Archangel's Storm

28

“I am,” she said, “always careful, but you . . . now I know why you are such a great spymaster.”

He didn’t understand her meaning, the warmth of her touch seeping through the thin black shirt he wore to linger on his skin. Drinking in the sensation, he ran his fingers down the line of her neck, hot satisfaction in his blood when she shivered. There was a deeper pleasure in this, in knowing what made her sigh, learning the intimacies of her body. Yet it was a pleasure he’d denied himself for hundreds of years.

“Jason?” Wounded eyes, blue and wet. “You’re leaving?”

“I told you I couldn’t stay.” Couldn’t give her his heart.

Fist clenching in the sheet she held to her breast, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I thought . . . when you kept returning . . .”

He’d been so young then, very good at his job, but far behind his peers when it came to emotions, to relationships. He’d thought that long-ago lover had understood he spoke the naked truth, never realizing the secret dreams brewing in her heart. A heart he’d broken without meaning to, without even knowing he held the power to do so. It had soon healed for she’d been young, too, and he thought that she might no longer even remember the black-winged angel she’d once pleaded with to stay with her.

But he’d never forgotten the lesson, and he wondered if Mahiya had truly heard what he’d said to her the night before or if she, too, harbored dreams of fixing the broken pieces of him. The truth was, no matter how she compelled him, she would soon realize what was shattered in him was nothing that could be healed, the damage done at such a young age that it had become part of his very psyche.

Yet instead of backing off, he did a selfish thing then. Lowering his head, he claimed the lush intoxication of her kiss, his hands thrusting into her hair to tumble black silk over his skin. She opened for him with a sweet sensual generosity that enticed without design, made him want to caress her every secret pleasure point until her desire was a shimmer across her skin and he knew her like no other man ever would.

“Jason? You’re leaving?”

Tugging back her head with the hand fisted in her hair, he forced himself to release lips swollen from his kisses. “Open your eyes.” It was a harsh order.

Thick lashes rose to reveal tawny eyes hazy with passion. “I see you, Jason.”

“And what do you see?” He stroked his free hand up her side, rubbed his thumb gently back and forth over her nipple through her clothing.

Her breath caught, but she didn’t break the eye contact. “A man who is a storm, who belongs to no one and who will never be tamed. To expect otherwise would be to ask for agonizing disappointment.”

Open eyes, he thought, she had wide-open eyes. “Some might say you’re attempting to seduce me in order to lead me on a leash.”

Laughter, warm and startled, spilled over the hilltop. “Only a fool would attempt to contain or direct a storm. I’m far too smart.”

He took her lips in an open-mouthed kiss in an attempt to drink of her laughter, steal some of her dazzling warmth of spirit to hoard inside him. Her nails dug into his chest through his shirt, her breast pushed into his hand, and her scent, it tangled around him in an exotic wildness.

The gut-deep sense of connection was an intense shock that made his nerve endings burn. He had never felt more real, more a part of the world.

Breaking the kiss only long enough that she could gasp in air, he slanted his mouth across hers again, licking and tasting and sinking into the carnal pleasure. Her nipple was a hard point beneath the fabric of her tunic, and when he squeezed it between forefinger and thumb, she jerked, pulling away from his touch.

Folding back wings that had become fully unfurled, he watched her attempt to resettle her breathing. “Not here,” she said at last, her chest rising and falling in an erratic rhythm. “Will you come to my bed?”

It was such a polite invitation, and yet her lips were wet from his kiss, her cheeks flushed with sexual need. “Yes.”

He’d said yes, but Jason left after escorting Mahiya back to the palace, having received a message on his phone he had to follow up on at once. Sensual frustration tearing through her veins, she decided to take care of a task of her own and headed to Vanhi’s apartments using busy internal passageways. If she was a target, it’d make it difficult for anyone to cut her from the herd.

Vanhi was reading when she arrived. Mahiya bent down to kiss her smiling cheek before taking a seat in one of the comfortable armchairs in the vampire’s living area. “I’m disturbing you.”

“You know you are always welcome.” Vanhi slid an intricate metal bookmark between the pages and put the book on the coffee table. “It worries me, Mahiya, the look I see in your eyes.”

“Vanhi—”

The vampire held up her hand. “I know you too well, my dear. I rocked you when you cried as a babe and when Arav shattered your heart as a young woman.” Sighing, she reached out to take one of Mahiya’s hands in her own, squeezed. “You’ve been waiting your whole life to love someone, my sweet girl. I don’t want you to squander the power of that beautiful heart on a man who will not value such a gift.”

“I understand him, Vanhi.” Never would she forget the terrible sorrow she’d tasted in his tale of Nene and her Yavi, until it hurt her to imagine the cause. “I’m not expecting anything but what he can give me.”

“You say that, but you’re deeply vulnerable to kindness, to any indication of care.”

The emotional blow stung. “You make me sound like an abused pet.”

Rising to her feet, Vanhi walked over to the dining area to pour two glasses of wine. “I do not begrudge you happiness.” Care in every syllable as she retook her seat, having handed Mahiya the second wineglass. “I just don’t want you hurt again.”

Mahiya gave the other woman a crooked smile. “If the hurt is an honest one, I will survive.” Perhaps she had spent her life waiting for someone to love, and Jason . . . he needed to be loved, as a wildflower needed sunlight.

Vanhi shook her head. “I bear fault in this—it is to my sorrow that I couldn’t be there for you, couldn’t give you the love every child should know.”

“You did all you could.” What Mahiya knew of kindness and affection came from Jessamy and Vanhi. “She is an archangel.” And your loyalty is first to her. It was a truth Mahiya had accepted long ago.

A bleak sadness in Vanhi’s expression. “Tell me why you come to me so late, Mahiya child.”

Setting aside her wineglass, Mahiya spoke of the teddy bear, and the vampire with hair of scarlet and skin of porcelain. Vanhi rubbed at the furrows that had formed between her eyebrows. “Oh, I know him.” A frustrated sound. “It’s flitting at the very corner of my eye, his name, but I cannot quite grasp it.”

“Sleep on it.” Exhilaration made Mahiya want to push, but Vanhi was thousands of years old, carried a million fragments of memory. “If it comes to you tomorrow morn, send me a message.”

Lines still marring her forehead, Vanhi gave a slow nod. “He was not important, I think. But always there, at the edges. That’s why he’s so hard to remember.” A rueful smile. “Truly, I am getting old. So many pieces of a lifetime—sometimes I think they are hidden in secret corners of my mind.”

“I only wish my memory were as good as yours.”

Vanhi’s smile faded. “I wish you could’ve known your mother, child.”

Mahiya’s spine went rigid. “She slept with a married man. A man who belonged to her sister.”

“Yes.” Vanhi gave a solemn nod. “They were ever in competition, Neha and Nivriti.” Drinking deep of her wine, the vampire held Mahiya’s gaze with eyes of vivid green. “It was Nivriti whom Eris first courted.”

The words were a fist punching against her ribs. “Neha was the one who committed the initial betrayal?”

“It was never that simple.” Vanhi’s eyes shut, opened again to display steely resolve. “I never before spoke to you about this, because what good would it have done? The past is gone, buried.” Finishing her wine, she played the stem of the glass between her fingers. “Now I see I was wrong. You must know where you came from if you are to take charge of your own destiny. And if I will not share these secrets with you, who will?”

Mahiya’s skin felt as if it would burst with all the questions she had inside her, but she kept quiet, intent on listening with every cell in her body.

“Everyone,” Vanhi murmured, “always calls Nivriti the younger sister, and she was . . . by five heartbeats.”

Her silence shattered. “Twins? How can that be? No one ever mentions it.”

“Neha was always stronger, until Nivriti was thrown into the shade. She was also the more innocent of the two, and as the centuries passed, people forgot the truth and just thought of her as younger.” Vanhi’s voice was grave with age, with history, as she continued. “As children, they didn’t fight or compete—Neha used to take great care of Nivriti, and theirs was a bond I thought nothing would break.”

Mahiya could barely absorb what Vanhi was telling her. “What changed?”

“Age, time, life.” A shake of her head. “Maybe it was jealousy on Nivriti’s part, arrogance on Neha’s, or maybe it was simple sibling rivalry, but they began to play a game. It started out as a battle of wits and devolved into something so ugly it hurt my heart to stand witness.”

Vanhi’s eyes shone wet. “First, if Nivriti asked the seamstress to make her a special dress, Neha would steal the design, get an identical one made in a shorter time and wear it prior to Nivriti’s big event. Nivriti would retaliate by hiding Neha’s gems so her sister would be forced to appear drab, while she glittered. After a while”—a hitching breath—“they began to play the game with people as their chess pieces.”

Mahiya’s gnawing curiosity twisted into a knot in her stomach.

“If one of them made a friend, the other would either charm that friend away or seed the relationship with vitriol until it curled up and died. It was such a foolish, foolish waste of their talents and gifts.”

Mahiya rubbed a fisted hand over her belly, for she knew it was about to get much worse. “I’ve heard my mother’s strongest ability had to do with things that flew?”

“Yes.” The shadow of a smile, lush red lips curving in memory. “She assured me the birds spoke to her and that she could see through their eyes. Falcons came to roost on her shoulders without aggression or anger . . . though as her bitterness grew, she no longer took joy in admiring their wild beauty, but began to use them as weapons.”

The wet spilled from Vanhi’s eye to trickle down to her lips. “I once saw her send a falcon down to claw the eyes out of a vampire’s head. He’d been her lover, had taken a position in Neha’s new-formed court. When I reached him, his face was a mask of red, his screams of agony piercing me to the bone.”

The adult Mahiya had never believed her mother a fairy-tale maiden who’d been wronged . . . but she’d had hopes—that Nivriti had been better than Neha, that Mahiya’s birth hadn’t been an act of ultimate hate. However, shatter her dreams though they might, she craved the truth, would hear all of it. “So Eris wasn’t their first battleground.”

“But he was the first they both loved.” Vanhi’s wineglass cracked under the force of her grip, sending a trickle of blood down her palm. Waving off Mahiya’s cry, Vanhi put the broken pieces on the coffee table and dabbed at the wound with a handkerchief. “I am sorry to say Eris was not worth either one of my girls—or of the daughters he helped create.”

“Vanhi, let me get a bandage.”

“Hush, child. It’ll close up soon enough.” A smile that took the sting out of the chiding. “But you can pour me another glass of wine.”

Mahiya did so, glad to see the vampire had indeed stopped bleeding.

“I’ve come to believe Eris courted Nivriti first because she was the more accessible,” Vanhi said, taking a sip of the crisp white wine. “Neha was already an archangel, but your mother was a power in her own right—I say to this day that she would’ve become Cadre had she lived. It was just that her development was a slow burn in comparison to Neha’s blaze.”

“Once Eris had her trust,” Mahiya guessed, having no illusions about the man who had fathered her, “he used that connection to reach Neha.”

“I don’t know if she knew he belonged to Nivriti at first.” Vanhi’s words were soft, poignant with love for the girls she’d helped raise. “I think Neha fell so deeply for Eris because she was unaware of the truth—had she been driven by the game, she would’ve made certain to armor her heart so she could discard him once he’d left Nivriti. As for Eris . . . love was an interchangeable token to him.”

Mahiya had nothing to say to that—she’d known her father too well.

“At the time,” Vanhi said, “Nivriti didn’t make any kind of a fuss. My poor child was heartbroken, even left the part of the territory she ruled as a powerful queen, and went away for many years to the lands Favashi now calls her own. I had never seen her so defeated. Neha, too, felt for her sister—I suppose she thought she had won the prize and could be the bigger person. The games stopped.”

Anger, clean and bright, bubbled under Mahiya’s skin. “My mother obviously decided to change the status quo long after Neha’s marriage.” Putting in motion events that had led to her daughter growing up motherless and trapped.

But Vanhi shook her head. “No, it was no game. Nivriti never felt about another man as she did about Eris.” The vampire put down her glass as if afraid she’d fracture it, too. “It is one of the world’s great injustices that he, of all men, had the keeping of two such strong women’s hearts.”

Mahiya’s anger shattered into a painful understanding for the mother she’d never known, because behind the ugliness of infidelity was an abiding love. Eris hadn’t been worthy of it, but that Mahiya had been conceived in love, at least on one side, it changed the very nature of her history.

“You cry.” Vanhi touched her fingers to Mahiya’s tears, wiping them away. “Ah, my sweet girl. I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

“I always wondered if she even cared I was taken from her,” Mahiya said, her vision blurred by the tears that kept falling. “Now I think that maybe she would have, that maybe I meant something to her.”

Distress bloomed on Vanhi’s face.

“You didn’t mean something to her. You meant everything.” Cupping Mahiya’s face, she said, “I have kept another secret from you, one I was enjoined by your mother to keep, for I was there at your birth.”