Archangel's Storm

16

“Tell me who gains from Shabnam’s death.”

Mahiya felt a sudden, frustrated urge to scream when Jason used the haunting clarity of his voice to speak those words. She’d deliberately baited him with her sweetly poisonous reply, wanting to incite a response, to shatter the obsidian ice that surrounded him until it felt as if she spoke to a black mirror.

“Is there a lady who waits to take her position?” he clarified when she remained silent.

“There are always those who wait.” She wrenched the strange madness under control, for what did it matter to her if Jason preferred to live a step distant from the world? “But Neha chooses who she will—an aspirant could kill off the entire group and fail to gain a place.” Her scarf lifted on the wind as they walked upstairs to take the high terrace path, flicked over Jason’s arm, his chest, before falling back neatly by her side.

I am jealous of a piece of fabric. Foolish when he does not even see me. “Sorry.” Last night on the balcony, when this deadly shadow of a man had made the clear effort not to hurt her feelings, her fascination with him had altered into something both tender and far more dangerous. The way he’d looked at her after his return, she’d hoped . . . but clearly, his actions had been nothing more than a quiet kindness.

The realization made her heart ache.

“You cannot leash the wind,” he said, his gaze an impenetrable depth she couldn’t fathom.

“No, I suppose not.” She broke the eye contact that was too much, too strong, too visceral. “It would’ve been better had Shabnam disappeared if this action was politically motivated,” she said, forcing herself to concentrate. “Her killing may well make Neha sympathize with her intimates and choose the next lady from within their ranks.”

“Might they gain an extra boon?” Jason’s wing was so close, she could see the fine black filaments that made up each midnight feather.

Her fingers curled into her palms. “No.” Though she was in no doubt that were such a thing a possibility, Shabnam’s “family” might well have sacrificed her with cold-blooded calculation. “Shabnam was worth more alive—she’d been with Neha a long time, had her trust and liking.”

“Your wings are dragging.”

“What? Oh.” Cheeks heating at the reminder one might give to a child, she raised her wings so that the edges no longer trailed on the red sandstone of the terrace.

Then he spoke again, and her embarrasment transformed into the most bittersweet of emotions. “You need to work on strengthening your wings in every detail. If Neha’s temper turns, it may come down to a race to a safe hiding place until I can work out a political solution to your freedom.”

“I am just over three hundred years old, Jason,” she said, using his name of her own volition for the first time, the small intimacy filling her mind with all the other fragile moments she’d dreamed of experiencing with the nameless, faceless lover she’d imagined in her darkest hours. One with whom she’d fly, see the world, build a life, build a home, fill it with laughter and love and happiness such as she’d never known.

“Even were I to have trained for endurance flying every day of my existence,” she said, holding onto that dream with every ounce of her strength in the face of harsh reality, “I couldn’t outfly Neha, even for the shortest flicker of time.” Neha was an archangel who had lived millennia, her power vast. She’d crush Mahiya like an insect and never notice.

“And a hiding place?” Mahiya shook her head. “I won’t let her bury me again. Better I die fighting for my freedom than to turn into Eris, dead in chains.” It was a fierce vow. “I will not allow her to pin my wings to the wall as Lijuan does to the butterflies she collects.”

Jason felt a dark wildness come to life within him at Mahiya’s impassioned declaration, but the response that came out of his mouth was almost icily calm, the words he’d wanted to speak hidden deep inside the silence that had been his existence for so long. “Lijuan would like to add me to her collection.”

Mahiya stumbled on a rough part of the terrace, would have fallen if he hadn’t shot out a hand and gripped her upper arm. Ignoring his hold, she stared at him. “Did she say that to your face?”

“Such unique wings you have, Jason. A pity if you should die in battle, those midnight wings destroyed. A quiet, measured death in the arms of a lovely girl ripe with her womanhood would be so much easier, do you not think?”

“She offered me a peaceful death.” He forced himself to release Mahiya, his need for touch a clawing thing inside him. “She’s been much more vocal about Illium.”

“Blue tipped with silver, yes, his wings are stunning,” Mahiya murmured. “I saw him once when he accompanied Raphael on a visit.”

Jason glanced down into eyes bright even in the shadows of an archway, and had the sudden realization the brilliance was an indication of emerging power. One no one had noticed because the change, like every aspect of Mahiya’s power, had to have been incremental. “Your own wings are just as unique.”

“No, they’re not.” Mahiya’s tone went flat. “My mother had the same.”

He hadn’t known that, and if wings of such beauty had been forgotten, it meant someone had buried the information. Neha, it seemed, had wiped her sister out of existence as well as out of life. Now she attempted to do the same to the child who bore wings the exquisite sapphires and emerald greens of a peacock’s spray.

“Did you . . . Have you seen Lijuan’s Collection Room?”

Jason halted, watched Mahiya rub her hands up and down her arms, as if they did not stand in sunlight thick as syrup. “Yes,” he said, “I have.” The Collection Room was located within the stronghold where Lijuan had first created her reborn, and kept permanently cold to preserve the bodies that hung on the walls, their wings spread out in magnificent display.

Some, Jason knew, had died in circumstances where their wings had remained undamaged, but others . . . others had simply vanished from the world. “If you saw that room,” he said, driven to touch a single finger to Mahiya’s cheek, “you’re lucky to be alive.”

She didn’t shrug away the touch. Flattening her hand over her belly, she said, “I thought I could bargain service for sanctuary. I convinced myself it would be akin to being a servant, that I’d be free aside from my duties.” A shiver wracked her frame. “I think the only reason Lijuan returned me to Neha rather than keeping me as a trophy was that she was deeply offended by the fact I would dare run from the archangel to whom I ‘owed duty.’”

“Were you a cat,” he murmured, his mind on the massive cold-storage room behind the Collection Room, filled with drawers big enough to hold angelic bodies, “I would say you are now poorer by at least seven of your nine lives.”

“What do you know?” It was a whisper dancing over his skin.

“Many things I cannot unsee.”

Jason’s words continuing to circle in her mind, heavy with a lingering darkness that tugged at the vulnerable core of her in spite of her conclusion that he felt no such need in return, Mahiya parted from him several minutes later. “I must attend to Neha,” she said. “I am meant to be spying on you after all.”

Jason’s response was as unexpected as the fleeting touch that had anchored her to the here and now when the nightmare of Lijuan’s stronghold threatened to suck her under. “You’re not hard enough for such a task”—almost gentle words—“and I honor the strength it must’ve taken to fight the bitterness, to refuse to allow your heart to petrify to pitiless stone.”

No one else had ever understood that truth, understood the conscious will it had taken to remain untainted and unbroken. Shaken at the way he could reach her so deeply when he remained so distant, she said, “I must go,” and turned to walk away.

When she looked over her shoulder seconds later, he was gone, the sky showing no sign of the spymaster who threatened to strip her to the soul. “Who are you, Jason?”

The wind held no answers for her.

Lowering her gaze from the sky, she took a deep breath and replaced the emotional armor Jason had disassembled with nothing but a touch, a few words. She could not go to Neha vulnerable and exposed.

Ten minutes later, when she located the archangel, it wasn’t within the cool confines of her private palace, but walking the ramparts, looking down at the city that was her own. Keeping her wings neatly to her back, her emotions under rigid control, Mahiya watched the archangel nod to the visitors walking or riding up the steep, curving path to the fort. Neha didn’t allow modern vehicles on the pathway or within the fort itself, but elephants, camels, and horses were considered acceptable means of transport.

“Have you forgotten who it is you come to speak to?” It was a silken question.

“I apologize if I have misstepped, my lady.” Once, the words would’ve been knife shards in her throat. Now, they were nothing but tools she used to distract the archangel while she worked to break out of this prison.

Silence. Neha’s wings a sweep of cool white scattered with a rare few jewel blue filaments that echoed Mahiya’s own feathers. The familial connection showed itself in other ways, too, but only to someone who knew what it was they searched for, and those old enough to deduce the truth also knew never to speak of it.

To everyone else, Mahiya was a distant descendant of Neha’s the archangel had taken in out of kindness after the death of her unnamed parents. That the newborn child had appeared eight months after Eris’s incarceration and Nivriti’s assumed execution had further distanced any connection that might’ve been made by most. Few could imagine that Neha had been cruel enough to have kept her sister chained through the months of her pregnancy, but Mahiya had heard the story from Neha’s own lips.

“A gift on your hundredth birthday.” The archangel’s smile caused a chill along Mahiya’s spine. “The history of your becoming.”

Angels didn’t easily die, but a female angel was most vulnerable after childbirth, especially a childbirth where her womb had been cut open with a rusty blade, her baby literally torn out of her by uncaring hands, her internal organs left to spill to the floor. Add in a lack of food and water, and the thin, thin air at the top of the distant mountain fort where her mother had apparently been held, and Nivriti had stood no chance.

Even then, powerful as she’d been, it must’ve taken her years of agony to starve to total death.

“You give offense by existing,” Neha said at last, and it was an almost absent comment. “Tell me about Jason.”

Mahiya did, and it was the truth . . . what she spoke of it in any case. As Jason had pointed out, she could hardly accuse Neha of murder and hope to live. “He appears to be upholding the vow,” she concluded, “and working to unearth the identity of the murderer or murderers.”

Neha’s eyes focused on some distant aspect Mahiya couldn’t see, the silk sari Neha wore now a cool champagne bordered in bronze, the folds pinned with neat precision on her shoulder by an antique brooch. Her blouse was a bronze that echoed the border, the cut perfect, the intricate back work necessary to accommodate wings done with such precision that the fit remained flawless.

No one, Mahiya thought, could say the Archangel of India was not the most elegant of creatures, but Mahiya alone understood the vindictive depth of hatred that had driven Neha for so long. It hadn’t surprised her in the least when Anoushka was found guilty of crimes against a child—the angel had watched her own mother raise a child for the sole purpose of vengeance after all. Kindness to a thousand other children could not eradicate the evil taint of that single heinous act.

“Do you mourn your father?” Neha asked into the silence.

“I mourn who he could’ve been.” There had been promise in Eris, and perhaps if he’d had better guidance as a youth, as a husband, he might have fulfilled it. That was as much forgiveness as she could give him, because he’d been an adult, too, had made his own choices.

“In that we are in agreement, child of my blood’s blood.”

Mahiya went motionless—it never augured anything but ill for her when Neha referred to the ties that connected them. However, today, the archangel simply tilted her face to the burning heat of the sun, allowing it to wash over the golden brown of her skin, imbuing it with warmth. At that moment, Mahiya could imagine why her people saw her as a benevolent goddess.

“I first met him when I was an angel of a thousand.” The words were soft, her gaze on a past long gone. “At four hundred, he was barely an adult to my mind, and I treated him as such. Irresponsible, I thought, but beautiful and with such masculine charm. Our paths did not cross again until I had become an archangel, and Eris a man elegant and confident.”

A hot desert wind waved over them a second later, breaking Neha’s reverie. “Have you ever loved, Mahiya?”

Knowing what was coming, she steeled her spine. “No.”

“Not even Arav?”

There it was, the blow that reminded her of a humiliation that had crushed her young heart, threatened to fracture her fledgling spirit. “I was a child then. What did I know of love?” However, she’d learned that pretty words were not to be trusted—and that she had a strength she’d never before understood.

“My daughter is dead,” Neha said, in an apparent non sequitur, “and so is my husband and consort. Some would say I am being punished for what I did to you and your mother.” Dark eyes on Mahiya’s face. “Do you think I am being punished, Mahiya?”

If you believe so. For your karma is of your own making.

“It is not my place to think such things, my lady.” Mahiya used every ounce of skill she’d picked up from her years in the court to hide her thoughts, keep her voice expressionless. “I am only grateful for your kindness in giving me a home.”

Neha’s lips curved, but the ice in her gaze remained frigid. “A pretty speech. Perhaps you will prove interesting, after all.” A slight motion of a slender hand, and Mahiya knew she’d been dismissed.

Walking the wide pathway along the ramparts until she came to steps that led down into the sprawling main courtyard—built at a time when ground armies were mounted on elephants—she made her way down with slow grace, though she wanted nothing more than to spread her wings and fly off into the mountains. That deadly chance was one she’d save for last, when she had no other hope.

“Yes. You matter.”

Hugging Jason’s quiet words to her heart, her faith in his integrity an instinct she had no will to fight, Mahiya crossed the stone of the courtyard with measured steps. Open as it was, with only a few miniature trees in large planters on the edges, she could feel a hundred eyes on her—guards, courtiers, servants.

She acknowledged those who acknowledged her, but stopped for no one . . . until a tall, handsome angel with skin of darkest brown and eyes of smoky gray walked into her path, his wings a mottled brown two shades paler than his skin. And she understood why Neha had spoken of the man who had taught Mahiya her first and most lasting lesson about love.