Archangel's Storm (Guild Hunter 5)

“She offered me a peaceful death.” He forced himself to release Mahiya, his need for touch a clawing thing inside him. “She’s been much more vocal about Illium.”

“Blue tipped with silver, yes, his wings are stunning,” Mahiya murmured. “I saw him once when he accompanied Raphael on a visit.”

Jason glanced down into eyes bright even in the shadows of an archway, and had the sudden realization the brilliance was an indication of emerging power. One no one had noticed because the change, like every aspect of Mahiya’s power, had to have been incremental. “Your own wings are just as unique.”

“No, they’re not.” Mahiya’s tone went flat. “My mother had the same.”

He hadn’t known that, and if wings of such beauty had been forgotten, it meant someone had buried the information. Neha, it seemed, had wiped her sister out of existence as well as out of life. Now she attempted to do the same to the child who bore wings the exquisite sapphires and emerald greens of a peacock’s spray.

“Did you . . . Have you seen Lijuan’s Collection Room?”

Jason halted, watched Mahiya rub her hands up and down her arms, as if they did not stand in sunlight thick as syrup. “Yes,” he said, “I have.” The Collection Room was located within the stronghold where Lijuan had first created her reborn, and kept permanently cold to preserve the bodies that hung on the walls, their wings spread out in magnificent display.

Some, Jason knew, had died in circumstances where their wings had remained undamaged, but others . . . others had simply vanished from the world. “If you saw that room,” he said, driven to touch a single finger to Mahiya’s cheek, “you’re lucky to be alive.”

She didn’t shrug away the touch. Flattening her hand over her belly, she said, “I thought I could bargain service for sanctuary. I convinced myself it would be akin to being a servant, that I’d be free aside from my duties.” A shiver wracked her frame. “I think the only reason Lijuan returned me to Neha rather than keeping me as a trophy was that she was deeply offended by the fact I would dare run from the archangel to whom I ‘owed duty.’”

“Were you a cat,” he murmured, his mind on the massive cold-storage room behind the Collection Room, filled with drawers big enough to hold angelic bodies, “I would say you are now poorer by at least seven of your nine lives.”

“What do you know?” It was a whisper dancing over his skin.

“Many things I cannot unsee.”

* * *

Jason’s words continuing to circle in her mind, heavy with a lingering darkness that tugged at the vulnerable core of her in spite of her conclusion that he felt no such need in return, Mahiya parted from him several minutes later. “I must attend to Neha,” she said. “I am meant to be spying on you after all.”

Jason’s response was as unexpected as the fleeting touch that had anchored her to the here and now when the nightmare of Lijuan’s stronghold threatened to suck her under. “You’re not hard enough for such a task”—almost gentle words—“and I honor the strength it must’ve taken to fight the bitterness, to refuse to allow your heart to petrify to pitiless stone.”

No one else had ever understood that truth, understood the conscious will it had taken to remain untainted and unbroken. Shaken at the way he could reach her so deeply when he remained so distant, she said, “I must go,” and turned to walk away.

When she looked over her shoulder seconds later, he was gone, the sky showing no sign of the spymaster who threatened to strip her to the soul. “Who are you, Jason?”

The wind held no answers for her.

Lowering her gaze from the sky, she took a deep breath and replaced the emotional armor Jason had disassembled with nothing but a touch, a few words. She could not go to Neha vulnerable and exposed.

Ten minutes later, when she located the archangel, it wasn’t within the cool confines of her private palace, but walking the ramparts, looking down at the city that was her own. Keeping her wings neatly to her back, her emotions under rigid control, Mahiya watched the archangel nod to the visitors walking or riding up the steep, curving path to the fort. Neha didn’t allow modern vehicles on the pathway or within the fort itself, but elephants, camels, and horses were considered acceptable means of transport.

“Have you forgotten who it is you come to speak to?” It was a silken question.

“I apologize if I have misstepped, my lady.” Once, the words would’ve been knife shards in her throat. Now, they were nothing but tools she used to distract the archangel while she worked to break out of this prison.

Silence. Neha’s wings a sweep of cool white scattered with a rare few jewel blue filaments that echoed Mahiya’s own feathers. The familial connection showed itself in other ways, too, but only to someone who knew what it was they searched for, and those old enough to deduce the truth also knew never to speak of it.

To everyone else, Mahiya was a distant descendant of Neha’s the archangel had taken in out of kindness after the death of her unnamed parents. That the newborn child had appeared eight months after Eris’s incarceration and Nivriti’s assumed execution had further distanced any connection that might’ve been made by most. Few could imagine that Neha had been cruel enough to have kept her sister chained through the months of her pregnancy, but Mahiya had heard the story from Neha’s own lips.

“A gift on your hundredth birthday.” The archangel’s smile caused a chill along Mahiya’s spine. “The history of your becoming.”

Angels didn’t easily die, but a female angel was most vulnerable after childbirth, especially a childbirth where her womb had been cut open with a rusty blade, her baby literally torn out of her by uncaring hands, her internal organs left to spill to the floor. Add in a lack of food and water, and the thin, thin air at the top of the distant mountain fort where her mother had apparently been held, and Nivriti had stood no chance.

Even then, powerful as she’d been, it must’ve taken her years of agony to starve to total death.

“You give offense by existing,” Neha said at last, and it was an almost absent comment. “Tell me about Jason.”

Mahiya did, and it was the truth . . . what she spoke of it in any case. As Jason had pointed out, she could hardly accuse Neha of murder and hope to live. “He appears to be upholding the vow,” she concluded, “and working to unearth the identity of the murderer or murderers.”