Authors: Nalini Singh
The other man looked up at that instant, as did Neha. This time, the archangel flowed toward Jason. “I have never seen you dressed thus,” she said, her approval patent. “All of Raphael’s Seven do clean up well, even that barbarian general of his.”
“I will tell Galen you said as much,” Jason said, knowing the weapons master didn’t give a damn about what any woman but one thought of him.
Gaze shifting to Mahiya, Neha said, “You do not greet Arav,” in a tone rimmed with frost.
20
“W
e met in the courtyard.” Mahiya kept her voice even, refusing to give Arav the satisfaction of seeing her stumble. Maybe her courage came from having Jason’s dark strength beside her—but she didn’t think so. Arav was the one individual who could make her forget reason and step perilously close to insult.
“Insult to a guest is an insult to me.”
Something Neha had said long ago to the child Mahiya had been when she’d returned to the fort for a visit during a break in her schooling. She’d never liked those visits, her time at the school with Jessamy the happiest of her life. The censure that particular day hadn’t been personal, and yet the way the archangel had looked at her had made the tiny hairs on the back of her neck prickle in warning.
The instant Neha had left, she’d run back to the nanny who looked after her when she was at the fort, the same one who’d later told her nothing she’d ever do would please Neha.
“Why doesn’t the lady like me?”
Her nanny’s stern face set into a frown before she gave a curt nod. “You’re old enough to know. Though you must never repeat this in public, your father is Eris, Neha’s consort. Your mother was Neha’s sister, Nivriti.”
She was small, didn’t immediately understand. “They shared a consort?”
Horror filled her nanny’s expression. “Never speak such filth, child.” Putting away the tunic she’d been folding, she shut the dresser. “Your mother seduced a man who was not her own, and she bore the fruit of their ugliness.”
Me, Mahiya thought, the fruit is me. “I’m ugly?”
A sigh, a softening in her nanny’s face. “You are not ugly, child, but you remind my lady of that ugliness. It is a testament to her kind nature that you are given all the rights and privileges of a princess.”
The latter, of course, was a lie. But even Mahiya would concede that Neha’s treatment of her while she’d been a minor had been scrupulous. Perhaps there’d been no warmth, but there’d been no abuse, either. She’d attended the Refuge school, studied in its libraries—and there, she’d had access to Jessamy’s kindness and guidance, felt what it was to be loved, for the Teacher loved all her students.
Then she’d come “home,” turned a hundred . . . and learned that Neha’s cruelty had simply been saved for the adult that hopeful, innocent child had become. The man who stood beside Neha was proof enough of that cruelty—even if the archangel hadn’t ordered the seduction, she hadn’t warned Mahiya about Arav’s duplicitous courtship, either, making certain that Mahiya’s first taste of romantic love would be a bitter one.
“You didn’t tell me you had spoken with Mahiya.” Neha’s voice was silk over steel.
Arav’s cheeks creased in a smile that glowed with charm. “We passed as I was on my way to speak to you.” He favored Mahiya with a condescending look of approval. “I did not say how glad I am to see you looking so well.” Raising his glass, he took a sip of wine, the square ring on his index finger flashing vivid blue in the candlelight, the stone a rare form of tourmaline.
“He is like a peacock, spreading his feathers and squawking loudly . . .”
“Thank you,” she said with a smile so dazzling, it took Arav visibly aback.
Small crystalline sounds silvered through the air as the glass bangles on Neha’s wrist moved against one another. “Come. Let us be seated.” Her gaze landed on Jason. “As guest at the fort, you sit on my left. Arav can entertain Mahiya—they are great friends.”
Mahiya felt an ineffable tension radiating off the man next to her, though his expression remained opaque, and she knew it was because of her. She also knew she couldn’t allow him to make an enemy of an archangel in an effort to spare her from Arav’s attentions. “Actually,” she said with a quick smile, “I see scholar Quinn across the room. I’ve just read his newest treatise, and I promised him I would talk with him about it.”
Neha didn’t bristle—the vampire was one of her favorites. That mattered less than the fact that Jason was no longer a blade about to be unsheathed.
* * *
“A
ll in all,” Mahiya said to Jason after the tea had been served and they were readying themselves to return to their palace, “it was not so terrible a dinner party.” Quinn had been a lovely companion, and Neha had been so engrossed in conversation with Rhys and Jason that she’d ignored Arav most of the night. “Arav has no idea who he’s dealing with—Neha’s playing with him as a cat does with a mouse.”
Jason’s response to her murmured supposition was silence. She didn’t read anything into it. He was, she thought as they walked out and began to cross the courtyard, thinking about the subject before he replied. “Temperature’s dipped.” Still, the night air was relatively balmy—though when she glanced up, it was to see the stars hidden by fat clouds that threatened rain.
When something fell from that sky, she thought it must be a bird, it was such a tiny thing. But then it grew bigger and bigger and—“Jason!”
However, Jason had already seen. Instead of running toward the body that had just crashed to the earth in a splatter of blood and bone that sprayed guests closer to the impact site, he shot straight up into the air, chasing the one responsible for the carnage.
Mouth dry, Mahiya watched him go, a black arrow soon invisible against the night, then made her way to the body, taking care not to step in the gore. She shut out the sound of a woman screaming about the blood on her face, the deeper voices of the men who called out to one another in a panic, the snap of the wind as others took off in pursuit, and swallowing her gorge, she focused only on the identity of the body.
That square ring of rare blue tourmaline, those mottled brown wings . . .
For a second, her brain couldn’t quite process what it was she was seeing, and then all her synapses fired, connections made, and she realized the angel without a head and likely without internal organs, was . . . “Arav.”
* * *
J
ason was fast, an ace at vertical takeoffs, but his prey had disappeared by the time he breached the heavy layer of dense waterlogged clouds. Given the limited time frame and Jason’s speed, he guessed the killer had flown just out of visual range, then dropped in a steep dive to slip into a hiding place.
Cocking his ear to the wind, he listened to where it had been interrupted, used it to track as one of the hunter born might use a scent. The ephemeral trace ended abruptly in the mountains just beyond the fort. Conscious his quarry had had enough time to take a low flight path, backtracking while Jason was above the cloud layer, he nonetheless landed and began to scan the rocky ground around him. There was no overt sign that anyone had landed, nothing but darkness—
Shimmering blue green caught by a ray of silver before the moon was hidden behind a cloud again.
Sliding the feather into his pocket for later examination, he flew up and back to Mahiya, confident that no matter her shock, she would not have broken.
She hadn’t.
Rather, she’d nudged one of the senior guard into organizing a perimeter around the splatter, though Jason expected the guard thought it all his own idea. “Good girl,” he murmured, and was almost expecting the raised eyebrow.
Then she shook her head, and he thought perhaps they’d just had a conversation.
Storing the moment to reflect on later, he sent two of the guards to find either high-powered portable lamps or torches. While they did that, he took in the bloody ruin of Arav’s body, weighed it against the wider situation. Shabnam’s murder could perhaps be put down to a smart copycat using Eris’s death as cover, but Arav’s?
It stretched the bounds of coincidence that a second hunter had been waiting to take advantage of the circumstances. There had to be a hidden connection between the victims he wasn’t yet seeing. Also, given how determined Arav had been to act Neha’s port in a storm, it must’ve been a strong temptation indeed that had drawn him up into the skies, away from those who might oppose his bid to be Neha’s next consort.
Jason considered the way Arav had looked at Mahiya when he’d thought himself safe from other eyes toward the end of the dinner, his mask slipping to reveal an ugly possessiveness that said he saw Mahiya as nothing but a trophy, a
thing
to be taken and used.
As Jason had already decided to teach the other angel a lesson in fear he’d never forget, he wasn’t particularly motivated to discover Arav’s killer. However, Shabnam had done nothing to deserve the death meted out to her, and so it was for her that he began to consider the hows and whys of this crime.
A man such as Arav might well find himself unable to control the impulse to take what he wanted should the chance arise. Yet in spite of the feather Jason had found—been meant to find?—Mahiya had never left Jason’s sight, couldn’t have lured Arav into the skies.
Another woman?
Arav wouldn’t be so stupid, not now.
That left politics. It was a surety that Arav had had a spy of his own in the court. Again, however, the timing didn’t make sense—why would the angel choose to meet his spy now? Yes, he’d disappeared outside for a cigar, but it had been clear to Jason that the other man was merely passing time until Neha finished speaking to her guests.
With Rhys having left earlier, Arav had had a clear run at lingering to be the last remaining guest. He would never have chanced missing that opportunity and the associated privacy to advance his embryonic courtship, regardless of any temptations of the flesh.
Rhys?
It had surprised Jason when Neha’s senior general had taken his leave while Arav was still buzzing around the archangel, but the move would make perfect sense had Rhys planned an ambush. Rhys wouldn’t even have to worry about skirting the attention of the guards. He was a general known to hold the loyalty of his men—because he did not mind getting blood on his own hands.
“Were you here when Arav stepped outside?” he asked the closest guard, an angel who stood stiff backed and at attention, facing outward from the body.
“No, sir. I was flying past when he plummeted, came to see if I could help.” A small pause as he glanced around at the other guards present. “I think Ishya and Gregor—who went to get a lantern—would’ve been on the doors at the time.”
Jason spoke to the petite, competent Ishya next, was told that yes, she and Gregor had seen Arav walk outside for a cigar. “However,” the vampire said, “he didn’t remain by the palace. I heard him comment to another guest that he’d walk off the dinner while he waited to speak to Lady Neha.” Ishya nodded at the courtyard garden, left in heavy darkness as a frame for the glittering Palace of Jewels. “As our task was to monitor the door, we didn’t follow his path. Jian was on the other side of the courtyard, may have seen more.”
“I saw the glow of his cigar in the dark,” Jian confirmed, his uptilted eyes speaking of the edges of Neha’s territory, where it brushed up against Lijuan’s, his wings a dusty white speckled with amber at the edges. “Once I recognized him as an invited guest, I continued on in my perimeter check. He’d vanished by the time of my next pass.”
Gregor returned with the portable outdoor lamps then, and Jason waited until the strong light sources were set up to talk to the vampire. He supported Ishya’s story but added, “I did see someone fly down toward Arav as he disappeared out of view, but he didn’t raise an alarm so I thought it must be a friend.” When asked for specifics about the second angel, all he could say was, “A woman . . . maybe. Or a slender man.”
“Thank you.” Leaving the mangled remains lit to garish brightness, raw red and wet pink over broken feathers of mottled brown, he nodded at Mahiya to make certain no one disturbed the scene, and walked inside the Palace of Jewels. Neha paced within, her anger so frigid it had frosted the mirrors.
So.
“Games,” she hissed. “Someone is playing games in my court.”
Yes. It was only the pattern that was proving elusive. Eris had been Neha’s consort, Audrey the woman who’d thought to cuckold an archangel, Shabnam a lady-in-waiting Neha had mourned with genuine sorrow, and Arav a suitor the archangel had been playing on a leash for her own amusement.
Jason accepted his initial conclusion had been false; Neha was innocent of the murders of Eris and Audrey. Rather, she’d been framed with a cunning that had fooled him and Mahiya both. A smart opponent, then, and one with enough skill and power to evade elite guards and lure both a lady and an experienced general to their deaths.
“A woman . . . maybe. Or a slender man.”
It could still be either. The lure didn’t have to be sexual, not when immortals played games of power.
“You will find the person responsible,” Neha ordered, her breath white in the chilled air. “You have the resources of the fort at your command.”
He understood he was being given freedom beyond that which he’d first been offered. “Are you aware of any reason why Arav might have been a target?”
“He was not even meant to be here,” Neha said, wings sweeping across the frost-lined floor, the tips glittering with broken-off flecks of ice. “He came to pay his respects after hearing of Eris’s death, stayed to press his suit.” She shook her head, her voice becoming strangely quiet. “He must’ve believed me cold of heart indeed, to think I would welcome a courtship when I stood vigil over my husband’s funeral pyre only this morn.”
Arav’s murder had been a chance opportunity, then, no finely tuned plan. “This will take longer than I initially estimated,” he said. “I may have to leave your territory for a period to take care of certain other matters.”
Neha’s eyes hit him full force, her skin incandescent with the lethal power that made her one of the Cadre.