His wife would always wake in his arms, safe and loved.
“Come back to me,” he whispered in the language of their long-ago homeland, part of him deathly afraid now that he couldn’t hear her voice, the husky intimacy of her laughter silent.
He didn’t know how he would bear the quiet, but he’d find a way, because she would hurt if he initiated a premature waking. And Honor was never, ever to be hurt. Not so long as Dmitri lived.
33
Two and a half hours after discovering the mutilated bodies of Neha’s pets, Jason called Raphael from a mountaintop touched with the dawn. “One of my people just sent through a report that indicates the possibility of Lijuan making the reborn again is now in the near-certain range.”
Jason’s man was situated not in Lijuan’s home fortress, but at another of the archangel’s strongholds. The distance from the origin made every piece of information suspect, but this particular rumor had been gaining momentum for weeks, until the highly intelligent vampire was sure it had been born in truth. The most recent whispers had been dangerously explicit in their detail.
“I cannot believe her a fool.” Ice in Raphael’s voice. “It was one of her reborn who first attacked her in Beijing.”
“It’s being whispered that she’s no longer choosing candidates from within her court, but from the peasants, those who look upon her as a demigoddess.” Lijuan was a good empress in many ways—her people always had enough to eat, and she meted out justice with a fair hand. However, she preferred to keep the majority of her people in a cultural and technological state that had remained unchanged for centuries.
“Why should I create discontent by permitting them to know of things beyond their reach? It is not as if they live long enough for it to matter.”
Words she’d spoken to Raphael four hundred years ago while Jason had been in the room, her decision that of an archangel who’d been alive millennia and who considered mortals little more than a disposable workforce. Yet age alone couldn’t account for her choice. Caliane was far, far older, and from all the reports Jason had had from Naasir, her people were well-learned and within her city lay a sprawling library open to all.
No, the desire Lijuan had to keep so many of her people in ignorance came from within her, as did her power to reanimate the dead to shambling, horrifying life. And it was this archangel who might well be teaching Neha how to handle her destructive new abilities. Jason had to find out the content of those lessons.
If Lijuan had groomed herself an ally to assist her in her malignant games, the earth might yet become a place of endless horror. A place where fire fell from the sky and the dead hunted the living for flesh, warm and blood drenched.
*
Mahiya was sitting on a bench in the pavilion in the courtyard in front of her palace, her magnificent wings spread on the marble behind her when he returned from speaking to Raphael. She said nothing until he came to stand beside her. “I keep thinking of her.”
Jason didn’t need her to tell him who she meant. “It’s a natural thing. Nivriti was your mother.”
Her head lifted, a slight hesitation to her as she said. “Your mother, Aurelani, is she alive?”
“No.”
“Wake up, wake up, wake up!”
Hidden from prying eyes by the spread of her wing and the columns of the pavilion, she reached a hand up to close it around his. “I’m sorry. I’ve made you sad.”
“No,” he said. “You didn’t. It happened an eon ago.” His emotions had aged, taken on a hue he couldn’t describe.
“Will you tell me about her?” Tawny eyes looked up at him, her lashes casting lacey shadows on her cheeks.
Until Mahiya, he hadn’t ever spoken of his mother to anyone, and even then, it had been in the guise of a romantic tale. He didn’t know if he could speak of her, of the mother the famed Aurelani had been to him, the scar tissue inside him a jagged barrier. “Ask me again another day.”
“All right.” With that gentle agreement, Mahiya leaned her head against his side. “I asked Vanhi to tell me stories about my mother this morning.” Her fingers squeezed his. “She told me many things, including about the lake palace that was her favorite place in all of this land. It’s not so very far from here. An hour’s flight.”
Jason looked down at the black silk of her hair, his mind filling with images of a desolate building covered with moss, its windows and doorways gaping maws. “Abandoned.”