Rage and violence, the killer’s fingerprint was unmistakable. “Do you recognize her?” he asked Neha, aware she had only just returned to Archangel Fort after Eris’s mountaintop funeral. From the heavily damp hair scraped into a knot at her nape and her simple tunic of pale blue paired with white pants, she’d been bathing afterward as was custom, when she received word of this death.
“Her name was Shabnam.” The archangel’s tone held raw grief. “She was one of my longest-serving ladies-in-waiting.” Crouching down beside the vampire’s head with its ravaged skin, uncaring that her wings scraped the cool marble and the blood that stained it, she reached out to close Shabnam’s eyelids over hazel eyes dulled in death, using a dot of power to make sure they remained so. “I scattered Eris’s ashes less than an hour ago while his mother sobbed, and now I must inform Shabnam’s people of her murder.”
Jason heard the anger beneath the grief, and it was another puzzle. “Will you tell me about her?”
“She was a butterfly,” Neha said, rising to her feet, her movements heavy, as if she was weighted down with sadness. “A pretty ornament who cared for glitter and sparkles. She was not dark of heart or wise of politics. The only reason she made it so high in my court was that I enjoyed her sense of innocence.” A twist of her lips. “Of all the women who serve me, she was the most harmless.”
Yet she had been killed with terrible cruelty. Jason wasn’t arrogant enough to think he could read all of Neha’s moods, but her sorrow appeared genuine. And while he could see her murdering Eris in a jealous rage, it beggared belief that she’d spill innocent blood while preparing to say her final farewell to her consort. Even if she had done so in a grief or guilt-fueled madness, she had no need to pretend. Brutal as it was to say, Shabnam had been Neha’s to kill.
“Do you believe it to be the same person who murdered Eris?” Neha asked, the cold blade of an archangel’s anger a faint nimbus of light burning off her wings.
“Perhaps.” Jason rose from his crouched position beside the body. “Or it could be an attempt to use Eris’s murder to cover an unrelated crime.” Shabnam had surely been a stunning woman in life. “Did she have a lover?”
“Yes. But Tarun is gone to Europe on a task for me—he could not have done this.”
Jason made a note to confirm Tarun’s whereabouts himself. It might be a truism, but the lover was most often the one responsible for the murder of a woman, mortal or immortal. Some darkness knew no boundaries. “Anyone else who might hold a grudge against her?”
Neha walked to the part of the terrace that flowed down a wide step to a covered pathway that, if followed, led to another, lower terrace. “She was a lady-in-waiting, Jason. I know little of her life.”
Of course.
Unlike the Seven, Neha’s ladies-in-waiting were there to entertain, amuse, and otherwise see to Neha’s comfort, dismissed from the archangel’s mind the instant they were out of sight. “May I have access to the others who serve you?” He would also contact Samira, gain her impressions of Shabnam and Tarun.
“Yes.” Neha flared out her wings. “Mahiya will know where to find them.” With that, she rose off the terrace, an angel of grace, power, and . . . centuries of blood that stained her hands to ruby blackness.
* * *
Jason found Mahiya in the courtyard below the terrace, and though he’d given her no instructions, she said, “Most of the ladies-in-waiting are even now gathering in their private garden. I would, however, recommend you speak to them one at a time.”
“Agreed. However, seeing how they act as a group may prove helpful.”
“This way.” She turned left, her mint green tunic crisp against her skin. “Word travels fast in the small city that is the fort,” she said, answering the question he hadn’t asked. “I knew about the discovery of Shabnam’s body perhaps five minutes after the guard made it.” Fixing the pin that held her long white scarf neatly over her left shoulder, she shot him an assessing look. “He says you arrived seconds later. Dropped out of the sky like a black arrow.”
“Do you think I killed Shabnam?” He knew he was capable of murder should he ever have anyone of his own to protect. But that, of course, was an academic consideration.
“No.” An answer far more resolute than he’d expected. “However, everyone wonders how you knew.”
The winds had whispered a name, tugged him in a certain direction, but that wasn’t a secret he could tell this princess who saw things no one should be able to see . . . and who made him think impossible thoughts about always being welcomed home as he’d been last night. “I was flying above the fort, saw the guard running in a panic. It wasn’t difficult to sweep down, find out why.”
Mahiya raised a single eyebrow but kept her silence, and a minute later, they walked through one of the cool passages inside the fort to exit a few feet from gardens clothed in a profusion of fragrant blooms. Five women stood in a knot in one corner, blooms of another kind. When Mahiya would’ve moved out from the passageway, Jason stopped her with a hand on the silken warmth of her arm, the scent of her a caress to the senses. “Wait.”
“The body language is interesting, is it not?” Mahiya’s quiet comment echoed his own thoughts, her wing brushing his as she leaned in so he could hear her.
He didn’t move away. “Very.”
The tallest lady, an angel, had positioned herself so she didn’t fully face any of the others. Another angel, her wings the dusty brown of a sparrow’s, was holding on to a sylph of a vampire with the broken desperation of someone who isn’t sure her legs will support her, while a dark-eyed angel and a vampire with pale skin wiped at their eyes with what appeared to be lace handkerchiefs.
“The sparrow,” he murmured, “she actually grieves.” The rest indulged in theatre.
“Yes.” Sympathy in the single soft word. “Shabnam and she were both inducted into their positions at the same time, and rather than competing for Neha’s attention, they became friends who helped each other navigate the politics.”
“Why should there be politics? They occupy the same rarefied position.”
Mahiya shot him a frowning look. “Are you making fun?”
Jason hadn’t ever been accused of that, even by the irrepressible Illium. “Strange as it may seem,” he said, “I have never had reason to know about the inner workings of a group of ladies-in-waiting.” He had operatives who were far more capable in that arena and who kept him apprised of any necessary information from such quarters.