Archangel's Storm (Guild Hunter 5)

“I understand him, Vanhi.” Never would she forget the terrible sorrow she’d tasted in his tale of Nene and her Yavi, until it hurt her to imagine the cause. “I’m not expecting anything but what he can give me.”

“You say that, but you’re deeply vulnerable to kindness, to any indication of care.”

The emotional blow stung. “You make me sound like an abused pet.”

Rising to her feet, Vanhi walked over to the dining area to pour two glasses of wine. “I do not begrudge you happiness.” Care in every syllable as she retook her seat, having handed Mahiya the second wineglass. “I just don’t want you hurt again.”

Mahiya gave the other woman a crooked smile. “If the hurt is an honest one, I will survive.” Perhaps she had spent her life waiting for someone to love, and Jason . . . he needed to be loved, as a wildflower needed sunlight.

Vanhi shook her head. “I bear fault in this—it is to my sorrow that I couldn’t be there for you, couldn’t give you the love every child should know.”

“You did all you could.” What Mahiya knew of kindness and affection came from Jessamy and Vanhi. “She is an archangel.” And your loyalty is first to her. It was a truth Mahiya had accepted long ago.

A bleak sadness in Vanhi’s expression. “Tell me why you come to me so late, Mahiya child.”

Setting aside her wineglass, Mahiya spoke of the teddy bear, and the vampire with hair of scarlet and skin of porcelain. Vanhi rubbed at the furrows that had formed between her eyebrows. “Oh, I know him.” A frustrated sound. “It’s flitting at the very corner of my eye, his name, but I cannot quite grasp it.”

“Sleep on it.” Exhilaration made Mahiya want to push, but Vanhi was thousands of years old, carried a million fragments of memory. “If it comes to you tomorrow morn, send me a message.”

Lines still marring her forehead, Vanhi gave a slow nod. “He was not important, I think. But always there, at the edges. That’s why he’s so hard to remember.” A rueful smile. “Truly, I am getting old. So many pieces of a lifetime—sometimes I think they are hidden in secret corners of my mind.”

“I only wish my memory were as good as yours.”

Vanhi’s smile faded. “I wish you could’ve known your mother, child.”

Mahiya’s spine went rigid. “She slept with a married man. A man who belonged to her sister.”

“Yes.” Vanhi gave a solemn nod. “They were ever in competition, Neha and Nivriti.” Drinking deep of her wine, the vampire held Mahiya’s gaze with eyes of vivid green. “It was Nivriti whom Eris first courted.”

The words were a fist punching against her ribs. “Neha was the one who committed the initial betrayal?”

“It was never that simple.” Vanhi’s eyes shut, opened again to display steely resolve. “I never before spoke to you about this, because what good would it have done? The past is gone, buried.” Finishing her wine, she played the stem of the glass between her fingers. “Now I see I was wrong. You must know where you came from if you are to take charge of your own destiny. And if I will not share these secrets with you, who will?”

Mahiya’s skin felt as if it would burst with all the questions she had inside her, but she kept quiet, intent on listening with every cell in her body.

“Everyone,” Vanhi murmured, “always calls Nivriti the younger sister, and she was . . . by five heartbeats.”

Her silence shattered. “Twins? How can that be? No one ever mentions it.”

“Neha was always stronger, until Nivriti was thrown into the shade. She was also the more innocent of the two, and as the centuries passed, people forgot the truth and just thought of her as younger.” Vanhi’s voice was grave with age, with history, as she continued. “As children, they didn’t fight or compete—Neha used to take great care of Nivriti, and theirs was a bond I thought nothing would break.”

Mahiya could barely absorb what Vanhi was telling her. “What changed?”

“Age, time, life.” A shake of her head. “Maybe it was jealousy on Nivriti’s part, arrogance on Neha’s, or maybe it was simple sibling rivalry, but they began to play a game. It started out as a battle of wits and devolved into something so ugly it hurt my heart to stand witness.”

Vanhi’s eyes shone wet. “First, if Nivriti asked the seamstress to make her a special dress, Neha would steal the design, get an identical one made in a shorter time and wear it prior to Nivriti’s big event. Nivriti would retaliate by hiding Neha’s gems so her sister would be forced to appear drab, while she glittered. After a while”—a hitching breath—“they began to play the game with people as their chess pieces.”

Mahiya’s gnawing curiosity twisted into a knot in her stomach.

“If one of them made a friend, the other would either charm that friend away or seed the relationship with vitriol until it curled up and died. It was such a foolish, foolish waste of their talents and gifts.”

Mahiya rubbed a fisted hand over her belly, for she knew it was about to get much worse. “I’ve heard my mother’s strongest ability had to do with things that flew?”

“Yes.” The shadow of a smile, lush red lips curving in memory. “She assured me the birds spoke to her and that she could see through their eyes. Falcons came to roost on her shoulders without aggression or anger . . . though as her bitterness grew, she no longer took joy in admiring their wild beauty, but began to use them as weapons.”

The wet spilled from Vanhi’s eye to trickle down to her lips. “I once saw her send a falcon down to claw the eyes out of a vampire’s head. He’d been her lover, had taken a position in Neha’s new-formed court. When I reached him, his face was a mask of red, his screams of agony piercing me to the bone.”

The adult Mahiya had never believed her mother a fairy-tale maiden who’d been wronged . . . but she’d had hopes—that Nivriti had been better than Neha, that Mahiya’s birth hadn’t been an act of ultimate hate. However, shatter her dreams though they might, she craved the truth, would hear all of it. “So Eris wasn’t their first battleground.”

“But he was the first they both loved.” Vanhi’s wineglass cracked under the force of her grip, sending a trickle of blood down her palm. Waving off Mahiya’s cry, Vanhi put the broken pieces on the coffee table and dabbed at the wound with a handkerchief. “I am sorry to say Eris was not worth either one of my girls—or of the daughters he helped create.”