Archangel's Storm (Guild Hunter 5)

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.

Jason discarded that thought as soon as it arose. Eris had been too self-centered, too much a man of ego to have ever chosen suicide, especially by such a convoluted method and in a way that left him violated and stripped of pride and beauty.

Porcelain clinked on porcelain as Mahiya put her cup on the saucer. “Neha would subvert you from Raphael. Perhaps that is the reason why.”

“No.” Not when Neha had met him soon after he arrived at the Refuge. “She must surely know I will never serve a woman who did such to the one she claimed to love.”

Mahiya’s gaze grew piercing, as if she’d heard the history that drove his declaration.

“And she is too proud to lie and claim you broke the vow in order to have you executed. Which does not leave us with any answers.” Reaching forward, she topped off his tea. “What will you do?”

He considered each of the facts he currently had, both together and as separate pieces. It wasn’t the murder that was the most important. That Neha and Lijuan were involved was problematic, but the two were neighbors—a friendship between them was not incomprehensible. Without further details, he remained in the dark as to the nature of their secret meetings.

And . . . he hadn’t yet worked out how to gain Mahiya her freedom. “I’m not ready to leave.”

Mahiya nudged forward the savories again. “Do you expect me to lie to her when she asks what you have discovered?”

He ate two more of the baked pastries filled with a sweet and spicy vegetable mix. “She won’t listen to the truth from you,” Jason spoke the merciless words knowing Mahiya had already come to the same conclusion. “Rather, she’ll use it as an excuse to kill you.”

Mahiya ate another sweet, her expression unruffled. “She doesn’t need an excuse.”

“I’m not so certain.” In killing Mahiya, Neha would be killing a child she’d helped raise, and angelkind revered the bond a child had with his or her parent or guardian. For a guardian to kill that child . . . it would break a taboo so deep, it was a racial imperative.

Jason, more than anyone, understood that such taboos could be broken, but doing so came at a price. “Executing you without due cause, and while she is clearly sane, would make her a pariah among our kind.” And Neha was a social creature, one who valued her connections around the world.

Sipping at tea that must be tepid by now, Mahiya met his gaze. “I’ll keep my silence, but your reputation precedes you. As the days continue to pass with no result from you, she’ll become suspicious.”

As it turned out, coming up with a way to allay Neha’s distrust was the one thing Jason didn’t have to worry about—because the crimson of blood violently spilled hadn’t yet stopped flowing.

* * *

Shock and sorrow both colored Neha’s eyes when she joined Jason beside the crumpled body discovered on a rooftop terrace on the other side of the courtyard from the Palace of Jewels. The weak postdawn sunlight washed everything in soft gold, made it appear a macabre painting. In the center of the painting lay a vampire dressed in a pair of black silk pajamas, the straps of her camisole ripped to expose heavy br**sts, her skin gray with death.

Her legs were twisted and broken, as if she’d fallen or been dropped from a height. However, the position of her body made it impossible to confirm whether she’d begun her descent from the sky or from one of the small ground-to-air defense towers mounted around the fort—the nearest one was at the right distance. Jason would speak to the guard who’d been on duty in the predawn hours, but instinct said the victim had never been in the tower, her fall arranged by an angel.

In spite of her exposed br**sts, the attack didn’t appear to have been sexual. The damage to her clothing had most likely occurred during the struggle. Unlike Audrey, this victim’s head wasn’t attached to her body; it had rolled to settle against one of the latticework barriers where he’d seen several exquisitely dressed women leaning and laughing yesterday as they looked out over the edge into the courtyard below. Today, the only sound he could hear was that of a woman’s jagged sobs, while in his line of sight lay splatters of congealed rust red where the head had bounced and rolled after being dropped.

She was looking at him from the other side of the room, her pretty dark brown eyes filmed over with a whiteness that was wrong. The stump of her neck was crusted with blood where it sat on the table in the corner, as if placed there for just this purpose.

Unsurprised by the echoes of horror that resonated through time, Jason locked the memory shut behind shields he’d had a lifetime to build, and continued to look at the body that lay in front of him, not one long gone from this earth.

This woman’s chest had been left unmolested, her heart still within her flesh, but in one thing, this body and Audrey’s were identical. Though the crush injuries caused by the fall obscured most of the bruises, Jason could tell the victim had been beaten with pitiless brutality before death. When he turned her over to look at her back, he saw that her spine had been ripped out to lie broken against blood-encrusted skin. He eased her back down with gentle hands, certain she’d been conscious for the beating, the torture, paralyzed and helpless as a babe.