Venomous snakes.
Their poison couldn’t kill an adult angel her age, but it could cause excruciating pain, convulsions, even temporary blindness and paralysis. “Tell me one thing.” He cupped the back of her head, pressed his cheek to her temple.
“Yes?”
“If you could kill Neha, would you?” A spymaster knew a great deal, such as when an archangel might be most vulnerable to attack by her enemies.
Mahiya shook her head. “No.” Shifting so they were eye to eye, she whispered, “In making that my goal, I’d become just like her, a woman driven by hate until there’s this knot of bitterness inside her that infects everything she touches.”
Anoushka, Jason thought, hadn’t become who she was in isolation.
“I’ll find my vengeance in living a life overflowing with happiness,” Mahiya vowed. “In drowning myself in love, not hatred.”
In that instant, her eyes incandescent against the golden brown of her skin, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he knew that she was too fine a thing for him, that the black emptiness within him would ruin her. And still he said, “The skies will be clear tonight. Will you fly with me?”
Her smile glowed, the horror erased by a fearless joy.
The hours passed with a leaden slowness. Jason retraced his every step in the search for the murderer, but it was his interview with the guards who’d been on Eris’s door when he was killed that proved the most intriguing. When Jason had believed Neha the murderer, the fact the archangel had said she’d stripped their minds and found nothing hadn’t been a surprise.
He hadn’t understood she meant that literally.
“I can’t remember,” the first guard said, a stricken expression in his eyes. “At the time, I had no consciousness of it, but later, when I was asked, I realized I had no memory of several hours of the night.”
The second guard told the same story.
Jason knew Venom had the capacity to mesmerize people—the vampire had gained it during his Making by Neha.
“Do you know of anyone else who possesses it?” he asked Mahiya that night.
“It’s a family trait,” she responded. “My mother was said to share it with Neha, though her abilities were otherwise dissimilar. I didn’t inherit it, but Anoushka did. Neha’s bloodline is an ancient one—I don’t know of any direct descendants with Anoushka dead, but there are some old ones who came before her who do not Sleep.”
Jason made a few calls, tracked down those forbearers. “The relationship is distant, and they’re all too weak to have killed even Shabnam.” The lady-in-waiting had been no power, but like all courtiers, she’d had a certain level of strength.
Mahiya frowned. “I can’t think of anyone else who is known to have that ability, but some angels are secretive about their strength.”
Yes, Jason thought, especially if the impact of the Cascade was rippling beyond the Cadre. “Did you discover anything?” She’d spent the last hours navigating the maze of afternoon and early evening court functions.
“A sense of unease,” she said. “Everyone is scared he or she will be the next target, and a number are making plans to leave the fort, but that’s all hot air. Neha will not forgive desertion, and they’re too self-obsessed to lose their place in the court.” She blew out a breath, rubbing at her forehead with her fingertips. “My head hurts from the inanity of it, and I have not one good piece of information to show for my efforts!”
“Enough,” Jason said. “We both need to spread our wings. Come.”
He allowed Mahiya to set the pace, to set their direction, shadowing her vibrant wings as she swept across the skies with the ease and grace of someone who knew the vagaries of the winds in the mountains, understood how the land interacted with the sky. She wasn’t the most technically accomplished flyer, but there was a lingering happiness to her every movement that was impossible to miss and that made her striking to watch.
“Free,” she said to him when they came to a stop on a high hill overlooking the twinkling lights of the city. “In the sky, I have always been free.”
Observing the naked pleasure on her face, Jason had to fight the urge to wrap her in his wings, hide her from the sight of those who would turn that joy to despair, using her love of the sky to torture her. “Be careful.”
Closing the small distance between them, Mahiya put a hand to his chest in a gentle feminine invitation he knew he had only to step back to reject. In spite of her vivid emotions, she wasn’t a woman who would pursue a man who made it clear he didn’t want her . . . or one who knew that in taking her, he might destroy the very brightness of spirit that caught him in delicate chains, agonizingly painful in their hope.
28
“I am,” she said, “always careful, but you . . . now I know why you are such a great spymaster.”
He didn’t understand her meaning, the warmth of her touch seeping through the thin black shirt he wore to linger on his skin. Drinking in the sensation, he ran his fingers down the line of her neck, hot satisfaction in his blood when she shivered. There was a deeper pleasure in this, in knowing what made her sigh, learning the intimacies of her body. Yet it was a pleasure he’d denied himself for hundreds of years.
He’d been so young then, very good at his job, but far behind his peers when it came to emotions, to relationships. He’d thought that long-ago lover had understood he spoke the naked truth, never realizing the secret dreams brewing in her heart. A heart he’d broken without meaning to, without even knowing he held the power to do so. It had soon healed for she’d been young, too, and he thought that she might no longer even remember the black-winged angel she’d once pleaded with to stay with her.
But he’d never forgotten the lesson, and he wondered if Mahiya had truly heard what he’d said to her the night before or if she, too, harbored dreams of fixing the broken pieces of him. The truth was, no matter how she compelled him, she would soon realize what was shattered in him was nothing that could be healed, the damage done at such a young age that it had become part of his very psyche.
Yet instead of backing off, he did a selfish thing then. Lowering his head, he claimed the lush intoxication of her kiss, his hands thrusting into her hair to tumble black silk over his skin. She opened for him with a sweet sensual generosity that enticed without design, made him want to caress her every secret pleasure point until her desire was a shimmer across her skin and he knew her like no other man ever would.
Tugging back her head with the hand fisted in her hair, he forced himself to release lips swollen from his kisses. “Open your eyes.” It was a harsh order.
Thick lashes rose to reveal tawny eyes hazy with passion. “I see you, Jason.”
“And what do you see?” He stroked his free hand up her side, rubbed his thumb gently back and forth over her nipple through her clothing.
Her breath caught, but she didn’t break the eye contact. “A man who is a storm, who belongs to no one and who will never be tamed. To expect otherwise would be to ask for agonizing disappointment.”
Open eyes, he thought, she had wide-open eyes. “Some might say you’re attempting to seduce me in order to lead me on a leash.”
Laughter, warm and startled, spilled over the hilltop. “Only a fool would attempt to contain or direct a storm. I’m far too smart.”
He took her lips in an open-mouthed kiss in an attempt to drink of her laughter, steal some of her dazzling warmth of spirit to hoard inside him. Her nails dug into his chest through his shirt, her breast pushed into his hand, and her scent, it tangled around him in an exotic wildness.
