Those memories a talisman, she swept over Guardian and its sentries. Some distance from the fort’s protective walls to the south lay the crumbling ruins of a temple that had been built long ago to honor the archangel who had ruled here before Neha. Neha wasn’t responsible for the destruction. It had simply fallen out of use some years after the archangel in question had been killed in a battle against another of the Cadre.
While one entire side had collapsed, the roof having crashed onto the paving stones below, the other half was more or less upright. Ten sturdy columns held up the remainder of the roof, the holes in it scattering sunshine over the floor below to create a mosaic of light and shadow.
Landing outside the temple, Mahiya took a deep breath of the thinner mountain air and folded her wings . . . just as a step sounded behind her. She twisted on her feet to find herself face-to-face with a Venom whose skin gleamed with sweat, his formerly pristine white shirt now damp and molding itself to sleek muscle, his unshielded eyes narrowed against the sunlight.
Astonished, she stared. “No one’s that fast.”
A flash of fang as he grinned. “I beg to disagree.”
Brain kicking into gear, she looked beyond him to the flat walls of the fort, snapped her head back. “You know the tunnels.” From what little information she’d been able to scrape up, the subterranean passages that connected the two forts had been built up over millennia, had to be a maze.
“Maybe.” Brushing past her with a speed that was in no way human, he ran up the temple steps.
“Venom!” She stepped into the dappled light of the temple on his heels . . . and was overwhelmed by a sense of peace. This had been her favorite playground when she’d been a child angel on visits home from the Refuge. She’d had a thousand adventures within its broken, tumbled-down walls, written her name with a charcoal stick on one of the columns before guilt made her return to rub it out.
The memory had her lips kicking up at the corners even as she searched for any sign of Neha and found none. However, Venom stood not far in front of her, checking a shadowed alcove. “You have to step out before you make yourself a target.” Neha would not tolerate the fact that Mahiya was being escorted by a vampire who remained something of a favorite, regardless of his choice to serve Raphael. “You can easily keep watch from a concealed position.” His help would be welcome should her sense of wrongness not be her imagination running riot.
“Hmm? No, I don’t think so.”
“I’ll drag you out if I have to.” He was Jason’s friend, and Jason, she knew instinctively, was a man with few friends. Venom couldn’t be allowed to throw his life away.
Venom’s response was low voiced. “Come look at this, Mahiya.”
25
Caught by the odd tone of his voice, she crossed through a beam of sunlight and came to a dead halt. Within the alcove in front of Venom sat a box wrapped in sparkling gold paper tied with a silver bow. When the vampire gingerly slid out the card tucked in under the silver ribbon, it proved to contain nothing but her name in the same script as that on the note commanding her to be here at this time.
“I may not be a spymaster like our Jason,” Venom mused, “but I would hazard Neha did not send that note.”
Mahiya had to agree, her mind trying to make sense of the bizarre circumstances and failing. “Let’s take the box outside before we open it.”
“You shouldn’t open it at all until Jason and I have a chance to—”
“As a strong vampire, your hearing is acute,” she interrupted. “Do you hear ticking? Anything to indicate it may contain an incendiary device?” If an explosion hit either of them right, it could decapitate and kill.
Venom angled his head, finally gave a reluctant shake. “No. But—”
“And, there is a high chance you have an excellent sense of smell.” She’d seen him “taste” the air with his tongue. “Smell anything suspicious?” The fact was, she knew if she walked away now, either Venom or Jason would take the risk. And that, she refused to allow. “Chemicals, anything?”
Gritted teeth. “No.”
“I don’t, either, and if this is the murderer,” she said reasonably, “he or she has no reason to play such games.” An angel strong enough to annihilate Arav could break her in half. “Someone else could have stumbled upon this—a guard on a break, a curious child—and none of the murders so far appear to have been random.” The latter was arguable, but her gut said there was a connection between the four victims, and she knew Jason agreed.
The slitted black pupils of Venom’s eyes narrowed as he considered her. “I thought you were a princess.”
“You should know that an archangel’s court is far more dangerous than the streets of New York.” She picked up the box before he could and took it, very carefully, into the sunshine. Making her way around to the side totally hidden from Guardian, she placed the box on a clear patch of grass a good fifty feet from the temple, on the theory that she didn’t want the walls collapsing on top of her. “Go stand in the distance.”