“Yes, exactly. I thought it may have been your work.” Hand sewn and embroidered, the eyes a lovely blue crystal, and the stitch work exquisite.
“Do you remember if it had a tiny yellow star on the left foot?”
Mahiya thought back. “Yes.”
“Then it is mine for certain. But I’m sorry, my lady, I don’t have another.”
“Oh, that’s a pity. Do you keep many?”
“No, only one of each kind.” The woman smoothed her hands down her apron. “I sold Daisy a week ago. Oh, let me take your cup.”
“Thank you. The tea was delicious.” Rich, milky, flavored with cardamom and sweetened with honey. “Do you remember to whom you sold Daisy? I may see if they are willing to sell it to me.”
“A vampire. Unfamiliar, perhaps a guest at the fort.” The woman bit her lip, shook her head. “He gave no name, but his hair was scarlet, his skin like fine bone china.”
“A difficult man to miss.” Yet she knew of no vampire with such hair and skin in the vicinity.
Another mystery.
* * *
Jason had spent the morning collecting information from quarters closed to others, and now landed in a farmer’s fallow field, heading to the shade cast by a hut likely used as a resting place during the planting season. He needed the whispering silence to think, to put all the pieces together.
The fact was, though he’d said nothing to either Venom or Mahiya, he had the amorphous feeling that Mahiya was the key. But while she’d had relationships of some kind with both Eris and Arav, nothing significant connected her to either Audrey or Shabnam. Yet, his instincts persisted—as if he’d seen or heard something he hadn’t consciously understood.
Frustrated, he took out his phone, deciding to pursue the answer to another question.
“Jason.” The warmth of Jessamy’s smile traveled through even the tiny screen. “It’s good to see you.”
“And you.” It was Jessamy who had first helped him remember what it was to be a person again.
Standing outside the place where he’d watched the baby angels go to learn things, he waited for the last lingering student to disappear before he slipped inside.
The woman within looked up, her eyes gentle with a kindness that wasn’t pity. “I have something for you,” she said, as if she’d been waiting for him, as if she knew he’d been listening to her lessons from the shadows for many days.
Walking over, she handed him a set of hard books with big letters on the pages. “To help you remember.”
He touched the cover, turned the pages.
He’d once had books like this, had read them over and over even after he was alone, but then they’d crumbled, and after a while, he’d forgotten he was supposed to know how to read. Until today, when Jessamy’s newest lesson had turned a key in his mind, unlocking the sound of his mother’s voice as she taught him his letters.
Taking the books, he left without a word.
It had taken him months to break his silence, but Jessamy, with her wise eyes and kind heart, had never pushed, always left him room to breathe. Now, he said, “I have a question for you.”
A tilt of her head.
“You know Lijuan has evolved, and Raphael has gained a new ability. There are now signs that something may be happening to Titus, though I cannot yet say what.” The warrior archangel’s people were fiercely loyal, and Jason’s spies had only been able to ascertain that Titus was battling an illness. As archangels did not get sick, Titus must be undergoing a transformation of some kind.
Neha’s ability to wield ice wasn’t public knowledge, thus he couldn’t speak of it without breaking the blood vow, but he had further evidence of a Cadre-wide phenomenon. “You remember Astaad’s erratic behavior.” The archangel had beaten one of his beloved concubines to a pulp, when he was known to be indulgent with his women to the point of spoiling them. “What I’m hearing is that he’s stabilized and may have gained nascent abilities over sea creatures.”
Jessamy’s expression was thoughtful. “At the time, his behavior was explained by the disruption caused by Caliane’s awakening.”
“The awakening of an Ancient is nothing to ignore,” Jason said, thinking of the lost city of Amanat risen in a place far from its origin. “But could Caliane’s awakening have been triggered by a more dominant force?” Lijuan’s dark evolution had predated Caliane’s waking by mere months, both events shifting the course of the world’s history.
“There’s no—” Jessamy went silent. “Wait.”
When she returned, it was with an old bound book she held with such care, it was clear it was fragile. “This history mentions an event called the ‘Cascade’ and states: ‘And the archangels were not who they should be, and bodies rotted in the streets, and blood rained from the skies as empires burned.’”
Expression solemn, Jessamy glanced up. “This Cascade was over twenty-five thousand years ago. I’ll begin to search the archives for further information, but though her exact age is disputed, I believe there is one archangel awake who would’ve experienced it firsthand.”
Caliane.
Ending the call soon afterward to make another, he rose on a flight path toward the fort, aiming for the office Rhys kept near the barracks that housed most of the guard. The other man was overseeing a training exercise from his balcony, but he had the forensic reports.
“Nothing we didn’t already know,” he said to Jason. “There was no finesse, no attempt to hide anything. Audrey appears to have had her organs removed, while Shabnam’s head was torn off. Arav, too, was ripped apart—tendons sheared, muscles snapped.”
Jason scanned the reports, saw the note about Shabnam’s head, read that Arav had indeed been ripped apart—by bare hands. Not a single mark that could be attributed to a weapon had been found on his body. That told Jason something important. Very, very few angels had the strength to physically rip out another angel’s spine, much less wrench off his head.
And to do that in flight against a general of Arav’s abilities? It would require near-archangel level strength or an unknown new ability. He needed to have his people begin to covertly check the power status of certain angels, get an indication if they, too, were being impacted by this strange evolution that seemed to be affecting the Cadre.
Flipping back, he rechecked the report on Shabnam. Though the pathologist had been unable to confirm, given the nature of her injuries, it was his considered opinion that her face had been raked with claws of some kind. Jason had witnessed Neha’s fingernails elongate into claws, but it wasn’t an ability limited to her alone. Still, it was another piece of the puzzle.
“Yes,” he said, retaining his copy of the forensic findings. “There’s nothing important here.” Rhys might be Neha’s man, but he wasn’t Jason’s.
26
Raphael considered the discussion he’d just had with Jason, and made the decision to put through a call to Caliane. His mother had initially been resistant to utilizing any kind of modern communications equipment, but after he’d refused to communicate with her using raw power, she had finally acquiesced to a small suite Naasir and Isabel had put in place.
Now, Raphael waited as the angel on duty went to retrieve Caliane.
“Raphael.” Eyes shining with love, she reached out toward the screen as she always did, as if she would touch him. “My son.”
“Mother.” So long had he thought her forever lost that each time he spoke to her, it was a kick to the gut, an ache in his heart. “I would ask you a question.”
“First, you must answer one of mine.” The order of an archangel who had been alive for an eon before her Sleep. “When can I next expect my son’s presence?” She waved her hand. “And I do not mean through this device.”
“I cannot leave the Tower until one of the senior Seven return.”
“The beautiful blue one. He is certainly not weak.”
No, Illium was in no way weak, but his power had been growing in unpredictable jolts; enough that he didn’t quite have a handle on his new strength. “Mother,” he said gently, for he would give her honor until and unless her terrible madness returned, “I am your son, but I am also Cadre. Do not attempt to run my Tower, and I will not attempt to run your city.”
Caliane’s gaze burned a dramatic blue flame, the glow deadly. “And should I decide to visit you, what then?”
“I and my consort would welcome you.”
“So you intend to continue the liaison? I could break her in a finger snap.”
“Then I would have to kill you—as I will do if I ever consider you a threat to Elena.” His mother was an Ancient, used to getting her way and to seeing him as a child. She needed to remember that the boy she’d left bleeding and broken and heartsick on a green field far from civilization was long gone. “I am not who I once was.”
The glow dimmed, melancholy in every line of her face, and he knew she relived the same memories. “Ask your question, Raphael.”
He spoke to her of the “Cascade,” saw immediate comprehension. “So”—a whisper that held the weight of too much knowledge—“it’s true. I’d begun to sense the signs but had hoped I was wrong.” Hair the shade she’d bequeathed him tumbled over her shoulders as she shook her head.
“Will you tell me about it?”
“It is exactly what the Refuge Historian believes it to be—a confluence of time and certain critical events that has ignited a power surge in the Cadre. Some will gain strength, while others will be reborn with new abilities. There is no way to predict the outcome, and many of these abilities will be erratic at best, have catastrophic effects at worst.”
“The Cadre may be able to weather the change successfully now that we have this knowledge.”
Caliane’s expression was suddenly old, so very old that he could believe Lijuan was right, that his mother had lived two hundred and fifty thousand years. “Yes, but you see, it was during the last Cascade that I believe I first became touched with madness, though I did not know it then, for it was an insidious intruder hiding within. There is no way to protect against such a change.”
27
Venom, his legs hanging over the side and his mirrored sunglasses in place, was sitting on the part of the balcony outside Jason’s room when Jason returned to the palace. A steaming cup of coffee sat next to his left hand.
“I had to beg,” the vampire said when he saw the direction of Jason’s gaze. “Your princess considers coffee an insult to the taste buds.” He raised his face to the sky, drinking in the sun with sinuous pleasure. “Did I ever tell you I hate the cold?”
“Every winter.” Jason passed Venom the forensic reports. “What do you see?”
“Archangel strength or near to it . . . or maybe an ability of some kind,” Venom said, because he’d been trained by Jason to see such things. “Puts a whole new spin on recent events. Lijuan?”
