”
“Just that we are together. We speak. We… we’re together. I don’t remember everything, but she’s there. Every time I close my eyes, she’s there.”
Leo said nothing, just blinked in surprise. Finally, he faced the road again. “Well, no wonder you didn’t want to wake up earlier.”
They fell silent for another few kilometers, but when they saw the lights of Budapest in the distance, Leo reached back and shook Rhys’s knee. “Wake up, old man.”
“What?” Rhys muttered. “I’m awake. I’m up.”
“We’re almost to Philip’s,” Leo said.
Malachi could see Rhys shaking his head and rubbing his eyes in the rearview mirror. The scribe patted his cheeks and grabbed his water bottle to take a drink.
“So, what have you ladies been gossiping about without me?”
“I was telling Malachi some of the funniest stories about Ava.”
“Oh really?”
“Like the time she told the bar full of Grigori that I was a catch.”
Rhys’s eyes gleamed mischievously in the light of a passing truck, then the corner of his mouth curled into a smirk.
“Did you tell him about the time she kissed me?”
Malachi hissed, “What?”
“There was tongue.”
He slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting the back of a red van, and Rhys went flying into the passenger seat, smashing his nose on the headrest.
“For heaven’s sake,” Rhys yelled from the back. “This again?”
Malachi didn’t know what Rhys was griping about. By the time they’d arrived at his friend Philip’s scribe house on the outskirts of Budapest, his nose had completely healed. Other than the smear of blood on his collar, he looked none the worse for wear.
They grabbed their bags out of the back of the Range Rover and walked toward the entrance.
“We’ll rest for a couple of days here,” Rhys said. “I’m still waiting to hear from Max. He should have a meeting with Gabriel by tomorrow at the latest. After that, we’ll know more about what’s going on in the city and what the political climate is like.”
“Do you still think we should keep quiet about what happened to Malachi?”
“Damien said not to tell anyone about Ava unless we absolutely had to. If that’s the case, I say we avoid talking about Malachi as well. Unless the word has spread from Cappadocia, we should be fine.”
Leo said, “I don’t think the scribes in Cappadocia have much communication with the houses in the city.”
Malachi had realized that if no other descriptor was given, “the city” always referred to Vienna. According to Leo, it was the center of the Irin race. Everything, from finances to art to government, centered on Vienna, where the Irin had lived for centuries under the noses of the human population. Malachi couldn’t remember it at all.