“Your wings are dragging.”
“What? Oh.” Cheeks heating at the reminder one might give to a child, she raised her wings so that the edges no longer trailed on the red sandstone of the terrace.
Then he spoke again, and her embarrasment transformed into the most bittersweet of emotions. “You need to work on strengthening your wings in every detail. If Neha’s temper turns, it may come down to a race to a safe hiding place until I can work out a political solution to your freedom.”
“I am just over three hundred years old, Jason,” she said, using his name of her own volition for the first time, the small intimacy filling her mind with all the other fragile moments she’d dreamed of experiencing with the nameless, faceless lover she’d imagined in her darkest hours. One with whom she’d fly, see the world, build a life, build a home, fill it with laughter and love and happiness such as she’d never known.
“Even were I to have trained for endurance flying every day of my existence,” she said, holding onto that dream with every ounce of her strength in the face of harsh reality, “I couldn’t outfly Neha, even for the shortest flicker of time.” Neha was an archangel who had lived millennia, her power vast. She’d crush Mahiya like an insect and never notice.
“And a hiding place?” Mahiya shook her head. “I won’t let her bury me again. Better I die fighting for my freedom than to turn into Eris, dead in chains.” It was a fierce vow. “I will not allow her to pin my wings to the wall as Lijuan does to the butterflies she collects.”
Jason felt a dark wildness come to life within him at Mahiya’s impassioned declaration, but the response that came out of his mouth was almost icily calm, the words he’d wanted to speak hidden deep inside the silence that had been his existence for so long. “Lijuan would like to add me to her collection.”
Mahiya stumbled on a rough part of the terrace, would have fallen if he hadn’t shot out a hand and gripped her upper arm. Ignoring his hold, she stared at him. “Did she say that to your face?”
“Such unique wings you have, Jason. A pity if you should die in battle, those midnight wings destroyed. A quiet, measured death in the arms of a lovely girl ripe with her womanhood would be so much easier, do you not think?”
“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.”