“I’ll find my vengeance in living a life overflowing with happiness,” Mahiya vowed. “In drowning myself in love, not hatred.”
In that instant, her eyes incandescent against the golden brown of her skin, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he knew that she was too fine a thing for him, that the black emptiness within him would ruin her. And still he said, “The skies will be clear tonight. Will you fly with me?”
Her smile glowed, the horror erased by a fearless joy.
*
The hours passed with a leaden slowness. Jason retraced his every step in the search for the murderer, but it was his interview with the guards who’d been on Eris’s door when he was killed that proved the most intriguing. When Jason had believed Neha the murderer, the fact the archangel had said she’d stripped their minds and found nothing hadn’t been a surprise.
He hadn’t understood she meant that literally.
“I can’t remember,” the first guard said, a stricken expression in his eyes. “At the time, I had no consciousness of it, but later, when I was asked, I realized I had no memory of several hours of the night.”
The second guard told the same story.
Jason knew Venom had the capacity to mesmerize people—the vampire had gained it during his Making by Neha.
“Do you know of anyone else who possesses it?” he asked Mahiya that night.
“It’s a family trait,” she responded. “My mother was said to share it with Neha, though her abilities were otherwise dissimilar. I didn’t inherit it, but Anoushka did. Neha’s bloodline is an ancient one—I don’t know of any direct descendants with Anoushka dead, but there are some old ones who came before her who do not Sleep.”
Jason made a few calls, tracked down those forbearers. “The relationship is distant, and they’re all too weak to have killed even Shabnam.” The lady-in-waiting had been no power, but like all courtiers, she’d had a certain level of strength.
Mahiya frowned. “I can’t think of anyone else who is known to have that ability, but some angels are secretive about their strength.”
Yes, Jason thought, especially if the impact of the Cascade was rippling beyond the Cadre. “Did you discover anything?” She’d spent the last hours navigating the maze of afternoon and early evening court functions.
“A sense of unease,” she said. “Everyone is scared he or she will be the next target, and a number are making plans to leave the fort, but that’s all hot air. Neha will not forgive desertion, and they’re too self-obsessed to lose their place in the court.” She blew out a breath, rubbing at her forehead with her fingertips. “My head hurts from the inanity of it, and I have not one good piece of information to show for my efforts!”
“Enough,” Jason said. “We both need to spread our wings. Come.”
He allowed Mahiya to set the pace, to set their direction, shadowing her vibrant wings as she swept across the skies with the ease and grace of someone who knew the vagaries of the winds in the mountains, understood how the land interacted with the sky. She wasn’t the most technically accomplished flyer, but there was a lingering happiness to her every movement that was impossible to miss and that made her striking to watch.
“Free,” she said to him when they came to a stop on a high hill overlooking the twinkling lights of the city. “In the sky, I have always been free.”
Observing the naked pleasure on her face, Jason had to fight the urge to wrap her in his wings, hide her from the sight of those who would turn that joy to despair, using her love of the sky to torture her. “Be careful.”
Closing the small distance between them, Mahiya put a hand to his chest in a gentle feminine invitation he knew he had only to step back to reject. In spite of her vivid emotions, she wasn’t a woman who would pursue a man who made it clear he didn’t want her . . . or one who knew that in taking her, he might destroy the very brightness of spirit that caught him in delicate chains, agonizingly painful in their hope.
28
“I am,” she said, “always careful, but you . . . now I know why you are such a great spymaster.”
He didn’t understand her meaning, the warmth of her touch seeping through the thin black shirt he wore to linger on his skin. Drinking in the sensation, he ran his fingers down the line of her neck, hot satisfaction in his blood when she shivered. There was a deeper pleasure in this, in knowing what made her sigh, learning the intimacies of her body. Yet it was a pleasure he’d denied himself for hundreds of years.
“Jason?” Wounded eyes, blue and wet. “You’re leaving?”
“I told you I couldn’t stay.” Couldn’t give her his heart.