Archangel's Storm

Jewels. Neha paced within, her anger so frigid it had frosted the mirrors.

So.

“Games,” she hissed. “Someone is playing games in my court.”

Yes. It was only the pattern that was proving elusive. Eris had been Neha’s consort, Audrey the woman who’d thought to cuckold an archangel, Shabnam a lady-in-waiting Neha had mourned with genuine sorrow, and Arav a suitor the archangel had been playing on a leash for her own amusement.

Jason accepted his initial conclusion had been false; Neha was innocent of the murders of Eris and Audrey. Rather, she’d been framed with a cunning that had fooled him and Mahiya both. A smart opponent, then, and one with enough skill and power to evade elite guards and lure both a lady and an experienced general to their deaths.

“A woman . . . maybe. Or a slender man.”

It could still be either. The lure didn’t have to be sexual, not when immortals played games of power.

“You will find the person responsible,” Neha ordered, her breath white in the chilled air. “You have the resources of the fort at your command.”

He understood he was being given freedom beyond that which he’d first been offered. “Are you aware of any reason why Arav might have been a target?”

“He was not even meant to be here,” Neha said, wings sweeping across the frost-lined floor, the tips glittering with broken-off flecks of ice. “He came to pay his respects after hearing of Eris’s death, stayed to press his suit.” She shook her head, her voice becoming strangely quiet. “He must’ve believed me cold of heart indeed, to think I would welcome a courtship when I stood vigil over my husband’s funeral pyre only this morn.”

Arav’s murder had been a chance opportunity, then, no finely tuned plan. “This will take longer than I initially estimated,” he said. “I may have to leave your territory for a period to take care of certain other matters.”

Neha’s eyes hit him full force, her skin incandescent with the lethal power that made her one of the Cadre.

21

“Do not break your word and my faith, Jason.”

“I have never lied to you,” he said, noting the ice that had begun to crawl up the walls, just as Mahiya had described. Mastery over the elements had never before been part of Neha’s repertoire.

It seemed many archangels were evolving.

“No,” she said at long last, the chill in the room retreating a fraction. “Unexpected for a spymaster, but you have honor. It is why I accepted your blood vow.” At that instant, she was the Neha of old, before Eris, before Anoushka. A deadly immortal, but one with a mind unclouded by bitterness or rage. “If you do need to be absent, make it fast.”

“I’ll attempt to negate the need.” Already working out how that could be done, he took his leave and exited to find that Rhys had arrived, along with a forensic team that was as modern as the fort was not.

He would’ve preferred his own team, but his instincts argued against Rhys’s involvement in the murders. Jason had studied the man, understood he was an angel from another time. Though he was imminently capable of killing Shabnam, he wouldn’t have left her with her breasts exposed. “Any signs of life?” Arav was a very powerful immortal—he could conceivably regenerate his head, missing arm, and torn-off wing.

Rhys shook his head. “We’ll give it the night, but his blood’s begun to crystallize. He’s not rising from this.”

Jason sensed the same. The insult from the high-velocity fall had obliterated the other damage, but he had the feeling Arav’s internal organs had been ripped out, along with his spinal cord. Jason could survive such an insult to his body, was certain Rhys could, too, but Arav hadn’t been in that league. “Did the same forensic team cover Shabnam’s death?”

“Yes—the report would’ve been ready tonight but for this,” Rhys answered. “However, Neha allowed no one to touch Eris. He was cremated without any kind of a forensic examination.”

Before, when all signs had seemed to point to Neha, that oversight hadn’t mattered. Now . . . “I need them to retrieve another body,” he said, making the decision to risk trusting the other man, “and I need everyone to stay silent on it.”

Rhys’s eyes darkened. “My lady—”

“Cannot know.” Jason told Rhys what he suspected about the woman whose crumpled body had lain exposed to the elements for far too long.

Rhys thrust a shaking hand through his hair. “The fools!” It was a judgment spit out in a low tone that wouldn’t reach beyond Jason. “Audrey was a woman of little wit, but to attempt to make a laughingstock of an archangel? Had she found out, Neha would have—” He bit off his words, suddenly the grim- faced general whose loyalty was to Neha.

“This”—Jason nodded at Arav’s body—“changes things. I do not believe her involved in any of the murders.”

A shuddering exhalation that sounded like relief. Jason didn’t understand the reaction, not when Neha was an archangel, violence part of her nature, until Rhys said, “No matter her rage, if she had murdered Eris, it would’ve eventually driven her mad. My lady loved true.”

Jason had seen the madness of love firsthand, scrubbed its rust red imprint from the walls, smelled the smoky remnants of the inferno, knew the damage it could do. It was the most dangerous, most destructive emotion of them all.

“The world,” Rhys added, “cannot afford a second insane archangel.”

Lijuan, Jason completed silently, was more than enough.

* * *

Having left her watch over the body once Jason arrived, Mahiya returned to her rooms, her skin sticky with the scent of death. It took twenty minutes under the pulsing spray of near-scalding water before she finally felt clean. Dressed in a simple black tunic with tapered pants of a deep blue that echoed part of her wings, she dried and loosely pinned up her hair before going out onto the balcony.

It was impossible to think about anything other than the carnage that had turned the fort into an abattoir, images of Shabnam’s violated flesh and Arav’s crushed and savaged body burned onto her irises. Without the evidence of what remained of Arav’s wings, as well as the heavy ring that had survived on a miraculously unshattered finger, she’d never have known it was him.

A quiet footfall.

Leaning over, she saw a servant passing along the softly lit pathway below, called out for him to halt. When she went down to join him, asking whether the servants had heard anything regarding Arav, his face closed up, his expression formal. “It was with great sorrow that we learned of General Arav’s death.”

“No one will punish you for speaking ill of him,” she said, “least of all I.” Everyone knew of her humiliation— she’d worn her heart on her sleeve during her involvement with Arav. “The lady’s fort is being painted bloodred and she wants answers.” Mahiya didn’t mourn Eris or Arav, and Audrey had made her own bed, but Shabnam had been an innocent. “Did Arav cause insult?”

It was clear the servant was torn between obeying the dictates of the archangel who was his liege and self- protective distance. The former won. “He was heard speaking to one who is loyal to Rhys, offering the man a position he did not yet have the ability to provide on the condition the other switch loyalties.”

“When I am consort . . .”

“How was he overheard?” Arav wouldn’t have broached the subject of such treachery in public.

Lashes coming down, head bowed, the servant backed away into the dark. At first, she thought he was refusing to answer, then she realized it was his answer. No, Arav hadn’t been stupid, but he’d been arrogant, an angel of nine hundred who considered weaker beings beneath his notice. “I see,” she said as the servant reappeared from the shadows. “Was Rhys aware of Arav’s attempts to subvert his people?”

Another falling of shutters. “I do not know.”

Yes, Rhys knew. He knows everything that happens in this fort.