From the thick area of dried material directly below the head, the brain might well have been turned into soup, allowed to drip out of Eris’s nose before he was turned back over and posed as he was now.
A small silence, and he wondered if he’d misjudged the internal strength of this princess raised in the hothouse that was the fort, but who watched him out of those eyes bright as a cat’s with a steely intelligence that fit neither her quiet acquiescence to Neha’s demands, nor the way she’d followed his own commands without argument.
Then she spoke, and he knew his instincts hadn’t steered him wrong. Mahiya might not be an opponent strong enough to concern him, but she was no pampered princess he could ignore. “So”—a considering look —“whoever did this came well prepared, not only with the blade he or she used to carve up Eris, but with the hook, perhaps other tools as well.”
“Including a garrote.” Jason pointed out the mark on Eris’s necrotic flesh, his sun golden skin now a home for creatures who fed on death. “It may have been the first attack.” Enough to disable the angel, allow time for the murderer to inflict more debilitating injuries. Because though humans termed angelkind immortal, there was perhaps one
“He was tied up,” Mahiya said, indicating the still-visible marks on Eris’s wrists, the decay of his flesh having exposed bone. “For the skin to decay that fast—”
“Means the bindings had to have cut through to bone.” It also explained the splatters of crystalline blood below where his wrists hung. “He was powerful enough to have snapped ordinary rope—this must’ve been infused with metal of some kind.”
“Or maybe the killer used extra garrotes as ties?” Mahiya offered, a sudden hesitancy to her.
Jason wondered exactly what kind of life the princess had lived that she’d made the same dark intuitive leap he had even as he finished speaking. “Yes. Could Neha have untied him, gotten rid of the evidence?” The act of a woman who did not want her lover found bound and helpless.
But Mahiya shook her head. “No, she only entered the room half a minute ahead of me.”
Which meant Eris had been left this way on purpose—displayed like a trophy, or a warning. But who would dare play such a game with Neha? Another of the Cadre? It was something to consider. As was the fact that Eris hadn’t simply been killed; he’d been tortured. Again, his suffering could’ve been intended to hurt Neha, but there seemed something deeply personal about this.
Everything was close contact, from the strangulation to the way the man’s other organs had been removed —by a small blunt knife, if Jason was reading the marks on the bone correctly. He was gut-certain the brain had been left for last, so there was a high chance Eris had remained conscious as the killer hacked out pieces of his body. He’d have drowned in pain and terror . . . which explained the raw flesh around his mouth, the cuts on his tongue and lips.
A gag of some kind to muffle his screams.
Rising, he took in Eris’s silken pants and vest embroidered with traditional designs that would’ve exposed his muscled chest. “Did he dress like this normally?”
“Yes—he was never untidy, never ungroomed, but he had long forgone the formality of court.”
And instead, Jason thought, chosen to embrace the languid sensuality that would appeal to his wife. A wife who had not forgiven him in three hundred long years. Looking around the room, Jason saw a clean floor beneath the recent bloodshed, polished statuettes, and gleaming walls. Clearly, servants had entrée into the palace.
So, he recalled, did others.
Kallistos, the vampire who’d sought to kill Dmitri, had known the location of Eris’s home in the United States, though it was a place many had forgotten. There was a good chance the vampire had received the information directly from Eris, either in return for some favor or by putting together discrete pieces of information Eris had let drop. Thus access to this palace was not an impossible thing.
“I’ve seen enough.” He headed toward the archway through which they’d entered, waiting so Mahiya wouldn’t fall behind, though he’d had time enough to assess her level of threat and decide she posed no danger at his back—she might move as quiet as the wind, but she wasn’t quiet enough. More, she had no heavy weapons on her body, her sari falling flawlessly around her form, the curve of her waist naked beneath the drape.
Her walk was too fluid for her to have a knife in a thigh sheath, and her bangles too thin to conceal a garrote. However . . . the pins in her hair were very, very sharp. Used the right way, they could blind a man, cut his carotid, even stop his heart. They were the weapons of a woman who wasn’t a trained fighter, but who did not intend to be a victim waiting to happen.
Jason felt a curl of unexpected fascination awaken within him.
Stairs wide enough for a being with wings greeted him to the right of the doorway, the fading moonlight falling onto the higher steps colored in the reds, yellows, and blues of a stained glass window that was maybe two handspans across but at least three feet long. Walking up, he ignored the hallway that led to the rooms on this level, and turned right instead—to go through a pair of doors set beside another long window of stained glass.
They opened onto a wide balcony enclosed on all sides by stone carved into delicate filigree that would’ve allowed Eris to look out into the yard but would’ve hidden him from the view of those below. Exquisite in its workmanship, it wasn’t an unfamiliar form of ancient architecture, though in most cases, it had been used by males to hide their lovers and concubines from the view of those who might covet them.
Stepping to the stone filigree, he found himself looking out over the city beyond the lake at the foot of the fort—the steep drop that led to it would’ve been a quiet torture to a winged being forbidden to ride the winds. “I heard a rumor that Neha clipped Eris’s wings in truth.” Despite the violation of the rest of Eris’s body, the wings Jason had just seen had been whole.
“I was too young at the time to remember it myself,” Mahiya said from where she stood with one hand on the doorjamb, “but I’ve heard it whispered of by others. However, she didn’t repeat the punishment once his wings grew back . . . and I think she regretted ever having done it.”
Love, Jason thought, could be the most debilitating of weaknesses.
Walking further down the balcony, he took in the windows along the inner wall, each created with ten red and green pieces of stained glass. The individual pieces were squares roughly the size of his palm, the effect delicate against the stone of the palace. The glass was echoed in the doors that stood open to reveal a bedroom that appeared to occupy most of the second level, its inner walls gently curved to embrace the central core of the palace.
A magnificent chandelier poured muted, flickering light from the ceiling. Its crystal sconces cradled a thousand candles, many of which had burned down, else the light would’ve been sharper, brighter. “Eris didn’t care for modern things?” he asked the woman who’d entered the bedroom from the corridor.
“No, he just preferred candlelight in his private chambers.”
Which meant the room downstairs had acted as his receiving area. “How many guests was he permitted?”
“It depended on Neha’s mood.” An answer that said much about Eris’s existence. “Never any women aside from Neha and myself. Even the servants who worked in this palace were all male.”
For a man who had been a favorite of women, it would’ve been akin to having a limb amputated. “Do you think the rule was observed?”
“I think Eris did not have any wish to anger Neha further.”
That didn’t answer the question, and the way Mahiya had subtly angled her face away from the light as she spoke told him she knew more than she was saying.
The stealthy hunter in Jason rose to full wakefulness.
6
“A leopard, as they say,” he murmured, his mind working at the question of Mahiya’s true
