When Neha’s private guard summoned him two hours later, the courtyard was close to cleared, the injured moved into internal rooms. Taking his leave of the healer under whom he’d been working, he entered the palace to find Neha seated on the thronelike chair at the head of the central room. The archangel had bathed and was dressed in fresh clothing, her wounds bandaged.
Those bandages told him both that the wounds were healing at a far slower rate than they should—and that Nivriti was no longer an ordinary angel.
“So, now you are a peacemaker?” Neha’s tone was dangerously neutral.
“You are one of the more rational archangels,” he said, and in spite of her acts after Anoushka’s death, the words were true. “To lose you would create more problems than it would solve.”
“Exactly how rational do you believe me to be?” A subtly calculated look.
“Enough to take and use what Lijuan could teach you about accelerating the emergence of your new abilities,” he said, “without allowing yourself to fall into her web.” It was a wild shot in the dark.
“Finally,” Neha said in a sinuous whisper, “we come to it. That was why you were so eager to assist me, was it not?”
“I am a spymaster.”
Neha’s smile was cold. “And to ask you to act in any other way would be akin to asking an eagle not to eat a rabbit.” Picking up a baby eyelash viper that had slithered across the floor to her, she draped it over her shoulders, absently stroking its yellow orange skin. “Yes, Lijuan has been most neighborly of late.”
Jason could guess. The trauma of Anoushka’s death had left Neha prime pickings for a predator like Lijuan. “I have wondered one thing,” he said.
Neha raised an eyebrow.
“Whether Lijuan can somehow siphon power, or is attempting to learn how to do so, from others in the Cadre.” It was a theory so nascent, he hadn’t even mentioned to Raphael. “Her offer to assist you would then make more sense.”
“Well, well, well.” Neha rose and walked down the shallow steps below her throne to shake her head. “Such a waste that you will never rule. Yes, the helpful Lijuan thought to play me.” A flash of teeth. “But she forgets, I have played this game for millennia, too, and I know how to get what I want.”
Jason was near certain there was, in truth, no true secret to accelerating the development of power, that Lijuan had simply taken advantage of the Cascade effect. At least nine thousand years of age, she’d had millennia to mine the Refuge library for such secrets, even had she not come into her power at a time when several Ancients yet sat on the Cadre. They could well have told her of the Cascade.
Such a plan would befit the Archangel of China’s intelligent, devious mind, but to bring it up now would be to make Neha look the fool, so he kept his silence and considered his report to Raphael. Though he couldn’t speak of the Lijuan–Neha connection, he could now discuss Neha’s new abilities—her display over the city had made them public.
“If you wish to keep my favor, Jason,” Neha said, sari whispering along the carpet as she walked to the window that looked out over the courtyard garden, “you will discover how Nivriti was able to do what she did, and then you will tell me.”
“I do that and I become part of your personal war. Raphael would not be pleased.”
“Do you always do what pleases Raphael?”
Jason knew the arch question was meant to prick his pride, but the fact was, he served Raphael out of choice, not compulsion. “I will leave your territory tonight,” he said, his tone even.
Neha’s wings flared, the indigo filaments catching the light, before folding neatly to her back as she turned to hold his gaze. “Tell me, when did you gain the ability to use shadows in such a fashion?”
He said nothing, for she could expect no answer. The truth was, what he’d done tonight was only one aspect of his strength—he could use the black lightning in a far more violent way. “Do you wish me to carry a message to Raphael?”
A sigh, a faint smile. “Tell him his spymaster’s faultless service has made me rethink our quarrel. I say Raphael is no longer my enemy.” She allowed the viper to crawl down her arm, twine itself over her skin. “Safe journey, Jason. I will attempt not to hurt Mahiya too badly when I find her.”
* * *
“I will attempt not to hurt Mahiya too badly when I find her.”
Jason understood Neha’s words had been meant to torment him. It wasn’t the first time someone had attempted such, but it was the first time they had found their mark. No matter his decision to give Mahiya time with her mother, he knew that was not what he was going to do, even if part of him said he used Neha’s taunt as an excuse.
Flying high and fast, he made certain no one tracked him from the fort. Only when he was dead sure he was alone in the skies, did he come down on the dawn-lit grasses of a jagged mountaintop, the biting winds attempting to rip his hair from its tie. Ignoring the chill whip of air, he took out his cell phone and put through a call to Raphael.
Raphael was quicker than Neha, perhaps because he’d been directly impacted by the events of that spring. “The world was in tumult when Caliane rose to wakefulness,” he said the instant he heard of Nivriti’s ability to harm Neha. “The chaos was put down to the disruption caused by her waking, but what if it was the confluence of two events, the reappearance of an Ancient concealing the emergence of an archangel?”
“I thought the same,” Jason said, recalling the violent storms that had hit the world, the sea rising in a fury, the plates of the earth shifting, ice falling when it should’ve long thawed, “but I didn’t sense the same depth of power in Nivriti that I do the Cadre.” The prickling consciousness of being in the presence of something other.
“And Neha would’ve known if her sister had become Cadre,” Raphael said. “One archangel always recognizes another—but from what you say, it appears she is in the dark about the origin of Nivriti’s abilities.”
“Yes. It could be that as Neha’s twin, Nivriti has a capacity to harm her that no other angel possesses—along with a certain resistance to Neha’s own abilities.” Twins were beyond rare in the angelic population, and Neha was the first archangel he knew of who had been born with another. “We have no guideline against which to judge the bond that ties them to one another.”
A short pause. “Should Nivriti believe herself Cadre, she’ll seek to join our number soon enough,” Raphael said thoughtfully. “Unlike Neha, the rest of us are not disadvantaged by a blood connection—it’ll take but a single meeting to answer the question of her strength. For now, continue to have your people keep a watch on her, on them both.”