Archangel's Storm

15

Jason saw no reason not to acquiesce when they both carried the same knowledge. “Perhaps others could’ve bribed their way in, but we both know only one person could have walked out of Eris’s palace soaked in blood and not been stopped by a single guard.” Guards who professed not to remember a single unusual detail from that murderous night—and who Neha hadn’t executed, though they had permitted the death of her consort.

Mahiya picked up a sweet that was a combination of sugar and milk spiced with cloves and topped with slivers of almond, ate it with great deliberation. “Yes,” she said at last, her tone rough silk, “that was my first thought.”

“You’ve changed your mind?”

“Why would . . . Your presence, it makes no sense.”

Yes, Jason thought, why would Neha invite him to solve a murder she herself had committed and for which no one would ever hold her to account? That was a far more powerful mystery than why Eris had died. It was either madness or fatal arrogance that had led the male angel to believe his wife wouldn’t discover his affair with Audrey. Or perhaps Eris had sought death after three hundred years of imprisonment.

Jason discarded that thought as soon as it arose. Eris had been too self-centered, too much a man of ego to have ever chosen suicide, especially by such a convoluted method and in a way that left him violated and stripped of pride and beauty.

Porcelain clinked on porcelain as Mahiya put her cup on the saucer. “Neha would subvert you from Raphael. Perhaps that is the reason why.”

“No.” Not when Neha had met him soon after he arrived at the Refuge. “She must surely know I will never serve a woman who did such to the one she claimed to love.”

Mahiya’s gaze grew piercing, as if she’d heard the history that drove his declaration.

“And she is too proud to lie and claim you broke the vow in order to have you executed. Which does not leave us with any answers.” Reaching forward, she topped off his tea. “What will you do?”

He considered each of the facts he currently had, both together and as separate pieces. It wasn’t the murder that was the most important. That Neha and Lijuan were involved was problematic, but the two were neighbors—a friendship between them was not incomprehensible. Without further details, he remained in the dark as to the nature of their secret meetings.

And . . . he hadn’t yet worked out how to gain Mahiya her freedom. “I’m not ready to leave.”

Mahiya nudged forward the savories again. “Do you expect me to lie to her when she asks what you have discovered?”

He ate two more of the baked pastries filled with a sweet and spicy vegetable mix. “She won’t listen to the truth from you,” Jason spoke the merciless words knowing Mahiya had already come to the same conclusion. “Rather, she’ll use it as an excuse to kill you.”

Mahiya ate another sweet, her expression unruffled. “She doesn’t need an excuse.”

“I’m not so certain.” In killing Mahiya, Neha would be killing a child she’d helped raise, and angelkind revered the bond a child had with his or her parent or guardian. For a guardian to kill that child . . . it would break a taboo so deep, it was a racial imperative.

Jason, more than anyone, understood that such taboos could be broken, but doing so came at a price. “Executing you without due cause, and while she is clearly sane, would make her a pariah among our kind.” And Neha was a social creature, one who valued her connections around the world.

Sipping at tea that must be tepid by now, Mahiya met his gaze. “I’ll keep my silence, but your reputation precedes you. As the days continue to pass with no result from you, she’ll become suspicious.”

As it turned out, coming up with a way to allay Neha’s distrust was the one thing Jason didn’t have to worry about—because the crimson of blood violently spilled hadn’t yet stopped flowing.

Shock and sorrow both colored Neha’s eyes when she joined Jason beside the crumpled body discovered on a rooftop terrace on the other side of the courtyard from the Palace of Jewels. The weak postdawn sunlight washed everything in soft gold, made it appear a macabre painting. In the center of the painting lay a vampire dressed in a pair of black silk pajamas, the straps of her camisole ripped to expose heavy breasts, her skin gray with death.

Her legs were twisted and broken, as if she’d fallen or been dropped from a height. However, the position of her body made it impossible to confirm whether she’d begun her descent from the sky or from one of the small ground-to-air defense towers mounted around the fort—the nearest one was at the right distance. Jason would speak to the guard who’d been on duty in the predawn hours, but instinct said the victim had never been in the tower, her fall arranged by an angel.

In spite of her exposed breasts, the attack didn’t appear to have been sexual. The damage to her clothing had most likely occurred during the struggle. Unlike Audrey, this victim’s head wasn’t attached to her body; it had rolled to settle against one of the latticework barriers where he’d seen several exquisitely dressed women leaning and laughing yesterday as they looked out over the edge into the courtyard below. Today, the only sound he could hear was that of a woman’s jagged sobs, while in his line of sight lay splatters of congealed rust red where the head had bounced and rolled after being dropped.

She was looking at him from the other side of the room, her pretty dark brown eyes filmed over with a whiteness that was wrong. The stump of her neck was crusted with blood where it sat on the table in the corner, as if placed there for just this purpose.

Unsurprised by the echoes of horror that resonated through time, Jason locked the memory shut behind shields he’d had a lifetime to build, and continued to look at the body that lay in front of him, not one long gone from this earth.

This woman’s chest had been left unmolested, her heart still within her flesh, but in one thing, this body and Audrey’s were identical. Though the crush injuries caused by the fall obscured most of the bruises, Jason could tell the victim had been beaten with pitiless brutality before death. When he turned her over to look at her back, he saw that her spine had been ripped out to lie broken against blood-encrusted skin. He eased her back down with gentle hands, certain she’d been conscious for the beating, the torture, paralyzed and helpless as a babe.

Rage and violence, the killer’s fingerprint was unmistakable. “Do you recognize her?” he asked Neha, aware she had only just returned to Archangel Fort after Eris’s mountaintop funeral. From the heavily damp hair scraped into a knot at her nape and her simple tunic of pale blue paired with white pants, she’d been bathing afterward as was custom, when she received word of this death.

“Her name was Shabnam.” The archangel’s tone held raw grief. “She was one of my longest-serving ladies-in-waiting.” Crouching down beside the vampire’s head with its ravaged skin, uncaring that her wings scraped the cool marble and the blood that stained it, she reached out to close Shabnam’s eyelids over hazel eyes dulled in death, using a dot of power to make sure they remained so. “I scattered Eris’s ashes less than an hour ago while his mother sobbed, and now I must inform Shabnam’s people of her murder.”

Jason heard the anger beneath the grief, and it was another puzzle. “Will you tell me about her?”

“She was a butterfly,” Neha said, rising to her feet, her movements heavy, as if she was weighted down with sadness. “A pretty ornament who cared for glitter and sparkles. She was not dark of heart or wise of politics. The only reason she made it so high in my court was that I enjoyed her sense of innocence.” A twist of her lips. “Of all the women who serve me, she was the most harmless.”

Yet she had been killed with terrible cruelty. Jason wasn’t arrogant enough to think he could read all of Neha’s moods, but her sorrow appeared genuine. And while he could see her murdering Eris in a jealous rage, it beggared belief that she’d spill innocent blood while preparing to say her final farewell to her consort. Even if she had done so in a grief or guilt-fueled madness, she had no need to pretend. Brutal as it was to say, Shabnam had been Neha’s to kill.

“Do you believe it to be the same person who murdered Eris?” Neha asked, the cold blade of an archangel’s anger a faint nimbus of light burning off her wings.

“Perhaps.” Jason rose from his crouched position beside the body. “Or it could be an attempt to use Eris’s murder to cover an unrelated crime.” Shabnam had surely been a stunning woman in life. “Did she have a lover?”

“Yes. But Tarun is gone to Europe on a task for me—he could not have done this.”

Jason made a note to confirm Tarun’s whereabouts himself. It might be a truism, but the lover was most often the one responsible for the murder of a woman, mortal or immortal. Some darkness knew no boundaries. “Anyone else who might hold a grudge against her?”

Neha walked to the part of the terrace that flowed down a wide step to a covered pathway that, if followed, led to another, lower terrace. “She was a lady-in-waiting, Jason. I know little of her life.”

Of course.

Unlike the Seven, Neha’s ladies-in-waiting were there to entertain, amuse, and otherwise see to Neha’s comfort, dismissed from the archangel’s mind the instant they were out of sight. “May I have access to the others who serve you?” He would also contact Samira, gain her impressions of Shabnam and Tarun.

“Yes.” Neha flared out her wings. “Mahiya will know where to find them.” With that, she rose off the terrace, an angel of grace, power, and . . . centuries of blood that stained her hands to ruby blackness.

Jason found Mahiya in the courtyard below the terrace, and though he’d given her no instructions, she said, “Most of the ladies-in-waiting are even now gathering in their private garden. I would, however, recommend you speak to them one at a time.”

“Agreed. However, seeing how they act as a group may prove helpful.”

“This way.” She turned left, her mint green tunic crisp against her skin. “Word travels fast in the small city that is the fort,” she said, answering the question he hadn’t asked. “I knew about the discovery of Shabnam’s body perhaps five minutes after the guard made it.” Fixing the pin that held her long white scarf neatly over her left shoulder, she shot him an assessing look. “He says you arrived seconds later. Dropped out of the sky like a black arrow.”

“Do you think I killed Shabnam?” He knew he was capable of murder should he ever have anyone of his own to protect. But that, of course, was an academic consideration.

“No.” An answer far more resolute than he’d expected. “However, everyone wonders how you knew.”

The winds had whispered a name, tugged him in a certain direction, but that wasn’t a secret he could tell this princess who saw things no one should be able to see . . . and who made him think impossible thoughts about always being welcomed home as he’d been last night. “I was flying above the fort, saw the guard running in a panic. It wasn’t difficult to sweep down, find out why.”

Mahiya raised a single eyebrow but kept her silence, and a minute later, they walked through one of the cool passages inside the fort to exit a few feet from gardens clothed in a profusion of fragrant blooms. Five women stood in a knot in one corner, blooms of another kind. When Mahiya would’ve moved out from the passageway, Jason stopped her with a hand on the silken warmth of her arm, the scent of her a caress to the senses. “Wait.”

“The body language is interesting, is it not?” Mahiya’s quiet comment echoed his own thoughts, her wing brushing his as she leaned in so he could hear her.

He didn’t move away. “Very.”

The tallest lady, an angel, had positioned herself so she didn’t fully face any of the others. Another angel, her wings the dusty brown of a sparrow’s, was holding on to a sylph of a vampire with the broken desperation of someone who isn’t sure her legs will support her, while a dark-eyed angel and a vampire with pale skin wiped at their eyes with what appeared to be lace handkerchiefs.

“The sparrow,” he murmured, “she actually grieves.” The rest indulged in theatre.

“Yes.” Sympathy in the single soft word. “Shabnam and she were both inducted into their positions at the same time, and rather than competing for Neha’s attention, they became friends who helped each other navigate the politics.”

“Why should there be politics? They occupy the same rarefied position.”

Mahiya shot him a frowning look. “Are you making fun?”

Jason hadn’t ever been accused of that, even by the irrepressible Illium. “Strange as it may seem,” he said, “I have never had reason to know about the inner workings of a group of ladies-in-waiting.” He had operatives who were far more capable in that arena and who kept him apprised of any necessary information from such quarters.

“A lady-in-waiting has certain access to Neha.” Mahiya appeared to have decided to take him at his word, though the suspicion in her eyes didn’t totally dissipate—and for some reason, that made a quiet amusement warm his blood. “None of them would be stupid enough to risk their position by actually asking for anything, but occasionally, if a lady is particularly favored, Neha will grant her a boon.”

Even a small boon from an archangel, Jason understood, could change the balance of power in a given situation. “Do they represent different groups in the court?” He looked at the women with new eyes, seeing iron butterflies, their wings edged with razors of ambition and greed.

“Not simply the court, but the territory.”

Thus, they all had puppet masters at their back, tugging strings, situating each for maximum gain . . . doing the dirty work.

“Lisbeth holds the most power at present.” She indicated the dark-eyed angel. “She’s very intelligent. They all are.”

He nodded in acknowledgment of the warning. “I take care to never underestimate an opponent, but I may have in this case.” Like the others around her, Lisbeth looked . . . frothy. Clothes of a gauzy fabric that caught the wind and glossy brown hair done up in an intricate mass of curls, jeweled combs in the strands, features painted with an artful delicacy that highlighted her ebony-skinned beauty. “I’ve seen enough.”

“Do you wish for me to organize interviews for you with the ladies?” Mahiya asked once they were back in the corridor.

“No.” He’d find them on their own when they didn’t expect to be questioned. Right now, he wanted the answer to a different kind of question. “You’ve become cooperative beyond the call of duty.”

A shallow court smile—one he realized he despised after having glimpsed a real one last night when she admitted to watching for him. “You,” she murmured, “are my best hope of escaping this hell.”

It made him wonder just how far she’d go.