Authors: Nalini Singh
Before.
Smoke still rose from the collapsed remnants of his father’s work house, but the fire had devoured a good meal and was settling down to sleep, the fallen beams glowing with a final few embers. He knew he wasn’t supposed to go near fire, but he went anyway, pushing away still-warm pieces with his hands. When the embers burned his skin, singed his feathers, he shook off the hurt and carried on, kicking aside the ash and the lumps of charcoaled wood until he saw his father’s head.
It was rolling around on the floor, all bone, the eye holes empty. His father’s body—charred black bones—lay in another part of the small building, and Jason knew then that his father had burned up his mother’s insides as well as his own, that he’d cut off his own head using the chopping thing he’d built . . . would have cut off Jason’s if Jason had made a sound when his father called out for him after the screams stopped and the blood began to seep through the trapdoor.
39
B
ut maybe his father had made a mistake, he thought suddenly, hope a bright star inside him, and his mother’s insides had survived?
He began to dig through the ash again, his skin burning, his face blackened by the dust. He dug, and he searched, and he left a trail of sticky red as his burnt skin peeled and his battered hands began to bleed. It was only when night fell that he realized there was nothing to be found.
His mother’s insides had been turned to ash.
“Only a very powerful immortal can rise from the ashes of flame.” Brown eyes shining with relief and concern both. “That’s why you must never play with fire, Jason. Even I cannot survive a fire should it reach my heart and mind, and you are a babe.”
Wings dragging under the half-moon, he walked out to the closest part of their lagoon, washed himself in the warm, shallow water. His mother didn’t like it when he came into the house dirty, so he washed and washed until all the blood and the dust was gone from his body, his raw and cut flesh stinging from the salt water. Carrying his dirty clothes, he left them on the porch where she always picked them up to wash. His wings were slick with water, so he opened and shook them off before going inside.
Mama always kissed his cheek and patted his wings dry with a soft cloth, but today, he had to do it himself. It was hard—his wings were bigger than his body, and he couldn’t reach every part.
“This way, Bumblebee.”
Listening to the memory, he spread the cloth on the floor and lay down on it like Mama and his father had once done, both of them laughing after a swim, their wings glistening in the sunlight as he circled delighted above them like “a big bumblebee.” That was a good memory, of the time before his father became a stranger who locked the bedroom door and made his mother make small, hurting sounds that twisted Jason up until he couldn’t breathe.
Dry, he put on clean clothes, and even though he wasn’t supposed to wear shoes inside the house, he thought it would be all right this time, because the floor was so dirty. Ready, he walked to the back door and out to where his mother kept things with which she worked in her garden. She’d like to be near her big yellow hibiscus flowers, he thought, beginning to dig. They were her favorites—when he brought her one, she always put it behind her ear, where it shone “brilliant as the sunrise against the black silk” of her hair.
His father had said that and kissed her.
Before.
He was only a child. It took him two days to dig the hole. He didn’t want to put his mother in the ground, but the flies had started to bother her in spite of the sheets he’d dragged out from the other rooms and spread over her. He knew she wouldn’t like that. So after he used a mat to gently pull the pieces of her to the hole he’d dug, he put a hibiscus flower in her hair and covered her up with her favorite amethyst shawl. “I love you, Mama.”
Then, he began to put the earth back inside the hole, on top of his mama. His tears ran silent and endless down his cheeks, his body having learned too well never, ever to make a sound. When it was all filled up and he knew none of the small animals that lived in the forest would be able to disturb her, he went to the beach to collect shells over and over, until her entire grave glittered and gleamed with the curves and twists and shine of the sea, the heavy blossoms of the hibiscus hanging overhead.
Then, he put his father’s bones in a sack and dragged it into the damp thickness of the trees, the weight too heavy for him to fly. He didn’t know how long he walked and dragged. A long time. Sometimes he rested. But finally he reached the small coral-reef encircled lagoon that jutted off the main atoll, like a twin that hadn’t quite formed properly.
Unlike their lagoon, he wasn’t allowed to play in this one. His father had told him there was a volcano under the surface, its crater deep. That volcano, it did something to the water, made it burn Jason’s eyes the one time he’d become curious and come to explore.
Heartbeat pounding against his ribs with the effort, he rose into the air and flew to the center of the bad lagoon and dropped the sack into its dark heart, watching as the sack sank below the surface and into the maw of the hidden volcano. As the lagoon ate up his father, and though Jason wanted to hate him, hate him, hate him, his heart hurt.
He remembered how his father had taught him about coral, about sea creatures, about how to work with wood to build instruments that made haunting music, and his eyes blurred until he couldn’t see anymore and he knew he had to get away before he fell into the bad lagoon. Straining his body, he flew up into the air and away, going as far as his tired muscles and heavy wings could take him before he stopped, looked around.
Their atoll was a ring of emerald green that circled a shimmering lagoon. He couldn’t fly around it in one day yet, but he planned to when he was bigger. His mother had said she’d go with him, show him all the secret places she’d found, but now she wasn’t here.
There was no one else.
He was all alone.
* * *
M
ahiya’s heart had broken a thousand times over as she listened to Jason’s story, as she thought of that small boy so alone and scared and sad. Yet she also knew that the man in front of her was not that boy, had not been that boy for hundreds of years. She couldn’t wipe away his pain and tell him everything would be all right.
Jason had learned too well that sometimes nothing could fix what was broken.
It wasn’t a conscious thought to walk toward him. It just seemed right. Just as it seemed right to slide her arms around his torso and lay her cheek on his chest.
Sometimes, touch could say far more than any words. So she just held him and felt fresh tears prick her eyes as his arms came around her, tucking her close. Her hands were under his wings, his over hers, and it seemed as if this was how they had always gone into an embrace, how they would go into an embrace a thousand years from now.
“My father,” Jason murmured, his cheek against her temple, “was a man of incredible talent fueled by a wildly passionate nature. His Nene meant more to him than anything and anyone else in existence.”
Black wings came around her, a midnight caress. “Perhaps his passionate attachment to my mother might have been tempered had they been allowed to live in peace in the world, or perhaps the darkness was the price he paid for his talent, but he loved her until it became an obsession, until one by one, he drove off all their friends with his jealousy. Even the women were not welcome—he believed they sought to lure her away with their tales of the Refuge.”
Leaving, Mahiya thought, woman and child alone with a man whose love had become a noose. “Your mother—” She cut herself off, realizing too late the question would cause him horrible pain.
But he knew what she had left unspoken. “She went against her family’s wishes in accepting his suit, but it wasn’t pride that kept her from taking me and returning to the Refuge. It was love.” His arms tightened around her. “Even when his jealousy escalated to the point where he imagined she had a secret lover, one who visited her during the rare times when he flew to a nearby island to harvest fruit. Even when he began to hurt her in ways that left no bruises but the ones in her eyes.”
Mahiya wanted to rage against his mother, to shake her. How could she have not protected her son from such horror? Yet, even as she screamed silently at the pain that had forged the man in her arms, she knew emotions were nothing so simple.
Neha’s continuing love for Eris was only one example.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and the words held all her sorrow, her rage.
Jason’s response was a stroke of his hand down her back, his heart beating strong and steady under her cheek, his body a furnace, his strength so inexorable she should’ve been terrified. But this was Jason, who would never hurt her. She’d known that deep within even before he told her of a past that made her understand why he helped “broken birds.”
A lance of pain, but even stronger was her need to bring Jason back from the horror, to remind him that the world was not just a creation of pain and suffering and loss. Pulling back enough that she could look into his eyes, she thought of everything he’d told her, picked out a hidden wonder.
“Do you know how to swim?” she asked into the silence, the night quiet around them but for the clicking sound that announced the presence of an inquisitive little lizard before it flicked its jewel green body and disappeared into a crevice in the temple wall. “You said you played in the lagoon.”
The question startled Jason. He’d expected the woman in his arms to ask him for the details of how he’d finally reached the Refuge, but this subject was a welcome diversion from the memories. “Like a fish. I’ll teach you if you like.” All angels could float, their wings buoyant. However, that buoyancy made athletic swimming, particularly deep dives, difficult. Jason’s parents had taught him tricks to negate the effect, at least for short periods of time.
“I’d like that.” Mahiya’s smile thawed the ice that had formed in his chest as he spoke of the losses that had forever altered the course of his existence.
“There is,” he said, tucking her a fraction closer, “as much freedom in the sea as in the sky if you know how to move in it.” Alone and with no parents to become alarmed that he’d gone too far, he’d learned to streak through the deep, his wings slicked to his back.
Nivriti.
He released Mahiya at the whisper of wind, folding his wings to his back. “Come.” Walking out and around the shadow-shrouded side of the temple, Mahiya silent as she followed, he looked toward the fort, searching for any sign of trouble.
He saw nothing . . . not until he swept his gaze to the right.
The night sky was a sheet of black, the glitter of the stars blotted out by an army of wings. Those wings appeared “wrong” to his vision until he realized they were pure jet. Since no living angel he knew of had wings akin to his own, that meant they had been dyed as camouflage. The vampiric ground guard had to be within minutes of the fort.
This is madness.
Mahiya’s horrified voice.
Even with this army, my mother cannot hope to take Neha on in combat.
Jason couldn’t disagree. Impressive as Nivriti’s forces appeared, they weren’t, not in comparison to the garrison that lived in the fort—which represented only a small percentage of the offensive resources at Neha’s command.
You should not watch this.
No . . . I should be a part of it. I may not know Nivriti, but she is my mother, and Neha has done nothing to win my loyalty.
Jason turned to pin her with his gaze.
You put yourself on that field, and you do nothing but distract your mother. Neha will use you, make Nivriti watch you bleed. You’re too weak to be anything but a liability.
Mahiya flinched.
That was cruel.
Cruelty is sometimes necessary.
You’re strong,
she retorted.
You could help my mother—but you’re a coward, hiding here.
He didn’t allow her to see what the mental slap did to him.
The instant I step onto that battlefield, I draw Raphael and all his people into a war.
Thousands, millions would die in the aftermath.
Mahiya seemed to wilt, her eyes on the black wings on the horizon.
I’m sorry. I knew that . . . I shouldn’t take my anger out on you. Forgive me, Jason.
He could taste her heartbreak.
It is forgotten.
Shifting to put her back to the wall, she slid down to sit against it, a desolation in her expression he’d never before seen, that stubborn, beautiful hope close to extinguished.
I’ve waited so long for her, and now she’ll die.
Jason turned his face toward the skies.
Stay here.
He rose up into the star-studded black before she could question him, blending into the night shadows with an ease that was instinctive. Then he shot straight at the approaching army, their slow, careful pace no match for his speed.
A cry went up only when he wanted to be seen. Raising a hand to halt crossbows being fired, a woman who was unquestionably kin to Neha cut away from the group to head to him. He felt her mental touch, chose not to acknowledge it.
Imperious and haughty, she stopped in front of him, fanning her unpainted wings to hold her position. “Spymaster.”
This woman, he thought, might have given Mahiya the delicate angles of her face, the wild blue and green of her feathers, but she was nothing like the child she’d birthed, her eyes touched with a devouring rage. “You should speak to your daughter before you undertake this suicide mission.”
Her eyes widened before laughter filled the air, husky and soft. “Ah, such faith.” A twist to her lips. “Lead me to her.”
Jason was unsurprised both at her lack of worry about a possible ambush, and her complete disregard of his veiled warning to retreat. Love and hate both had a tendency to blind, to destroy reason. “She is not far.”
Guardian Fort was alive with activity by the time he returned to the temple, and it took a combination of fine timing and luck to bring Nivriti down without being detected. Mahiya wasn’t where he’d left her—she was standing on the steps to the temple, a crossbow in hand, the bolt notched and in position to fire.
He almost smiled. He knew the dangerous whip of anger in the tawny brightness was for him, for the way he’d left her, but it changed into shock as her gaze alighted on Nivriti.
* * *
T
he dull thud of the crossbow hitting the ground snapped Mahiya out of her stunned motionlessness. Bending reflexively, she picked it up without ever taking her eyes from the woman who walked toward her, dressed in what appeared to be fighting leathers of black, her wings the template from which Mahiya’s had been cast.
“Daughter.” A whisper-soft word, the woman’s fingers alighting on her cheek as her expression overflowed with a depth of emotion that ripped at Mahiya’s heart, her soul. “Forever beloved of my heart.”