by Nalini Singh
“There are no sins in pleasure.” It was something Dmitri had once said to him, a sardonic twist to his mouth, the mockery directed inward.
Mahiya’s soft laugh changed the words, turned them sensual and playful. “I think I shall make that my motto when I am free, and live the life of an unabashed hedonist.”
Images of her clothed in raw silks and exquisite cashmere, her body petted and smoothed with exotic creams, her lips closing over a delicious morsel as she lay on satin sheets flashed through his mind. Sliding a fingertip down her spine, he spread his hand on her lower back, his fingers just brushing the curves below. “I would be happy to massage you with scented oils.” Until her skin gleamed and she lay boneless beneath his touch.
Her laugh was startled this time, huskier. Rubbing her cheek against his skin, she said, “Dangerous man—I’m not certain I’d survive the pleasure.” Pushing up against his chest, she looked down at him, her hair tumbling over one smooth shoulder, her breasts hidden by the sheet she’d pulled up to hold against her chest. Always so modest, though as a lover, she gainsaid nothing he demanded.
“Vanhi,” she said, expression becoming solemn, “said something else important. I forgot to tell you with everything else. She thought she might have seen the vampire with bone-pale skin and scarlet hair once. Long ago.”
Jason listened, added that fact to the information he already had.
“So?” she prompted when he didn’t respond. “I know you were out doing what you do earlier. What did you learn?” A scowl. “Do not think to keep me in the dark, Jason.”
He should’ve reminded her she held no cards to play, but he knew that would hurt her, and he didn’t want to hurt this princess with her heart strong enough to survive three hundred years with an archangel who saw her only as a means to an end. “There is plenty of moonlight.”
Making an exasperated sound, she dipped her head to kiss him, sinking her teeth into his lower lip in a bite that didn’t so much as sting. “This is not the time for spymaster humor.”
Were she another woman, he’d have thought she attempted to use the afterglow of sex to sway him, but this was Mahiya—who had grown up in a hotbed of lies but chose not to use those tactics. Caressing her with the hand he had on her lower back, he said, “I found a couple who remember seeing a vampire who fits the description in Neha’s court three to four hundred years ago.”
“They can’t be more certain?” she asked, a humming kind of tension in her frame.
“At five thousand years old . . .”
Mahiya sighed. “Like Vanhi, their memories are tucked away in secret corners of their minds.” A thoughtful pause, before she said, “Just over three hundred years ago, Eris was exiled to his palace, and my mother was executed.”
After being kept alive long enough to give birth to the child she carried in her womb.
The words hung unspoken between them.
“They weren’t the only ones,” Jason said, wondering how much she knew. “Those who had known of the affair and helped Eris and Nivriti were executed; others who were simply loyal to Nivriti were exiled.”
Mahiya pushed away from his chest to sit upright, her wing brushing across his body, the warmth of her suddenly gone. “A man on the edge of their circle,” she murmured, “would’ve been considered a hanger-on. Exile, then.”
“It’s a workable conclusion.” To focus only on one possibility when it wasn’t yet a certainty was to create blind corners where the enemy could hide. “The question is, why would he expose himself to you?”
“A sense of residual loyalty perhaps.” Tawny eyes vivid as a cat’s in the darkness met his, the potential locked within her body a luminous brilliance. “But there is another question.”
“Which is?” Jason got the same sense of power from Mahiya that he had from a young Illium. It might take her longer than the blue-winged angel to grow into that power—her mother’s daughter in that perhaps, but given room to breathe, to develop, Mahiya would become an angel to be reckoned with . . . and he had the sudden, blinding thought that he wanted to witness the change, watch her spread her wings.
“How,” she said now, “did he get the box to the temple?”
It was an astute question. “Some vampires can climb like spiders,” he said, having seen a grinning Venom scale the Tower one moonless night after he and Illium made a bet, “but the chances of being caught would’ve been very high.” Not only did angelic guards sweep the area, the sentinels who watched over Guardian Fort had a wide field of view.
“He could’ve used the tunnels—Venom said he didn’t see any other footprints along the route he used, but I’ve heard it’s a labyrinth.”
“I’ll have him check them again.” He reached for the cell phone he’d placed on the bedside table after pulling it from his discarded jeans.
“Now?”
“It’s the best time.” No one would worry overmuch over a vampire walking about in the night, much less one known to be favored by women.
As it was, he heard a soft female sigh in the background when Venom answered. “No problem,” the other man said. “I’ve just fed, have plenty of energy.”
Jason heard the satiation in the vampire’s tone, knew he’d fed from the vein—and assuredly from a very willing female. “Watch your back.” Sex could cloud even the sharpest mind, and while Neha liked Venom, he remained one of the Seven.
The sound of rustling, as if Venom was getting out of bed. “Don’t worry. She’s a delicious playmate, but all she wanted to pump was my cock, not my brain.”
“Will you be able to check every possible route up to Guardian?”
“I can get it done before dawn.”
Hanging up soon afterward, Jason said, “You think the box was flown there,” to the woman beside him, her expression pensive.
“Yes.” Mahiya took the sheet with her as she got off the bed, the filaments of her feathers a thousand soft kisses across his skin. Disappearing into her dressing room, she returned clothed in a vivid blue robe tied at the waist.
He’d already pulled on his pants, though he’d left off his shirt and sword—the latter within reach, as it always was. Putting his back to the solid wall beside a small window of stained glass, he watched her walk to open that window and look beyond, bathed in the moonlight.
“A teddy bear, it’s either a silly romantic gift,” she whispered at long last, “or the kind of thing you give to a child.”
He thought of the feather of blue green he’d found the night of Arav’s murder, of the fact that Nivriti had inherited the ability to mesmerize, and he could not discount the impossibility behind the troubled look on Mahiya’s face. “What has Neha told you about your mother’s execution?”
“That she began her death screaming and begging for her life.” Her fingers tightened so hard on the window ledge that her bones pushed up against skin. “‘I watched my dear sister’s organs spill out of the gaping hole that had been her womb and the blood pour off the stubs of her wings, then left her to starve to death.’ That’s what Neha said to me when I asked about my mother.” She swallowed. “Vanhi says she lied about the manner of my birth, but Vanhi had to leave after I was born. Neha could have done exactly as she said.”
Warmth, a hand on her cheek, a thumb on her jaw, the pressure gentle but inexorable. Turning, she found herself the focus of eyes of near obsidian that burned with a dark flame that had her heart skipping a beat.
Jason’s thumb moved gently across the dip of her chin. “As we see from Eris, from you, Neha knows how to hold a grudge.”
Mahiya sucked in a breath, for she’d expected Jason to argue against the painful hope inside her chest. “But to have kept my mother alive all this time out of spite?” She shook her head. “Why would she do that?”
“The same reason she did it to Eris—love and hate intertwined. You tell me Nivriti was her twin. That is a bond of the soul.”
Mahiya thought back to a day she’d come upon Neha and Eris in the courtyard
when they’d believed themselves alone. She should’ve turned, walked away, but she’d been caught by the tableau they made: Neha, her expression young and vulnerable in a way Mahiya had never seen, allowing Eris to tip up her chin with his finger, tease a smile from her lips.
Of course, that moment hadn’t lasted, the past too crushing a weight to allow such fragile seeds to sprout, but—“I think if he hadn’t died, Neha would have allowed him out. Perhaps even soon.” She turned to face Jason, his hand sliding to cup the side of her neck. “Anoushka’s death hit her hard. She began to visit Eris more and more.”
“There were rumors she was trying to get herself with child.”
“I can’t give you an answer as to the truth of that, but what I believe is that she needed the comfort of the man who’d fathered her child—and Eris, to his credit, did give her that comfort.” How much had been real, and how much a fantasy created in order to get into Neha’s good graces, she didn’t know. Whatever it had been, it had given Neha some surcease—and who was Mahiya to gainsay the choices of a man who’d spent three centuries locked in pretty chains, even if he had made his own bed?
Releasing his hold on her, Jason shifted to lean one shoulder against the wall. “I’m not certain how long any freedom would’ve lasted. I’ve been able to confirm that Audrey was warming his bed.” A pause. “If she was the first and he lasted three hundred years before breaking”—Jason’s tone made it clear he thought otherwise—“then he may have been a stronger man than we credit.”
Mahiya thought again of that vulnerable look on Neha’s face and wondered if a woman with so much love in her heart would’ve eventually been able to forgive every trespass. “It matters little now. Eris is gone, and someone is either playing a sick game with me, or . . .” The words lodged in her throat, too heavy, too important to come out.
* * *
I hope she lives.
Jason didn’t speak the thought aloud, but regardless of how many complications it would create, he hoped that Mahiya got a miracle. He understood what it was to grow up without a mother, but he’d at least had a whisper of time with his own.
“Jason, baby, what in the world are you doing?”
He gave his mother a long-suffering look and paused in his labors. “Planting coconut trees.”
A solemn nod. “I see.” Going down on her knees, she picked up one of the coconuts he’d collected. “Perhaps you should plant them a little farther up the beach.”
He patted the sand over the coconut he’d buried, the sound of the waves lapping at the wet sand a familiar music. “Why?”
“The sea might wash them away otherwise.”
Considering that, he decided she was right. “Will you help me carry them?”
Her smile made him feel warm inside in a way nothing else ever did. “I was hoping you’d ask.”
Jason could barely remember what that warmth had been like, the echo of his mother’s love faded and dull, but he knew it had been something piercingly beautiful to the heart of the boy he’d been, and so he knew such beauty existed. Mahiya didn’t even have that. For her sake, he hoped that Neha had found herself unable to execute her twin, as she’d been unable to execute her consort.
“Will you tell Neha?” Mahiya’s question was nearly silent. “What we’re considering? That. . .my mother might be alive?”
31
“Neha alone knows the truth of our supposition,” Jason said, thinking through the matter, “and if we are right, and your mother is already free, telling Neha cannot disadvantage her.” The vampire with scarlet hair was unlikely to be the only one of her people Nivriti had found, gathered together. “Neha may also have an idea of where Nivriti might have located her base of—”
Mahiya made a sudden tight sound in her throat. “If it is my mother, I know why she killed Arav.”
So did Jason. The man had hurt Mahiya, hurt Nivriti’s child, deserved punishment. Jason found he had no argument with that, and the realization made him halt, consider who Mahiya was to him. He had no answer to that, but he suddenly saw one to her earlier question. “I will not speak to Neha about this.”
Mahiya shuddered, shook her head. “No. If she murdered Shabnam, I can’t protect her.”
“This isn’t about protecting Nivriti.”
Mahiya’s eyes searched his face. “What is it?” Closing the distance between them, she placed her hand on his chest. There was tenderness but nothing proprietary or possessive in the touch, and he knew she spun no moonbeams in the air, expected nothing from him but the man that he was.
Something tense and waiting in him relaxed. He didn’t want to end this with Mahiya, but it was a decision he would’ve been forced to make had she sought to claim him, sought to see in him a future he couldn’t build with her. Not in the way Dmitri had with Honor, Raphael with Elena.
“A hostage,” he said, his hand on her lower back. “If we give Neha this information, we give her a hostage.”
Mahiya’s eyes widened in pained understanding, but she shook her head. “You risk breaking the blood vow, Jason.” A fierce whisper. “It could mean your death.”
“There is time yet.” Until he was certain Nivriti lived, this fell under his mandate, his silence no threat to the vow. “And I will not put you in harm’s way.” He’d made his choice, and it was this woman with her eyes as bright as a creature wild and dangerous for whom he’d raise his sword, not an archangel full of centuries-old hatred.
Mahiya’s lower lip quivered. “You must not.” Her fingers brushed his jaw, her mouth soft on his own. “Thank you for putting me first. No one else ever has, and I will never forget that you did so.” Her voice cracked. “But you yourself said Neha might know where my mother might be hiding. I cannot buy my life with Shabnam’s blood screaming for justice. If we are right, then my mother killed her as surely as she killed Arav. But this time, for no reason.”
“There was a reason—Shabnam was Neha’s favorite.”
Mahiya lifted a trembling hand to her mouth. “Akin to a child destroying a sibling’s favorite toy out of jealousy or spite.”
A scream ripped through the fort on the heels of her horrified words.
* * *
No angelic or vampiric body awaited them this time, but there was carnage nonetheless. Thrown across what seemed like every inch of the public audience hall were the limp, mangled bodies of at least twenty of Neha’s pet snakes, the columns that held up the structure splattered with blood.
“This took time.” Mahiya knelt down beside the thick body of a tree boa whose dry leathery skin continued to gleam a dramatic green. “The snakes aren’t tame as such—they come only to Neha’s hand. Tracking and patience, this required both.”
Hearing the sadness in her tone, Jason met her gaze in wordless question.
“After Guardian,” she said with a tight smile, “I can’t avoid the fear that curdles my stomach at the sight of Neha’s creatures, but I will not allow that fear to rule me.” Grim determination. “I try to remember what I’ve always known—that left alone, these creatures would avoid me as I’d avoid them. They did not deserve to be slaughtered.”
A wash of wind, Neha coming to land behind them, the anger on her face shot through with grief. Not saying a word, she stepped to the edge of the audience hall and simply looked, as if taking note of every single snake that had been butchered. And they had been. The boa Mahiya had been crouching beside appeared an exception, but closer examination showed it to be only half of the snake.
After being hacked into pieces, the reptiles had been flung around the audience hall. Such a thing would be impossible to do in daylight, but this particular area would’ve been all but deserted in the darkest part of night—the early discovery had occurred because of a lover’s spat that had sent a male vampire aimlessly wandering the fort.
“Do their bodies tell you anything?” Neha asked with frigid politeness.
Jason shook his head. “Only that the blade used was most probably a butcher’s clea
ver.” A simple, sharp cut. “Is there any pattern to the ones who were harmed?”
Neha’s gaze lingered on several of the mutilated snakes. “They were the most docile—older pets who had become used enough to humans that they wouldn’t have slithered away at being approached.” Her wings held neatly off the blood-streaked floor, she said, “I must care for them.” Reaching back, she took a woven basket from the lady-in-waiting who’d arrived with her.
Not saying a word, Mahiya took a second basket and helped Neha gather up the remains. The silence was acute, Neha’s anger a pulse he could almost sense against his skin. But that wasn’t what Jason listened for, what he watched for. Because he was almost certain that out there in the shadows, within sight of the audience hall, stood someone who laughed at Neha’s distress.
However, not even his eyes, with their extraordinary night vision, could penetrate the thick clouds of black that coalesced inside the arches and doorways he could see from this vantage point. Starting a search for the watcher would be pointless. He or she had the advantage of having planned an escape route, would be long gone by the time Jason reached their hiding place.
Instead, he stood guard, never losing sight of where Mahiya was at any moment, regardless of his focus on the shadows.
“Come.” Neha said nothing else as she took flight, basket in hand.
Mahiya rose after her, and Jason followed, rising above them both in order to keep watch. However, Neha didn’t go far, landing on a small mountain plateau perhaps five minutes later. In the center of the open space stood a flat gray stone set atop a number of other stones shaped to brick smoothness and slotted in to create a squat pyramid.
Placing both baskets on the flat stone, Neha bent down and whispered something so soft, the wind buffeted her words away before they reached Jason. The first tendril of smoke appeared from below the baskets a second later.
By the time Neha stepped away from the little pyre, flames licked out of the baskets, and he understood the archangel had gained power not just over ice, but over fire. Ice could harm, but fire . . . fire was annihilation and violence on a level beyond. And Neha could now drop the flickering yellow orange death from the sky.
