*
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.”
Neha’s eyes focused on some distant aspect Mahiya couldn’t see, the silk sari Neha wore now a cool champagne bordered in bronze, the folds pinned with neat precision on her shoulder by an antique brooch. Her blouse was a bronze that echoed the border, the cut perfect, the intricate back work necessary to accommodate wings done with such precision that the fit remained flawless.
No one, Mahiya thought, could say the Archangel of India was not the most elegant of creatures, but Mahiya alone understood the vindictive depth of hatred that had driven Neha for so long. It hadn’t surprised her in the least when Anoushka was found guilty of crimes against a child—the angel had watched her own mother raise a child for the sole purpose of vengeance after all. Kindness to a thousand other children could not eradicate the evil taint of that single heinous act.