Authors: Nalini Singh
14
H
aving spent the remainder of the day listening unseen to courtiers and soldiers, mortals and vampires, angels young and old, Jason used the cloak of night to conceal himself as he flew over the fort. He was near certain of the identity of the person who had murdered Eris. However, he needed two further pieces of information—Mahiya was currently attempting to gather one of those pieces in the trenches of Neha’s court.
Sweeping down to land near the exquisite courtyard garden where the beautiful had gathered tonight ostensibly to share their sorrow, he allowed the pool of darkness he’d chosen as his landing place to seep into him. Regardless of what some whispered, Jason couldn’t create shadows from thin air, but he could extend and amplify the smallest tendrils of the dark until he simply didn’t register in most people’s vision, or if he did, it was as a ghost image caught out of the corner of the eye.
He hadn’t always been so at home in the shadows.
“How can I be a night scout if I’m afraid of the dark?” His lower lip quivered as he walked beside his mother, helping her collect shellfish from the beach half a morning’s flight from their home.
“Everyone’s scared of the dark when they’re young.” Tugging him to a shallow rock pool, she showed him a hermit crab crawling around with its home on its back. “You love the dark sometimes—like on the night flight you took with your father.”
“There were stars then.” They had reminded him of the sparkly jewels his mother used to wear when the visitors came. No one had visited for a long time, probably because his father was always so angry. “It wasn’t really dark.”
His mother’s amethyst dress floated in the breeze. “You already see better in the dark than I do—you helped me find my lost earring two nights ago, remember?”
Jason nodded. “It wasn’t hard.” The black pearl with the pretty blue shimmer had kind of twinkled at him in the dark.
“Not for you, my smart boy.” Laughing in that way that made him laugh, too, she said, “One day, you’ll see so well at night, it will be as if you walk in daylight. You’ll never again be scared of the dark.”
His mother had been right. By the time he was a hundred and fifty, his night vision had developed to the point where he had the sight of a nocturnal predator. The dark was home to him, and now he wrapped it around himself as he stood watch.
The open space was lit only by the flickering light from hundreds of candles, many cradled protectively in colored glass holders that turned the marble of the buildings around the courtyard into a dreamscape. As for those who stood within—laughter was muted, the hues less vibrant than might be expected in an archangel’s court, but that was the only bow to Eris’s death.
No one would guess that his funeral pyre blazed tomorrow.
Yet regardless of the many painted butterflies who held glasses of champagne and spoke with elegant gestures while subtly jockeying for position, he had no difficulty pinpointing Mahiya. Dressed in a silk sari of blue green embellished with a thin gold border, she moved through the crowd with the ease of someone on familiar ground.
Right then, she halted, angling her head in his direction, her gaze so intent he imagined he could glimpse the brilliant tawny brown even from this distance. There was no way she could’ve sensed him, but he was certain she had. When she moved again, it was with a fine layer of tension across her shoulders. An enigma was Mahiya, with the manners of the court elite and the instincts of a hunter.
Looking away to sweep the crowd with his gaze, he confirmed that Neha remained with Eris’s body. Jason had had confirmation that she’d granted Eris’s family permission to attend the dawn funeral ceremony, but no one else. Some whispered the archangel was jealous of her consort even in death, but Jason believed Neha mourned too deeply to share her grief.
Returning his attention to Mahiya, he saw that she was drifting away from the group. He scanned the guests who remained once more before making his way to the palace he shared with Mahiya, catching a glimpse of blue green silk whispering past the doorway.
Entering behind her, he locked the main doors and made his way upstairs to find her on their shared balcony, her gaze on the courtyard lit only by four quiet lamps. She didn’t startle when he came to stand beside her. A single wide, shallow step separated his balcony area from hers, and where he had columns holding up the roof, the edge open for easy flight, she had a railing, which she now gripped.
“Her name was Audrey.” Quiet words, no apparent residue of her earlier anger. “Tall, curvaceous blonde vampire. She’d been part of Neha’s circle for two decades but hadn’t made it into the inner court.”
“How long ago did she disappear?”
“The same day as Eris’s murder, though no one else has yet put the two events together. Those who’ve noticed Audrey’s absence believe it’s a simple case of conflicting schedules. No one has bothered to try to contact her—she wasn’t one of the favorites, and the friendships she made were shallow at best.” Hands clenching on the railing, she continued to stare out into the night. “Do you believe she killed Eris?”
Look at me, princess.
“It’s one conclusion.”
Her fingers flexed on the railing. “Do I matter?” It was a question with so many nuances, he knew he caught but the bluntest edge. “In the grand scheme of your existence, does my life matter to you on any level?”
He was a man used to keeping secrets, but he knew at that instant that he had to answer this, or he risked losing something he wasn’t even aware he searched for. “Yes. You matter.”
A tremor quaked Mahiya’s frame . . . and at last, she turned those bright eyes his way. “Then you will uphold our bargain?”
“Yes.” Bargain or not, Jason had no intention of leaving her to Neha’s mercies, but he would make her no promises until he knew they would not be broken.
When he stepped to the edge of his side of the balcony in preparation for taking flight, Mahiya said, “She isn’t in her chambers. I checked earlier.”
Jason wasn’t used to explaining himself to anyone. Even Raphael gave him free rein, but Mahiya’s statement held a brittle pride that said this woman, this survivor, had been pushed to the brink. “Good.” He turned, held her gaze to show that he wasn’t ignoring her. “I have another idea I wish to explore.”
A pause, then a small nod, her voice no longer cool when she said, “I’ll wait for your return.”
Strange what those simple words did to him as he flew off the balcony and up into the diamond-studded jet of the night sky. There, he hovered invisible against the stars and
listened
.
His gift wasn’t one he could call up on command, but he could put himself into the optimum frame of mind to trigger it. Now, he did just that, the capricious winds whipping strands of hair from his queue and pasting the thin linen of his shirt against his body.
Whispers began to filter through to his mind minutes later, a thousand small fragments that meant nothing. Patient, he allowed the river of sensory input to flow around him. Then he caught a single whisper that wasn’t a word so much as a
sense
. Shifting into the wind, he flew over the ridges and valleys of the mountains, following an instinct honed to a keen edge by near to seven hundred years of life.
Nothing stood out about the valley where the trail stopped cold, but he came down under the moonlight nonetheless, careful to land with a stealth that was as innate as breathing. Swathed in shadows, the land betrayed none of its secrets . . . until the wind shifted.
Dusty decay, but no scent of rot.
Catching the line of the breeze, he traced it back to a tumble of gray stone, some of the rough chunks the size of small cars. The sheer rock face above told him their origin, though enough time had passed that the hardy grasses evolved to survive this harsh climate had grown to above his knee around the rocks.
It was, he thought, sheer luck that the body had fallen into a crevice when it had been dropped. Or the remnants of it in any case. The long skirt set with hundreds of tiny mirrors would otherwise have been a beacon in the sunlight. As it was, that girlish skirt was shaded by the rocks, the majority of the body caught in a fissure created by two adjoining hunks of stone.
The blood had dried and flaked over the time she’d lain here alone and forgotten, her long blonde hair dry but paradoxically shiny, her face unrecognizable. However, the shade between the rocks had preserved enough tissue on her face and body that he could speculate as to the fact she’d been severely bruised. The rocks could be responsible for the damage, but Jason would bet she’d suffered the abuse prior to death. Because this killing, like Eris’s, had been about fury, about rage.
The viciousness of it was such that even the decay and the foraging of small animals and birds couldn’t hide the fact that she’d been stabbed over and over. Where the skeletal structure of her body lay exposed to the elements, he could see the notches the blade had cut into her bones, marks of an ugly violence that would last long after the maggots had cleaned up what remained of her flesh.
Audrey had clearly not been the strongest of vampires, because while her heart was gone—ripped out by a brutal hand if her splintered rib cage was any indication—her head was still attached to her body. That head had been cracked and damaged, the skin of her neck shriveled to mummylike dryness where it wasn’t missing, but from what Jason could see, the damage had been caused by birds and rodents eating at her flesh, not by an attempt at decapitation.
Her hands were bone now, no way to tell if she’d worn a ring on a particular finger, but he could as easily glean that from a photograph now that he knew her name. Walking the area around the body, he saw nothing else of note. It went against his every belief to leave her here, but he could not risk bringing her to the fort as yet. Neha’s response was unpredictable—things could get deadly very quickly unless he did this exactly right.
And Audrey was long past being hurt. He had to consider other lives now.
“Whatever happens, I’ll make sure you get home,” he promised, before shifting back to a more open part of the valley and rising into the night sky.
Mahiya’s balcony doors were open as if in invitation, and when he entered, it was to find her seated on a cushion on the living room floor. She’d changed from the sari into a tunic of vivid aquamarine teamed with slim cotton pants in plain black, her hair gathered in its familiar knot at the nape of her graceful neck.
In front of her sat a low table carved of dark wood and inlaid with the merest glimmer of fine gold around the edges, on top of which stood a pot of tea alongside a tray of mixed savories and sweets, and two cups. He halted, disappointment curling through his body. “You’re expecting someone.”
Mahiya’s laugh was warm. “I am expecting you.”
He hadn’t been caught off guard for a long, long time. “How did you know when I would return?” Swirls of steam rose from the fine black tea she’d begun to pour.
“A good host learns her guest’s rhythms.” She waved a slender hand bare of rings but circled by two glass bangles the same shade as the tunic, toward the flat cushion on the other side of the table “Please, sit.”
He wondered if she sought to seduce him, decided it unlikely—her tunic was too modest, the mandarin collar high, her sleeves elbow length, and her face scrubbed clean. Thrown a little off-balance by the fact she’d gone to all this trouble, he nudged aside the cushion and took a seat directly on the floor, his wings draping over the smaller jewel-toned cushions thrown around, the fabric soft against the bottom of his wings. “You must have a sensory gift of some kind to have anticipated my arrival with such accuracy.”
“What? No.” Her startled look transformed with the second word into an honesty so rueful that he knew she would’ve preferred to claim a gift. “I was watching the skies for you. So you see, there is no mystery after all.”
Except that she had seen him. No one saw Jason when he didn’t want to be seen, and he hadn’t wanted to be spotted coming in to the fort. Which meant Mahiya did have a gift. “When did you spot me?” he asked in a casual tone, wanting to gauge the extent of her abilities. “When I dropped out of the clouds?”
“I assume so—I saw you on the horizon just past Guardian.”
He’d been
high, high
in the sky at that point, a black dot against black. The fact Mahiya had developed what appeared to be an acute visual sense at such a young age told him she had the potential to grow into a power among angelkind. He’d erred, he admitted, lulled into complacency by the gentleness of her strength, akin to the quiet but persistent fall of water against stone rather than a violent quake, forgetting the fact she’d been born of two powerful immortals.
“Your tea.”
“Thank you,” he said in the same language she’d spoken, received a smile in return.
When she nudged over the plate of savories, he ate over half of them before halting—he’d missed dinner, was hungrier than he’d realized. All the while, Mahiya watched him with those cat-bright eyes of hers, and he searched for the poisonous hatred that should’ve infected her . . . only to find an incisive intelligence and a sweetness of spirit she couldn’t hide, no matter how good she was at court masks.
Fascination entangled with a pride he had never expected to feel for the Princess Mahiya, for she had to have the will of a lioness to have managed to hold that poison at bay, though it dripped on her each and every day.
“Did you find Audrey?”
Jason considered the question, decided to trust her with the truth, measure her response. “Yes.”
“She’s dead, isn’t she? And she was most likely the woman warming my father’s bed.”
The speed and accuracy of her conclusion made Jason still. “You know who killed Eris,” he said slowly, realizing he’d erred in more than one way. “You’ve always known.” She was far too smart, far too good at listening to what was unspoken, not to have put the pieces together.
In the process of placing her teacup on the table, she jerked, had to act quickly to stop the fine porcelain from tipping over. “What?”