Archangel's Storm

41

Mahiya pumped her wings upward, making certain to keep to her mother’s side of the battle line, so as not to provide Neha with an easy target. Jason gave her an almost imperceptible nod when she reached him, and she knew he was relinquishing the reins, an acknowledgment that she knew the players far better than he did.

“You are destroying the city,” she said to Neha. “You are killing your own people.”

Wings continuing to glow, Neha looked down, frowned, and waved a hand. A thin layer of ice formed over the places where the noxious green of Nivriti’s web had begun to bubble through roofs and walls . . . and people. It froze, then seemed to break off in inert pieces. Neha waved her hand again, but the fires Jason hadn’t smothered continued to burn, the archangel’s ability to create ice apparently exhausted.

It wasn’t only fatigue that marked both women.

Neha’s wings and body bore raw wounds from the same acid, her cheek gouged on one side to reveal her jawbone, her left wing sporting a palm-sized hole that would’ve crippled most angels. Meanwhile, blood of near black seeped from Nivriti’s nose and ears, even the corners of her eyes, the poison in her bloodstream attacking her from the inside out.

“Your forces are decimated,” she said to her own mother, wanting Nivriti to turn around, to see how many of her people were dead or viciously injured. “And you are fading.”

Nivriti swept out a hand, the burst blood vessels in her eyes having turned her gaze crimson. “Get out of the way, child.”

“I am not the child here.” Mahiya held her position, speaking to them both. “You are at a stalemate, and soon, you’ll be wrestling each other on the ground with the mortals watching as they would a circus act.”

Frozen silence from both Neha and Nivriti.

Then her mother started to laugh, and it was awash with near-manic delight. “That would certainly not do for your vaunted dignity, sister dearest.”

“It would suit you very well” was Neha’s cutting response, grooves of pain bracketing her mouth as one of the minor tendons in her left wing appeared to give way. “You have ever wanted to perform.”

Nivriti shrugged, wiped her bloody nose on her sleeve. “At least I did not believe a great act for truth and take a man who did not love me as my consort.”

“No, you only bore his child and stayed faithful while he rutted like a tomcat.”

Mahiya had the strangest feeling of being caught in the middle of a sibling squabble. Except this squabble had already cost hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives. “My father,” she said with a deliberation designed to offset their emotion-fueled dialogue, “was a man beautiful enough to enchant a heart of stone, but he was not strong, was not worthy of either one of you.”

“My daughter speaks the truth.” A great bitterness in Nivriti’s expression, an ugly thing that could eat a person up from the inside out. “I did you a favor, sister. He was lifting the skirts of one of his no doubt many whores inside your fort when I came to rescue him. So I returned with a few gifts.”

Neha hissed and snapped out the poison whip, but weakened as she was, it didn’t go far. “It was not your place to render judgment.”

“You dare say that?” Nivriti attempted to spray her with the acid, failed. “After you played judge and jury?”

Jason, you must speak. They won’t listen to me, no matter how much sense I make. The fact was, they dismissed her as a child. Their pride is the weakest point for both.

Jason stirred. “If you wish to duel to the death,” he said in a quiet, steely voice that demanded attention, “we will get out of the way, but in your current condition, you will end up wrestling on the ground, amusement for the mortals. I am certain no archangel or angel has died so ignominious a death.”

Silence.

Then Nivriti raised an arm and the remainder of her troops formed around her, even as Neha’s own troops stood down. The archangel’s lips twisted into a cold smile. “Run while you can, little sister. I’ll make sure we meet again.”

Nivriti’s responding smile was as dark as the blood dripping from her eyes. “Be assured I’ll be waiting.” With that, she swept around, her troops closing behind her in a black guard. Mahiya.

Mahiya started at the command from her mother, but that shock was nothing to when she heard Jason’s voice in her mind. Go with her. It is the safest place for you.

She wanted to argue, wanted to shake him, tell him her place was by his side, but he was already turning toward Neha. Far more, she realized, was in play than the needs and desires of a princess who had never had a kingdom to rule or a man to love, until she gave her heart to an enemy spymaster with wings of midnight.

Even so, he could’ve taken an instant to reassure her that he would find her.

Agony wrenched through her at the sight of him getting further away with each wingbeat. Biting her lips, she stilled the urge to call out after him. She’d already laid her heart at his feet—she would not beg. Because while she didn’t expect Jason, his scars soul deep, to love her as she loved him, she understood he must choose to be with her free of any other consideration.

It wasn’t enough, would never be enough, if all he felt was a responsibility to watch over her because she had no one else. Now that the latter was no longer true . . . Swallowing, she reached out one last time with her mind and set him free. Take care of yourself, Jason.

Her mother’s squadron parted to allow her into the center, closing behind her to form an impenetrable wall.

Jason forced himself not to turn and watch after Mahiya. He knew that at this moment, he was the known, the familiar. If he asked her to come with him, she would. Once she’d spent time with Nivriti, however. . . .

No, he would not steal the familial relationship she had the chance to forge, not even if it caused an agonizing hollowness inside him to lose the mental connection with her as she flew out of range, protected by her mother’s people. He would give her time and space enough to decide if she wished to walk beside him now that her life had a whole new dimension.

Having flown escort to Neha while Rhys made certain of Nivriti’s retreat, he kept an eye on the archangel’s damaged wing as she brought herself in to land in front of the Palace of Jewels. When she dipped to the side as she came in, he deliberately landed too close to her, so that her stumble would be blamed on his clumsiness rather than taken as a sign of weakness by the others landing around them.

Pride, as Mahiya had said, was an integral component of Neha’s nature.

Righting herself by pushing off his body, she ignored him as she entered her private apartments, but he knew that to leave now would be to undo any good he’d done. So he walked out to the courtyard to help deal with the injured—just because angels and vampires were hard to kill didn’t mean they didn’t hurt. A man who knew how to inject morphine and other pain relief medication was always useful in battle conditions.

When Neha’s private guard summoned him two hours later, the courtyard was close to cleared, the injured moved into internal rooms. Taking his leave of the healer under whom he’d been working, he entered the palace to find Neha seated on the thronelike chair at the head of the central room. The archangel had bathed and was dressed in fresh clothing, her wounds bandaged.

Those bandages told him both that the wounds were healing at a far slower rate than they should—and that Nivriti was no longer an ordinary angel.

“So, now you are a peacemaker?” Neha’s tone was dangerously neutral.

“You are one of the more rational archangels,” he said, and in spite of her acts after Anoushka’s death, the words were true. “To lose you would create more problems than it would solve.”

“Exactly how rational do you believe me to be?” A subtly calculated look.

“Enough to take and use what Lijuan could teach you about accelerating the emergence of your new abilities,” he said, “without allowing yourself to fall into her web.” It was a wild shot in the dark.

“Finally,” Neha said in a sinuous whisper, “we come to it. That was why you were so eager to assist me, was it not?”

“I am a spymaster.”

Neha’s smile was cold. “And to ask you to act in any other way would be akin to asking an eagle not to eat a rabbit.” Picking up a baby eyelash viper that had slithered across the floor to her, she draped it over her shoulders, absently stroking its yellow orange skin. “Yes, Lijuan has been most neighborly of late.”

Jason could guess. The trauma of Anoushka’s death had left Neha prime pickings for a predator like Lijuan. “I have wondered one thing,” he said.

Neha raised an eyebrow.

“Whether Lijuan can somehow siphon power, or is attempting to learn how to do so, from others in the Cadre.” It was a theory so nascent, he hadn’t even mentioned to Raphael. “Her offer to assist you would then make more sense.”

“Well, well, well.” Neha rose and walked down the shallow steps below her throne to shake her head. “Such a waste that you will never rule. Yes, the helpful Lijuan thought to play me.” A flash of teeth. “But she forgets, I have played this game for millennia, too, and I know how to get what I want.”

Jason was near certain there was, in truth, no true secret to accelerating the development of power, that Lijuan had simply taken advantage of the Cascade effect. At least nine thousand years of age, she’d had millennia to mine the Refuge library for such secrets, even had she not come into her power at a time when several Ancients yet sat on the Cadre. They could well have told her of the Cascade.

Such a plan would befit the Archangel of China’s intelligent, devious mind, but to bring it up now would be to make Neha look the fool, so he kept his silence and considered his report to Raphael. Though he couldn’t speak of the Lijuan–Neha connection, he could now discuss Neha’s new abilities—her display over the city had made them public.

“If you wish to keep my favor, Jason,” Neha said, sari whispering along the carpet as she walked to the window that looked out over the courtyard garden, “you will discover how Nivriti was able to do what she did, and then you will tell me.”

“I do that and I become part of your personal war. Raphael would not be pleased.”

“Do you always do what pleases Raphael?”

Jason knew the arch question was meant to prick his pride, but the fact was, he served Raphael out of choice, not compulsion. “I will leave your territory tonight,” he said, his tone even.

Neha’s wings flared, the indigo filaments catching the light, before folding neatly to her back as she turned to hold his gaze. “Tell me, when did you gain the ability to use shadows in such a fashion?”

He said nothing, for she could expect no answer. The truth was, what he’d done tonight was only one aspect of his strength—he could use the black lightning in a far more violent way. “Do you wish me to carry a message to Raphael?”

A sigh, a faint smile. “Tell him his spymaster’s faultless service has made me rethink our quarrel. I say Raphael is no longer my enemy.” She allowed the viper to crawl down her arm, twine itself over her skin. “Safe journey, Jason. I will attempt not to hurt Mahiya too badly when I find her.”

“I will attempt not to hurt Mahiya too badly when I find her.”

Jason understood Neha’s words had been meant to torment him. It wasn’t the first time someone had attempted such, but it was the first time they had found their mark. No matter his decision to give Mahiya time with her mother, he knew that was not what he was going to do, even if part of him said he used Neha’s taunt as an excuse.

Flying high and fast, he made certain no one tracked him from the fort. Only when he was dead sure he was alone in the skies, did he come down on the dawn-lit grasses of a jagged mountaintop, the biting winds attempting to rip his hair from its tie. Ignoring the chill whip of air, he took out his cell phone and put through a call to Raphael.

Raphael was quicker than Neha, perhaps because he’d been directly impacted by the events of that spring. “The world was in tumult when Caliane rose to wakefulness,” he said the instant he heard of Nivriti’s ability to harm Neha. “The chaos was put down to the disruption caused by her waking, but what if it was the confluence of two events, the reappearance of an Ancient concealing the emergence of an archangel?”

“I thought the same,” Jason said, recalling the violent storms that had hit the world, the sea rising in a fury, the plates of the earth shifting, ice falling when it should’ve long thawed, “but I didn’t sense the same depth of power in Nivriti that I do the Cadre.” The prickling consciousness of being in the presence of something other.

“And Neha would’ve known if her sister had become Cadre,” Raphael said. “One archangel always recognizes another—but from what you say, it appears she is in the dark about the origin of Nivriti’s abilities.”

“Yes. It could be that as Neha’s twin, Nivriti has a capacity to harm her that no other angel possesses—along with a certain resistance to Neha’s own abilities.” Twins were beyond rare in the angelic population, and Neha was the first archangel he knew of who had been born with another. “We have no guideline against which to judge the bond that ties them to one another.”

A short pause. “Should Nivriti believe herself Cadre, she’ll seek to join our number soon enough,” Raphael said thoughtfully. “Unlike Neha, the rest of us are not disadvantaged by a blood connection—it’ll take but a single meeting to answer the question of her strength. For now, continue to have your people keep a watch on her, on them both.”

“Sire.” Ending the call, Jason turned his ear to the wind, listening for the fading echoes of a retreating army . . . and the shimmering, stubborn hope of a princess whose presence he missed tucked against his mind.