“Her name was Audrey.” Quiet words, no apparent residue of her earlier anger. “Tall, curvaceous blonde vampire. She’d been part of Neha’s circle for two decades but hadn’t made it into the inner court.”
“How long ago did she disappear?”
“The same day as Eris’s murder, though no one else has yet put the two events together. Those who’ve noticed Audrey’s absence believe it’s a simple case of conflicting schedules. No one has bothered to try to contact her—she wasn’t one of the favorites, and the friendships she made were shallow at best.” Hands clenching on the railing, she continued to stare out into the night. “Do you believe she killed Eris?”
Look at me, princess. “It’s one conclusion.”
Her fingers flexed on the railing. “Do I matter?” It was a question with so many nuances, he knew he caught but the bluntest edge. “In the grand scheme of your existence, does my life matter to you on any level?”
He was a man used to keeping secrets, but he knew at that instant that he had to answer this, or he risked losing something he wasn’t even aware he searched for. “Yes. You matter.”
A tremor quaked Mahiya’s frame . . . and at last, she turned those bright eyes his way. “Then you will uphold our bargain?”
“Yes.” Bargain or not, Jason had no intention of leaving her to Neha’s mercies, but he would make her no promises until he knew they would not be broken.
When he stepped to the edge of his side of the balcony in preparation for taking flight, Mahiya said, “She isn’t in her chambers. I checked earlier.”
Jason wasn’t used to explaining himself to anyone. Even Raphael gave him free rein, but Mahiya’s statement held a brittle pride that said this woman, this survivor, had been pushed to the brink. “Good.” He turned, held her gaze to show that he wasn’t ignoring her. “I have another idea I wish to explore.”
A pause, then a small nod, her voice no longer cool when she said, “I’ll wait for your return.”
Strange what those simple words did to him as he flew off the balcony and up into the diamond-studded jet of the night sky. There, he hovered invisible against the stars and listened. His gift wasn’t one he could call up on command, but he could put himself into the optimum frame of mind to trigger it. Now, he did just that, the capricious winds whipping strands of hair from his queue and pasting the thin linen of his shirt against his body.
Whispers began to filter through to his mind minutes later, a thousand small fragments that meant nothing. Patient, he allowed the river of sensory input to flow around him. Then he caught a single whisper that wasn’t a word so much as a sense. Shifting into the wind, he flew over the ridges and valleys of the mountains, following an instinct honed to a keen edge by near to seven hundred years of life.
Nothing stood out about the valley where the trail stopped cold, but he came down under the moonlight nonetheless, careful to land with a stealth that was as innate as breathing. Swathed in shadows, the land betrayed none of its secrets . . . until the wind shifted.
Dusty decay, but no scent of rot.
Catching the line of the breeze, he traced it back to a tumble of gray stone, some of the rough chunks the size of small cars. The sheer rock face above told him their origin, though enough time had passed that the hardy grasses evolved to survive this harsh climate had grown to above his knee around the rocks.
It was, he thought, sheer luck that the body had fallen into a crevice when it had been dropped. Or the remnants of it in any case. The long skirt set with hundreds of tiny mirrors would otherwise have been a beacon in the sunlight. As it was, that girlish skirt was shaded by the rocks, the majority of the body caught in a fissure created by two adjoining hunks of stone.
The blood had dried and flaked over the time she’d lain here alone and forgotten, her long blonde hair dry but paradoxically shiny, her face unrecognizable. However, the shade between the rocks had preserved enough tissue on her face and body that he could speculate as to the fact she’d been severely bruised. The rocks could be responsible for the damage, but Jason would bet she’d suffered the abuse prior to death. Because this killing, like Eris’s, had been about fury, about rage.
The viciousness of it was such that even the decay and the foraging of small animals and birds couldn’t hide the fact that she’d been stabbed over and over. Where the skeletal structure of her body lay exposed to the elements, he could see the notches the blade had cut into her bones, marks of an ugly violence that would last long after the maggots had cleaned up what remained of her flesh.
Audrey had clearly not been the strongest of vampires, because while her heart was gone—ripped out by a brutal hand if her splintered rib cage was any indication—her head was still attached to her body. That head had been cracked and damaged, the skin of her neck shriveled to mummylike dryness where it wasn’t missing, but from what Jason could see, the damage had been caused by birds and rodents eating at her flesh, not by an attempt at decapitation.
Her hands were bone now, no way to tell if she’d worn a ring on a particular finger, but he could as easily glean that from a photograph now that he knew her name. Walking the area around the body, he saw nothing else of note. It went against his every belief to leave her here, but he could not risk bringing her to the fort as yet. Neha’s response was unpredictable—things could get deadly very quickly unless he did this exactly right.
And Audrey was long past being hurt. He had to consider other lives now.
“Whatever happens, I’ll make sure you get home,” he promised, before shifting back to a more open part of the valley and rising into the night sky.
Mahiya’s balcony doors were open as if in invitation, and when he entered, it was to find her seated on a cushion on the living room floor. She’d changed from the sari into a tunic of vivid aquamarine teamed with slim cotton pants in plain black, her hair gathered in its familiar knot at the nape of her graceful neck.
In front of her sat a low table carved of dark wood and inlaid with the merest glimmer of fine gold around the edges, on top of which stood a pot of tea alongside a tray of mixed savories and sweets, and two cups. He halted, disappointment curling through his body. “You’re expecting someone.”
Mahiya’s laugh was warm. “I am expecting you.”
He hadn’t been caught off guard for a long, long time. “How did you know when I would return?” Swirls of steam rose from the fine black tea she’d begun to pour.
“A good host learns her guest’s rhythms.” She waved a slender hand bare of rings but circled by two glass bangles the same shade as the tunic, toward the flat cushion on the other side of the table “Please, sit.”
He wondered if she sought to seduce him, decided it unlikely—her tunic was too modest, the mandarin collar high, her sleeves elbow length, and her face scrubbed clean. Thrown a little off-balance by the fact she’d gone to all this trouble, he nudged aside the cushion and took a seat directly on the floor, his wings draping over the smaller jewel-toned cushions thrown around, the fabric soft against the bottom of his wings. “You must have a sensory gift of some kind to have anticipated my arrival with such accuracy.”
“What? No.” Her startled look transformed with the second word into an honesty so rueful that he knew she would’ve preferred to claim a gift. “I was watching the skies for you. So you see, there is no mystery after all.”
Except that she had seen him. No one saw Jason when he didn’t want to be seen, and he hadn’t wanted to be spotted coming in to the fort. Which meant Mahiya did have a gift. “When did you spot me?” he asked in a casual tone, wanting to gauge the extent of her abilities. “When I dropped out of the clouds?”
“I assume so—I saw you on the horizon just past Guardian.”
He’d been high, high in the sky at that point, a black dot against black. The fact Mahiya had developed what appeared to be an acute visual sense at such a young age told him she had the potential to grow into a power among angelkind. He’d erred, he admitted, lulled into complacency by the gentleness of her strength, akin to the quiet but persistent fall of water against stone rather than a violent quake, forgetting the fact she’d been born of two powerful immortals.
“Your tea.”
“Thank you,” he said in the same language she’d spoken, received a smile in return.
When she nudged over the plate of savories, he ate over half of them before halting—he’d missed dinner, was hungrier than he’d realized. All the while, Mahiya watched him with those cat-bright eyes of hers, and he searched for the poisonous hatred that should’ve infected her . . . only to find an incisive intelligence and a sweetness of spirit she couldn’t hide, no matter how good she was at court masks.
Fascination entangled with a pride he had never expected to feel for the Princess Mahiya, for she had to have the will of a lioness to have managed to hold that poison at bay, though it dripped on her each and every day.
“Did you find Audrey?”
Jason considered the question, decided to trust her with the truth, measure her response. “Yes.”
“She’s dead, isn’t she? And she was most likely the woman warming my father’s bed.”
The speed and accuracy of her conclusion made Jason still. “You know who killed Eris,” he said slowly, realizing he’d erred in more than one way. “You’ve always known.” She was far too smart, far too good at listening to what was unspoken, not to have put the pieces together.
In the process of placing her teacup on the table, she jerked, had to act quickly to stop the fine porcelain from tipping over. “What?”
Setting his own cup on the table, he reached for the pot and poured her more tea. “Drink.”
Fingers trembling, she didn’t dispute the order. By the time she put the cup back down, her expression was acute with determination. “You first.”
15
Jason saw no reason not to acquiesce when they both carried the same knowledge. “Perhaps others could’ve bribed their way in, but we both know only one person could have walked out of Eris’s palace soaked in blood and not been stopped by a single guard.” Guards who professed not to remember a single unusual detail from that murderous night—and who Neha hadn’t executed, though they had permitted the death of her consort.
Mahiya picked up a sweet that was a combination of sugar and milk spiced with cloves and topped with slivers of almond, ate it with great deliberation. “Yes,” she said at last, her tone rough silk, “that was my first thought.”
“You’ve changed your mind?”
“Why would . . . Your presence, it makes no sense.”
Yes, Jason thought, why would Neha invite him to solve a murder she herself had committed and for which no one would ever hold her to account? That was a far more powerful mystery than why Eris had died. It was either madness or fatal arrogance that had led the male angel to believe his wife wouldn’t discover his affair with Audrey. Or perhaps Eris had sought death after three hundred years of imprisonment.