“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.
42
Mahiya didn’t know what she’d expected of her mother’s base, but it wasn’t a fortified palace complex hidden in a mountain valley a bare four hours away on the wing. However, it made perfect sense—Nivriti couldn’t have covertly flown a fleet in the dark over a much longer distance. The vampiric ground troops, their journey longer, had traveled to the city in vehicles that wouldn’t stand out on the roads and now retreated in the same fashion.
They brought with them the dead and the less critical of Nivriti’s injured, Rhys and Nivriti’s senior general having negotiated a short window in which the fallen could be retrieved. While Nivriti was constrained to depart the city immediately, she’d sent half her angelic battalion to the ground—supervised by Rhys’s men—to rescue and carry home the worst injured, vampires and angels both. That unit was approximately two hours behind them, the ground vehicles almost half a day.
This complex, Nivriti told Mahiya after they landed in the predawn dark under the watchful eye of the small squadron she’d left to stand guard, had once been hers—and was now again. “Neha allowed it to fall into ruin.” A pleased statement. “The surrounding village dried up without the palace’s custom, and so the area is a barren, forested wasteland.”
“A perfect place to hide an army.” Entering the palace, Mahiya took in the ancient tapestries, as well as the paintings that had been created using the walls themselves as a canvas—of elephants and horses ridden by sword-wielding vampiric warriors, and angelic maidens shy of smile but with weapons in their hands.
The once brilliant colors were now pale ghosts, the jewels worn by warriors and maidens both dull rocks. It was clear the tapestries and the carpets that covered the stone floor were as old as the paintings, but the surviving pieces had had the dust beaten out of them to reveal works of faded splendor. The walls and floors of the palace itself had also been scrubbed until the beauty of the building, full of intricate carvings and lacework windows, made further adornment an indulgence not a necessity.
“Neha’s greatest weakness has always been arrogance,” Nivriti said after pouring a glass of water from a nearby pitcher, drinking it down. “She has never believed I could be her equal, and so she left no guards on me or on the places that have always been, and will always be, mine.” Words as hard as the stone of her stronghold. “Now she has learned better.”
An angel, his left wing dragging as a result of a burn across its upper half, walked in then. “My lady,” he said. “I am sorry to interrupt, but we must talk about our defensive plans with so many injured.”
Nodding at the male, Nivriti waved Mahiya away. “Go find a place to rest, child.” Her eyes dropped to the crossbow still in Mahiya’s hand. “You will not need that here, but I’m glad my daughter is not a useless ornament.” With that, she was gone.
Mahiya took the chance to explore the palace. What she found was that it was as close to an impregnable fortress as you could get and still be a place that was clearly home for Nivriti and her people. High perimeter walls, but soft rugs on the floor. Weapons everywhere she looked, but a kitchen that permeated the rooms with mouthwatering smells.
When she made her way to a balcony at the back of the palace, she saw both a working well and healthy fruit and vegetable gardens inside the defensive walls. Though the skies were still gray, a vampire had already begun to work the gardens, and he told her the water in the well was sourced from an underground reservoir. “No way for anyone to poison it.”
Such precautions wouldn’t protect the stronghold against aerial attack, but the mountains around the valley were set up with ground-to-air weaponry Mahiya guessed had been hidden until the assault on Neha, and there was only one road leading in. It was a place meant to hold under a siege, she thought as she walked back inside the palace.
Though no one appeared to be paying attention to her, guards came out of nowhere to redirect her path when she tried to go down a particular corridor. They also took her crossbow, saying they’d get it cleaned for her.
Using her best princess smile, she said, “Of course,” and left without argument.
It took an hour of watching and waiting, but the lingering guards were eventually called away on another task, and it took her but ten seconds to make it to the doors and through. The rooms beyond were locked with old-fashioned bolts and padlocks, bars on the small windows cut into the doors.
A sudden chill in her bones, she looked into the first window.
A bloodsoaked and unconscious angel lay within, his wings pinned to the floor by bolts pounded through the feathers, tendons, and muscle. Horror a crushing weight on her chest, she forced herself to walk to the next cell—to find a vampire hanging from his wrists by thick chains, beaten and bloodied, his head slumped forward on his chest. She recognized them both from Archangel Fort. Neither was powerful enough to be immediately missed, but both were old enough to have knowledge of the inner workings of the fort.
“Mahiya.”
Having heard the tread of Nivriti’s boots, she didn’t startle. “You broke these people.”
“Neha would do the same to mine.” Ice, rigid and brutal. “She did far worse to me.”
It was at that instant that Mahiya admitted the thought she’d nurtured in a secret corner of her heart—that the murders of Eris and Audrey, Shabnam and Arav, had been an aberration, that her mother did not harbor the ugliness of cruelty in her bones. “Will you release them now?”
“No.” Nivriti reached through the bars to wrap that sticky green web around the vampire’s throat.
“Mother, stop.” She gripped Nivriti’s hand, pulled, but it was too late, the substance already on the prisoner.
As Mahiya watched horrified, his skin and muscle and bone dissolved into bubbling white until the body fell away from the neck. The only mercy was that the male never gained consciousness. “That’s . . .”
“More merciful than what Neha would’ve done to him had he crawled home.”
“Your power was to do with birds.” It was the plea of a child desperate to save something of her dream of her mother. “With living things.” Not this sadistic death.
The smile that touched Nivriti’s eyes was tinged acidic green. “The ability died,” she said flatly. “But buried in the earth, I found comfort in other creatures.” She shifted to the cell that housed the angel. “They sacrificed their lives when I needed sustenance, and shared their strength with me.”